Volu m e II - Purdue University Calumet

In an article published during the war by Jean-Paul Sartre, he is less than supportive of France’s
efforts and speaks out strongly against colonization and torture as a whole. Sartre criticizes the methods
used in Algeria, comparing the French military to the Nazis; the French, he says, found it impossible to
come to terms with, let alone understand, the German occupation and the atrocities of the concentration
camps, yet when the French government turned to Algeria, having occupied it for a century, the French
turned a blind eye to the horrors brought upon the Algerians (88). Algerians, Sartre argues, were every bit
as human as the French and deserved to be treated as such (93). Sharing Sartre’s disgust for the French
torture methods was Simone de Beauvoir, who recounts the story of Djemila Boupacha, an indigenous
woman working with the FLN. In addition to the torture, de Beauvoir discusses the absence of Boupacha’s
lawyer during her trial, another citizen’s right which was denied to her (5). Djebar also mentions the
torture she knew was taking place during the war, but describes more vividly the death of her husband at
the hands of the French army; he was put on a post in the middle of Ouled Larbi, a village southeast of
Algiers. He was then executed publicly (Djebar 232). A similar execution is shown in the film Battle of
Algiers when a prisoner is taken outside the prison walls, closed off from the public but visible from the
prisoners’ windows, and led to the guillotine. The French government supplemented individual executions
with covert bombings; government officials gained access to Algerian housing settlements where they
suspected FLN members to be living and planted bombs accordingly. Perhaps an even greater injustice,
certainly a greater betrayal of loyalty, was shown to the indigenous French-Algerians who chose to fight
with the French army, against their own countrymen. Known as “harkis,” these French-Algerian soldiers
were promised protection from the Algerian government should the French lose the war, but the French
government was able to provide neither adequate security, nor safe passage from Algeria to France after the
war. As a result, these soldiers were left in Algeria and executed for their treachery (Virtue).
The manner in which both Sartre and de Beauvoir respond alludes to the severity and,
correspondingly, the disgust with which much of the French public responded. Others however, regarded
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