Your report (France admits to torture during Algerian conflict, 14 September) says allegations of torture being used systematically by the French government during the Algerian war of independence were previously “shrouded in secrecy and denials”. However hard the French government of the day tried to hide these facts, in 1963, within a year of independence, Pierre Vidal-Naquet wrote a book, translated and published in the UK in 1963 as Torture: Cancer of Democracy, France and Algeria 1954-62, describing in detail the extent to which the police and the army used torture as a matter of routine. He argued that the horrific practice of torture, founded on both class and racial prejudice, had become endemic in France despite the fond belief of most French people that it was a “characteristically foreign institution” – one that France, with its constitution based profoundly on the rights of human beings, would never subscribe to. He revealed just how far the cancerous effects of torture had spread throughout France (of which Algeria was then claimed to be a part) on both sides of the Mediterranean during the tragedy of the war, corrupting the institutions of the state at all levels.
Gillian Dalley
London
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