Then appeared Captain Pierre-Henri Simon’s book, Contre la Torture. Simon was a Catholic writer who had spent five years in prisoner-of-war camps during the Second World War; shortly after his release he had visited Belsen and, shocked by the rejection of responsibility by the local Germans, he had said to himself, “May the good people of France never fall into such a moral degradation of this order!” Though Simon was in no way an apostle of withdrawal from Algeria, his book listed malpractices witnessed there, sternly denouncing them as well as the collective culpability of the army and nation at large.

Horne, Alistair, A Savage War of Peace- Alge…, loc. 729