A gentle breeze off the Mediterranean helped cool Algiers on that sunny late-summer afternoon. It was 1956, and a pale, blond law student strolled along the chic Rue d’Isly. She stopped at the Milk Bar, entered, and ordered a sherbet. A few blocks away, her friend, a pretty brunette, sat in a café, chatting with her mother. Around 6:15, the women settled their bills and departed, leaving behind their beach bags. Fifteen minutes later, the bombs exploded. Ten bystanders were crippled, two were killed; the victims ranged in age from 13 to 20. The Battle of Algiers was entered, and the era of modern urban terrorism had begun.
Ted Morgan was in Algeria at the time, and records the war’s unprecedented tactics in his poignant memoir, My Battle of Algiers. Born Sanche de Gramont--he adopted an anagram of his surname a few years before he became an American citizen--Morgan descends from a long and distinguished line of French nobility. At the age of 23, one year out of Yale, he received a conscription notice. He was living in Massachusetts, and avoiding military service would have been as easy as staying stateside. But, feeling a debt of honor to the memory of his father, Morgan unenthusiastically reported for duty, a private in the French army.
By the time he arrived in northern Africa, Morgan had been promoted to lieutenant. He had sought an officer’s commission in the hope of avoiding the increasingly unpopular conflict, but instead found himself ordered to the countryside, 50 miles southwest of Algiers, where a savage bush war raged. His unit, the First Regiment of the Colonial Infantry, consisted of misfits and castoffs, thoroughly undistinguished officers, battle-hardened sergeants, and cheerful Senegalese soldiers. On the foothills and in the forests, Morgan and his men battled the merciless guerrillas of the Algerian Front de Libйration Nationale (FLN).
While on leave in Algiers, Morgan called on a family friend at the American consulate. There he was introduced to Gen. Jacques Massu, commander of the elite 10th Paratroop Division. Paris had just granted Massu carte blanche to bring to an end the FLN’s ongoing city-wide terrorist campaign. Propaganda would be a crucial element of Massu’s strategy, and something about the young lieutenant impressed the general. On the spot, Massu reassigned Morgan to a highly sensitive agitprop unit. Morgan would spend the remainder of his service at the army’s secretly run pro-French, Arab-audience newspaper. Morgan was out of uniform but in the know.
The year 1957 saw the French wage a ruthless urban counterinsurgency campaign in Algiers. Massu cordoned off the Casbah--where 80,000 Arabs lived on 45 densely packed acres--and blanketed its streets with regular military patrols. Soldiers set up checkpoints throughout the city, severely curtailing the Algerians’ freedom of movement. Men were routinely picked up without cause and held without trial. Strikes were put down at gunpoint.
The linchpin of Massu’s strategy, however, was the systematic and unapologetic use of torture. The policy was intended neither as a form of retribution nor an exercise in sadism, but rather as a utilitarian measure, limited to interrogations and directed toward gathering intelligence. The paratroopers were clinical and pitiless. It became widely known that detained suspects, including a number of native-born French citizens, would be subjected to beatings, waterboarding, electrocution, and, on occasion, summary execution.
Morgan was privy to much of this information at the time, and has since supplemented his firsthand knowledge with careful historical investigation. His book relates the unfolding battle in generous (if, alas, unsourced) detail. My Battle of Algiers is a well-wrought introductory survey of not only the battle itself, but of the entire eight-year Algerian War.
But it is as a memoir that the book really sings. Morgan has a novelist’s touch, and uses it to great effect. He manages to capture the feeling of the place, not just its sights and sounds and smells, but its peculiar susceptibility to absolutism, its incandescent hatreds, as pure and undiluted as its impossibly bright sunlight. Morgan gradually draws the reader into his tragic realization that peaceful compromise was rendered impossible by the steady liquidation of men of good will.
Yet Morgan intends the book to be more than a memoir. “The Battle of Algiers,” he writes, offers “a miniature model for the Battle of Baghdad.” The analogy leaves much to be desired, as Morgan admits. Iraq is far removed from the United States, geographically and psychologically, and has never been home to millions of American colons. The Algerian War was basically binary, pitting Arabs against Frenchmen; the Iraqi War involves Americans, Shiites, Sunnis, Kurds, and various foreign interlopers. Though the FLN made profligate use of terrorist bombs, it never conceived of using suicide bombers, and though the French had tanks and helicopters at their disposal, they relied almost exclusively on small arms. But, such differences notwithstanding, Morgan maintains that America can learn two invaluable lessons from the French experience in Algeria.
The first is simple. The dirty secret of torture is that it works. In today’s debates, one often hears that torture is ineffective, since a man under duress will say anything to end his suffering. France’s counterinsurgency efforts in Algiers, however, belie that facile proposition. Interrogations in Algiers routinely involved the patient, methodical use of torture, and led directly to the dismantling of the FLN’s urban-terror networks. Such methods overcame the numerical insufficiency of the government’s security forces, and decisively contributed to French victory in the campaign for the city.
The second lesson is equally straightforward. However effective torture may be, recourse to it must be resisted at all costs. The act of torture invariably “dehumanizes the victim and corrupts the tormentor.” Throughout his reflections, Morgan seems more preoccupied with the latter half of that formulation. Perhaps this results from his feeling that he himself was profoundly morally compromised by the war. Morgan describes how, enraged over the death of a friend, he beat a captured guerrilla to death. Ever since, he admits, he has lived with an “inner disfigurement.”
It is possible to agree with Morgan’s conclusion without conceding his rationale. He is surely right that, though torture may be effective, it remains deeply immoral. But Morgan errs in locating the immorality of torture primarily in the psychological health of the torturer. Indeed, it is not uncommon to learn that such men are capable of living out the rest of their lives without any sense of guilt for their actions. It remains a basic truth of human nature that a uniform is all that many men need to dissociate themselves from the evil they commit.
The case against torture is far stronger when it focuses on its victims, both individually and collectively. The idea that torture offends the fundamental dignity of the individual human person is, one hopes, sufficiently common to preclude the necessity of its repetition. Less often considered, however, is the corrosive effect of torture on nations. A torture regime creates deep enmity toward the state, both within and without. It invites retaliation, as Algerian terrorists in Paris repeatedly demonstrated. And it splinters the body politic, setting in tension a people’s love of country with their love of justice.
More important, a nation that resorts to an open policy of torture relinquishes its claim to decency. No country that institutionalizes the practice may be counted among the civilized nations. Two died and ten were wounded on that sunny late-summer afternoon in Algiers. But the day’s real casualties, as Ted Morgan movingly shows, were the peace of Algeria and the honor of France.
Christopher Levenick is the W.H. Brady Doctoral Fellow in Social and Political Studies at AEI.
