The Question
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βThe lesson of this book... is that we are all on the edge of savagery and if we begin to slip over that edge, we fall fast and far.β β D. W. Brogan,Β The New York TimesΒ
βWritten with spare and simple candor, the book is much more than a scalding footnote to fever-hot headlines.Β The QuestionΒ does not stop with the Algerian question but goes on to ask: What does it mean to be a human being? It tells of the shame and glory of man.β βΒ Time
βIn his modest, unassuming and precise fashion, Alleg is describing a triumph of the human spirit... The importance of Allegβs book extends far beyond Algeria and France. For this is what can happen anywhere; what does happen in many parts of the world and what could happen here. There is nothing βinhumanβ about it. It is too, too human. To hush it up, to deny it for any reason whatever is to be an accomplice of the torturers...β βΒ Scotsman
β[A] noble and in a sense ennobling book, the dominant impression it leaves is one of a progressive and finally an almost total degradation, a degradation both of persons β except for the tortured, the outlawed β and of social institutions.Β The QuestionΒ is far more than an account of atrocities, however spectacular.β βΒ The Nation
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Henri Alleg (1921-2013), born Harry Salem to Jewish parents from Russia and Poland, studied literature at the Sorbonne, became a French-Algerian journalist and a member of the Communist Party. He started writing under the name Alleg for theΒ Alger RΓ©publicain, a daily newspaper sympathetic to Algerian nationalism, and became its editor-in-chief in 1951. In June 1957, he was arrested on suspicion of undermining the power of the French state, andunderwent tortureΒ for one month in El-Biar, a suburb of Algiers, at the hands of theΒ French Army. Allegβs account of his interrogation wasΒ smuggled out of prisonΒ and published in 1958 byΒ Editions de MinuitΒ asΒ La Question, and that same year in English asΒ The Question. Alleg gained international recognition for hisΒ stance against tortureΒ in the context of the Algerian War. The French government bannedΒ La QuestionΒ after 60,000 copies had been sold. In 1960,Β a military court which barred the public and the press from the trialΒ condemned Alleg to 10 years of hard labor in France, but he escaped from prison in 1961 and took refuge in Czechoslovakia.
After the 1962 Evian Accords, Alleg returned to France and then to Algeria. He helped rebuild theΒ Alger RΓ©publicainΒ but was declared persona non grata after the 1965 military coup by Houari BoumΓ©dienne. Alleg moved back to France where he worked as a journalist forΒ LβHumanité until 1980 and wrote several books, including a three-volume history of the Algerian War of Independence andΒ Algerian MemoirsΒ published in 2005. He died at age 91.
