The Torturer's Dilemma: Analyzing the Logic of Torture for Information

the generals, and above all du Gaulle, who would steer French politics and policy after the collapse of
the fourth republic.
More likely, the danger that intimidation would alienate the population population rather than
gain their loyalties – possibly creating new FLN adherents – lay at the very heart of the French
understanding of the revolt as a guerre révolutionaire. This conception, which emphasized the political
nature of the war, and the necessity of winning over the hearts and minds of the populace, would in
practice be undermined by the need to restore order before engaging the reforms that alone could offer
a political solution: it nonetheless lay at the center of the strategy put forward by the officers who had
served (and developed their theories about revolutionary war) in Indochina. Among the 'revolutionary
war' theorists who held high positions in the Forces of Order were Col. Yves Godard (Massu's second
in command), Aussaresses, Trinquier and Col. Michel Bigeard – all attached to the 10 th DP. (Cradock
and Smith, p. 73) While the vast bulk of the theory was geared towards rural guerrilla warfare, its
understanding of the goal of urban terror is instructive: urban terror (in the eyes of the theorists) was
meant to shake the population's faith in the authorities, by showing it to be unable to stop the violence,
as well as to provoke the authorities into an overreaction that would further alienate the people's
sympathies. In terms of the use of torture, then, the more the French would be able to restrict torture to
those that knew something useful – and thus to those who were tightly linked to the terrorist networks –
the less blowback it would receive. But if torture were to become widespread an indiscriminate, then
the intelligence received would be less reliable, and come at the cost of alienation. The focus on
popular support (denying it to the enemy and gathering it for oneself) was central to the theory – so
much so that the prime mark of revolutionary war was that control of territory was fully supplanted as a
goal by control of population. (ibid., p. 76) Torture as an indiscriminate means of intimidation would
fail because the FLN could present itself as an alternative to French rule. (Herreros, 2006; Kalyvas,
2004)
The explosion of torture victims is consequently the strongest evidence that the French were not
in a position to discriminate between ignorant and knowledgeable captives. Their incentives were
clearly understood to militate towards restricting torture only to those who withheld important
information: and yet the French tortured on a large scale enough to ensure that innocents were being
swept up in explosively large numbers. Even if the torture needed to be widespread at first (in order to
penetrate the OPA/FLN structure through the population's knowledge of and contact with the taxmen,
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