Circulating Violence: <i>Guerre contre-révolutionnaire</i> as the Intellectual Foundation of Modern Torture

Abstract This comparative article examines the iterative interactions between the French conception of guerre contre-révolutionnaire and the (re-)legitimation of modern torture techniques from the late nineteenth to the early twenty-first centuries. Based on a threefold argument, and drawing on multilingual historical sources and museal artifacts, it argues that the ideological campaign against the “revolutionary war” was a specifically military-intellectual approach to dealing with real or imagined subversive enemies. This dispositif promoted torture as a method of obtaining information and intimidating victims. First, this article shows how torture and the corresponding knowledge production can be traced back to colonial Indochina. There, archaic techniques were peculiarly blended, often with other experiences and indigenous practices. Later, leading military officers believed that the resulting doctrine of counterrevolutionary warfare was successful largely because of the use of methods of torture that left no trace. This key feature facilitated the export of its techniques to other regions. Therefore, in a second step, this article shows how this intertwined knowledge system was applied to the Algerian War, where it was widely employed and exploited. Subsequently, the fear of the spread of global communism facilitated the emergence of torture as a covert science of the Cold War. Third, this essay demonstrates how leading French theorists globalized their teachings by influencing their South American counterparts through their cross-continental interactions from the 1960s onward. Since the end of the Cold War, traces of this savoir-faire have remained potent, culminating in their influence on U.S. American counterinsurgency doctrine.