From the Battle of Algiers onwards this was to become a growing canker for France, leaving behind a poison that would linger in the French system long after the war itself had ended. The resort to torture poses moral problems that are just as germane to the world today as they were to the period under consideration. … As Jean-Paul Sartre wrote in 1958, “Torture is neither civilian nor military, nor is it specifically French: it is a plague infecting our whole era.”

XREF: Pairs with discussions of French colonial memory and ongoing reckonings over the Algerian War.

Horne, Alistair, A Savage War of Peace- Alge…, loc. 580