Henri Alleg

Henri Alleg (20 July 1921 – 17 July 2013), born as Harry John Salem, was a French-Algerian journalist, director of the Alger républicain newspaper, and a member of the French Communist Party. After Editions de Minuit, a French publishing house, released his memoir La Question in 1958, Alleg gained international recognition for his stance against torture, specifically within the context of the Algerian War (1954–1962).

Alleg was born in London in 1921 to Jewish parents of Russian-Polish origin. During his childhood in Paris, Alleg never fully embraced his Jewish identity due to his opinions of Israel as an agent of racist colonialism. His early educational years coincided with the Spanish Civil War, during which time he was met with an increasingly politicized school environment with Italian refugees who opposed Mussolini arriving in France along with Jewish Germans.

Alleg left for Algeria in 1939 and, at age 18, became intimately involved with the Algerian Communist Party. A fifteen year old Georgette Cottin served as an intermediary with the leaders of the Jeunesses Communistes and supplied a typewriter and roneo saved from the headquarters of the Youth Hostels of Algiers which made it possible to publish a few issues of the Jeune Garde newspaper.

Postwar, Alleg worked as editor-in-chief of the Alger Républicain, a daily paper sympathetic to Algerian nationalism, from 1950 to 1955. In 1951, Alleg became director of the publication, which alone in Algeria advocated a free democratic press for Algerian grievances against France. The newspaper was banned in September 1955 by the French authorities due to its communist and anti-colonial perspective.

In November 1956, after many of his colleagues at the newspaper were arrested by French colonial authorities, Alleg went into hiding, maintaining his journalistic connections by continuing to submit pro-independence articles to the French Communist journal l'Humanité. Many of his articles never saw publication due to government censorship of writing that advocated Algerian independence.

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