Early Emergence and Adoption of a “White” Torture Paradigm in the French and British Empires

In the late nineteenth and throughout the twentieth century, there was an intellectual tendency toward the cleansing of torture. As Darius Rejali has impressively illustrated, classical, brutal and mostly physical forms of torture were modified and adapted in various regions and replaced by a “modern,” psychological and scientific paradigm of “white” or “clean” torture.Footnote ²² These new forms of coercive violence primarily aimed at increasing efficiency. At the same time, by increasingly minimizing visible physical marks, torture was shifted towards psychological methods—many of which were pioneered by the French and the British. This is why contemporary witnesses perceived this “white torture” as modern and scientific. In reality, “white torture” was anything but “clean.” The physical suffering of the victims was merely replaced by the carefully devised regulation and instrumentalization of psychological and emotional pain, which was increasingly amplified with technical devices. This process was uneven and benefited from the multidirectional interaction with conflicts in non-European areas. This dichotomy between archaic “classical” and subtle “modern” methods of torture was, for example, already described by the French journalist Andrée Viollis with regard to the French colonial administration in Indochina in the mid‑1930s: “There are tortures that can be called classic. … But besides these tortures of a rather archaic kind, there are more refined, more modern ones: all invented and practiced, in particular by the Sûreté de Cholon.”Footnote ²³

The French colonial state in Indochina was not alone in inventing these sophisticated, mostly non-invasive torture techniques. Regarding the British Empire, the Anglo-Irish officer Charles Edward Callwell, a veteran of the Second Anglo-Afghan War and the Boer Wars, published one of the first authoritative manuals on colonial warfare at the beginning of the twentieth century, in which he described how trustworthy information was “unavoidably defective” in colonial wars.Footnote ²⁴ As Calwell’s manual illustrates, the search for information played a central role in locating and exposing the enemy and thus formed what Katherine Judith Anderson calls an evolving “system of knowledge.”Footnote ²⁵ Within this system, imperial troops were able to plan and prepare for confrontations with nationalist and colonial opponents.

Since the genesis of torture is closely linked to so-called “small-scale wars” in seemingly remote areas, strategists, military planners and intelligence officials often drew on colonial experiences. For the British Empire, the writings of Callwell,Footnote ²⁶ T. Miller Maguire,Footnote ²⁷ Ernest Swinton,Footnote ²⁸ William HenekerFootnote ²⁹ and Charles Gwynn became influential.Footnote ³⁰ They formulated methods for quickly and effectively suppressing uprisings in the colonies.

For France, however, asymmetric warfare was much more of a historical constant than it was for the British Empire or other imperialist powers. Despite the structural use of force, until the 1940s, French counterinsurgency operations had a successful track record in the eyes of many military officers and politicians.Footnote ³¹ To them, the colonization of Algeria and Madagascar served as cases in point. French military and police officers thus gained far more experience in highly asymmetrical wars than their counterparts in other European empires. Consequently, from the theatres of war in Algeria (1830–1848), Mexico (1862–1866), Indochina (1858–1900), Madagascar (1883–1897) and Morocco (1900–1934), the French approach to counterinsurgency and interrogation was gradually refined.Footnote ³² However, there was often a lack of clear political leadership or a coherent strategy from the French Third Republic. This left many French generals, officers and colonial bureaucrats with the burden of implementing political decisions themselves at the local level.Footnote ³³ Unlike Callwell, French officers did not want to provoke major decisive battles that would physically destroy the enemy. Instead, leading French thinkers began to interpret the enemy as an overall system that was to be fought in its safe heavens. This was accompanied by the expansion of colonial sovereignty, village by village. This process was known as pacification, and was intended to result in the decisive and permanent suppression of any uprising.Footnote ³⁴

French Marshal Thomas Bugeaud was notorious in the nineteenth century for striking fear into France’s enemies during the conquest of Algeria. General Joseph Gallieni rose to fame through France’s colonial wars, particularly through his victory in the Tonkin campaign (1883–1886) and his tough policy in Madagascar, which expanded on Bugeaud’s ideas of pacification.Footnote ³⁵ Together with his novice Louis-Hubert Lyautey—who, to his credit had spoken out against torture and mistreatment while quelling the Moroccan rising in 1925—Gallieni developed the tache d’huile theory of colonial state building in which secure localized zones were spread through raids (ratissage) and resettlement (regroupment), like an inkpot spilling out over a map.Footnote ³⁶ Historians Jacques Frémeaux and Bruno C. Reis have summarized the extremely brutal tradition of this French approach to counterinsurgency: “The French strategic aim was to force the populations into total submission.”Footnote ³⁷ Pacification was used during the French colonization in Morocco and Algeria in particular. This view would resurface during the Cold War as well as in the early 2000s, becoming an official term in U.S. interrogation policies during the global war on terror.Footnote ³⁸

Like the Americans in the war on terror, French General Théophile Pennequin—who like Gallieni and Lyautey was a veteran of Indochina—linked military operations to socio-economic pacification operations.Footnote ³⁹ French officers prioritized interrogations, intelligence and the targeted use of force: torture was used during the French suppression of the Malagasy Uprising 1947–1949 and the subsequent recolonization of Madagascar by Generals Marcel Pellet and Pierre Garbay. This experience from Madagascar later informed practices by the French from the Ivory Coast to Cameroon, Indochina, Morocco and Tunisia.Footnote ⁴⁰

However, the intellectual legacy from Indochina became most significant for the global reception of torture. In Indochina, extreme violence was the order of the day, not only in prisons, but also in the everyday handling of the local population.Footnote ⁴¹ In French Indochina, various actors tortured their opponents. Early torture practices by leading actors of the grande nation developed since the initial colonization and were derived from military punishment techniques. Many of these persisted even after disciplinary penalties were suspended due to their brutality.Footnote ⁴²

The diplomatic correspondence contains sporadic evidence of torture, but more frequently, an intellectual distance is taken from aggressive interrogation techniques. A confidential letter from the Résident Supérieur au Tonkin in November 1897 reported on the “question by water [and] fire.”Footnote ⁴³ Torture in French prisons and interrogation centers in Indochina was intense and formed part of a distinct prison culture.Footnote ⁴⁴ Historian Patrice Morlat and journalist Andrée Viollis, for example, reported on specially made forceps that were used to extract eyeballs.Footnote ⁴⁵ More importantly, French interrogators experimented with psychological techniques like stress positions relatively early on.Footnote ⁴⁶ Many French officials were interested in their enemies’ use of torture during interrogations as part of the constant uprisings that challenged French rule. From these observations, the French derived their own insights and frequently copied proven methods.Footnote ⁴⁷ The ingenuity of French torture expertise was emphasized by contemporary witnesses: “They [the tortures] are of various kinds and show an astonishing wealth of sadistic imagination.”Footnote ⁴⁸

Depictions circulated by the Vietnamese Communist Party today illustrate the use of various French and Vietnamese torture devices, particularly to combat the Cần Vương movement from 1885 to 1896. Forced confinement in stress positions for days on end was combined with instruments of physical torture: the wooden cangue of Chinese provenance and other tools restricted the prisoners’ ability to move. Prisoners whose feet were clamped into wooden beams fared even worse (see figure 1).Footnote ⁴⁹ Other shackles and handcuffs were used to force prisoners into stress positions. In addition, fetters, handcuffs, truncheons, hammers and knives were used to beat and stab the victims (see figure 2).Footnote ⁵⁰

Figure 1. The prisoners’ lower legs were clamped in the holes of this wooden beam, creating rudimentary stress positions. Source: Vietnam National Museum of History (Bảo Tàng Lịch Sử Việt Nam), Hà Nội, Vietnam, Cùm chân, author’s photo, 12 April 2023.

Figure 2. Colonial instruments of torture in French Indochina: Fetter, handcuff, truncheon, hammer and knife. Source: Vietnam National Museum of History (Bảo Tàng Lịch Sử Việt Nam), Hà Nội, Vietnam, Roi bằng xương cá và roi da, Xích khóa tay, Xích chân, author’s photo, 12 April 2023.

Many of these tools were not used exclusively for torture, but also to punish and to intimidate. Due to the ubiquity of these practices, criticism of French colonial torture grew. Efforts to abolish torture throughout Indochina had already been made before the turn of the century.Footnote ⁵¹ For instance, torture was abolished in Cochinchina after the French penal code was introduced in 1877. In Annam it remained officially in use until it was outlawed in 1913.Footnote ⁵² A letter from the Gouverneur Générale de l’Indochine in 1911 commented on the apparently pervasive use of torture in courts throughout Southeast Asia: “These judicial procedures are not confined to Annam. A recent trial also revealed their existence in Cambodia. These practices are absolutely intolerable. They must end at all costs. … The civilizing tradition of the nation [of France] forbids us to put up with them [these methods]. Inaction or silence becomes complicity.”Footnote ⁵³

However, by inaction and silence, the elites indeed became complicit in the period that followed. Hence, progress on the abolition of torture and punishment techniques was slow. Journalist Viollis, for example, described countless acts of torture by the French in the 1930s. Viollis mentioned foot whippings imported from China, as well as the breaking of ribs and bones, impalement, water and fire torture, the insertion of wooden dowels into the orifices of the body, and the flogging of prisoners.Footnote ⁵⁴ At the same time, others also reported beatings, stress positions, the extraction of finger- and toenails, torture by cutting and by burning, deprivation of food and drink, and the feeding of salted rice or pungent liquids.Footnote ⁵⁵

Little is known about the exact extent and prevalence of these techniques. According to Viollis, such torture was carried out “daily” at the Cholon police station in 1931—often ordered by the French but carried out by local Vietnamese torturers.Footnote ⁵⁶ According to the communist newspaper La Lutte, the torture applied in Saigon was “terrible.”Footnote ⁵⁷ Years earlier, the Résident Supérieur du Tonkin felt compelled to condemn the rampant torture in Southeast Asia. He referred to the bans on shackling and the use of the cangue and pleaded for a clearer separation between the accused and the convicted.Footnote ⁵⁸

Given the long tradition of Vietnamese resistance, information about hiding places, weapons, supporters and resistance fighters was of paramount importance. Torture techniques followed the warring parties and thus migrated from the cities to the provinces. The Chinese falaka, in which the soles of the victims’ feet were severely beaten, was exported from Saigon to the more remote provinces of Indochina: “In Saigon, the tortures are skillfully applied. They have at least one aim: to extract confessions without leaving any trace. … Beatings on the soles of the feet were imported from Saigon to the provinces.”Footnote ⁵⁹

The French Sûreté, partly a colonial intelligence service, together with the colonial police, had penetrated Indochina down to the provincial level and established new and “cleaner” torture techniques—even more intensely than military forces.Footnote ⁶⁰ Victim reports from the late 1920s and 1930s testify to particularly subtle torture interrogations by the Sûreté in various provinces of Indochina.Footnote ⁶¹

However, in contrast to the Cold War, this early knowledge of torture was only seldom passed on in institutions or schools, and more often spread through informal personal communication.Footnote ⁶² One such practice was the undressing of victims, which was used from an early date.Footnote ⁶³ Undressing was combined by the Sûreté with other techniques, such as beatings, stress positions, scalding, intimidation through fatigue exercises, and a method called stomach twisting: Lan mé ga, Vietnamese for “twisting the gizzard,” also euphemistically called “the toad” (la crapaudine). This was often a preferred method: “It [lan mé ga] is particularly popular with interrogators because it leaves no visible traces.”Footnote ⁶⁴

Electric torture soon became even more important than lan mé ga. Footnote ⁶⁵ In fact, according to Rejali, torture using electricity was first developed and tested in Indochina—long before the Argentinian police began experimenting with the electric picana, before the widespread use of the electric chair, and even before the use of electric torture by the Vichy and Nazi regimes.Footnote ⁶⁶ Journalist Viollis was one of the first to describe French electric torture after the suppression of the Yên Bái Mutiny in 1931.Footnote ⁶⁷

A forerunner of the infamous gégène electric torture machine was developed in Indochina in the 1930s.Footnote ⁶⁸ This involved an instrument for portable electric torture, which could be used directly in the field thanks to mobile generators, sometimes combined with water to maximize the pain. This meant that the French police were equipped to torture suspects in places far away from interrogation centers. The innovation of the gégène prevailed firstly because it left almost no traces and secondly because it led to fewer deaths compared to other variations of electric torture.Footnote ⁶⁹

From lan mé ga to the gégène, Indochina had an extensive and sophisticated history of torture. Colonial officials witnessed French soldiers studying and copying Vietnamese torture techniques.Footnote ⁷⁰ This created an experimental atmosphere in which new techniques were tried out, reproduced and adapted by both sides. The Vietnamese intelligence expert Trần Đăng Ninh experienced this process firsthand. He himself managed to escape twice from the notorious Hỏa Lò torture prison, which is why he wanted to halt the Communists’ own use of torture, leading to its ban in 1948 in some cases for political reasons.Footnote ⁷¹ Similar abolitionist endeavors during the beginning of the Indochina War can only be observed intermittently. Rather, French torture intensified. One example of this is the rampant use of electric torture, soon spreading to Europe. The electric technique perfected in Indochina migrated overseas and reappeared in the French Gestapo during the Vichy regime. From there, electric torture was most likely passed on to Hungary via the German Gestapo during the Second World War.Footnote ⁷²

Thus, the French experience in Indochina became an important source not only for interrogation techniques during the Second World War, but also for the subsequent global Cold War. The process of refining torture that can be traced to Indochina was fostered by new biological findings, technological inventions, and objects of modernization. Water and electricity allowed for the controlled dosing of pain. From a history of knowledge view, the development of the gégène stands out, making it possible to mobilize traceless torture across geographical space. The advent of electricity in general and the gégène in particular brought the disciplinary power of the colonial empire to the countryside. Indochina had thus become the intellectual incubator of an originally colonial but soon pan-regional pattern of torture.

Decolonization and Torture: The Violent Legacy of Indochina

As has become evident, the origin of this French savoir-faire lay in Indochina, where torture flourished. While the Algerian War is often seen as the apex of French torture, its widespread use emerged at least partially from colonial Indochina as well as the First Indochina War. There, the French Armed Forces routinely engaged in coercive methods against the Viet Minh and suspected civilian sympathizers.Footnote ⁷³ Occasionally, the French themselves were also tortured by their enemies.Footnote ⁷⁴ Though not officially sanctioned at the outset, torture became part of a recurring pattern of military operations, often justified as a tactical necessity in the struggle against guerrilla warfare. Despite this, the torture of soldiers and civilians was described in contemporary French documents as “the most despicable crimes,” part of a “full range of horrors” and “outpouring of hatred.”Footnote ⁷⁵

By the early 1950s, Indochina veterans such as Charles Lacheroy began to observe and theorize their practices. This article argues that this transition from practice to doctrine marks a critical evolution where the prevailing dispositif of torture moved from an improvised countermeasure to an integral component of guerre contre-révolutionnaire. The Indochina War thus served as both a training ground and a conceptual incubator, bridging colonial military repression in Asia with its later manifestations in North Africa.

With the defeat at Điện Biên Phủ in 1954, the French had to withdraw for good. Some French contemporaries explicitly associated this battle with torture by their Vietnamese enemies: “We were tortured in Indochina, and that led to Dien Bien Phu.”Footnote ⁷⁶ As the tortured Colonel and later doctoral candidate Robert Bonnafous demonstrated in his thesis, neglect and abuse were ubiquitous in the prison camps of the Viet Minh, sometimes accompanied by torture.Footnote ⁷⁷ More than half—some authors put the figure as high as two-thirds—of the prisoners who survived the battle of Điện Biên Phủ died in these camps, mostly due to disease. Many were subjected to political re-education and communist brainwashing.Footnote ⁷⁸ Prisoners who showed little discipline were shackled and exposed to swarms of vermin.Footnote ⁷⁹ The large number of prisoners of war in Southeast Asia became one of the International Committee of the Red Cross’ biggest concerns.Footnote ⁸⁰ Of the total 37,000 French prisoners, the Viet Minh are said to have released only 10,700.Footnote ⁸¹ As a result, many contemporaries spoke of a “red hell”Footnote ⁸² or of “deathcamps,”Footnote ⁸³ from which only the emaciated “living dead” returned to France.Footnote ⁸⁴

The surviving brutalized Indochina veterans self-righteously referred to themselves as the “Centurions of the Far East.”Footnote ⁸⁵ Many of these French officers had already encountered Nazi torture techniques as part of the résistance—and many had experienced the Gestapo’s brutal torture methods firsthand. Yet, according to contemporary observers and historians, it was their colonial experience that left a deeper imprint.Footnote ⁸⁶ Many captains of the French expeditionary corps, who later became colonels and generals in Algeria, were shaped by Southeast Asia.Footnote ⁸⁷ The French historian Yves Courrière observed: “The injection of officers and non-commissioned officers from Indochina [to Algeria], who had been deeply affected by ‘Viet’ techniques, opened new horizons.”Footnote ⁸⁸

Courrière and Raphaëlle Branche have argued that the prolonged exposure to asymmetrical warfare, guerrilla tactics, and ideological confrontation in Southeast Asia had a sustained and systematic influence on the mindset and moral worldview of these officers.Footnote ⁸⁹ In contrast to the relatively brief and defensive struggles against Nazi occupation, the Indochina War exposed officers to years of attritional conflict, captivity and political re-education under Viet Minh control. As demonstrated by Dennis Leroux, anti-communist propaganda flourished in post-Second World War France. The Indochina War, and specifically the experiences of French officers in Viet Minh captivity, played a pivotal role in their radicalization. Political re-education under communist supervision fostered a deeply personal and emotional anti-communism, which the officers took with them to later campaigns, particularly in Algeria—even though the Algerian partisans were not Communists.Footnote ⁹⁰ Nevertheless, psychological and political warfare became a “central feature of the Cold War,” particularly for French officers.Footnote ⁹¹ Their resistance identity was shaped by the Second World War, but it was their experiences in Indochina that led them to adopt an aggressive counterinsurgency ethos. Hence, descriptions of torture in the Indochina and Algerian wars of decolonization are strikingly similar.Footnote ⁹² In fact, techniques such as the gégène, naked interrogations, as well as stress positions, were used in both wars and suggest a fil rouge, culminating in the frequent use of water and electricity, causing drowning and electrocution in the most extreme cases.Footnote ⁹³ Most of these methods were learned and passed on as forms of torture. One contemporary proudly claimed, “to conduct an interrogation, you need to know the techniques.”Footnote ⁹⁴

No one better illustrates this military circulation of violence than Colonel Marcel Bigeard. He was captured and neglected by the Viet Minh in the spring of 1954, after parachuting twice over Điện Biên Phủ.Footnote ⁹⁵ Bigeard later described his time in a Viet Minh prison camp as “four months … of total horror.”Footnote ⁹⁶ Along with other Indochina veterans, Bigeard was transferred to Algeria only two years later. Paul Alain Léger, Bigeard’s brother in arms, is another example. He willingly adopted the Southeast Asian torture regime: “In Asia he [Léger] learnt about intelligence, and the most subtle kind of intelligence. … Only the result counted.”Footnote ⁹⁷ Future General Jacques Massu was influenced by the Southeast Asian torture regime in a similar way. After the Algerian War, the contemporary witness Jules Roy accused him of being “beyond reproach” in his tolerance of violence.Footnote ⁹⁸

Thus, after a crushing military defeat and the trauma of captivity, a brutalized cohort of officers was sent to North Africa in quest of revanche.Footnote ⁹⁹ It was precisely because Indochina was a failed French war that leading thinkers were eager to learn lessons in order to survive in the global struggle against communist expansionism: “They believed they have learned their lesson in Indochina.”Footnote ¹⁰⁰ Besides all their willingness to learn and adapt, the embarrassing defeat in Indochina had weakened French morale. It was even recommended by critics that frustrated officers should not be sent to Algeria.Footnote ¹⁰¹ However, due to an impending personnel shortage in the top ranks, this request could not be met—a decision that would have serious consequences. Former prisoners of the Viet Minh interpreted the Algerian War not simply as a colonial rebellion but as part of a global communist conspiracy. Thus, anticommunism provided a mobilizing narrative that created cohesion across diverse personal backgrounds and career frustrations.Footnote ¹⁰² Heavily influenced by the trauma of Indochina, these military thinkers became important theorists of the guerre conte-révolutionnaire—a military philosophy which adapted torture to new geopolitical realities.

Facing the Specter of Subversion and Revolution: Torture as a Covert Cold War Science

After the Second World War, the theory known as guerre contre-révolutionnaire became a protective cover for the systematic use and circulation of violence. It included practical knowledge, which was rarely codified in public, but soon gained secret validity due to the geopolitical context of the emerging Cold War. Torture techniques from the major regular wars of the twentieth century began to merge with experiences from smaller wars, to form a modern archetype of torture. This torture regime was not free-floating but was always linked to leading circles of experts and institutions. Moreover, this system of knowledge was linked to material practices. In its implementation on the ground, the torture expertise illustrates power relations and contemporary forms of biopolitical control in a particularly powerful way. It is no exaggeration to view it as a Foucauldian dispositif of power—even in democracies.Footnote ¹⁰³ This dispositif comprised a characteristic set of discourses, institutions and practices through which power and ultimately violence circulated.

After the Second World War, attempts were made on both sides of the Iron Curtain to disguise torture as a legitimate interrogation technique to avoid modern, evidence-based criminal prosecution. Even more strongly than before, leading theorists argued for the abandonment of direct techniques in favor of methods and techniques that left no or only temporary physical damage. In contrast to the old, classical torture, the systematic manipulation of the psyche was supposed to produce quicker and better results. However, these interventions often led to psychological and emotional trauma. One example that illustrates the fluid transition between “physical” and “psychological” torture is stress positions, in which victims had to remain in the same position for hours on end, provoking muscle spasms.

This “science of pain” continued to flourish during the Cold War. The psychological part of this “torturology” was linked to real and sometimes hallucinatory threat scenarios. The phantasm of communist subversion by an enemy hidden deep within one’s own society legitimized contemporary forms of torture.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ It was therefore thanks to the onset of the Cold War, decolonization and the rise of strategic research that torture did not simply disappear after the World Wars, but adapted like a chameleon to a new context. In the West, communist subversion seemed to threaten the free world as a fifth column, while in the East, capitalist influence and democratic reform were dreaded. Indirect proxy conflicts extended the Cold War and facilitated transatlantic solidarity. Claude Delmas, an influential French defense intellectual, argued in 1959 that Russian and Chinese stooges were at work in diverse countries such as Greece, Iran, Tunisia and, of course, Vietnam and Algeria.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ It was precisely these areas that became experimental zones for sophisticated forms of torture.

French torture in Indochina and Algeria was developed in cooperation with secret services.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ After the French withdrew from Indochina, Syria and Lebanon, they were determined to hold on to their remaining colonies, especially in geographically close North Africa. The French General Lionel “Max” Chassin and Colonel Charles Lacheroy were among the first veterans to analyze the military defeat in Southeast Asia and derive insights from it. From his rich, practical experiences, Lacheroy deduced the lesson that communist “revolutionary war” called for a new and all-encompassing counter-doctrine.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ In a 1957 internal study, Lacheroy wrote of a “new form of warfare” that threatened the free world.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ With regard to this new global war, the French Army had a pioneering role to play—indeed, “all possible means should be utilised.”Footnote ¹⁰⁹ For Lacheroy, the origins of guerre contre-révolutionnaire lay in Indochina, because “no period in our military career was so formative.”Footnote ¹¹⁰ According to Lacheroy, communist subversion was focused in the French and British colonial territories.Footnote ¹¹¹ A “total war” was now to be fought there, in which entire societies had to be militarized.Footnote ¹¹²

As a model, Lacheroy cited the findings of modern psychology and the biological insights of Sergei Chakhotin, a Russian microbiologist and ideologist of the Iron Front. Chakhotin became famous for developing pioneering propaganda techniques.Footnote ¹¹³ According to the historians Paul and Marie-Catherine Villatoux, Lacheroy’s contribution to French military thinking in the 1950s was considerable.Footnote ¹¹⁴ But his influence also stands out in terms of the reception he achieved. He became “the principal promoter of the French doctrine of ‘revolutionary war.’”Footnote ¹¹⁵ Lacheroy not only analyzed the modus operandi of the Viet Minh but also derived from it a generally applicable model of war. For him, the key to success lay with the civilian population, which had to be won over through psychological warfare. A charismatic teacher and officer who was recognized by many of his contemporaries as a gifted didactician, Lacheroy went so far as to suggest that the French neglect of the civilian population was the reason for their defeat in Southeast Asia. For Lacheroy, it was clear after Indochina that the communist enemy could no longer be dealt with by the “Code Napoléon.”Footnote ¹¹⁶

Like other French officers, Lacheroy was convinced that the Vietnamese guerrillas had co-opted the role of the civilian population, drawing them into their struggle, appropriating their position and functions for the guerrillas’ own political and military purposes.Footnote ¹¹⁷ He studied other sources, such as Mao Zedong, Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, the British strategist Basil H. Liddell Hart and T. E. Lawrence.Footnote ¹¹⁸ From their conceptions, Lacheroy derived his own messianic doctrine. Guerre contre-révolutionnaire was conceptualized not only for application in colonial wars, but explicitly for all the wars of the twentieth century.Footnote ¹¹⁹

When Lacheroy was recalled from Indochina to Paris in the summer of 1953, he was put in charge of the Centre d’études Asiatiques et Africaines in the French capital. He was given the task of training French troops, which allowed him to share his understanding of the Vietnamese revolutionary war through various means, including conferences, lectures and articles.Footnote ¹²⁰ A conference he co-organized at the Sorbonne in 1957 on guerre révolutionnaire et arme psychologique was open specifically to officers. There were 52,000 copies printed of Lacheroy’s own publication on guerre révolutionnaire. Footnote ¹²¹ His readers, whom he referred to as “apostles” were taught the art of this science.Footnote ¹²² Lacheroy and later epigones such as Colonel Roger Trinquier skillfully built on previous French thinkers on pacification such as Lucien Poirier, Maurice Prestat, Jacques Hogard and Pierre Saint-Macary.Footnote ¹²³ According to the historian François Géré, torture was “systematised” and “banalised” in the units they commanded.Footnote ¹²⁴ Moreover, the use of torture might have been a sign of bad morale. As part of guerre contre-révolutionnaire, soldiers were to undergo a specific new type of training, in small elite units and in close contact with the enemy.Footnote ¹²⁵ This novel training was intended to circumvent the problem that many existing regulations contradicted Lacheroy’s vision. Instead, Lacheroy called for tolerance from above and flexibility from below as the only way to put the enemy in its place.Footnote ¹²⁶ For Lacheroy, as later for the French Indochina expert Bernard B. Fall as well as Claude Delmas, the enemy was active at different levels of society and thus had to be engaged in multiple spheres.Footnote ¹²⁷

Lacheroy drew his lessons from his experience as well as from historical case studies. He studied the uprisings in Madagascar, Indochina, Cambodia, Morocco and Tunisia.Footnote ¹²⁸ This approach was in line with the curriculum of the École Superieure de Guerre at the time, which taught small-scale warfare from Tacfarinas in Roman Africa (17–24 AD), through the Vendéen (1789–1769), Soviet (1917), German (1918–1922), Spanish (1931–1936), Greek (1946–1949) and contemporary Moroccan and Tunisian case studies.Footnote ¹²⁹ A pioneering study in this field was co-authored by the Israeli Lieutenant Colonel Mattityahu Peled, who would later serve in the notorious cinquième bureau responsible for psychological operations in Algeria.Footnote ¹³⁰

Lacheroy never wrote much, commenting: “I decided on my own to train my officers in revolutionary warfare by explaining to them everything they had to do.”Footnote ¹³¹ Like Lacheroy, Bigeard, Chassin and Trinquier, many French officers learned an idealized lesson from Indochina that the French Army must never again suffer an ignominious defeat due to a lack of national will. Indeed, their colleagues later displayed a deep distrust of politicians. The abstraction of guerre contre-révolutionnaire capitalized on this resentment. It called for the ideological determination of the soldier, in the field as well as on the home front.Footnote ¹³² As a result, the leading role of the political was soon called into question. Lacheroy and his allies prioritized the implementation of military orders, creating a centralized command that increasingly marginalized political guidelines.

For Lacheroy, the Algerian War became an almost holy crusade in which his theory had to prevail. He saw himself as called upon to save the country from communism and to consolidate France’s status as a world power.Footnote ¹³³ His brother in arms, Colonel Marcel Bigeard, a self-styled chivalrous officer, proclaimed:Footnote ¹³⁴ “As defenders of the freedom of the West, we are here as ambassadors for the Crusaders.”Footnote ¹³⁵ Many other French officers articulated similar views.Footnote ¹³⁶ The analysis of guerre révolutionnaire was largely based on the military approach of the Viet Minh and was reverse-engineered to defeat similar opponents.Footnote ¹³⁷

The wrong lessons of Indochina thus became a “huge machinery put in place by the [French] Army.”Footnote ¹³⁸ This systemic ideology interpreted the Cold War as an intermediate condition in between war and peace, and as a global confrontation with Bolshevism.Footnote ¹³⁹ Geopolitics was often associated with very specific, interest-driven interpretations of history. But this was primarily a discourse in semi-official journals and organs. Partly because of the arrogance of the spokesmen, the dissemination of knowledge was slow. Toward the end of the 1950s, however, the first written instructions became available.Footnote ¹⁴⁰

One of the excesses of guerre contre-révolutionnaire was the implicit tolerance of torture and, in more than a few cases, its active propagation. This behavior had little to do with a strong and confident military. Desperate for a solution, many apologists expected all available military and psychological means to be made available, including semi-legal and illegal instruments.Footnote ¹⁴¹ After all, many of the principles of guerre contre-révolutionnaire were in open conflict with international humanitarian law and human rights. Alluding to Carl von Clausewitz, Colonel Antoine Argoud, for example, weaponized one of the Prussian war theorist’s most famous quotes to illustrate the effectiveness of torture: “Do certain forms of torture […] contradict the demands of a Christian conscience? … Within the framework we have set ourselves, torture and capital punishment are acts of war. And war is an act of violence designed to force an adversary to carry out our will. Violence is the means. The goal is to impose our will on the enemy. … War is an act of violence and there is no limit to the manifestation of this violence.”Footnote ¹⁴²

The defeat in Indochina thus became the starting point for a generation of officers with bold ideas and an impulse driven by action. Consequently, there was a call for similar methods and means. By the end of the 1950s, the discourse on torture in France had been radicalized into the following syllogism: “psychological action = revolutionary war = torture.”Footnote ¹⁴³

The French military had thus developed its concept for winning future wars. This approach was implemented in Algeria and then exported by French advisers to the United States and Latin America, where modern knowledge of torture was to spread even further. Guerre contre-révolutionnaire became the intellectual matrix, “a new set of operational and strategic ‘fixed values’” in which torture could be transmitted.Footnote ¹⁴⁴ As a result, the experience of recent years would soon inform the use of torture by allied countries during the Cold War and beyond.Footnote ¹⁴⁵ It was less the military or political effectiveness of modern torture that was decisive. Rather, it was the mostly unofficial embedding of subtle techniques in an overall ideological concept, which soon gained global popularity due to an apparent lack of alternatives. A specter haunted the “free world,” and guerre contre-révolutionnaire seemed the viable response to this apparent danger.

Globalizing Knowledge against Subversion: Ideologues, Theorists and Followers

The intellectual scaffolding of guerre contre-révolutionnaire benefited from the practical experiences of most of its advocates. But to what extent was it the intellectual system that transmitted torture? By exploring the circulation of torture knowledge, a previously hidden history of organized violence is uncovered.

The strong anti-communism of guerre contre-révolutionnaire facilitated both the direct and indirect spread of knowledge to more remote areas. Indeed, the transnational campaign against communism favored the export. What was tested in Indochina was further differentiated in France’s second great war of decolonization in Algeria. Though the Algerian insurgents were very different in their fighting style and morale, the French colloquially referred to them as “Viets.”Footnote ¹⁴⁶ While France would also lose this war, the matrix of torture tested in the Kasbah of Algiers was soon exported to the United States—and thus indirectly back again to Vietnam—but also to Latin America.Footnote ¹⁴⁷

With the arrival of experienced colonial officers and troops from Indochina, the French changed their tactics in Algeria from 1956 onward. The Indochina veterans formed a tight-knit group, with a great deal of firsthand experience.Footnote ¹⁴⁸ French author Jean Lartéguy described the importance of Algeria as a testing ground for the spread of the lessons learned: “It was here that a new concept of war was developed, based on several experiences that the instructors had gone through: Indochina, Diên Biên Phu, the Viet Minh camps, fighting in the sands or the jebels, the battle of Algiers. Everything is carefully calculated around a single idea: to make the captain, on whom all the weight of this war rests, a trained athlete, a revolutionary war leader, a believer who can transform himself from a high-tech scout into a political agitator.”Footnote ¹⁴⁹

The new French leadership began to informally and unofficially tolerate, and in some cases promote, this violent version of counterinsurgency. The Algerian case illustrates that even former victims of torture, in this case from Indochina or the Second World War, could themselves use torture—that is, that victims of torture can later become torturers.Footnote ¹⁵⁰ The focus in Algeria was on the civilian population as the “sine qua non for victory.”Footnote ¹⁵¹ Human intelligence was linked both to strategic intelligence operations in France and to clandestine operations in other countries, particularly Israel. The key to success in guerre contre-révolutionnaire seemed to lie in the rapid dissemination of important information. At the same time, conventional land warfare tactics with heavy weapons and standing troops were perceived as counterproductive.Footnote ¹⁵² In the struggle against subversives, water torture in the bathtub or electricity applied by the gégène were more promising because they left no traces and therefore could not be proven even by doctors, according to an internal investigation order.Footnote ¹⁵³ Even the French poster boy David Galula, a leading theorist who drew on his experiences from Algeria to write influential treatises, admitted to having used “physical deprivation and psychological coercion.”Footnote ¹⁵⁴ Euphemistically referred to as “police methods,” one of these techniques “consisted of placing suspects in shallow trenches closed-off with barbed wire, and then denying them food and water until they provided information.”Footnote ¹⁵⁵ Galula’s biographer assumed that his protagonist had learned these torture techniques from previous wars. Later, the United States rediscovered the advice of Galula, whose work was recognized in 2008 during the war on terror when it was translated from English into French.Footnote ¹⁵⁶

Before Galula could be utilized for the war on terror, the influence of French ideas reached Latin America. Both French and Anglo-American expertise are partly responsible for the excesses of torture there. In Argentina, for example, the ground for torture was prepared in a discursive process initiated in the 1950s, in which Argentine and French officers objectified and popularized the counterrevolutionary war as the war of the future. As the former chief of police of Buenos Aires, General Ramón Camps, explained: “In Argentina, we were influenced first by the French and then by the United States. … [The French] organised centres for teaching counterinsurgency techniques … and sent out instructors, observers, and an enormous amount of literature.”Footnote ¹⁵⁷

The Argentinian reception of the French lessons flourished in the following years. The Argentine Revista de la Escuela Superior de Guerra, published by the Naval War College, reported non-stop on the French “fight against subversion.”Footnote ¹⁵⁸ These interpretations culminated in a course on subversive actions organized in 1981.Footnote ¹⁵⁹ Not only was French know-how used, but British and American counterinsurgency techniques were also referenced in Argentina.Footnote ¹⁶⁰ As in other Latin American countries, the Argentine Armed Forces were ideologically assigned the role of a “civilising force” on the way to a “new and glorious nation.”Footnote ¹⁶¹

The French influence in Argentina can be traced back to Colonel Carlos Jorge “Chivo” Rosas. He was a student at the École Supérieure de Guerre in Paris in the 1950s. On his return, Rosas worked as a professor of strategy and tactics in Buenos Aires, and was a regular contributor to the Revista de la Escuela Superior de Guerra. Footnote ¹⁶² Other Argentine officers who studied in Paris during the Cold War were Pedro Tibiletti, later director of the Escuela Superior de Guerra in Buenos Aires, Cándido Hure, later vice-director of that school, Manrique Miguel Mom, author of various articles on revolutionary war and teacher at the Escuela Superior de Guerra, Alcides López Aufranc and later Edgardo Daneri. They even regularly invited radicalized French members of the terrorist Organisation Armée Secrète (OAS) to Argentina to share their knowledge.Footnote ¹⁶³ In addition, French diplomats had been working in an official mission in Buenos Aires since the late 1950s. The three French officers stationed in Argentina were pleased that German influence on the Argentine Armed Forces was beginning to fade after the Second World War in favor of French ideas.Footnote ¹⁶⁴ The last French military advisers did not leave Argentina until 1981.Footnote ¹⁶⁵ However, the heyday of French influence came in the early 1960s. Afterward, the defeat in Algeria and a failed colonels’ putsch in France led to a crisis of the French school in Latin America, before it was revived by Franco-American representatives in the 1970s.Footnote ¹⁶⁶ Through years of training, the French prepared the ground for Argentine torture during the military dictatorship.Footnote ¹⁶⁷ The close contact with France meant that “most torture methods were developed before 1976.”Footnote ¹⁶⁸ Ramón J. Camps compared the very similar French and American concepts and concluded that: “The French pointed to the overall design, whereas the North Americans focused exclusively or nearly exclusively on military aspects.”Footnote ¹⁶⁹

Only later did imported influences from the “amigo americano” greatly enrich the characteristic knowledge of torture.Footnote ¹⁷⁰ As early as 1957 and 1958, Patrice de Naurois, a French Lieutenant-Colonel and adviser to the Argentinean Escuela Superior de Guerra, described French warfare in the school’s official journal.Footnote ¹⁷¹ Shortly afterward, de Naurois, a close follower of the French doctrine, wrote on the “strategy and tactics of the Viet Minh during the Indochina campaign.” This essay referred to France as a role model for Argentina.Footnote ¹⁷² On this basis, the author developed his own theory of subversive war,Footnote ¹⁷³ the foundation for later debates on the Indochina War, most notably from the pen of Colonel and Professor D. Leopoldo R. Ornstein.Footnote ¹⁷⁴ As early as 1959, Colonel Manrique Miguel Mom argued that conventional war theories should be considered obsolete in the face of current threats. Instead, the real danger to Latin America came from the followers of Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin and Mao. Since this unpredictable adversary sought “absolute power over body and soul,” only the militarization of society could help.Footnote ¹⁷⁵ A year earlier, Mom edited an article on “revolutionary war” by French officer Jacques Hogard, which was translated into Spanish.Footnote ¹⁷⁶ In the autumn of 1958, the François Pierre Badie saw French psychological warfare as “the order of the day,” which “together with the atomic bomb could change the laws of war.”Footnote ¹⁷⁷ According to Badie, “revolutionary war” was aimed at “the human spirit,” referring explicitly to French military officers.Footnote ¹⁷⁸ For Badie, this psychological warfare had no limits, either spatial or social. He linked it to a well-known slogan from Carl von Clausewitz:

Hence psychological warfare was seen as “part of a total war,” which was primarily about information:Footnote ¹⁸⁰ “Any operation must be based on the deepest possible prior knowledge of the enemy.”Footnote ¹⁸¹ Later, Badie wrote a lengthy text about the Chinese “revolutionary war,” which he failed to fully comprehend.Footnote ¹⁸² Colonel Tomás A. Sánchez de Bustamante did the same, referring to the French interpretation by Lionel Chassin,Footnote ¹⁸³ and describing the international communism lurking everywhere as “intrinsically perverse.” Again, French military figures such as Chassin as well as French war experiences in Southeast Asia and North Africa were used to support this thesis.Footnote ¹⁸⁴ Lieutenant-Colonel Jean Nougues, another French guest writer, introduced Argentinian readers to French operations in Algeria.Footnote ¹⁸⁵ French Lieutenant-Colonel Henri Grand d’Esnon, meanwhile, focused on the characteristics of subversive warfare.Footnote ¹⁸⁶ Jean Nougues pointed to a communist threat to the entire Latin American subcontinent.Footnote ¹⁸⁷ The French General Raoul Salan, who had a sinister past in the use of torture in Algeria, was introduced to the audience by the Argentinean Colonel Jorge Raúl Orfila.Footnote ¹⁸⁸ In 1963, a special issue of the Revista de la Escuela Superior de Guerra devoted almost two hundred pages to the French experience of war in Indochina. According to the authors, this was the only truly “revolutionary war” to date: “Consequently, the experiences and lessons learned from its study are of extraordinary value.”Footnote ¹⁸⁹

Hence, Lieutenant Colonel López Aufranc argued that French definitions of “counter-revolution” against organized terrorism should be applied to Argentina.Footnote ¹⁹⁰ He saw the infiltration of society by the Communists as the main problem. López Aufranc even visited the Algerian theatre of war, where he served in the French psychological warfare unit. In 1958, more than a hundred Argentine officers followed López Aufranc’s lead and traveled to Algeria, a country they believed was under threat from communism.Footnote ¹⁹¹ It may therefore have been López Aufranc’s experience that allowed French ideas to flourish in Argentina. He later commented as follows:

Thanks to lessons like these, the shrewd López Aufranc had made himself a sought-after teacher. General Spirito, the chief of staff of the Argentine Army, used his influence to appoint him chairman of the newly formed Committee to Combat Marxist Expansion.Footnote ¹⁹³ As a result of these intellectual influences, leading Argentine officers began to read Roger Trinquier.Footnote ¹⁹⁴ In addition, the Revista de la Escuela Superior de Guerra published reports on French counterinsurgency under “Humberto” Lyautey, French geostrategists, French military regulations, French defense policy and, last but not least, French advice on infiltration tactics.Footnote ¹⁹⁵

Thus, when the tricolor was taken down from over Algiers in 1962, sealing the end of France’s colonial empire in North Africa, the French concept of counterinsurgency was given a new lease of life in Latin America. In fact, after a brief hiatus in the second half of the 1970s, Gallic influences regained ground in Argentina when Robert Servent, a veteran of the Second World War, Indochina and Algeria, was sent to Buenos Aires. He moved into his office in the French military mission, which was still set up in the Escuela Superior, and was happy to pass on his experience. Servent was friends with Argentina’s last military dictator, Reynaldo Bignone, as well as with another French torture expert, Paul Aussaresses.

It was Servent who resurrected the French doctrine from Algeria and popularized it in Buenos Aires under the guise of gathering information.Footnote ¹⁹⁶ All too often he drew on his extensive experience of torture in Algeria.Footnote ¹⁹⁷ Other leading French ideologues such as General André Beaufre and Colonel Roger Trinquier, both veterans of Indochina and Algeria, lectured in Buenos Aires and their books and articles were translated into Spanish in the 1970s. Trinquier’s book La Guerre Moderne was already translated into Spanish in 1963. In the Spanish preface, Trinquier did not mince his words, extolling the values of torture. Just as the anti-aircraft gun was used against foreign aircraft and the machine gun was used by the infantryman, the righteous soldier against terrorism had to use torture.Footnote ¹⁹⁸ Bernard B. Fall spoke of a “Cartesian rationality” within whose terms Trinquier and other officers saw the use of torture.Footnote ¹⁹⁹

The Argentinians would soon exceed the boldest expectations of their much-praised French teachers. Argentine Lieutenant-Colonel Federico later said: “In any case, it was thanks to the teaching we received on the Algerian Revolutionary War that we were able to wage our own war in Argentina. … We can try to live in denial, but to win an anti-subversive war, torture is unavoidable.”Footnote ²⁰⁰

General Acdes Vilas pointed out the practical relevance of his French role models: “I say this with pride. … I have been paying attention to work on this subject published in France … produced by OAS and French army officers who had fought in Indochina and in Algeria. … On the basis of the experience gathered throughout these classics in the field, … I started issuing orders.”Footnote ²⁰¹

These orders were often imbued with a hypertrophic fear of a Latin American fifth column, which also allowed for the targeted disappearance of victims, usually from helicopters and airplanes. The elimination of torture victims had already been popularized by French exponents in Algeria, before being copied in Guatemala and Argentina. It was later reproduced in Chile, El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua, Mexico, Iraq, Sri Lanka, Peru and Colombia.Footnote ²⁰² In the broadest sense, the long-term detention of captives without clear sentences and outside the established justice system as part of the American war on terror could also be interpreted as a similar form of enforced disappearance.Footnote ²⁰³