Henri Alleg: A Tribute by David L. Schalk

The BROTHERWISE DISPATCH,VOL#2,ISSUE#8,JUNE-AUGUST/2013

On July 17, 2013, three days shy of his 92nd birthday, the great Franco-Algerian (he held both nationalities) journalist, militant, intellectual, Henri Alleg, died. The word “hero” can be genuinely applied to this modest, gracious, gentle, amazingly courageous, generous man. His passing came a year after he suffered an incapacitating stroke, but his sons had informed me that his condition was stable, so I and a multitude of friends and admirers from around the world were stunned, surprised, saddened when we received the news. We had no preparation for the disappearance of the author of one of the greatest works of the twentieth century, The Question. Tributes have poured in, including from the Presidents of Algeria and France.

In the words of Marnia Lazgreg, a distinguished Algerian intellectual, “His death really marks the end of an era… He may very well be the last HUMANIST of the xxth century.”

Right up until his stroke in July 2012, Henri Alleg continued to lecture widely, to give interviews, to campaign actively for peace, justice and freedom, to speak out again torture in all its forms, and wherever it may be found.

When I had the honor of participating in a five-question interview series for The Brotherwise Dispatch, published in June 2013, I had no way of knowing the finality that represented my choosing to give Henri Alleg the last word in the last question.

I said there that Monsieur Alleg’s painful and gripping account of the torture by French paratroopers he endured in 1957 retains its power and prescience today. (We remember that one of the original meanings of the word, dating from the Middle Ages, was putting people to “the question,” torturing them, whether for political or religious or other reasons.)

From 1951 until the French colonial authorities shut it down in 1955, Henri Alleg edited the newspaper Alger Républicain. (His name is a pseudonym; he was born Harry Salem). The newspaper was independent in several senses – while Henri Alleg was a member of the Algerian Communist Party, the journalists working there came from several parties and the paper took an independent political line, while advocating the end of French colonial rule and the liberation of the Algerian people. The banning of Alger Républicain set in motion a series of events leading to Monsieur Alleg’s arrest in June 1957, and he was brutally tortured for a month by the elite French paratroopers, who had “won” the Battle of Algiers. He survived, miraculously, was sent to a regular prison, where his lawyer smuggled out on tiny pieces of paper the handwritten text of what became The Question.

Eventually Henri Alleg escaped from prison in 1961, and in 1962 was welcomed back to Algeria by the leaders of the newly independent nation. For three years he resumed his post of editor of a reborn Alger Républicain. In a tragic twist of historical irony, the newspaper was banned again after a coup d’état bringing Colonel Houari Boumediene to power; Henri Alleg had to flee his adoptive homeland back to France, where he resumed his career as a journalist, and political activist, never really retiring. Only in 2002 did he return to Algeria for a powerful and moving reunion with his surviving former colleagues, some of whom had been tortured by the new regime. That return is beautifully captured in a poignant documentary film, by Jean-Pierre Lledo, “Un rêve algérien.”

The 2006 paperback edition of The Question, with an Afterword by Monsieur Alleg, remains in print. It should be read and reread by all our political and military leaders. The 2006 edition also includes a useful introduction by James Le Sueur, filling in background for a new generation of readers in the English-speaking world, for whom the terrible and brutal Algerian War of Independence, 1954-1962, is at best a dim memory. Le Sueur concludes his introduction by reminding us that the new edition of The Question came out at a time when the Iraq war was raging, when we confronted “the sometimes blurred reality of torture in the post-September 11 world…” He notes that political leaders in 2006, and his words are painfully true in 2013, “…attempt to create ever more clever euphemisms such as ‘muscular questioning’ to disguise the ugly truth about torture. The lessons of The Question remain as valid today as they were in 1958, and perhaps all the more so because the French question has become a question for us all.”

I still cannot believe that Henri Alleg is no longer with us, and he must have again the last word. I quote the conclusion of his 2006 Afterword, where he reminds us “… it is always useful for those who retain a belief in peace, and a hope for a better future, not to forget the lessons of the past, even when they are painful to contemplate.”