"Whatever the case", continued Tocqueville, "we may say in a general manner that all political freedoms must be suspended in Algeria."[11] Historian Olivier Le Cour Grandmaison thus wrote that "From the years 1840 to the 1962 independence, the physical body of the "Arab" has therefore been used as a terror instrument on which the colonial power has never ceased engraving the marks of its almighty power. Torture in Algeria and in the French Empire: an exception limited to wars of national liberation conducted against the metropole? No, the rule."[12] However, Le Cour Grandmaison's work has been criticized by Gilbert Meynier and Pierre Vidal-Naquet in an article published in Esprit.[13]