Resistance, Representation, and War: Algerian Women, the French Army, and the Djamila Boupacha Case

Sarah Kleinman

Advisor: Dr. Sheryl Kroen

Spring 2012

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Dr. Howard Louthan and Erin Zavitz for guiding me through the thesis-writing process; Dr. Sheryl Kroen for her invaluable advice, constructive criticism, enthusiasm, and encouragement; and my parents for their unconditional love and support. This thesis would not have been possible with you.

ii

Table of Contents

Introduction………………………………………………………………………………..1

Chapter One: Djamila’s Resistance: Women of the urban FLN networks and the French Army’s “emancipation” campaign………………………………………...7

Chapter Two: Djamila’s Torture: Rape, culture, and sexualized violence in the French-Algerian War……………………………………………………………….14

Chapter Three: Intellectuals for Djamila: Left-wing intellectuals, public opinion, and reports of torture..……………………………………………………………….……21

Chapter Four: Beauvoir’s Ethics and Halimi’s Justice: The Djamila Boupacha Case…………………..29

Conclusion………………………………………………………………………………..40

Bibliography……………………………………………………………………………..44

iii

Introduction

On the night of February 10, 1960, French military forces raided the Boupacha family home in Dely Ibrahim, near Algiers.1 Ostensibly, the French paratroopers were searching for two prominent members of the Algerian independence movement (known as the FLN, or Front de Libération Nationale).2 Forcing their way into the home, the soldiers dragged the entire family from their beds by waking them with brutal punches to the face and blows from rifle butts.3 Upon finding two letters from the FLN members, the French paratroopers arrested twenty-two year old Djamila Boupacha, her brother-in-law Abdelli Ahmed, and seventy-one year old father Abdelaziz Boupacha. Djamila Boupacha would subsequently be beaten, tortured, and raped by members of the French Army.

Unlike thousands of other torture cases brought before military tribunals in Algeria during the French-Algerian War, the details of Djamila Boupacha’s story received considerable public attention in metropolitan France. Her case became a cause célèbre during a colonial war of independence which brought down France’s Fourth Republic and irrevocably altered the political, social, and economic landscape of both France and Algeria. How, then, did the trial of one woman manage to garner so much publicity? Part of the answer lies in the strategy employed by Boupacha’s lawyer, Gisèle Halimi, and the timely intervention of Simone de

Beauvoir. However, the resonance of the case extends much further than piquing public opinion.

In order to properly understand the case, one must examine the nature of the pervasive violence in the French-Algerian War, the specificities of systematic torture practiced in Algeria, the place of women during the conflict, and the multivalent role of gender.

1 Simone de Beauvoir and Gisèle Halimi, Djamila Boupacha: The story of the torture of a young Algerian girl which shocked liberal French opinion, trans. Peter Green (New York: Macmillan, 1962), 33. 2 Ibid. 3 Ibid. 1

The French-Algerian War, Algeria’s war of independence from France, lasted from 1954 to 1962. Historians disagree over the official starting point of the French-Algerian War, although the most frequently cited date is November 1, 1954. In what became known as Bloody

All-Saints Day, the newly-formed FLN launched attacks against numerous French military and police targets, calling for secession from France.4 Although colonized by French settlers and exploited for its resources, Algeria held the unique status among all French-occupied territories as the only French possession not technically a colony. France annexed Algeria in 1834 making it an integral part of France in the 1848 Constitution of the Second Republic.5 In the immediate aftermath of the November 1954 uprisings, Minister of the Interior François Mitterrand countered the fledgling Algerian independence movement by stating, “Algeria is France. And

France will recognize no authority in Algeria other than her own.”6 This gave the government every right to establish martial law, referred to as “police operations.”7 The army took over legislative, judicial, and administrative structures in Algeria, effectively establishing supreme and uncontested control.

Almost a year later on November 22, 1955, the Philippeville massacre inexorably altered the dynamics of the conflict. The FLN attacked civilian targets, killing 71 Europeans, including women and children. The French Army’s response to the Philippeville incident was “swift and severe.”8 In their efforts to reestablish authority, maintain the status quo, and resist decolonization, the French Army in Algeria turned to torture tactics. French military authorities

4 Raphaëlle Branche, “Torture of terrorists? Use of torture in a “war against terrorism”: justifications, methods and effects: the case of France in Algeria, 1954-1962,” International Review of the Red Cross 89.867 (2009), 545. 5 Alistair Horne, A Savage War of Peace: Algeria 1954-1962 (London: Macmillan, 1977), 32. 6 James D. Le Sueur, Uncivil War: Intellectuals and Identity Politics During the Decolonization of Algeria (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001), 28, footnote 3: quote from The New York Times, November 8, 1954. 7 Branche, “Torture of terrorists?” 545. 8 Le Sueur, Uncivil War, 30. 2 cited torture as the only effective means of responding to the Algerian insurgency and collecting intelligence.9 According to historian Raphaëlle Branche, “without ever being explicitly justified in writing – given that it was a form of violence totally prohibited under French law – torture was suggested by the highest authorities and on the whole was both tolerated and encouraged.”10

My objective in writing this thesis is to turn a focused lens on a particular cause célèbre, as well as shed light on the situation of Algerian women, the purposes and uses of torture, and the importance of liberal French intellectuals and public opinion during the French-Algerian

War. According to James D. Le Sueur, “it was the story of Djamila Boupacha…which really became the cause célèbre and finale of the anti-torture cases [during the war].”11 Through autobiographies, a writer’s wartime journal, the testimonies of torture victims, and newspaper articles, I will demonstrate how the Boupacha case captured public opinion and revealed the importance of Algerian women, torture, and intellectual engagement to the history of the French-

Algerian War.

Chapter One will explore the various active roles Algerian women played during the conflict, specifically focusing on the women of the urban FLN networks. An examination of the

French Army’s relationship with Algerian women, specifically the small group of “evoluées”

(French-educated Algerian Muslim women) supportive of Algerian independence, is crucial towards understanding Djamila Boupacha’s case. Boupacha belonged to this small stratum of educated women; she came from a bourgeois family with nationalist tendencies, received a

French education, and dressed in “European” clothing. Boupacha was also a member of the

9 James D. LeSueur, “Torture and the Decolonization of French Algeria: nationalism, ‘race’ and violence during colonial incarceration,” in Colonial and Post-Colonial Incarceration, ed. Graeme Harper (New York, Continuum, 2001), 161. 10 Branche, “Torture of terrorists?” 547. 11 Le Sueur, “Torture and the Decolonization of French Algeria,” 168. 3 urban FLN network, and this group’s relationship to the French Army and the Algerian war effort reveals many intricacies about identity, gender roles, and the dynamics of the war itself.

Women’s active roles in the war, both in auxiliary civilian support services and as resistance fighters, transgressed traditional gender boundaries in an unprecedented way that posed significant problems for the French Army and the “emancipation” program French authorities sought to implement.12 This emancipation campaign, a targeted psychological warfare campaign, aimed to re-make Algerian women’s identities along colonial European lines and became a central facet of the French Army’s counterrevolutionary policies.

Chapter Two will explore the violence and torture Algerian Muslim women suffered at the hands of the French Army in the countryside and in urban detention centers. Once the

French Army became aware of female rebels working within the FLN ranks and identified women as potential threats, women were subject to the same systematic violence and treatment in detention as men. The sexual component of this violence reveals the deeper nature of the

French Army’s relationship with female combatants and the female population. In the words of historian Marnia Lazreg, women’s bodies became another “terrain in the counterrevolutionary war.”13 Chapter Two will explore and demonstrate how Muslim women’s bodies became a site of colonial control for the French Army.

Chapter Three will examine the impact of the French-Algerian War on French intellectuals. The French-Algerian War forced a reconsideration of French culture and identity,

12 In her 2004 dissertation, Ryme Seferdjeli argues that the politicization of Algerian women during the French- Algerian War, in their entry into the public sphere and wide-spread participation in political activities, was unprecedented prior to the start of the conflict in 1954. Ryme Seferdjeli,“‘Fight with us, women, and we will emancipate you’: France, the FLN and the Struggle over Women during Algerian War of National Liberation 1954- 1962” (PhD diss., London School of Economics, 2004), 82. 13 Marnia Lazreg, Torture and the Twilight of Empire: From Algiers to Baghdad (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008), 165. 4 and intellectuals played a vital role in this re-conception.14 Groups of organized intellectuals played a large role in bringing specific torture cases to light in the press, and Djamila

Boupacha’s case was no exception. Gisèle Halimi and Simone de Beauvoir founded the Djamila

Boupacha Committee to mobilize public opinion and keep the case in the public eye. This chapter will situate Halim and Beauvoir’s endeavor in the storied French intellectual tradition of political engagement as well as the succession of individual torture cases during the war.

Chapter Four - the main body of my thesis - will focus a specific lens on the Boupacha case itself. Thanks to Halimi, Beauvoir, and the Djamila Boupacha Committee, Boupacha’s trial became an international incident and illustrated the hypocrisy of the French colonial military establishment in Algeria. Halimi, a Tunisian-born human rights lawyer, and Beauvoir, author of

The Second Sex and the most prominent female French intellectual at the time, understood and effectively employed the power of the French intelligentsia in order to undermine the French government’s moral and political authority. They sought to achieve individual justice for

Boupacha by putting the entire military establishment on trial in the press and highlighting the blatant and repeated obstructions of justice by French military authorities in Algeria. Halimi and

Beauvoir’s strategy also attacked the widespread public indifference to the atrocities of the

French-Algerian War. The first and only case during the French-Algerian War taken up chiefly by women on behalf of a female resistance fighter, Halimi and Beavoir’s efforts on behalf of

Boupacha allow an exploration of what Ranjana Khanna terms a “transnational feminist gesture,”15 as well as how gender norms and mores can complicate feminist activism.

14 James D. Le Sueur, Uncivil War, 1. 15 Ranjana Khanna, Algeria Cuts: Women and Representation, 1830 to the Present (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008), 90. 5

In the words of Marnia Lazreg, “Boupacha’s case highlights the institutional imbalance between a woman insisting on making her torture known, and the state’s effort to discredit her in order to cover up the practice.”16 The trial of Djamila Boupacha was a moment in which elements of gender, violence, representation, and objectification converged, making it an important point of study for the French-Algerian War. The violent decolonization of Algeria altered the political, social, and cultural landscape of both France and Algeria in ways that still resonate today. The conflict forced a re-consideration of “the universality of French culture”17 and by the war’s end violence and social unrest had spread from Algeria to metropolitan France.

The integral relationship of France and Algeria rendered the terror that became endemic to the conflict both fundamental and striking. By examining the war through the Djamila Boupacha case, as well as the violence and torture perpetrated specifically against Algerian women, the story of the last gasp of the French Empire gains new historical significance.

16 Lazreg, Torture, 163. 17 James D. Le Sueur “Decolonizing ‘French Universalism’: Reconsidering the Impact of the Algerian War on French Intellectuals,” The Journal of North African Studies 6.1 (2001), 167. 6

Chapter One: Djamila’s Resistance: Women of the urban FLN networks and the French Army’s “emancipation” campaign

“This Djamila Boupacha of yours is not a nice girl… she wants independence for Algeria!” – Maurice Patin18 In a scene from the classic film The Battle of Algiers (1966), three women carefully remove their white haïks (a loose fitting garment fully covering the head and body with a triangle of cloth below the eyes), or “veils,” in front of a mirror. The women then comb their hair, apply lipstick, and change into European clothing – skirts, sun dresses, high-heeled shoes. A man enters the room and gives them handbags with specific instructions to be at three separate locations. Later, three bombs explode in an Algiers milk bar, a cafeteria, and the Air France office.19

The women depicted in the film are based on a small group of Algerian resistance fighters, known in Arabic as the fidayate.20 Members of the urban insurgency networks, fidayate distributed FLN political tracts, collected money for the FLN, delivered medical supplies, and gathered clandestine intelligence in urban cafés.21 Many of these women transported weapons, bombs, and sensitive documents during the Battle of Algiers. Nearly all the fidayate had family connections to the FLN and histories of family political involvement, along with an urban French lycée education.

It is important to stress that the fidayate comprised the minority of female resistance fighters during the French-Algerian War, only about 0.2 percent of the total population of women active in the Algerian resistance effort.22 Nevertheless, this small group of women had a profound effect on the French Army and the collective imagination during the French-Algerian

18 Halimi, Djamila Boupacha, 99. Emphasis in the original. Maurice Patin served as President of the Committee of Public Safety during the French-Algerian War. 19 Gillo Pontecorvo. La Bataille D'Alger: The Battle of Algiers (Irvington, NY: Criterion Collection, 2004). 20 Seferdjeli, “‘Fight with us,” 123. 21 Natalya Vince, “To be a moudjahida in Independent Algeria: Itineraries and Memories of Women Veterans of the Algerian War” (PhD diss., University of London, 2008), 43. 22 Seferdjeli, “Fight with us,” 87. 7

War. The unique place of the fidayate and the inability of French military authorities to understand their political action and roles in the resistance movement led to an extreme reaction to female insurgency, provoking an atmosphere of hysteria over determining the gender of combatants.

~~~

Far from being passive observers, Algerian women participated in the nationalist resistance movement in a variety of capacities, from providing logistical and medical support to taking part in armed conflict.23 Experiences serving with the nationalist movement differed for highly-educated women of the urban FLN networks (fidayate) and women of the rural command units (moujahidate), whose make-up included French-educated Muslim women from urban centers and thousands of peasant women (moussebilate) who provided support to guerilla bands

(known as the ALN, or Armée de Libération nationale) in the interior. In his history of the FLN,

Daniel Meynier writes that “moudjahidate, through their [wartime] participation, unveiled themselves and coexisted with men,” and he refers to photos in which women and men are comfortably sharing their daily activities in rural areas.24 Most women working with guerilla units were young, with half under 20 and ninety-percent under 30 years old.25 Moujahidate were often made up of better-educated women from urban centers and towns fighting for independence; they were often literate whereas male members of the ALN from rural areas were not.26 Women who left their homes in urban areas to join the ALN units provided medical,

23 Official records at the Algerian Ministry for Veterans (Mujahideen) officially recognize 10,949 female veterans out of 336,784 total veterans. Historians Natalya Vince and Djamila Amrane cite this number as a gross underestimate due to under-reporting and errors in official record keeping. Natalya Vince, “Transgressing Boundaries: Gender, Race, Religion, and “Françaises Musulmanes” during the Algerian War of Independence,” French Historical Studies, 33:3 (Summer 2010), 445. 24 Gilbert Meynier, Histoire Interieure du FLN, 236; quoted in Seferdjeli, “Fight with us,” 123. 25 Raphaëlle Branche, “Sexual Violence in the Algerian War,” in Brutality and Desire: War and Sexuality in Europe’s Twentieth Century, ed. Dagmar Herzog (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2011), 249. 26 Natalya Vince, “To be a moudjahida," 38. 8 logistical, and communications support. Moujahidate also acted as political and social organizers, as women could access traditionally female spaces to inform rural residents about the role and political aims of the FLN.27 In villages where ALN guerilla bands emerged, peasant women fulfilled roles as seamstresses, washers, and cooks.

Despite moujahidate making up the majority of female participation in the war, the most famous female resistance fighters were members of the urban insurgency networks. During the

Battle of Algiers in 1957, a number of fidayate detonated bombs for the FLN (as depicted the film, The Battle of Algiers).28 The Battle of Algiers and the emergence of the fidayate marked a decisive turning point in the relations of the French Army to Algerian women in urban centers.

The fidayate’s participation shattered two stereotypes of “the Arab woman” held by the French

Army: (1) the “traditional” Muslim woman – submissive, cloistered, and subservient to Arab patriarchy, therefore a non-threat and (2) the “Europeanized” Muslim woman wearing European clothing, therefore emancipated and automatically supportive of Algérie française.29 The Battle of Algiers turned these two assumptions on their heads. During the battle, women had worn the haïk in order to hide and transport weapons, bombs, and documents. Several fidayate wearing

European clothing successfully by-passed checkpoints undeterred to eventually plant and detonate bombs.30 Furthermore, some “women” wearing the haïk were disguised male FLN members relaying weapons, bombs, or information.

This distinct minority of Algerian-French Muslim women proved much harder for army officials to conceptualize and, therefore, rationalize or compartmentalize according to colonial

27 Seferdjeli, “Fight with us,” 94. 28 Natalya Vince, “Transgressing Boundaries,” 445. 29 Ibid., 454. 30 Yacef Saadi, chief FLN officer during of the Battle of Algiers, writes in his memoirs that he particularly recruited fidayate who looked “European” in order to fool French paratroopers and bypass army checkpoints. Saadi, La bataille d'Alger, Tome 1, p. 282; quoted in Seferdjeli, “Fight with us,” 127. 9 stereotypes. Historian Natalya Vince has explored the French Army’s misconceptions of this minority of Algerian women in depth, citing the memoirs of General Jean-Yves Godard. In his memoirs, Yves seemed “almost obsessed with the apparently Europeanized female bombers,”

Vince notes.31 About Hassiba Ben Bouali, a member of the fidayate killed in the Battle of

Algiers, Godard wrote:

nothing in her language or her attire differentiates her from a young European woman of bourgeois background.32

Godard’s apparent inability to understand Ben Bouali’s political motivations relates to the French Army’s increasing efforts to assimilate Algerian Muslim women as an indirect means of pacification. The contours of the French “emancipation” program, aimed at winning over the

“hearts and minds” of Algerian women, began to take shape in 1956, with the transfer of power to General Robert Lacoste and, according to historian Neil MacMaster, “a new policy that was specifically aimed at conquest via emancipation of Algerian women.”33 The army’s efforts operated through a number of guises – establishing medical centers, schooling, extending the vote to Algerian women, and even electing an Algerian Muslim woman to the French parliament.34 The program was put into motion with the “unveiling” rallies of 1958, during which groups of Muslim women publicly removed their veils in orchestrated parades. Arguably the most intrusive reform implemented as part of the emancipation campaign was the reform of civil marriage and family law in Algeria, known as the statut personnel, in 1959.

From the French Army’s perspective, the fidayate should, by rights, be the most

“emancipated” and strongest supporters of the official emancipation program and de Gaulle’s

“Third Force,” the group of French-Algerian Muslims (évoluées) supportive of Algérie

31 Vince, “Transgressing Boundaries,” 452. 32 Yves Godard, Les Trois Batailles d’Alger, Tome I: Les paras dans la ville (Paris, 1972), 340-341; quoted in Ibid. 33 MacMaster, Burning the Veil, 78. 34 Nafissa Sid Cara was elected to the l'Assemblée nationale française in 1959. 10 française.35 However, the fidayate blurred both ideological and gender roles, frustrating the

French Army as they directly harassed and challenged French control of Algeria. The women of the urban FLN networks defied the image and role the French Army designated for them; the army underestimated their ability to appropriate the ideals of both the French Republic and

Algerian nationalism into political action.

This upending of gendered stereotypes through insurgent violence led to hyper-concern over the veil, female appearance, and dress in general. This was the result, as Marnia Lazreg writes, of “gender differences not visible with the naked eye” employed in a violent context, such as the Battle of Algiers.36 Women who lacked identifiable Muslim dress-markers, who looked, dressed, and spoke more like Frenchwomen or European settlers, subverted tropes through their nationalist action. Gender and dress-markers were no longer indicators of safety or potential harm for French troops, facing the army with an “unexpected and unfamiliar enemy.”37

As gender roles blurred, the French Army became fixated on determining gender. During army patrols in the countryside, female villagers were “frisked,” euphemisms for genital confirmation and pubic hair examinations. “Verifying a woman’s genitals” guaranteed that a woman was not a man wearing women’s clothing,38 practices discovered during the Battle of

Algiers. Immediately before the battle, the military still felt it imperative that women be searched by other women – French female social workers were employed for this purpose.39 By

1958, male soldiers were frisking women during patrols of rural areas. These strip searches were designed to be humiliating, usually performed in front of family members or the entire

35 Seferdjeli, “Fight with us,” 207. There has been little research done on the minority of French-educated Algerians who did in fact support reconciliation with France. 36 Lazreg, Torture, 165. 37 Vince, “Transgressing Boundaries,” 458. 38 Branche, “Sexual Torture,” 249 and Lazreg, Torture, 164. Lazreg refers to a military circular recommending genital and pubic examination, and describes it as a “military-ordered practice.” 39 Lazreg, Torture, 166 and MacMaster, Burning the Veil, 243. 11 community. Length of the pubic hair was determined to equate with sexual activity, indicating a shaved pubic area as evidence of recent sexual activity and that the woman’s absent husband must be nearby.40 As such, a hyper-concern over veiling and gender morphed into sexual humiliation, a mirror for the development of torture tactics used during the war, and only one step removed from the methods of sexual torture that would have a profound and specific effect on women and the population as a whole.

The famous scene in The Battle of Algiers discussed at the beginning of this chapter is emblematic of how the FLN employed the practice of veiling, constructions of gender, and ethnic stereotypes against the French Army. In the scene, Algerian women donned European clothing in order to disguise themselves to by-pass checkpoints. Women did in fact disguise themselves in this way during the Battle of Algiers and subsequent activities for the FLN urban networks, but, as historians Neil MacMaster and Natalya Vince have pointed out, these actions were merely extensions of the fidayate’s dual world. Of the scene in The Battle of Algiers,

Natalya Vince writes: “in reality, the women chosen for such tasks often already looked and dressed in a European way and were part of a tiny minority who had received a French education alongside European students.” Neil MacMaster likewise notes that “cross-dressing into a

European style…was an extension of a current practice of Muslim women in the urban environment.”41 In the cosmopolitan environment of many Algerian urban centers, dress (or, more specifically, wearing or not wearing the haïk) did not automatically signify a particular group affiliation for these educated Muslim women. Rather, identity and dress were both fluid and negotiable.

40 Branche, La torture et’armee pendant la guerre d’Algerie: 1954-1962 (Paris: Gallimard, 2001), 309 and Lazreg, Torture, 165. 41 Neil MacMaster, Burning the Veil, 138. 12

Djamila Boupacha belonged to this small stratum of French-educated women working for the Algerian nationalist cause. This French upbringing was combined with Algerian nationalist sentiments and education at home. Her family had been involved in the nationalist cause since the 1930s, and her brothers and brother-in-law were members of the FLN.42 As early as 1955,

Boupacha and her family provided shelter to male FLN combatants in their home.43 Boupacha began her FLN activities in Algiers as a liaison agent and political militant, distributing arms, political tracts, medicine, and monetary aid to FLN families.44 In photographs taken of her at the time, Boupacha did not wear a veil or hijab, making her Muslim identity less outwardly visible.

As shown, the lack of outwardly visible militant affiliation and the nature of rebel insurgency during the French-Algerian War would lead to gendered cultural violence as a French military tactic. The subversion of gendered stereotypes created a hysteria surrounding gender that would lead to sexual abuse and rape of women as an unofficially sanctioned military policy that would be perpetrated against female combatants in both the rural countryside and urban detention centers.

42 Boupacha’s father and uncles were members of the Parti du peuple algriénne (PPA), a nationalist party established in 1937 and disbanded in 1939. Vince, “To be moudjahida,” 39. 43 Seferdjeli, “Fight with us,” 131. 44 Interview with Djamila Boupacha, Algiers, March 31, 1998. Seferdjeli, “Fight with us,” 131. 13

Chapter Two: Djamila’s Torture: Rape, culture, and sexualized violence in the French-Algerian War

“So when the soldiers take the men from their homes and confine them outside of the village while they ransack their houses, they know that their wives and their daughters will be violated as well.” – Mouloud Feraoun45

“I cannot imagine a woman being arrested and interrogated who was not also raped…all those I defended had been.” – Gisèle Halimi46 By 1957 the French Army’s use of torture was systematized, authorized, and routinized.47

Any individual, whether a man or a woman, arrested and deemed a rebel terrorist was subject to torture in detention centers. What began as a method for extracting and gathering intelligence on guerilla warfare morphed into its own form of military terror tactic, justified by French authorities as the necessary subjugation of a virulent revolutionary threat. A distinguishing feature of the torture carried out during the French-Algerian War was its overwhelmingly sexual cast. An examination of the nature and specificities of this sexual violence expressly allows for a more nuanced understanding of the high stakes of the war.48 Violence specifically perpetrated against women occurred in tandem with the French Army’s attempts to control women’s allegiance to suit the colonial project with the “emancipation” campaign, revealing the ultimate paradox of the civilizing mission. The irony lies in the fact that women experienced the brunt of the French Army’s sexual violence while they were simultaneously the main targets for social re- organization into the colonial model.49

Another facet of torture during the French-Algerian War was the frequency of and silence surrounding rape. “Although torture was discussed in the media,” historian Marnia Lazreg

45 Mouloud Feraoun, Journal 1955-1962: Reflections on the French-Algerian War (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2000), 262. 46 Branche, La torture et l’armee, 304. 47 Lazreg, Torture, 111. 48 Branche, “Sexual Violence,” 248. 49 Lazreg, Torture, 146. 14 writes, “and civil as well as military authorities were also willing to address it, rape was not.”50

While torture served as an instrument in counterrevolutionary warfare, rape was considered somewhat more normalized or less egregious – a side-effect of war rather than an acknowledged method of torture. Yet, despite this differentiation, again according to Marnia Lazreg, “the notion that French soldiers could rape women embarrassed French authorities more than torture did.”51 Seemingly, revealing that Algerian women had been raped by French soldiers would have been doubly as damaging in metropolitan France as revelations of torture.

~~~

Torture in Algeria became a tactic of “normalized terror to forestall the collapse of the empire in an age of decolonization.”52 French colonial officials, however, claimed that torture was an “epiphenomenon”53 of the war; a reaction against the barbarity of rebel forces and attacks against European civilians, the result of a spontaneous convergence of circumstances that necessitated torture in order to maintain the security of the European population in Algeria and to prevent anarchy. Torture and interrogation tactics were of course physical as well as psychological and sexual in nature. According to Marnia Lazreg, “sex was understood to be the fundamental, most efficient way of making a combatant or suspect talk,” and therefore systematized torture in Algeria logically led to the widespread sexual abuse of prisoners.54 In addition to being the most intimate personal violation, sexual torture also possessed certain practicalities for protecting the identity of army torturers. Sexual torture oftentimes left no mark and was the hardest to prove.

50 Lazreg, Torture, 130. 51 Ibid. 52 Lazreg, Torture, 3. 53 Ibid. 54 Lazreg, Torture, 143. James D. Le Sueur also comes to the conclusion that torture was the “logical” outcome of France’s hegemonic policio-military system, in Le Sueur, “Torture and the Decolonization of Algeria,” 161. 15

Both men and women were subject to similar methods of sexualized torture in detention centers. Electrodes (using a gégène)55 were applied to the breasts and genitals.56 Men’s testicles were crushed or burned away with electric shocks.57 Women and men could be raped with various objects. However, the consequences and implications of rape for women in colonial

Algeria functioned differently than for men.58 Algerian Muslim women felt rape more keenly as a result of their place in their society and communities. As Raphaëlle Branche notes, “men, of course, could also be subjected to rape, but its symbolic signification, which is part of its criminal efficiency, was greater for a woman, because it could directly threaten… her position within her family.”59 Algerian men, often forced to watch as their wives or daughters were violated, were humiliated in turn by their inability to protect their female family members.60 It is through this association that rape gained its force as a collective act of violence.

Raphaëlle Branche notes military archives that reveal internal memos on reports of rape, citing the army’s awareness that “rapes happened, and happened repeatedly.” 61 These rapes occurred in both rural areas and urban detention centers. Violence against women in the countryside functioned as a means of pacification. Jacques Zéo, a soldier serving in the Kabylie mountains, noted the “frequency of rape” during military reprisals as well as routine search operations.62 Zéo’s description furthers the notion that soldiers expected access to female civilians: “Well, let’s not talk about rape, during the 15 days [of reprisals] the men helped

55 Halimi, Djamila Boupacha, 39. The gégène was a portable army field telephone modified to carry out electric shock torture. 56 Lazreg, Torture, 126. 57 Le Sueur, “Torture and the Decolonization of Algeria,” 165. 58 Ibid. James D. LeSueur notes that “specific types of torture were aimed at types of individuals” (emphasis in the orginal). It can be concluded then that women were the targets of specialized sexual violence with specific aims. 59 Branche, “Sexual Violence,” 250. 60 MacMaster, Burning the Veil, 222. 61 Branche, “Sexual Violence,” 248. 62 Lazreg, Torture, 155. 16 themselves freely.”63 Another soldier, Jean-Paul Meurisse, describes arriving back at his base camp to find his superior officer waiting with a dozen local women for the officers to choose from.64

The wartime journal of Algerian writer Mouloud Feraoun provides insight on this violence in rural areas, as well as the dynamics between the rural population and the French

Army. Feraoun described the “systematic rapes” that occurred in the rural Ouadhias region, as related to him by a friend.65 Feraoun also outlined what he felt to be the French Army’s mentality towards this sexual violence with an inversion of the colonial trope. Sarcastically referring to rural villagers as “primitives,” he wrote: “[they] have not evolved enough to accept the idea that anyone can rape their women with impunity.”66 Here, Feraoun inverted the assumptions of the civilizing mission – the Algerian villages have “not evolved enough” to allow

French soldiers to violate the women of the village and so need to be enlightened. Feraoun’s cynicism reveals the irony of French attempts to “modernize” Algeria and the Algerian population by, in effect, brutalizing the population and disregarding cultural mores.

The second context of violence against women occurred in military detention centers.

When female FLN members were arrested, they could expect sexual abuse as a matter of course.67 Marnia Lazreg points out that violence against women in custody exposed the state’s objectification of Muslim women in the colonial context:

63 Ibid. 64 MacMaster, Burning the Veil, 223. 65 Feraoun, Journal, 166. 66 Ibid., 262. 67 Lazreg, Torture, 160. On the other hand, Raphaëlle Branche argues that “the fact that torture was widespread in Algeria does not necessarily mean that prisoners were systematically raped.” Branche, “Sexual Violence,” 251. 17

It is not so much routine rape presumably committed in violation of the army’s rules of engagement as rape under arrest that exposes the state’s view of women, who had been objectified as the most telling pieces of material evidence against the assumed backwardness of Islam – the tangible, palpable difference between French “civilization” and the “primitiveness” of the culture that informed the guerre révolutionnaire.68 The example of Djamila Boupacha’s torture is typical of detained female combatants.

Boupacha described her thirty-three day ordeal at the hands of French paratroopers to Gisèle

Halimi. Boupacha was stripped naked, spat on, shocked with electric nodes attached to her nipples and genitals, burned with cigarette butts, nearly drowned in a bathtub, and raped with a bottle.69 Boupacha also related how her father and brother-in-law were dragged into her cell and forced to watch her take beatings from French paratroopers.70 This act was meant to induce

Boupacha’s confession as well as humiliate the two men. It amounted to psychological taunting as a failure to protect their daughter/sister-in-law, illustrating in this context how women could be used as objects to taunt men or force them to confess.

Furthering the notion that the torture of women under arrest revealed “the state’s view of women,” Algerian women and female combatants were not the only female victims of torture in detention centers.71 The French Army also arrested European women sympathetic to or actively aiding the Algerian nationalist cause. Natalya Vince notes archival documents of seven

European women imprisoned at the Villa Sésini detention center in Algiers.72 Vince comments on the futility of the women’s appeal for release by writing letters to high-ranking military authorities. Just like these seven women, most political prisoners faced a legal vacuum in the military tribunal system. Djamila Boupacha’s case would expose these same abuses of justice by the colonial government and military tribunals.

68 Lazreg, Torture, 159-160. 69 Halimi, Djamila Boupacha, 39. 70 Ibid., 36. 71 Lazreg, Torture, 163. 72 Vince, “To be a mujahida,” 42. 18

The state’s efforts to diminish the significance of the rape of women held in detention are also readily apparent in the Djamila Boupacha Committee’s encounter with Minister of Public

Safety Maurice Patin. A few of the committee members, including Simone de Beauvoir, Gisèle

Halimi, and Germaine Tillion, met with Patin to lobby for Boupacha’s trial to be moved to

France. Downplaying the issue of rape in detention and the case itself, Patin stated “we’re not concerned with real torture [in this case], the kind of thing they used to do in Indo-China….the victim is made to sit on the bottle, as you might say. Penetration per anum, very violent. Liable to perforate the gut. Generally fatal.”73 Through Patin’s sexist comments, the rape of a woman became a normal bodily function. Rape is rendered meaningless in this instance because women’s bodies are designed for penetration. Furthermore, the overarching importance for Patin was protecting the soldiers involved. Patin suggested the legal proceedings and media surrounding the case damaged the soldiers’ morale and standing in Algeria more than anything else.

In conclusion, sexual violence – and specifically the rape of women – was a means of degrading the entire population and family structure, not only the individual. Rape in colonial

Algeria functioned by “assaulting values particularly fundamental” to Algerian communities and groups.74 As Mouloud Feraoun somewhat gauchely stated in his journal:

Up to now, the basic objective of [rural Algerian] social life, manners, and customs has been to jealously safeguard the sex of their women. They believe that it is their inalienable right to possess this, for their honor has been buried in the vagina like a treasure more precious than life itself.75

73 Halimi, Djamila Boupacha, 97. Emphasis in the original. 74 Branche, “Sexual Violence,” 253. 75 Feraoun, Journal, 262. 19

“In this society where virginity of women is the highest value,” writes Raphaëlle Branche, rape became “ultimately, men’s business – political violence, cultural and political violation.”76 Rape functioned as a cultural assault and violation of taboos as well as an attack on masculinity.

However, as Marnia Lazreg writes, “more than men, women’s bodies were subjected to greater indignity inside as well as outside the torture chamber.”77 The French emancipatory measures and official emancipation rhetoric “obscured the reality of women’s rape on the ground.”78 This in essence reveals the paradox of the mission civilisatrice and the French

Army’s policies on women during the French-Algerian War. Army authorities supported a gender-specific emancipation campaign to extend the rights and civilization of the French

Republic to Algerian women while simultaneously subjecting women to brutal sexual violence in the countryside and detention centers. The maintenance of Algérie française both paradoxically mandated sexual violence against the population and the allegiance of the population, especially women’s allegiance.

76 Branche, “Sexual Violence,” 253. 77 Lazreg, Torture, 130. 78 Lazreg, Torture, 154. 20

Chapter Three: Intellectuals for Djamila: Left-wing intellectuals, public opinion, and reports of torture

“Our military tribunals certainly do have a peculiar idea of justice.” – Émile Zola79 The relationship between intellectuals, politics, and French identity occupies a seminal place in the French Republican tradition. Venita Datta writes that “in no other country does the intellectual play such an important role in society as the voice of the national conscience.”80

French intellectuals, at different historical moments, have guided public debate and emerged as a social group with an unspoken social contract to expound on the state of the French Republic.

The tradition of the engaged intellectual in France extends back to the nineteenth century and competing conceptions of France are irrevocably bound up with the intellectual enterprise. In the words of Eric Richtmyer, the intellectual would become “a bifurcated figure, with both a leftist and rightist face, each of which believed itself to be the true bearer and shepherd of the spirit of the nation-state.”81 This long tradition would deeply inform intellectual debates on the

French-Algerian War, with each side of the ideological divide – simplistically, the leftists associated with communism and Third World decolonization, the rightists with army hardliners and staunch nationalism – claiming to represent France and defend Republican values.

Halimi and Beauvoir’s efforts on behalf of Djamila Boupacha fit in with this long tradition of intellectual engagement, a tradition extending back to the 1890s and most closely

82 associated with The Dreyfus Affair. In 1894, Captain Alfred Dreyfus, a Jewish army officer, was arrested and falsely accused of selling army secrets to German spies. The most divisive cause célèbre in French history brought numerous fin-de-siècle French political and social

79 Émile Zola, “Letter to M. Félix Faure, President of the Republic (J’Accuse),” in The Dreyfus Affair: ‘J’accuse’ and Other Writings, ed. Alain Pagès, trans. Eleanor Levieux (Yale University Press, 1996), 51. 80 Venita Datta, Birth of a National Icon: The Literary Avant-Garde and the Origins of the Intellectual in France (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press), 1. 81 Eric William Richtmyer, “Beyond Commitment: Intellectual Engagement in Politics in Postwar France, 1944-- 1962” (PhD diss., University of Minnesota, 2010), 29. 82 Ibid., 28. 21 tensions to the surface, including anti-Semitism and the true meaning of Republicanism (the tenets of which included rights of the individual, upholding the rule of law, and the extent of the

Catholic Church’s proper influence on the secular state). The Dreyfus Affair divided the French body politic, public thinkers, and the national press; the two camps became known as the

Dreyfusards and the anti-Dreyfusards.

At the height of the Dreyfus affair, writer Émile Zola published his famous front-page essay “J’Accuse!” in L’Aurore on January 13, 1898. Writing as if the article was a letter to

Prime Minister Félix Faure, Zola accused government and military officials of obstruction of justice and gross complicity in the Dreyfus case. Zola criticized the secrecy of the court proceedings, outlined the superficial evidence against Dreyfus, accused military officials of blatant anti-Semitism, and questioned the current validity of the rule of law in France. He wrote:

France, the great and liberal cradle of the rights of man, will die of anti-Semitism if it is not cured of it…Truth and justice – how ardently we have striven for them! And how distressing it is to see them slapped in the face, overlooked, forced to retreat!83

The L’Aurore edition containing “J’Accuse!” sold between 200,000 and 300,000 copies in a single day.84 Zola furthermore took a personal risk in publishing his accusations; the government sued him and the editor of L’Aurore for libel soon after publication.85

Zola’s piece galvanized the leftist opposition to the Dreyfus Affair and stands as a fearless work criticizing military officials in the public intellectual tradition. “For the first time,” writes David L. Schalk, “les intellectuels emerged in France during the Dreyfus Affair, and did so in order to take a political stance.”86 Intellectuals arose out of the Dreyfus Affair as a group distinct from the eighteenth-century philosophes such as Voltaire and Diderot. Venita Datta

83 Zola, “Letter to M. Félix Faure, President of the Republic (J’Accuse),” 51. 84 Ibid., xvii 85 Ibid., xix. 86 David L. Schalk, War and the Ivory Tower: Algeria and Vietnam (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 40. 22 argues that the French intellectuel as a distinct social group emerged out of the broader social, political, and cultural context of fin-de-siècle France, with intellectuals supplanting religious figures as the source of moral authority in a rapidly modernizing world.87 The Dreyfus Affair pitted family member against member, dividing French society as well as coalescing groups of public thinkers. Whether leftist or rightist, the Dreyfus Affair altered intellectuals’ relationship to political events; articulating moral concerns of the Republic became a moral imperative tied to effective political engagement.

Heirs to this tradition, public intellectuals in the mid-twentieth century grappled with the political, social, and moral upheavals brought about by the French-Algerian War. “At stake [in the French-Algerian War],” writes Eric Richtmyer, “once more was the identity of the French nation, and the values of postwar France, just as much as its physical borders….French intellectuals appointed themselves the custodians of French identity, a trust in which it was their task to speak out against injustices.”88 Furthermore, the legacy of World War II, the Vichy government, la Résistance, and memories of the Gestapo colored debates surrounding injustice and torture with a painful irony. A military with the heritage of the French Resistance was torturing Algerian Muslims at home and abroad, in the name of France, the country of humanism and the Declaration of the Rights of Man. Furthermore, Charles de Gaulle, leader of the

Resistance, acted as the puppet head of what many left-leaning intellectuals considered a proto- fascist government.

87 Datta, National Icon, 1. Datta points out the significance of early intellectuals being designated as clercs (“clerics”), signs of the vestiges of the Catholic Church’s influence on French society. 88 Richtmyer, “Beyond Commitment,” 147. 23

Leftist intellectuals against the war in Algeria took up the mantle of defending the

Republican principles of France by opposing the army’s torture tactics.89 Violence perpetrated by the state in the name of the French Republic posed problems for many left-wing intellectuals; the question of torture became central to intellectual debates. “Torture in Algeria,” Marnia

Lazreg writes, “was a watershed for French intellectuals.”90 Intellectuals who grappled with the question of torture included Jean- Paul Sartre, Albert Camus, Germaine Tillion, Franz Fanon,

François Mauriac and numerous others. By the end of the 1950s, many of the left intelligentsia saw themselves as guardians of a moral authority that had been co-opted by an out-of-control military establishment.

As a result of the hegemonic politico-military system in Algeria, prisoners had virtually no avenue to a fair trial unless activists in metropolitan France successfully mobilized public opinion on their behalf. Individual torture cases, and the few that became cause célèbres, gave intellectuals a means to voice opposition to France’s policies in Algeria. “By legitimizing their positions through appeals to justice and right,” writes Eric Richtmyer, “French intellectuals turned their speech into ethical action.”91 Intellectuals published articles in newspapers and literary magazines in order to expose the army’s use of torture to the court of public opinion.

While soldiers’ testimonies of the torture of Algerian Muslims proliferated from 1955 onward,92 none provoked a national outcry comparable to the cause célèbre of Henri Alleg. The editor of the communist newspaper Alger républican, Alleg participated in clandestine activities for the FLN and was arrested for “endangering the safety of the state” on June 10, 1957.93

89 Simultaneously the “Right” also claimed to be defending the fundamental principles of the Republic, which would be destroyed if Algeria gained independence from France. 90 Lazreg, Torture, 213. 91 Richtmyer, “Beyond Commitment,” 152. 92 Le Sueur, “Torture and the Decolonization of French Algeria,” 165. 93 “The Victory” by Jean-Paul Sartre, in Alleg, The Question (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2006), xxxvii. 24

Alleg’s account of his torture, published as The Question, provided concrete evidence and a first- hand account of the army’s torture tactics. Alleg detailed how electric nodes were attached to his face, nipples, and genitals; the burns later became infected. He was savagely beaten by groups of paratroopers, hung by the ankles from a plank of wood, water was forced in his mouth and up his nose, and he was given forced injections of a barbiturate his torturers called “truth serum.”

Alleg’s testimony proved the French Army had no compunctions about torturing Europeans for information.

The Question was unique because it was a detailed firsthand account of an army torture victim. The text, smuggled out of the Lodi detention camp while Alleg was still imprisoned, was one of the first testimonies of torture to attract wide-spread attention of the French public.94

Published in February 1958, Alleg’s book received the unique distinction of being the first book seized by the French government since the eighteenth century.95

Jean-Paul Sartre quickly took up his pen to protest Alleg’s treatment. Sartre’s essay, “A

Victory,” was published in L’Express on March 6, 1958 in response to Alleg’s testimony and drawn-out trial.96 “In 1958, in Algiers,” Sartre wrote, “people are tortured regularly and systematically.”97 Sartre framed the dynamics of torture practiced by the French Army as motivated by racial hatred, while simultaneously apotheosizing and universalizing Alleg’s ordeal. Hundreds of writers and public figures came to Alleg’s defense and spoke out against his

94 Le Sueur, “Torture and the Decolonization of French Algeria,” 167. 60,000 copies were sold before the book was seized by the French government. 95 Ibid., 166. 96 Judith Surkis, “Ethics and Violence: Simone de Beauvoir, Djamila Boupacha and the Algerian War,” French Politics, Culture and Society 28.2 (2010), 40. 97 “A Victory” by Jean Paul Sartre, in Alleg, The Question, xxvii. 25 torture, including Minister of Culture André Malraux, authors François Mauriac and Roger

Martin du Gard, and General Jacques de Bollardière.98

Moreover, The Question offers numerous glimpses of Algerian Muslims in the El Biar prison undergoing similar tortures as those Alleg suffered. Alleg did not fail to highlight the fact that women were being tortured by the French Army; gender did not provide women with immunity. According to Alleg, the female prisoners were beaten, insulted, raped, and subjected to both water and electrical torture. Alleg’s widely-read book brought female prisoners into the

French public consciousness, even though in his account they were only fleeting glimpses.99

Another case that galvanized intellectuals and public opinion grew out of Alleg’s testimony: that of the disappearance of French national Maurice Audin. Audin, a mathematics professor at the University of Algiers, a communist, and an FLN activist of French origin, disappeared the day before Henri Alleg’s arrest. Due to the persistence of Josette Audin,

Maurice Audin’s widow, historian Pierre Vidal-Naquet published a volume dedicated to Audin’s mysterious disappearance and argued military officials were complicit in the cover-up of his death.100 Vidal-Naquet and mathematician Lauren Schwartz formed the Maurice Audin

Committee in order to arouse public opinion and protest the army’s lack of accountability.101

Gisèle Halimi and Simone de Beauvoir would eventually form a similar committee of intellectuals, academics, and professionals on behalf of Djamila Boupacha.

Prior to Boupacha’s trial, the most famous trial and torture case of an Algerian woman was that of Djamila Bouhired. Like Boupacha, Bouhired worked for the FLN urban bomb

98 Alleg, The Question, xv. 99 Ibid., 35. 100 Ibid., 37. 101 Le Sueur, Uncivil War, 199. 26 network. During the Battle of Algiers, French military forces captured Bouhired who was in the process of transporting clandestine documents to FLN leader Yacef Saadi. Tortured and beaten by French paratroopers, Bouhired was tried by a French military tribunal and sentenced to death on July 19, 1957.102 The verdict caused an international media uproar, thanks in part to FLN defense lawyer Jacques Vergès’s strategy that, in the words of Marnia Lazreg, “used the courtroom as a political space for the indictment of French military violence, torture, and abuse of human rights.”103 Vergès and novelist Georges Arnaud published Pour Djamila Bouhired, a book that accompanied Bouhired’s trial. The French military court commuted Bouhired’s sentence on March 14, 1958.

Another scandal broke on June 18, 1959 when Editions de Minuit published La

Gangrène.104 The book contained the testimonies of five young Algerian students who were arrested and tortured in Paris by the Direction de Surveillance Territoire (DST, France’s secret police).105 In his essay “A Victory,” Sartre addressed the rumors of torture methods being used in civil prisons in France itself; La Gangrène vindicated these rumors. La Gangrène affirmed that torture tactics were no longer confined to Algeria during the French-Algerian conflict; they had spread to the heart of metropolitan France. Numerous intellectuals spoke out in defense of the students tortured on French soil.

Thus, by the time Djamila Boupacha’s brother sent a letter to Gisèle Halimi in April 1960 asking if she would take on his sister’s case, the French public could no longer claim ignorance of the French Army’s practice of torture. Stories proliferated and torture cases no longer

102 Seferdjeli, “Fight With Us,” 130. 103 Lazreg, Torture, 159. 104 The Gangrene (London: Lyle Stuart, 1960). Judith Surkis notes that the book was immediately seized upon publication and criminal charges were filed against the publisher, Jerôme Lindon. Surkis, “Ethics and Violence,” 41. 105 Le Sueur, Uncivil War, 204 and Surkis, “Ethics and Violence,” 41. 27 shocked; in fact, they had become commonplace.106 Halimi and Beauvoir would therefore have to come up with an effective, distinct strategy in order to arouse public sympathy on Boupacha’s behalf.

106 Surkis, “Ethics and Violence,” 41. 28

Chapter Four: Beauvoir’s Ethics and Halimi’s Justice: The Djamila Boupacha Case

“The most scandalous aspect of any scandal is that one gets used to it.” – Simone de Beauvoir107 On May 18, 1960, a military tribunal in Algiers held the first hearing in Djamila

Boupacha’s trial.108 Boupacha had been imprisoned for over three months and stood accused of planting a bomb in a university cafeteria on September 27, 1959.109 Boupacha appeared before the court with Gisèle Halimi as her legal counsel. Halimi noted the remarkable speed with which the military court had compiled significant evidence against Boupacha, as well as the amount of time her client had been held in jail illegally. The official prison warrant submitted to the court stated that Boupacha had been arrested and arraigned on March 15 while in fact she had been arrested on February 10 and tortured for 33 days.110 Citing the insufficient amount of time allotted to her to prepare Boupacha’s defense, Halimi managed to secure a temporary adjournment of the case.

Halimi, an experienced FLN defense lawyer, immediately recognized the military court’s capacity to sweep her client’s case under the rug. As a matter of state security, new reforms promulgated in February 1960 made military tribunals, rather than civilian judges and courts, responsible for administering justice in all “terrorist” cases.111 Halimi, recognizing the farce of trial by jury in Algeria, chose to pursue justice for Boupacha by placing trust in the rule of law and the power of public opinion. “The judges had to be told of it, and not the judges alone: the whole of France should know what was afoot,” Halimi wrote.112

107 Simone de Beauvoir, “Pour Djamila Boupacha,” Le Monde, June 3, 1960. 108 Halimi, Djamila Boupacha, 24. 109 Ibid., 26. 110 Ibid., 47, 51. 111 Ibid., 84 and Surkis, “Ethics and Violence,” 42. 112 Halimi, Djamila Boupacha, 30. 29

After writing to high-ranking government officials in France to destroy any official recourse to ignorance, Halimi recruited Simone de Beauvoir to her client’s cause. Beauvoir’s involvement in the case marked her first foray into political activism against French colonialism and the French-Algerian War. The evolution of Beauvoir’s views on the French-Algerian War and her impressions of Boupacha’s trial are recorded in the third volume of her autobiography,

Force of Circumstance. In her retrospective account, Beauvoir insisted that she had never thought of herself as “a woman of action,” but rather as “a woman of letters.”113 However, as the war dragged on, and stories of torture and human rights violations were reported daily in the press, Beauvoir recorded her personal reactions to what was going on around her. “I could no longer bear my fellow citizens,” she wrote, “it was even worse, because, whether I wanted to be or not, I was an accomplice of these people I couldn’t bear to be in the same street with.”114 The notion of widespread apathy was particularly troubling to Beauvoir:

This hypocrisy, this indifference, this country, my own self, were no longer bearable to me. All those people in the streets, in open agreement or battered into a stupid submission – they were all murderers, all guilty. Myself as well. “I’m French.” The words scalded my throat…115

Beauvoir “wanted to stop being an accomplice” to the atrocities she continually read about in Algeria.116 With these concerns simmering under the surface, Beauvoir agreed to write an article on Boupacha’s behalf the very same day Halimi approached her. Titled “For Djamila

Boupacha,”117 the article appeared in the June 3, 1960 edition of Le Monde.118

113 Simone de Beauvoir, Force of Circumstance, trans. Richard Hunt (New York: Putnam, 1965), 461. 114 Ibid., 368-369. 115 Ibid., 384. 116 Ibid., 369. 117 The title of the article was a reference to Pour Djamila Bouhired, the book written by lawyer Jacques Verges detailing the trial of Djamila Bouhired. 118 “Pour Djamila Boupacha,” Le Monde, June 3, 1960. 30

In her article, Beauvoir identified the locus of the Boupacha scandal as the French public’s indifference to the atrocities being committed “in [their] name” in Algeria.119 “The most scandalous aspect of any scandal,” she wrote, “is that one gets used to it.”120 Beauvoir lamented the lack of accountability brought to bear on the authorities as a result of the public’s indifference. As Émile Zola had done before her, Beauvoir framed the dynamics of military corruption and mishandling of justice as a betrayal of not just one female prisoner but of the whole of France. By implicating the authorities, Beauvoir argued that the people of France were apathetic accomplices to the authorities’ crimes. Beauvoir called for an investigation into the

“circumstances in which Djamila made her confession,” stating that if the authorities decided against such an investigation, it would be an open admission of the practice and sanction of military torture and the corruption of French military justice.121

The article’s purpose was to delay the immediate proceedings of the military court hearing against Boupacha in Algeria, protect the Boupacha family (who had been threatened by military authorities), illustrate the flagrant abuses of justice in the case, and drum up public support in order to launch an official investigation into Boupacha’s torture. Beauvoir’s tone neither sentimentalized Boupacha’s situation nor based her argument solely on moral outrage.

Beauvoir instead presented the facts of Boupacha’s case in a forthright and blunt manner, publicizing the Algerian authorities’ efforts to hamper Halimi’s defense,122 the use of a retracted confession obtained under torture, and the coercion of witnesses to corroborate Djamila’s crime.123 Accused of terrorist activity, Boupacha, without Halimi and Beauvoir’s intervention,

119 Ibid. 120 “Pour Djamila Boupacha,” Le Monde, June 3, 1960. 121 Ibid. 122 Consular authorities in Algeria repeatedly did not allow Halimi sufficient time to remain in the country in order to prepare Boupacha’s defense. 123 Halimi, Djamila Boupacha, 194. 31 would have most likely been sentenced to death, despite an illegally obtained confession and allegations of torture.

The day after the article’s publication, the French government seized all copies of the Le

Monde edition in Algeria.124 The government seizure only served to draw more attention to the case and Beauvoir’s involvement. Readers’ letters and telegrams came flooding in not only from

France, but Italy, England, Russia, Costa Rica, Cuba, Egypt, and Israel, all of which “seemed to express a mood of shocked awakening.”125 Many letters drew comparisons with torture and government complicity during the Nazi occupation. A French reader from Finistère wrote, “As a former member of the Resistance I find the whole thing uncomfortably reminiscent of Gestapo methods.”126 A letter to the editor of The Guardian newspaper noted, “Surely it is our duty to use what influence we have on our French neighbors and allies to persuade them not to allow the name of France to be equated with inhumanity.”127

Now that Beauvoir’s article had garnered worldwide attention, Halimi and Beauvoir decided to establish a committee in order to keep the case in the public eye. The Djamila

Boupacha Committee would thereafter meticulously publicize every development in the case.

Many notables joined the cause: Rene Julliard, André Philip, Françoise Sagan, Jean-Paul Sartre,

Germaine Tillon, and others. The plan of action would be to defend Djamila’s individual liberties while denouncing and revealing repeated obstruction of justice by the authorities. The committee held press conferences for French and foreign journalists, sent delegations to meet with government officials, and issued communiqués to the press. Their efforts maintained public

124 Julien Murphy, “Beauvoir and the Algerian War: Toward a Post-Colonial Ethics,” in Feminist Interpretations of Simone de Beauvoir, ed. Margaret A. Simons (Philadelphia: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1995), 272. 125 Halimi, Djamila Boupacha, 67. 126 Ibid. 127 “Torture in Algieria,” The Guardian, June 24, 1960. 32 visibility of the case’s proceedings and furthered Djamila’s status as a symbol of French bourgeois resistance to the war.

Between 1960 and 1962, the committee published a series of twelve témoignages

(testimonies) as articles in various Parisian newspapers.128 The immediate purpose of the early témoignages was to arouse public opinion enough to commute a possible death sentence at the second hearing of the case on June 17, 1960. The committee writers also used Boupacha’s case to appeal to a sense of national pride tarnished by the use of torture in Algeria. As Christine

Quinan writes, “much like Beauvoir’s and Alleg’s chosen rhetorical strategies, a sense of national pride runs throughout these témoignages.”129 Henri Alleg, who became a member of the

Djamila Boupacha Committee, wrote in his testimony, “No doubt those who demand in the name of the honor of their nation, the condemnation of Djamila Boupacha’s torturers, and through them of torture itself…will also have at their side ever-increasing numbers of those who know that the Algerian people’s struggle against colonialist oppression and for its independence is identical with the French people’s struggle against Fascism and for democracy.”130 In essence, individual justice for Boupacha meant France could be saved.

Novelist Françoise Sagan’s article on Boupacha’s behalf, entitled “La jeune fille et la grandeur,” summarized the facts of the case and extended an appeal to end the sense of national indifference towards the war in Algeria. “I did not think that there could be limits to the general indifference on certain subjects,” Sagan wrote, “…or from the horrified weariness one feels as one signs the thousandth petition.” Sagan further indirectly implicated President Charles de

128 Republished as appendices to Halimi and Beauvoir’s book, Djamila Boupacha: The story of the torture of a young Algerian girl which shocked liberal French opinion. 129 Christine Lisa Quinan, “Remembering Bodies: Gender, Race, and Nationality in the French-Algerian War” (PhD diss., University of California, Berkeley, 2010), 79. 130 Halimi, Djamila Boupacha, 207. 33

Gaulle. She wrote, “I do not understand why an intelligent man, who has the sense of grandeur and also the power, has still done nothing about it…I do not believe that the fanfares of grandeur could ever drown out the screams of a young girl.”131

Sagan’s reference to Boupacha as a “young girl” scratches the surface of how

Boupacha’s image and gender were used in multiple ways on both sides of the political spectrum. Efforts to discredit Boupacha in the Algerian right-wing press were mediated through gender and focused on her sexuality. Gender also became a weapon with which to discredit

Boupacha’s supporters and legal team. Although the sexual nature of Boupacha’s torture and allegations brought her own sexual modesty into question due to gender biases of the time,

Halimi and Beauvoir sought to use Boupacha’s sexual modesty – as the “tortured virgin” - to the defense’s advantage. Sexual cultural mores – and the cult of virginity – were also very important to Boupacha and became a source of anxiety for her as well.

Before the case was removed to Caen, France, Boupacha’s body and sexual habits were subject to scrutiny in the right-wing French-Algerian press. At the second hearing of the case on

June 17, 1960 the prosecution presented new evidence in the form of photographs. Seized from the Boupacha home, the photographs showed Djamila Boupacha in the company of two male

FLN fighters.132 Boupacha also testified that she had sheltered male FLN combatants in her home and the press seized upon this admission. “Do not these documents suggest,” a journalist wrote in the Echo d’Alger, “that a supposedly straitlaced and orthodox Muslim girl really used her bedroom to entertain men in?”133 An article in the right-wing periodical Voici Pourquoi reproduced the photos, rebuked Simone de Beauvoir’s article, and sarcastically pointed out,

131 “La jeune fille et la grandeur,” Françoise Sagan, L’Express, June 16, 1960. 132 “Le process de Djamila Boupacha,” Le Monde, June 18, 1960 and Halimi, Djamila Boupacha, 87. 133 “De nouveaux documents á charge intervenant dans l’affaire…,” L’Echo d’Alger, June 18, 1960 34

“here are the forgotten images of Djamila Boupacha and her innocent companions.”134 The article and accompanying images framed Boupacha as a modern revolutionary, implying that she was both sexual and dangerous.

The right-wing Algerian press also used gendered insults to discredit Halimi and

Beauvoir, the Djamila Boupacha Committee as a whole (which was mostly comprised of female members), and Algerian women’s participation in the war in general. M. Tabourel, of Fraternité

Française, wrote a somewhat belated but nevertheless scathing response to Sagan’s article.

Tabournel criticized Sagan’s intellect and implied that the “weaker sex” (meaning Halimi,

Beauvoir, and Sagan) spearheading Boupacha’s legal defense was leading the public astray.135

Another article in Nouveaux Jours commented on Algerian women’s participation in the war as rebel fighters, lamenting “that our charming companions of ‘the weaker sex,’ oblivious to their

‘gentleness and feminine grace,’ had treacherously committed themselves to active participation in the nationalist cause.”136 By virtue of the majority of Boupacha’s legal team and Boupacha herself being female, Halimi and Beauvoir’s activism became implicitly about gender, even if the goal was an assault on the colonial structure.

Despite such volleys in the right-wing press and resistance from French Army authorities, the Committee succeeded in bringing public opinion to bear to such an extent that the case was transferred from the Algiers courts to the Caen Division in France in December 1960.137 When the case was successfully transferred to France, the focus of Djamila’s status as a public symbol was the sexual nature of her torture and the outrage it provoked. What made Beauvoir’s Le

134 “Voici les images oubliée de Djamila Boupacha,” Voici Pourqoui, July 7, 1960. 135 “Le Maitres A Penser: Françoise Sagan et le sens de la grandeur,” M. Tabourel, Fraternité Française, July 8, 1960. 136 Halimi, Djamila Boupacha, 87. 137 Ibid., 91. 35

Monde article scandalous to public opinion was that she recounted Boupacha’s torture in graphic detail, in particular her rape with a bottleneck:

…Djamila was transferred to Hussein Dey, where three harkis, two Army men and three plainclothes police inspectors put her through the Third Degree. They affixed electrodes to her nipples with Scotch tape, subsequently applying them to her legs, face, anus, and vagina. This electrical treatment was interspersed with blows and cigarette- burns…Djamila Boupacha herself states what in fact took place: ‘I was given the most appalling torture of all, the so-called “bottle treatment”. First they tied me up in a special posture, and then they rammed the neck of a bottle into [me]. I screamed and fainted….138 Beauvoir did not dance around the issue of Boupacha’s rape; this was a part of

Beauvoir’s strategy. Halimi and Beauvoir had purposefully recounted the violence done to

Boupacha’s body. The upsetting nature of Boupacha’s torture, reported in vivid detail in a widely read French newspaper, combined with the star power of Simone de Beauvoir, was what would turn the case into a cause célèbre.

Establishing Boupacha’s violated virginity would become the focus of legal proceedings as well as the campaign the committee made before the public. 139 Halimi recognized the importance of proving Boupacha’s virginity not only as a publicity angle but as an important legal point in the case: the court in Algiers repeatedly called into question the veracity of the claims that Boupacha was raped. Boupacha first requested a medical exam on May 11, 1960 at her initial hearing. A military doctor examined Boupacha but the court altered the doctor’s report, stating “they found no evidence of a menstrual complaint.”140 In France, Boupacha was examined by five doctors, all of whom produced a lengthy medical report that concluded “all might well argue in favor of traumatic defloration.”141 Their evaluation also sought to answer a

138 Halimi, Djamila Boupacha, 195. 139 Surkis, “Ethics and Violence,” 44. 140 Halimi, Djamila Boupacha, 45. 141 Ibid., 125-126. 36 question deemed fundamental to the case: did Djamila Boupacha possess “a mentality corresponding with that of a virgin.”142 Dr. Helene Wolfson, after a lengthy psychological evaluation, answered in the affirmative.

Boupacha herself remained very emotionally distressed at what the loss of her virginity meant personally and culturally. Halimi states that Boupacha “was quite obsessed by the overriding importance of coming to her husband a virgin.”143 During a discussion with Halimi,

Boupacha viewed losing her virginity as worse than losing an arm or a leg.144 She remained very concerned about her virginity and what its loss meant for her as an Algerian-Muslim woman.

Muslim nuptial rites in Algeria required the husband to reveal bloodstained sheets the morning after consummation in order to prove the bride’s virginity.145 Boupacha worried that she would not be able to marry because of her ordeal. As Christine Quinan notes, having the case played out very publicly in the press meant that “[Boupacha] also risked losing access to a whole set of cultural privileges, including marriage and respect.”146

The multivalent uses of gender and virginity in the case cut multiple ways, from

Boupacha’s image in the press in both France and Algeria to her legal defense. As historian

Judith Surkis writes, “Boupacha’s physical and metaphorical “purity” became an important focus of the legal proceedings and the case that the committee made before the public.”147 André

Philip, a member of the Djamila Boupacha Committee, wrote in his témoignage:

142 Halimi, Djamila Boupacha, 125-126. 143 Ibid., 75. 144 Ibid. 145 Ibid., 126. 146 Quinan, “Remembering Bodies,” 73. 147 Surkis, “Ethics and Violence,” 44. 37

The campaign initiated on behalf of Djamila Boupacha derives part of its importance from the fact that her case is the very symbol of that corruption of ends by means which threatens to destroy our country utterly; it is the very honour of France which has become tarnished in the treatment of this girl, it is the values which define France in the eyes of the world that the torturers are destroying.148 Combined with the appeal to national pride, the public opinion campaign linked the virginal Boupacha with the purity and honor of France, a purity defiled by the military authorities in Algeria. Boupacha was defined in the leftist French press by her torture and lost virginity, not by her political activism, her intelligence, or her identity as an Algerian-Muslim woman. In the témoignages the Djamila Boupacha Committee wrote on her behalf, she is repeatedly referred to as a girl, not a woman. The campaign focused on Boupacha’s youth and virginity, brushing over references to her political radicalism. Futhermore, Boupacha’s self- expression was moderated through Halimi. Boupacha spoke out in two letters to her supporters but a full narrative portrait only appeared in February 1962 with the publication of Djamila

Boupacha: The story of the torture of a young Algerian girl which shocked liberal French opinion, the text Halimi and Beauvoir wrote to accompany the case. The book bears her name and presents the facts of her case, but was also specifically targeted to appeal to a liberal French audience.

Boupacha was, in many ways, the perfect candidate to elicit sympathy from a broad

French public, indicated by the ease with which she became a public symbol. She had studied in

French for her diploma, subscribed to liberal French values, and came from a bourgeois Algerian family. In the photographs of her published in the press, Boupacha wore European clothing, making her Muslim identity less outwardly visible. According to Professor Suzanne Gauch, “she

148 Halimi, Djamila Boupacha, 237 38 and her family appealed to the French values her supporters embodied.” 149 Even after her torture at the hands of French soldiers, Boupacha still dreamed of one day walking the streets of

Paris.150

As for the case itself, military authorities refused to furnish the Caen court with photographs of the military officers Boupacha accused. In February 1961, the Caen magistrate presiding over the case, Phillip Chausserie-Laprée, submitted a thorough report to the Attorney-

General calling for the witnesses subpoenaed by the defense to be called before the court, along with photographs of the accused officers.151 After further delay and refusal by military authorities, the Djamila Boupacha Committee announced in November 1961 that Boupacha

“intended to bring a civil suit against both General Ailleret and the Minister of War, M. Messmer for the harborage of malefactors and criminal breach of judicial autonomy.”152 The military’s overarching argument for not providing the evidence was that the release of the photographs would be damaging to “morale.”153 After a considerable delay by military authorities, the case was brought to a premature close in March 1962 by the end of the French-Algerian War.

Marking the cessation of hostilities in the conflict, the Evian Accords granted political and legal amnesty to both Algerian nationalists and the French military. The Accords nullified all war crimes, in essence eliminating any sort of recourse to justice in court for Djamila Boupacha.

149 Suzanne Gauch, Liberating Shahrazad: Feminism, Post-Colonialism, and Islam (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007), 11. 150 Halimi, Djamila Boupacha, 113. 151 Ibid., 135. 152 Ibid., 176-177. 153 Lee Whitfield, “The French Military Under Female Fire: The Public Opinion Campaign and Justice in the Case of Djamila Boupacha, 1960-1962,” Contemporary French Civilization, XX.1 (1996), 86. 39

Conclusion

On March 14, 1963, the British press reported on the first diplomatic delegation from the newly-independent state of Algeria. An article in The London Times reported that the delegation included three men and “a pretty young woman” who, the article noted, “was not interested in fashion; all she was concerned with was the political life of Algeria.”154 The article went on to note that the young woman was very well-dressed for one so interested in politics (she “was clothed and coiffured with an elegance that few girls interested only in politics could have achieved”). In almost every respect, the article remained more concerned with the young woman’s appearance and demeanor than her political acumen. However, as the title of the article indicated, this young woman was in fact Djamila Boupacha.

Djamila Boupacha was released from prison in Rennes, France, on April 23, 1962.155

She lived in Gisèle Halimi’s home for a short time until, according to Halimi, she was kidnapped by FLN agents and taken back to Algeria.156 Halimi could not get in contact with Boupacha for months until Boupacha resurfaced as part of the Algerian diplomatic delegation in Britain. How and why did Boupacha end up back in the international spotlight as the face of the newly- independent Algeria?

Just as the French army was aware of the potent symbolism of Algerian women through its “emancipation” campaign, the new Algerian government set up by the FLN remained highly conscious of the effect of its young, mediatized heroines on the Algerian population and the international media. According to Natalya Vince, throughout 1963 and 1964, “heroines of the revolution such as Djamila Bouhired, Zohra Drif, and Djamila Boupacha were traveling the

154 “Well-Dressed Disdainer of Fashion: Mme. Boupacha the Politician,” The London Times, March 14, 1963. 155 “Djamila Bouhired, Jacqueline Guerroudj, Djamila Boupacha ont été libérées,” L’Humanite, April 23, 1962. 156 Gisèle Halimi, Milk for the Orange Tree (London: Quartet Books, 1990), 300. 40 world as official representatives of the FLN: symbols of the youthfulness and modernity of the

Algerian revolution.”157 For a brief time after the French-Algerian conflict ended, the FLN utilized Djamila Boupacha and other revolutionary women as spokespeople because of their political activism and public image as revolutionaries. However, this progressive side of the

FLN, so lauded in the FLN’s own publications such as El Moudjahid, proved to be superficial at best. In just a short time, women would no longer be allowed to fulfill roles as Algerian political functionaries or even have a voice in politics at all. Opportunities for women in the public sphere closed down as the new Algerian state became steadily more conservative and influenced by radical religious groups.

Boupacha’s role with the diplomatic delegation was the last time she appeared in the international spotlight. She returned to Algeria, where she still lives as a married mother and grandmother.158 The final episode of Boupacha’s life in the public eye underscored how women active in the Algerian resistance effort, although revolutionaries and political activists in their own right, were posited as symbols and emblems for very different political causes. Similarly, throughout Boupacha’s ordeal, her image in the French and French-Algerian press came to symbolize a number of different things – the innocent virgin, a Joan-of-Arc, dangerous female resistance fighter – for, once again, different political groups.

Djamila Boupacha’s case was a specific illustration of a female resistance member’s struggle in the colonial military justice system, but the resonances of the case extended much further than exposing a corrupt military. The trial of a woman who should, according to French authorities’ logic, be the most receptive to the emancipation campaign also revealed the French

157 Natalya Vince, “Colonial and Post-Colonial Identities: Women Veterans of the “Battle of Algiers,” French History and Civilization, Papers from the George Rudé Seminar, Volume 2 (2009), 160. 158 Vince, “To be moudjahida,” 46. 41

Army’s frustrated efforts to establish a following of Algerian women through targeted assimilation. Under the emancipation campaign, the “hearts and minds” along with the physical bodies of Muslim women were considered a discursive site of control in the colonial context, one that French Army authorities sought to use to their advantage. Algerian women’s involvement in the resistance movement thwarted these efforts and contradicted stereotypes of Muslim women as passive and benign. In the tense, violent context of the French-Algerian War, these dynamics led to a heightened atmosphere over determining the gender of combatants, making women the targets for physical violence and sexual humiliation.

The army’s use of torture against Algerian resistance fighters affected female combatants especially. The sexual abuse and rape of Algerian women in detention centers and the countryside occupied a special place in the violence perpetrated by the French Army, considered at once the most unspeakable and the most banal. This sexualized violence operated as a means of degrading the Algerian population, as well as the individual woman. Boupacha’s case provided a legal example of an accusation of rape against members of the French Army, as well as the legal and cultural hurdles the defendant and her legal team had to undergo in an attempt to obtain a fair trial.

By the time the case scandalized public opinion in 1960, left-leaning French intellectuals were struggling to reconcile French Republican ideals with France’s role in the war. Reports of military torture chambers eroded the government’s moral authority and damaged France’s image as a defender of human rights. Intellectuals sought to make sense of the ruptures in French culture and identity, and did so by advocating for individual victims of torture and mobilizing public opinion. Forcing the Republic to live up to its ideals, Halimi and Beauvoir’s campaign for

42

Boupacha resonated with the long history of political engagement in the French Republican tradition.

However, the efforts made by French intellectuals on Boupacha’s behalf also revealed the ambiguities and problems of representation and objectification in the context of the French-

Algerian War. The Djamila Boupacha Committee’s publicity campaign sought to achieve tangible results in Boupacha’s case and bring her torturers to justice – in doing so, however,

Boupacha’s symbolic status was directly linked with the violent loss of her virginity. The campaign linked the scandal of sexual outrage to wounded national pride, placing gender at the center of a debate about torture and individual justice. Gisèle Halimi and Simone de Beauvoir utilized Boupacha’s story as a political weapon in order to achieve specific, tangible ends for

Boupacha and her family; in doing so, however, they nevertheless inadverently deployed a certain image of Boupacha targeted to appeal to a French liberal audience.

In conclusion, studying the Djamila Boupacha case allows for a fascinating look at gender roles at this particular historical moment as well as many specificities of the French-

Algerian War. The multiple layers of the case reveal the hybrid identities of the women of the

FLN bomb networks and their relationship to the French Army, the meaning of sexual violence in the context of the French-Algerian War, the role of French intellectuals in torture cases, and how gender can inadvertently cut multiple ways across political boundaries. Djamila

Boupacha’s trial and the issues surrounding it offer a new perspective on the French-Algerian conflict, one that places women, their experiences, political activism, and complex identities into focus, providing a new wrinkle in the historiography of the French-Algerian War and the decolonization of Algeria.

43

Bibliography

Primary Sources

Newspapers

El Moudjahid

France Observateur

Fraternité Française

The Guardian L’Echo d’Alger L’Express L’Humanité Le Monde The London Times Voici Pourquoi

Alleg, Henri. The Question. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2006.

Beauvoir, Simone. Force of Circumstance. New York: Putnam, 1965.

le Halimi. Djamila Boupacha: The Story of the Torture of a Young Algerian Girl Which Shocked Liberal French Opinion. Translated by Peter Green. New York: Macmillan, 1962.

Feraoun, Mouloud, and James D. Le Sueur. Journal, 1955-1962: Reflections on the French- Algerian War. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2000.

The Gangrene. Trans. Robert Silvers. New York: Lyle Stuart, 1960.

Milk for the Orange Tree. London: Quartet Books, 1990.

The Right to Choose. St. Lucia, Australia: University of Queensland Press, 1977.

Pontecorvo, Gillo. La Bataille D'Alger: The Battle of Algiers. Irvington, NY: Criterion Collection, 2004.

Zola, Émile. The Dreyfus Affair: ‘J’accuse’ and Other Writings, edited by Alain Pagès. Translated by Eleanor Levieux. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996.

44

Secondary Sources

Branche, Raphaëlle. La Torture E -1962. Paris: Gallimard, 2001.

Branche, Raphaëlle. “Sexual Violence in the Algerian War.” In Brutality and Desire: War and Sexuality in Europe’s Twentieth Century, edited by Dagmar Herzog, 247-260. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009.

Branche, Raphaëlle. “Torture of terrorists? Use of torture in a “war against terrorism”: justifications, methods and effects: the case of France in Algeria, 1954-1962.” International Review of the Red Cross 89.867 (2009): 543-560.

Caputi, Mary. “Beauvoir and the Case of Djamila Boupacha.” In Simone de Beauvoir’s Political Thinking, edited by Lori Jo Marso and Patricia Moynagh, 109-126. Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2006.

Cole, Joshua. “Intimate Acts and Unspeakable Relations: Remembering Torture and the War for Algerian Independence.” In Memory, Empire and Post-Colonialism: Legacies of French Colonialism, edited by Alex G. Hargreaves, 125-140. New York: Lexington Books, 2005.

Datta, Venita. Birth of a National Icon: The Literary Avant-Garde and the Origins of the Intellectual in France. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1999.

Gauch, Suzanne. Liberating Shahrazad: Feminism, Post-Colonialism, and Islam. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007.

Horne, Alistair. A Savage War of Peace: Algeria 1954-1962. London: Macmillan, 1977.

Khanna, Ranjana. Algeria Cuts: Women and Representation, 1830 to the Present. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2008.

Lazreg, Marnia. Torture and the Twilight of Empire: From Algiers to Baghdad. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008.

Le Sueur, James D. “Beyond Decolonization? The Legacy of the Algerian Conflict and the Transformation of Identity in Contemporary France.” Historical Reflections/Reflexions Historiques 28.2 (2002): 277-291.

Le Sueur, James D. “Decolonizing ‘French Universalism’: Reconsidering the Impact of the Algerian War on French Intellectuals.” The Journal of North African Studies 6.1 (2001): 167-186.

45

Le Sueur, James D. “Torture and the decolonization of French Algeria: nationalism, ‘race’ and violence during colonial incarceration.” In Colonial and Postcolonial Incarceration, edited by Graeme Harper, 161-175. New York: Continuum, 2001.

Le Sueur, James D. Uncivil War: Intellectuals and Identity Politics During the Decolonization of Algeria. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001.

MacMaster, Neil. Burning the Veil: the Algerian War and the ‘Emancipation’ of Muslim Women, 1954-62. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2010.

Murphy, Julien. “Beauvoir and the Algerian War: Toward a Postcolonial Ethics.” In Feminist Interpretations of Simone de Beauvoir, edited by Margaret A. Simons, 263-297. Philadelphia: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1995.

Quinan, Christine Lisa. “Remembering Bodies: Gender, Race, and Nationality in the French- Algerian War,” PhD diss., University of California, Berkeley, 2010.

Richtmyer, Eric William. “Beyond Commitment: Intellectual Engagement in Politics in Postwar France, 1944—1962,” PhD diss., University of Minnesota, 2010.

Schalk, David L. War and the Ivory Tower: Algeria and Vietnam. New York: Oxford University Press, 1991.

Seferdjeli, Ryme. “‘Fight with us, women, and we will emancipate you’: France, the FLN and the Struggle over Women during the Algerian War of National Liberation 1954-1962,” PhD diss., London School of Economics, 2004.

Shepard, Todd. The Invention of Decolonization: The Algerian War and the Remaking of France. Ithaca, N.Y: Cornell University Press, 2006.

Surkis, Judith. “Ethics and Violence: Simone de Beauvoir, Djamila Boupacha, and the Algerian War.” French Politics, Culture and Society 28.2 (2010): 38-55.

Vince, Natalya. “Colonial and Post-Colonial Identities: Women Veterans of the “Battle of Algiers,” French History and Civilization, Papers from the George Rudé Seminar, Volume 2 (2009) 153-168.

Vince, Natalya. “To be a moudjahida in Independent Algeria: Itineraries and Memories of Women Veterans of the Algerian War,” PhD diss., University of London, 2008.

Vince, Natalya. “Transgressing Boundaries: Gender, Race, Religion, and “Françaises Musulmanes” during the Algerian War of Independence,” French Historical Studies, 33:3 (Summer 2010), 445-474.

46

Whitfield, Lee. “The French Military Under Female Fire: The Public Opinion Campaign and Justice in the Case of Djamila Boupacha, 1960-62.” Contemporary French Civilization XX.1 (1996): 76-90.

47