Torture and the Twilight of Empire looks at the intimate relationship
between torture and colonial domination through a close examination of
the French army's coercive tactics during the Algerian war from 1954 to
1962. By tracing the psychological, cultural, and political meanings of
torture at the end of the French empire, Marnia Lazreg also sheds new
light on the United States and its recourse to torture in Iraq and
Afghanistan.
This book is nothing less than an anatomy of torture--its methods,
justifications, functions, and consequences. Drawing extensively from
archives, confessions by former torturers, interviews with former
soldiers, and war diaries, as well as writings by Jean-Paul Sartre,
Albert Camus, and others, Lazreg argues that occupying nations justify
their systematic use of torture as a regrettable but necessary means of
saving Western civilization from those who challenge their rule. She
shows how torture was central to guerre révolutionnaire, a French
theory of modern warfare that called for total war against the subject
population and which informed a pacification strategy founded on brutal
psychological techniques borrowed from totalitarian movements. Lazreg
seeks to understand torture's impact on the Algerian
population--especially women--and also on the French troops who became
their torturers. She explores the roles Christianity and Islam played in
rationalizing these acts, and the ways in which torture became not only
routine but even acceptable.
Written by a preeminent historical sociologist, Torture and the
Twilight of Empire holds particularly disturbing lessons for us today
as we carry out the War on Terror.