Seventy years ago on June 3 1960 Simone de Beauvoir wrote an article in Le Monde about routine torture practice in Algeria which had the French government seize that issue of the paper and destroy all copies. They were too late – her words were out and were key to changing the country’s history. One sentence was this:
“When the government of a country allows crimes to be committed in its name, every citizen thereby becomes a member of a collectively criminal nation.”
Three years before de Beauvoir wrote her article, a brilliant university student named Zohra Drif was condemned to death for her role as a soldier in the Algerian nationalist movement, the FLN. Her autobiography from that period newly published in English, Inside the Battle of Algiers, is a remarkable testimony of the extremely courageous role women played inside the armed wing of the Algerian nationalist movement. Zohra Drif was one of the iconic group which took the war for independence into the French quarters of Algiers with bombs placed in cafes and restaurants. They paid with death, torture, years in French jails, and the military destruction of much of the historic Casbah, for the end of France’s settlement colony.
