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Biography: Politics and Government Start‑class

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The article may be improved by following the WikiProject Biography 11 easy steps to producing at least a B article. -- Edofedinburgh 00:13, 29 March 2007 (UTC)

Wikified as part of the Wikification wikiproject! JubalHarshaw 19:04, 19 September 2006 (UTC)

Documentation

Behemothing 05:39, 18 March 2007 (UTC) added information, citations

Discussion

I wrote a senior honors thesis on Henri Alleg and L'Question at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and have inserted much of my background information into this article. Behemothing 05:39, 18 March 2007 (UTC)

Initial article content

Henri Alleg (1921 - ) was a French national who became famous for his role in the French-Algerian 'War Without a Name' (1954-1962) after the publication of Italic textLa QuestionItalic text in 1958.

Alleg moved to Algeria in 1939, and as an 18 year old was intimately involved with the Algerian Community Party. He became the editor of the Alger Republicain, an Algerian daily sympathetic to Algerian nationalism, from 1950 to 1955. The newspaper was banned in September of 1955 by the French authorities. In November of 1956, after many of his colleagues at the newspaper were arrested, Alleg went into hiding. On June 12, 1957 he was arrested by the 10th Parachutist Division in the home of his friend, Maurice Audin who was arrested the day before and would die while imprisoned under questionable circumstances. He underwent one month of torture in El-Biar, a suburb of Algiers, before being transferred to a 'camp' in Lodi (all in Algeria) despite the fact that no charges had been laid against him. Finally, on August 17, 1957, as a communist party member, he was formally charged with offenses against the external safety of the State and the rebuilding of a dissolved league. He was sentenced to ten years in prison, during which he wrote La Question (Question(1958) in English; translation by John Calder) which chronicled the torture he endured throughout the thirty days he spent in El-Biar. Alleg had used the real names of his torturers in his narrative, many of them highly decorated officers. Upon it's publication on February 12, 1958, the text quickly spread shockwaves through the French population, and the French government immediately banned the book for political reasons the same year as its publication, the first book to be banned for political reasons in France since the 18th century. The book was reprinted in March of 1958 by Swiss press, and translated by John Calder and printed in English the same year. Despite the ban, the novel continued to circulate underground in France, and served as a means of revealing the scope of torture during the Algerian War. Alleg escaped from prison and made his way to Czechoslovakia. With the passing of the Evian Accords in 1962, Alleg returned to France and then Algeria. He helped rebuild the Alger Republicain and continued to publish numerous books and appear in several documentaries.

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] 00:45, 6 November 2007 (UTC)

There are many issues which need clarification;...

• There are many issues which need clarification; these are merely some of them:
• Henri Salem
• Harry Salem
• "...attempting to reconstitute a dissolved league."
• Lodi
• El-Biar
• El Biar {I did write a redirect.}
• La Question
• paras

There are certainly other issues that need editing.

Thank You,

] 00:45, 6 November 2007 (UTC)

Possible POV issues

For what it's worth, I've got two sources here:

• Ordeal by Torture, TIME, June 9, 1958 (a book review)
• The Trial, TIME, June 27, 1960 (on his trial and apparent sentencing)

This second source says he was sentenced to ten years. We can infer that he never served that but it would be nice to put that in the article.

The first source includes this passage: "The painful identification that the reader feels with Alleg cannot blot out the nagging realization that, as a Communist, Alleg himself has been a consenting party to the same tortures and to a degradation of man that, for its wholesale scale, dwarfs the war-begotten atrocities of El Biar."

Bearing that in mind, this entire article appears to be too sympathetic to Alleg's side of the story. It needs to be toned down at the very least. While I can believe that Alleg was tortured, we really only have his word that this happened.

His version of events claims he was waterboarded, which raises questions. If he's not lying, was it a different method than what's said to be used today? If it's not substantially different, and if he's really not lying about any of this, then does that make him the only known recipient of waterboarding who didn't break?

These are simply questions. We need more sources. I'm sure some editors here are competent French readers. It would be nice if we could get the French government side of the story, especially from back then.

While we're at it, I'm curious to know where Alleg stood during the Hitler-Stalin pact. We know that his party claimed to be "anti-war" during that time but we don't have any comment from him on that here. I wish this article didn't have so many holes.

-- Randy2063 (talk) 02:11, 6 January 2008 (UTC)

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