Revolution is mankind's way of life today. This is the age of revolution; the "age of indifference" is gone forever. But the latter age paved the way for today; for the great masses of mankind, while still suffering the greatest oppression and the greatest affronts to their dignity as human beings, never ceased to resist, to fight as well as they could, to live in combat. The combatant dignity of humanity was maintained in an unbreakable though not always visible line, in the depths of the life of the masses and in the uninterrupted fight—slandered, attacked, but alive in the very center of history—of little revolutionary vanguards bound to this profound human reality and to its socialist future, and not to the apparent omnipotence of great systems.

The women, the family, the children, the aged—everybody participates. The double oppression, social and sexual, of the woman cracks and is finally shattered; and its essential nature as the social oppression of the family as a whole is revealed. It is simply that its weakest parts—the children, the elderly, the women—must bear the most exaggerated forms of oppression. But in the revolutionary struggle, the relative weakness, the apparent defenselessness of these groups disappear. What was formerly a disadvantage becomes an advantage for the revolution.

For this reason, the power of each guerrilla fighter does not rest simply in himself, his weapon, and his army unit. He is the incarnation of the will of the people to struggle, of the resistance, of the anonymous and innumerable ways in which the people seek to harass and liquidate the oppressor and refuse to collaborate with him. This is the only "magic" the guerrillas have—that they are the representatives of a social force immensely superior to their own numbers and fire power, a social force that constantly encircles, attacks, and intimidates the enemy.

The Algerian people accepted the radio when it ceased to be an instrument of the enemy and was useful for the revolution. In the same way the Cuban people accepted literacy and achieved it in a year when this became a goal of the revolution, when they saw it was tied to their own concrete interests and not to those of capitalist governments. The transistor radio has been transformed into a revolutionary implement as powerful as the gun.

As in Algeria, the Bolivian miners defend their radio transmitters as part of their collective existence. Many unions have bought their transmitter with voluntary contributions of a day's, two days' and even three days' wages per month from all the workers in the mine. The Bolivian miner earns $20 to $40 per month. One must consider his standard of living in order to understand what it means for him to give up a day's or two days' wages each month so that the union can get its radio.

Frantz Fanon tells how modern medical techniques, when they were brought in by imperialism, were resisted and rejected by the Algerian population—"ignorant, obstinate, backward" according to the cultured imperialists who were baffled by this rejection. But these same techniques were accepted with dizzying haste when the revolution adopted them. Culture, like truth, is concrete. And for the masses the most elevated form of culture, that is to say, of progress, is to resist imperialist domination and penetration, although this might come wrapped up in valid forms of "culture" or "civilization." The Algerians kept their women behind veils, rejected the doctors, would not accept the radio. But they were not backward. In their way, they were defending civilization as well as they were able.

Frantz Fanon tells how modern medical techniques, when they were brought in by imperialism, were resisted and rejected by the Algerian population—“ignorant, obstinate, backward” according to the cultured imperialists who were baffled by this rejection. But these same techniques were accepted with dizzying haste when the revolution adopted them. Culture, like truth, is concrete. And for the masses the most elevated form of culture, that is to say, of progress, is to resist imperialist domination and penetration, although this might come wrapped up in valid forms of “culture” or “civilization.” The Algerians kept their women behind veils, rejected the doctors, would not accept the radio. But they were not backward. In their way, they were defending civilization as well as they were able. Civilization, for them, meant first of all to resist imperialism and second to cast it into the sea at whatever cost. And they were right.

One morning, from the home of the Bolivian miner who was giving me lodging—a home measuring two meters by three, the walls and floor of which were of earth, and which housed his wife and child as well—I saw that there was an ambulance at the corner from the Inter-American Health Service. It was giving free vaccinations against smallpox. I asked my host why he didn't send his son to be vaccinated. And he answered, "Are you crazy? Who knows what kind of filth these gringos are injecting, in order to turn us Bolivians into idiots so they can exploit us better?" Thus are the "Alliances for Progress" received. Basically, the miner was right. For in his way he was defending something that was much more important to him than a vaccination.

The revolution ends all that; the source of human dignity, it is preparing humanity, through its transformation in the revolution, for the construction of socialism. Without this transformation there will be no material base for the building of socialism. I say material advisedly since it is not only the means of production which are material, but also the accumulated experience in the heads, hearts, and hands of men.

It is a fact that a people who went through the Algerian war do not feel intimidated by the atomic menace. Nor do the people who are living through the war in Vietnam. Nor even do those who, without experiencing actual warfare, live lives which are "a permanent struggle against an omnipresent death," as Fanon says. And it is easy to imagine that if one day the transistor radio of a Bolivian miner, or a Colombian peasant, or an Algerian fellah tells them that Moscow and Peking have been destroyed by atomic bombs, they will rise up furiously and instantaneously to destroy in turn all that which represents their enemies.

The rising generations are neither more flexible nor more tired than those who launched the struggle. There is, on the contrary, a hardening, a determination to be equal to the historical challenge, a determination, too, not to make light of hundreds of thousands of victims. And there is also an exact appraisal of the dimensions of the conflict, of the friendships and the solidarities, of the interests and the contradictions of the colonialist universe.

Having a gun, being a member of the National Army of Liberation, is the only chance the Algerian still has of giving a meaning to his death. Life under the domination has long been devoid of meaning.

There is in Algeria, as the Algerian people see it, an irreversible situation. French colonialism itself has recognized it, and it attempts, anarchically, to tag along behind the historic movement.

While in many colonial countries it is the independence acquired by a party that progressively informs the diffused national consciousness of the people, in Algeria it is the national consciousness, the collective sufferings and terrors that make it inevitable that the people must take its destiny into its own hands.

It seems to us that in Algeria the principal point on which men of good will and the French government stumble is the European minority. This is why we have devoted a whole chapter to this question.

One million hostages behind barbed wires, and now the French themselves sound the alarm: "Medication no longer has any effect on these regrouped people, so great is their physiological deterioration."

One million hostages behind barbed wires, and now the French themselves sound the alarm: "Medication no longer has any effect on these regrouped people, so great is their physiological deterioration." What then? Colonialism is fighting to strengthen its domination and human and economic exploitation. It is fighting also to maintain the identity of the image it has of the Algerian and the depreciated image that the Algerian had of himself.

How can one imagine, as General de Gaulle ingenuously invited them to do, that the Algerians will "go back to their homes"? What meaning can this expression have for an Algerian of today?

The new relations are not the result of one barbarism replacing another barbarism, of one crushing of man replacing another crushing of man. What we Algerians want is to discover the man behind the colonizer; this man who is both the organizer and the victim of a system that has choked him and reduced him to silence.

The indigent and famished women were the first to be besieged. Every kilo of semolina distributed was accompanied by a dose of indignation against the veil and the cloister.

Thus the rape of the Algerian woman in the dream of a European is always preceded by a rending of the veil. We here witness a double deflowering. Likewise, the woman's conduct is never one of consent or acceptance, but of abject humility.

The deliberately aggressive intentions of the colonialist with respect to the haïk gave a new life to this dead element of the Algerian cultural stock—dead because stabilized, without any progressive change in form or color. We here recognize one of the laws of the psychology of colonization. In an initial phase, it is the action, the plans of the occupier that determine the centers of resistance around which a people's will to survive becomes organized.

The deliberately aggressive intentions of the colonialist with respect to the haïk gave a new life to this dead element of the Algerian cultural stock—dead because stabilized, without any progressive change in form or color. We here recognize one of the laws of the psychology of colonization. In an initial phase, it is the action, the plans of the occupier that determine the centers of resistance around which a people's will to survive becomes organized. … It is the white man who creates the Negro. But it is the Negro who creates negritude. To the colonialist offensive against the veil, the colonized opposes the cult of the veil. What was an undifferentiated element in a homogeneous whole acquires a taboo character, and the attitude of a given Algerian woman with respect to the veil will be constantly related to her overall attitude with respect to the foreign occupation.

Upon the outbreak of the struggle for liberation, the attitude of the Algerian woman, or of native society in general, with regard to the veil was to undergo important modifications. These innovations are of particular interest in view of the fact that they were at no time included in the program of the struggle. The doctrine of the Revolution, the strategy of combat, never postulated the necessity for a revision of forms of behavior with respect to the veil. We are able to affirm even now that when Algeria has gained her independence such questions will not be raised, for in the practice of the Revolution the people have understood that problems are resolved in the very movement that raises them.

In the beginning, the veil was a mechanism of resistance, but its value for the social group remained very strong. The veil was worn because tradition demanded a rigid separation of the sexes, but also because the occupier was bent on unveiling Algeria. In a second phase, the mutation occurred in connection with the Revolution and under special circumstances. The veil was abandoned in the course of revolutionary action. What had been used to block the psychological or political offensives of the occupier became a means, an instrument. The veil helped the Algerian woman to meet the new problems created by the struggle.

There is thus a historic dynamism of the veil that is very concretely perceptible in the development of colonization in Algeria. In the beginning, the veil was a mechanism of resistance, but its value for the social group remained very strong. The veil was worn because tradition demanded a rigid separation of the sexes, but also because the occupier was bent on unveiling Algeria. In a second phase, the mutation occurred in connection with the Revolution and under special circumstances. The veil was abandoned in the course of revolutionary action. What had been used to block the psychological or political offensives of the occupier became a means, an instrument. The veil helped the Algerian woman to meet the new problems created by the struggle.

The truth is that the study of an occupied people, militarily subject to an implacable domination, requires documentation and checking difficult to combine. It is not the soil that is occupied. It is not the ports or the airdromes. French colonialism has settled itself in the very center of the Algerian individual and has undertaken a sustained work of cleanup, of expulsion of self, of rationally pursued mutilation.

There is not occupation of territory, on the one hand, and independence of persons on the other. It is the country as a whole, its history, its daily pulsation that are contested, disfigured, in the hope of a final destruction. Under these conditions, the individual’s breathing is an observed, an occupied breathing. It is a combat breathing.

There is not occupation of territory, on the one hand, and independence of persons on the other. It is the country as a whole, its history, its daily pulsation that are contested, disfigured, in the hope of a final destruction. Under these conditions, the individual's breathing is an observed, an occupied breathing. It is a combat breathing.

One phenomenon deserves to be recalled. In the course of the Moroccan people’s struggle for liberation, and chiefly in the cities, the white veil was replaced by the black veil. This important modification is explained by the Moroccan women’s desire to express their attachment to His Majesty Mohammed V. It will be remembered that it was immediately after the exiling of the King of Morocco that the black veil, a sign of mourning, made its appearance. It is worth noting that black, in Moroccan or Arab society, has never expressed mourning or affliction. As a combat measure, the adoption of black is a response to the desire to exert a symbolic pressure on the occupier, and hence to make a logical choice of one’s own symbols.

Attention must be called to a frequent attitude, on the part of European women in particular, with regard to a special category of evolved natives. Certain unveiled Algerian women turn themselves into perfect Westerners with amazing rapidity and unsuspected ease. European women feel a certain uneasiness in the presence of these women. Frustrated in the presence of the veil, they experience a similar impression before the bared face, before that unabashed body which has lost all awkwardness, all timidity, and become downright offensive. Not only is the satisfaction of supervising the evolution and correcting the mistakes of the unveiled woman withdrawn from the European woman, but she feels herself challenged on the level of feminine charm, of elegance, and even sees a competitor in this novice metamorphosed into a professional, a neophyte transformed into a propagandist.

The Algerian’s age-old jealousy, his “congenital” suspiciousness, have melted on contact with the Revolution. It must be pointed out also that militants who are being sought by the police take refuge with other militants not yet identified by the occupier. In such cases the woman, left alone all day with the fugitive, is the one who gets him his food, the newspapers, the mail, showing no trace of suspicion or fear. Involved in the struggle, the husband or the father learns to look upon the relations between the sexes in a new light. The militant man discovers the militant woman, and jointly they create new dimensions for Algerian society.

Thus hundreds of Algerian families whose standard of living was sufficient to enable them to acquire a radio did not acquire one. Yet there was no rational decision to refuse this instrument. There was no organized resistance to this device. No real lines of counter-acculturation, such as are described in certain monographs devoted to underdeveloped regions, have been shown to exist, even after extensive surveys. It may be pointed out, nevertheless—and this argument may have appeared to confirm the conclusions of sociologists—that, pressed with questions as to the reasons for this reluctance, Algerians rather frequently give the following answer: "Traditions of respectability are so important for us and are so hierarchical, that it is practically impossible for us to listen to radio programs in the family. The sex allusions, or even the clownish situations meant to make people laugh, which are broadcast over the radio cause an unendurable strain in a family listening to these programs."

For a European to own a radio is of course to participate in the eternal round of Western petty-bourgeois ownership, which extends from the radio to the villa, including the car and the refrigerator. It also gives him the feeling that colonial society is a living and palpitating reality, with its festivities, its traditions eager to establish themselves, its progress, its taking root. But especially, in the hinterland, in the so-called colonization centers, it is the only link with the cities, with Algiers, with the metropolis, with the world of the civilized. It is one of the means of escaping the inert, passive, and sterilizing pressure of the "native" environment. It is, according to the settler's expression, "the only way to still feel like a civilized man."

Through the experience of a war waged by his own people, the Algerian came in contact with an active community. The Algerian found himself having to oppose the enemy news with his own news. The "truth" of the oppressor, formerly rejected as an absolute lie, was now countered by another, an acted truth. The occupier's lie thereby acquired greater reality, for it was now a menaced lie, put on the defensive. It was the defenses of the occupier, his reactions, his resistances, that underscored the effectiveness of national action and made that action participate in a world of truth. The Algerian's reaction was no longer one of pained and desperate refusal.

The European, after 1954, knew that something was being hidden from him. This is the period in which the old pejorative expression, the Arab telephone, has taken on an almost scientific meaning.

These hysterical cases were sometimes merely wounded and were given over to the police for questioning. The pathological nature of their behavior would not be recognized, and the accused would be tortured for days until the press reported that he had been shot trying to escape while being transferred to another prison, or that he had died of a recurring ailment. In the dominant group, likewise, there were cases of mental hysteria; people would be seized with a collective fear and panicky settlers were seen to seek an outlet in criminal acts. What made the two cases different was that, unlike the colonized, the colonizer always translated his subjective states into acts, real and multiple murders.

In the dominant group, likewise, there were cases of mental hysteria; people would be seized with a collective fear and panicky settlers were seen to seek an outlet in criminal acts. What made the two cases different was that, unlike the colonized, the colonizer always translated his subjective states into acts, real and multiple murders.

Almost magically—but we have seen the rapid and dialectical progression of the new national requirements—the technical instrument of the radio receiver lost its identity as an enemy object. The radio set was no longer a part of the occupier’s arsenal of cultural oppression. In making of the radio a primary means of resisting the increasingly overwhelming psychological and military pressures of the occupant, Algerian society made an autonomous decision to embrace the new technique and thus tune itself in on the new signaling systems brought into being by the Revolution.

Here we come upon a phenomenon that is sufficiently unusual to retain our attention. The highly trained French services, rich with experience acquired in modern wars, past masters in the practice of “sound-wave warfare,” were quick to detect the wave lengths of the broadcasting stations. The programs were then systematically jammed, and the Voice of Fighting Algeria soon became inaudible. A new form of struggle had come into being. Tracts were distributed telling the Algerians to keep tuned in for a period of two or three hours. In the course of a single broadcast a second station, broadcasting over a different wave-length, would relay the first jammed station. The listener, enrolled in the battle of the waves, had to figure out the tactics of the enemy, and in an almost physical way circumvent the strategy of the adversary. Very often only the operator, his ear glued to the receiver, had the unhoped-for opportunity of hearing the Voice.

But by common consent, after an exchange of views, it would be decided that the Voice had in fact spoken of these events, but that the interpreter had not caught the transmitted information. A real task of reconstruction would then begin. Everyone would participate, and the battles of yesterday and the day before would be re-fought in accordance with the deep aspirations and the unshakable faith of the group. The listener would compensate for the fragmentary nature of the news by an autonomous creation of information.

The advocates of integration, for their part, here saw a new opportunity to promote a “French Algeria” by making the occupier’s language the sole practical means of communication available to Kabyles, Arabs, Chaouias, Mozabites, etc. This thesis, on the level of language, went back to the very basis of colonialism: it is the intervention of the foreign nation that puts order into the original anarchy of the colonized country. Under these conditions, the French language, the language of the occupier, was given the role of Logos, with ontological implications within Algerian society.

In August 1956, the reality of combat and the confusion of the occupier stripped the Arabic language of its sacred character, and the French language of its negative connotations. The new language of the nation could then make itself known through multiple meaningful channels.

Before 1954, the receiving instrument, the radiophonic technique of long-distance communication of thought was not, in Algeria, a mere neutral object. Looked upon as a transmission belt of the colonialist power, as a means in the hands of the occupier by which to maintain his strangle hold on the nation, the radio was frowned upon. Before 1954, switching on the radio meant giving asylum to the occupier’s words; it meant allowing the colonizer’s language to filter into the very heart of the house, the last of the supreme bastions of the national spirit. Before 1954, a radio in an Algerian house was the mark of Europeanization in progress, of vulnerability.

Gone were the days when mechanically switching on the radio amounted to an invitation to the enemy. For the Algerian the radio, as a technique, became transformed. The radio set was no longer directly and solely tuned in on the occupier. To the right and to the left of Radio-Alger's broadcasting band, on different and numerous wave-lengths, innumerable stations could be tuned in to, among which it was possible to distinguish the friends, the enemies' accomplices, and the neutrals. Under these conditions, having a receiver was neither making oneself available to the enemy, nor giving him a voice, nor yielding on a point of principle. On the contrary, on the strict level of news, it was showing the desire to keep one's distance, to hear other voices, to take in other prospects. It was in the course of the struggle for liberation and thanks to the creation of a Voice of Fighting Algeria that the Algerian experienced and concretely discovered the existence of voices other than the voice of the dominator which formerly had been immeasurably amplified because of his own silence.

The old monologue of the colonial situation, already shaken by the existence of the struggle, disappeared completely by 1956. The Voice of Fighting Algeria and all the voices picked up by the receiver now revealed to the Algerian the tenuous, very relative character, in short, the imposture of the French voice presented until now as the only one. The occupier's voice was stripped of its authority.

Along the same line should be mentioned the manner in which programs are listened to in Kabylia. In groups of scores and sometimes hundreds around a receiver, the peasants listen religiously to "the Voice of the Arabs." Few understand the literary Arabic used in these broadcasts. But the faces assume a look of gravity and the features harden when the expression Istiqlal (Independence) resounds in the gourbi (shack). An Arab voice that hammers out the word Istiqlal four times in an hour suffices at that level of heightened consciousness to keep alive the faith in victory.

The appearance of themes of morbid protection, their importance as a technique of self-defense and even of self-cure in the historic development of mental disease, have already been studied in classic psychiatry. Plagued by his accusing "voices," the victim of hallucinations has no other recourse but to create friendly voices. This mechanism of transformation into its antithesis that we here point out has its counterpart in the disintegrating colonial situation.

On the other hand, the Voice of Algeria was imagined to be pronouncing death sentences by certain Algerian collaborators. Suffering from serious fits of depression, these men who usually belonged to the police services, would be attacked, insulted, convicted by the "rebel" radio. Likewise, European women as well as European men in outbreaks of anxiety would very clearly hear threats or condemnations in the Arabic language. Such phenomena were practically unknown before 1954.

The most important point of this modification, it seems to us, is that the family, from being homogeneous and virtually monolithic, has broken up into separate elements. Each member of this family has gained in individuality what it has lost in its belonging to a world of more or less confused values. Individual persons have found themselves facing new choices, new decisions. The customary and highly structured patterns of behavior that were the crystallization of traditional ideas suddenly proved ineffective and were abandoned. Tradition, in fact, is not solely a combination of automatic gestures and archaic beliefs. At the most elementary level, there are values, and the need for justification. The father questioned by the child explains, comments, legitimizes.

Before 1954, the existence of nationalist parties had already introduced changes into the native private life. The nationalist parties, the parliamentary political action, the spreading of slogans advocating splitting off from France, had already given rise to certain contradictions within the family. These developments invited the inert resistance of the colonized society to turn into action. For the tense immobility of the dominated society, the nationalist parties tried to substitute awareness, movement, creation. The people, as a whole, agreed with these parties, but they had a sharp memory of the legendary ferocity of the French military and police. Witnesses of the colonial invasion, still alive 30 or 40 years ago, had often related to them episodes of the conquest. In many regions of Algeria the accounts of massacres and the burning of villages were still vividly remembered. The conqueror had settled in such numbers, he had created so many centers of colonization, that a certain passivity encouraged by the colonial domination made itself evident and gradually took on a tinge of despair. Before 1954, the son who adopted a nationalist position never did so, really, against his father's wishes, but his activity as a militant in any case never in any respect modified his filial behavior within the framework of the Algerian family. The relations based on the absolute respect due to the father and on the principle that the truth is first of all the unchallengeable property of the elders were not encroached upon. Modesty, shame, the fear of looking at the father, of speaking aloud in his presence, remained intact, even in the case of the nationalist militant. The absence of actual revolutionary action kept the personality in its customary channels.

In the Algerian family, the girl is always one notch behind the boy. As in all societies in which work on the land represents the main source of the means of subsistence, the male, who is the privileged producer, enjoys an almost lordly status. The birth of a boy in a family is greeted with greater enthusiasm than that of a girl. The father sees in him a future working partner, a successor to the family plot and after his death a guardian for the mother and the sisters. The young girl, without being humiliated or neglected, cannot help being aware of the fuss made over her brother.

All these restrictions were to be knocked over and challenged by the national liberation struggle. The unveiled Algerian woman, who assumed an increasingly important place in revolutionary action, developed her personality, discovered the exalting realm of responsibility. The freedom of the Algerian people from then on became identified with woman's liberation, with her entry into history. This woman who, in the avenues of Algiers or of Constantine, would carry the grenades or the submachine-gun chargers, this woman who tomorrow would be outraged, violated, tortured, could not put herself back into her former state of mind and relive her behavior of the past; this woman who was writing the heroic pages of Algerian history was, in so doing, bursting the bounds of the narrow world in which she had lived without responsibility, and was at the same time participating in the destruction of colonialism and in the birth of a new woman.

The women in Algeria, from 1955, began to have models. In Algerian society stories were told of women who in ever greater number suffered death and imprisonment in order that an independent Algeria might be born. It was these militant women who constituted the points of reference around which the imagination of Algerian feminine society was to be stirred to the boiling point. The woman-for-marriage progressively disappeared, and gave way to the woman-for-action. The young girl was replaced by the militant, the woman by the sister.

Sometimes the girl would come down from the mountain, carrying a new identity card. She would then have the opportunity of telling the father and the mother what prodigious actions were taking place every day in the djebel. She would show photographs. She would speak of her chiefs, of her brothers, of the population, the wounded, the French prisoners. She would look at the father, she would sit facing the father, would speak to him and not be embarrassed. And the father would not turn his face away; he would not feel shame. On the contrary, he would feel a real joy at seeing his daughter again, at seeing her new personality radiating through the house; he would not be displeased to hear his daughter speaking out and it would absolutely not occur to him to remind her that a woman should be silent. For the three days of her leave, the father would feel no need to question his daughter as to her moral behavior in the maquis. This silence did not betray a lack of interest or a resignation with respect to yesterday's demand of virginity. It was rather because the father could gauge the immense step taken by society, and these questions that were still present to his mind revealed themselves to be inappropriate and irrelevant.

The Algerian woman, in throwing caution to the winds, at the same time divests herself of the instinct to protect her home. Reproaching one's husband for not participating in a combat known to be deadly is a paradoxical kind of behavior, to say the least. But the women no longer consider the man's conditions as they did before. The man's job is patriotic activity and no one can affirm his virility if he is not a part of the fighting nation.

The woman's presence in the maquis would disturb the husband much less than her militant activity in the centers. The woman who would set out on a mission three hundred kilometers from her domicile, who would sleep wherever she could, among unknown companions, inevitably created a certain number of problems for the husband. They were never formulated, to be sure, but no revolution can, with finality and without repercussions, make a clean sweep of well-nigh instinctive modes of behavior.

The couple becomes the basic cell of the commonwealth, the fertile nucleus of the nation. The Algerian couple, in becoming a link in the revolutionary organization, is transformed into a unit of existence. The mingling of fighting experience with conjugal life deepens the relations between husband and wife and cements their union. There is a simultaneous and effervescent emergence of the citizen, the patriot, and the modern spouse. The Algerian couple rids itself of its traditional weaknesses at the same time that the solidarity of the people becomes a part of history.

The husband's repudiation of his wife that could be immediately proclaimed at any time and that reflected the fragility of the conjugal bond is no longer automatically legalized. The husband must explain his reasons for wanting a divorce. There are attempts at reconciliation. In any case, the final decision rests with the local officer. The family emerges strengthened from this ordeal in which colonialism has resorted to every means to break the people's will. In the midst of the gravest dangers the Algerian adopts modern forms of existence and confers on the human person his maximum independence.

The war waged by French colonialism obliges the Algerian people to be constantly and wholly engaged in the battle. Confronted by an adversary who has sworn to keep Algeria, even without the Algerians, it is difficult to remain oneself, to maintain preferences or values intact. Feminine society undergoes change both through an organic solidarity with the Revolution, and more especially because the adversary cuts into the Algerian flesh with unheard-of violence.

Even then, it seems virtually impossible to revive the habitual techniques of despair. The war has dislocated Algerian society to such a point that any death is conceived of as a direct or indirect consequence of colonialist repression. Today there is not a dead person in Algeria who is not the victim of French colonialism. It is impossible for an Algerian civilian to remain untouched by the war of colonial reconquest. More than this, there is not a death of an Algerian outside of Algeria which is not attributed to French colonialism. The Algerian people have thus decided that, until independence, French colonialism will be innocent of none of the wounds inflicted upon its body and its consciousness.

The regrouped mechta is a broken, destroyed mechta. It is merely a group of men, women and children. Under these conditions, no gesture is kept intact. No previous rhythm is to be found unaltered. Caught in the meshes of the barbed wires, the members of regrouped Algerian families neither eat nor sleep as they did before. This can be seen, for example, on the occasion of a death. The lamentations, the wails, the grief-stricken faces, and the contortions of the body have today practically disappeared. The classic mourning tears are hardly any longer to be found in Algeria. All this began in 1955 when the French troops, for the fun of it, or in the course of a repression, would overrun a locality and machinegun five or ten men. These collective deaths, without warning, without a previous illness that had been treated and fought, abandoned in the ditch on the edge of the road, cannot set into motion emotional mechanisms that are homogeneous to a society. Lamentations and grief-stricken faces are part of a patterned, stable world. One does not weep, one does not do as before when one is faced with multiple murders. One grits one's teeth and one prays in silence. One further step, and it is cries of joy that salute the death of a moudjahid who has fallen on the field of honor. It must not be believed, however, that the traditional ceremonies are repeated in the case of natural deaths, resulting from illnesses or accidents. Even then, it seems virtually impossible to revive the habitual techniques of despair. The war has dislocated Algerian society to such a point that any death is conceived of as a direct or indirect consequence of colonialist repression. Today there is not a dead person in Algeria who is not the victim of French colonialism. It is impossible for an Algerian civilian to remain untouched by the war of colonial reconquest. More than this, there is not a death of an Algerian outside of Algeria which is not attributed to French colonialism. The Algerian people have thus decided that, until independence, French colonialism will be innocent of none of the wounds inflicted upon its body and its consciousness.

The colonized perceives the doctor, the engineer, the schoolteacher, the policeman, the rural constable, through the haze of an almost organic confusion. The compulsory visit by the doctor to the douar is preceded by the assembling of the population through the agency of the police authorities. The doctor who arrives in this atmosphere of general constraint is never a native doctor but always a doctor belonging to the dominant society and very often to the army.

Reduced, in the name of truth and reason, to saying "yes" to certain innovations of the occupier, the colonized perceived that he thus became the prisoner of the entire system, and that the French medical service in Algeria could not be separated from French colonialism in Algeria. Then, as he could not cut himself off from his people, who aspired to a national existence on their own soil, he rejected doctors, schoolteachers, engineers, parachutists, all in one lump.

For dozens of years, despite the doctor's exhortations, the Algerian shied away from hospitalization. Even though the specialist might insist that any hesitation would seriously endanger the patient's life, the patient would hang back and refuse to be taken to the hospital. It would always be at the last moment, when hardly any hope remained, that consent was given. Even then, the man who made the decision would make it in opposition to the group; and as the case would be a desperate one, as the decision had been too long delayed, the patient would usually die.

It is necessary to analyze, patiently and lucidly, each one of the reactions of the colonized, and every time we do not understand, we must tell ourselves that we are at the heart of the drama—that of the impossibility of finding a meeting ground in any colonial situation.

It is not possible for the colonized society and the colonizing society to agree to pay tribute, at the same time and in the same place, to a single value. If, against all probability, the colonized society expresses its agreement on any point with the colonizing society, there will at once begin to be talk about successful integration.

The doctors say: "Those people are rough and unmannerly." The patients say: "I don't trust them." Whereas the doctors claim that the colonized patient doesn't know what he wants, whether to stay sick or be cured, the native keeps saying, "I know how to get into their hospital, but I don't know how I'll get out—if I get out." Fairly soon the doctor, and even the nurse, worked out a rule of action: with these people you couldn't practice medicine, you had to be a veterinarian.

The colonized obscurely realizes that penicillin is more effective, but for political, psychological, social reasons, he must at the same time give traditional medicine its due. (The healer fulfills a function and therefore needs to earn a living.) Psychologically, the colonized has difficulty, even here in the presence of illness, in rejecting the habits of his group and the reactions of his culture. Accepting the medicine, even once, is admitting, to a limited extent perhaps but nonetheless ambiguously, the validity of the Western technique. It is demonstrating one's confidence in the foreigner's medical science. Swallowing the whole dose in one gulp is literally getting even with it.

The European individual in Algeria does not take his place in a structured and relatively stable society. The colonial society is in perpetual movement. Every settler invents a new society, sets up or sketches new structures. The differences between craftsmen, civil servants, workers, and professionals are poorly defined. Every doctor has his vineyards and the lawyer busies himself with his rice fields as passionately as any settler. The doctor is not socially defined by the exercise of his profession alone. He is likewise the owner of mills, wine cellars, or orange groves, and he coyly speaks of his medicine as simply a supplementary source of income. Not exclusively dependent on his practice, deriving a sometimes enormous income from his properties, the doctor has a certain conception of professional morality and of medical practice. The colonialist arrogance, the contempt for the client, the hateful brutality toward the indigent are more or less contained in the formula, "I don't have to sit around waiting for clients to make a living." The doctor in Besançon, in Liège, or in Basel has left the land and has taken his place in the economic sector defined by his profession. Perpetually in contact with suffering humanity, the world of the sick and the disabled, the doctor has a set of values. Thus he will usually be found to belong to one of the democratic parties, and his ideas are likely to be anticolonialist. In the colonies, the doctor is an integral part of colonization, of domination, of exploitation. In Algeria we must not be surprised to find that doctors and professors of medicine are leaders of colonialist movements.

In a colonial situation there are special realities. In a given region, the doctor sometimes reveals himself as the most sanguinary of colonizers. His identity as a doctor no longer matters. Just as he was a doctor in addition to being a property owner, so he becomes the torturer who happens to be a doctor. The dominant authority, for that matter, has organized the over-all behavior of the doctor as it relates to the struggle for liberation. Thus, any doctor treating an Algerian whose wound appears suspicious must, on penalty of legal action, take down the name of the patient, his address, the names of those accompanying him, their address, and communicate the information to the authorities.

A soon as they were known to the people, these measures confirmed their certainty that the colonizers were in complete agreement to fight against them. Convinced that the European doctors and pharmacists would comply with this decision, the French authorities posted police officers in civilian clothes or informers in the vicinity of the pharmacies run by Algerians. The supplying of medicines in certain areas became a difficult and painful problem. Alcohol, sulpha drugs, syringes were refused. In 1955, the French military command in its estimates of Algerian losses nearly always included a certain number of hypothetically wounded who, "for lack of treatment are assumed dead."

We have had occasion to treat men and women who had been subjected to this torture for days. We shall study elsewhere the grave consequences of these practices, but we can point out here that the most important consequence has appeared to us to be a certain inability to distinguish the true from the false, and an almost obsessive fear of saying what should remain hidden. We must always remember that there is hardly an Algerian who is not a party to at least one secret of the Revolution. Months after this torture, the former prisoner hesitates to say his name, the town where he was born. Every question is first experienced as a repetition of the torturer-tortured relationship.

Other doctors, attached to the various torture centers, intervene after every session in order to put the tortured back into condition for new sessions. Under the circumstances, the important thing is for the prisoner not to give the slip to the team in charge of the questioning: in other words, to remain alive. Everything—heart stimulants, massive doses of vitamins—is used before, during, and after the sessions to keep the Algerian hovering between life and death. Ten times the doctor intervenes, ten times he gives the prisoner back to the pack of torturers.

It is understandable that such facts should provide the basis for an incomparable dynamism and the point of departure for new attitudes. The problems of hygiene and of prevention of disease were approached in a remarkably creative atmosphere. The latrines recommended by the colonial administration had not been accepted in the mechtas but they were now installed in great numbers. Ideas on the transmission of intestinal parasites were immediately assimilated by the people. The elimination of stagnant pools was undertaken and the fight against post-natal ophthalmia achieved spectacular results. The problem was no longer that mothers neglected their children, but that aureomycin was at times unavailable. The people wanted to get well, wanted to care for themselves and were anxious to understand the explanations proffered by fellow doctors or nurses. Schools for nurses were opened and the illiterate, in a few days, proved capable of making intravenous injections.

Medical practice in the colonies very often assumes an aspect of systematized piracy. Injections of twice-distilled water, billed as penicillin or vitamin B-12, chest X-rays, radiotherapy sessions "to stabilize a cancer," given by a doctor who has no radiological equipment, are examples. In the latter case, the doctor need only place the patient behind a sheet and after 15 or 20 minutes announce that the session is over. It even happens that doctors in rural centers (several examples of this in Algeria are known) boast of taking X-rays with the aid of a vacuum cleaner. We may mention the case of a European doctor practicing in Rabelais (in the region of Orléansville) who explains how he manages, on market days, to earn more than 30,000 francs in the course of a morning. "I fill three syringes of unequal size with salt serum and I say to the patient, 'Which injection do you want, the 500, the 1000 or the 1500 franc one?' The patient," so the doctor explains, "almost always chooses the most expensive injection."

Thus, its President, Professor Piedelièvre, in an official letter addressed to the Councils of the Order of Doctors of Algiers, of Constantine, and of Oran wrote: “May I remind you that in no case and under no pretext can professional secrecy be violated! I likewise point out to you that doctors are duty bound to treat all persons with the same conscientiousness, whatever be their religion or their race, whether they are friends or enemies. I wish to draw your attention, finally, to the fact that the Code of Deontology, in its Article Three, has clearly stated: ‘The doctor must treat all his patients with the same conscientiousness, whatever be their condition, their nationality, their religion, their reputation and his feeling toward them.’” … We may add further that many European doctors refused to apply the decisions adopted by the French authorities in Algeria.

We have seen military doctors, called to the bedside of an Algerian soldier wounded in combat, refuse to treat him. The official pretext was that there was no longer a chance to save the wounded man. After the soldier had died, the doctor would admit that this solution had appeared to him preferable to a stay in prison where it would have been necessary to feed while awaiting execution. The Algerians of the region of Blida know a certain hospital director who would kick the bleeding chests of the war wounded lying in the corridor of his establishment.

A change in attitude on the part of the Algerian toward the occupier’s hospital centers was likewise to be noted. It would in fact happen that the need of a particular medication or of a surgical operation impossible to carry out in the maquis would cause the doctor to advise the civilian to let himself be transferred to a hospital directed by the French. The hesitations and refusals that had been met with before the Revolution vanished and the population would follow the orders given by the Algerian doctor in the maquis. This new attitude was very marked in 1956–57. I had occasion during this period to visit a great number of hospitals. The European doctors expressed their surprise to me at the time. Since the war, they said, “the Moslems let themselves be treated in the hospitals in the proportion of five to one as compared to the preceding years. One wonders why this is so.” … It should also be added that the hospital administrations in the maquis had a strategic interest in having civilians cared for by the French and keeping medical supplies for the soldiers, who could not be evacuated.

In Algeria the forces of the Left do not exist. It is unthinkable for European democrats really to militate in Algeria outside the Algerian Communist Party. We know that even the Algerian Communist Party was for a long time confined within a reformist position of the French Union type, and that for long months after November 1, 1954, the Algerian Communists denounced the terroristes provocateurs—in other words, the F.L.N.

This democratic European, accustomed to semi-clandestine contacts with Algerians, unwittingly learns the laws of revolutionary action. And when those whom he used to receive in his home tell him to give shelter to a friend, to find medications, or to transport a parcel, there is as a rule no difficulty. We must emphasize the point that never has a member of the Front deceived a French democrat. It would be out of the question to expose a man or a woman who had always commanded our esteem to the slightest risk, without warning them. The decision to help the F.L.N. was taken quite knowingly, in a wholly responsible way.

The European men and women who have been arrested and tortured by the police services and the French parachutists, by their attitude under torture, have shown the rightness of this position taken by the F.L.N. Not a single Frenchman has revealed to the colonialist police information vital to the Revolution. On the contrary, the arrested Europeans have resisted long enough to enable the other members of the network to disappear. The tortured European has behaved like an authentic militant in the national fight for independence.

For five years the F.L.N. has not considered it necessary to insist on the participation of Europeans in the fight for liberation. This policy is dictated by the consideration that these Europeans should not be made conspicuous, that their action should not be differentiated from that of any other Algerian. The F.L.N. did not want to make of them "show Europeans" in the ranks of the Revolution, on the model of colonial Algeria where the "show" Moslem and Jew were ritually to be found in every committee.

For the F.L.N., in the new society that is being built, there are only Algerians. From the outset, therefore, every individual living in Algeria is an Algerian. In tomorrow's independent Algeria it will be up to every Algerian to assume Algerian citizenship or to reject it in favor of another.

Finally, colonial Algeria being an eminently racist country, the different mechanisms of racist psychology are to be found there. Thus the Jew, despised and excluded by the European, is quite happy on certain occasions to identify himself with those who humiliate him to humiliate the Algerian in turn. But it is very rare, except in the region of Constantine where many poor Jews find shelter in the shadow of the colonial reign, to see Jews, in broad daylight, affirm their membership in Algeria's extremist groups.

With the measures taken by the French ministers Soustelle and Lacoste, we found that pharmaceutical products and surgical instruments were hit by an embargo. We have already pointed out that directives addressed to doctors made it an obligation for them to notify the police authorities of any wounded man who appeared suspect.

European doctors and pharmacists then began to treat wounded A.L.N. members without discrimination, and to deliver the antibiotics and the ether asked for by the F.L.N. militants. Hundreds of millions of units of penicillin daily made their way to the maquis.

Other doctors went further and unhesitatingly answered calls to go to the nearby mountains to treat the wounded. Sometimes when the wound was very serious the moudjahid would be taken in the doctor's car to a friendly clinic and treated for a week or two. The French police learned of these things, for after a certain period some of these clinics were regularly searched.

It would also sometimes happen that, after a wounded prisoner had been operated on by French doctors, while still under the effect of anaesthesia he would disclose certain secrets. The nurse, after the wounded man was entirely awake, would advise him to be cautious and tell him what he had revealed. On the other hand, it could also happen that an intern present in the room would immediately telephone to the police who would then, two hours after a critical operation, subject the patient to real torture sessions.

Apart from the Europeans arrested and often frightfully tortured by the French troops for "complicity with the enemy" there are of course in Algeria a great number of Frenchmen engaged in the fight for liberation. Others have paid for their devotion to the Algerian national cause with their lives. It was thus, to give an example, that Maître Thuveny, an attorney of Oran, who had fought for a long time in the ranks of the F.L.N., died as the result of an assault organized in Morocco by the French Second Bureau.

This absence of curiosity with regard to our country's burning problems had its origin, it must be recognized, in the unconscious race prejudice we all bore within us, having been inoculated by twenty years of colonial life. Being of the Left, we had, to be sure, surmounted the aggressive colonialist racism, but we had by no means rid ourselves of paternalism. Not the least of the shocks that we experienced was the realization that we were still racist in attitude.

From the very beginning, the colonialists would attack us, would ask us point-blank to choose, to be for or against the fellagha, to be for France or "anti-France." In the beginning we still were bewitched. Refusing to take a position on the problem, we took refuge in protests against the brutalities of the repression. A committee of students for the defense of civil liberties had been set up. I decided to become a member. It was in this Committee that I was able for the first time to have political discussions with Algerians. Up to that time I had never had such conversations even with my best Moslem friends. A tacit agreement seemed to have been concluded; we recognized the validity of nationalist sentiments among our Moslem friends, but we never spoke of this so as not to break those bonds of friendship whose fragility we sensed.

And as in a psychodrama, the aggressiveness would disappear with the anxiety. I was able to observe that this easing of tension occurred when the Moslems declared: "You are Algerians, just as we are, but if you want to leave the country you are free to do so." And the Europeans would always answer, "We don't want to leave and we don't want to be strangers in this country." On such a basis fruitful discussions could take place.

As we separated, one of us said, "And now we have no one left but the F.L.N. to speak for us." It quickly became obvious to us that with France reluctant to make the fascist minority of Algeria toe the mark, it was henceforth up to the F.L.N. to do so. After February 6th we could no longer turn our eyes toward France. Not from her would salvation come.

The same time that the colonized man braces himself to reject oppression, a radical transformation takes place within him which makes any attempt to maintain the colonial system impossible and shocking. It is this transformation that we have studied here.

It is true that independence produces the spiritual and material conditions for the reconversion of man. But it is also the inner mutation, the renewal of the social and family structures that impose with the rigor of a law the emergence of the Nation and the growth of its sovereignty.

We say firmly that Algerian man and Algerian society have stripped themselves of the mental sedimentation and of the emotional and intellectual handicaps which resulted from 130 years of oppression. This same colonialism that held the people in the tight meshes of the police and of the army is today wounded to the death. French colonialism in Algeria has always developed on the assumption that it would last forever. The structures built, the port facilities, the airdromes, the prohibition of the Arab language, often gave the impression that the enemy committed himself, compromised himself, half lost himself in his prey, precisely in order to make any future break, any separation, impossible. Every manifestation of the French presence expressed a continuous rooting in time and in the Algerian future, and could always be read as a token of an indefinite oppression.

It was the size of the European settlement, the rapacity of the settlers and their racist philosophy that required of every French expression in Algeria a maximum of solidity and of weight. Likewise, it was the robustness and the vehemence of French achievements that maintained and reinforced the oppressive category of colonialism.