"Whatever the case", continued Tocqueville, "we may say in a general manner that all political freedoms must be suspended in Algeria." 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." However, Le Cour Grandmaison's work has been criticized by Gilbert Meynier and Pierre Vidal-Naquet in an article published in "Esprit".