This article investigates how the concept of ‘conscience’ emerged as a battleground within the French Catholic Church and as a politicized concept with implications for ideas about human rights. State-sponsored torture during the Algerian War (1954–62) prompted dissident Christians to pioneer the use of ‘individual conscience’ as a tool of resistance. The Christians of the anti-torture movement embraced the theologically informed language of conscience alongside a French, secular tradition of rights drawn from the 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen. The way that Catholic dissidents thought about rights transcended the secular–religious divide; while recognizing a liberal concept of rights coming out of the French Revolution, these Catholics also insisted upon the spiritual function of individual conscience as a check upon the state. Intra-Catholic debates about conscience thus reveal the political and theological diversity within mid-twentieth-century Christianity, long assumed to have been dominated by actors on the political right, as well as the multiplicity of coexisting ways of speaking about and interpreting human rights.

中文翻译：

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法国基督教反酷刑运动与良心政治

本文探讨了“良心”概念是如何成为法国天主教会内部的一个战场，并成为一个对人权观念产生影响的政治化概念。阿尔及利亚战争（1954-62 年）期间国家支持的酷刑促使持不同政见的基督徒率先使用“个人良心”作为抵抗工具。反酷刑运动的基督徒接受了具有神学知识的良心语言，以及源自 1789 年《人权和公民权利宣言》的法国世俗权利传统。天主教持不同政见者思考权利的方式超越了世俗与宗教的鸿沟；在承认法国大革命产生的自由权利概念的同时，这些天主教徒还坚持个人良心的精神功能是对国家的制约。因此，天主教内部关于良心的辩论揭示了 20 世纪中叶基督教内部的政治和神学多样性，长期以来一直被认为是由政治权利的参与者主导的，以及谈论和解释人权的多种共存方式。