Authors: RENÉ GIRARD
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In the second chapter of
The Scapegoat
, which is presented here, Girard offers a kind of
"grammar" of persecution in his delineation of stereotypes of persecution. These stereotypes are: a crisis of the loss of the distinctions felt to be necessary to social order; accusations
made against victims onto whom the alleged crimes undermining law and order are
transferred; and the signs of victims, both those within the cultural system who are weak or
marginal and those who exist outside the system, such as foreigners. Every culture is a
differential system, which means that it coheres as a unitary complex of differences or
distinctions. Those bearing the signs of victims do not differ in the right way -- in a way in
keeping with the system's complex of differences; they are thus always potentially
threatening and may be the object of persecution and mob violence, or they may be set aside
as a pool of sacrificial victims.
I shall confine my discussion to collective persecutions and their resonances. By collective
persecutions I mean acts of violence committed directly by a mob of murderers such as the
persecution of the Jews during the Black Death. By collective resonances of persecutions I
mean acts of violence, such as witch-hunts, that are legal in form but stimulated by the
extremes of public opinion. The distinction is not, however, essential. Political terrors, such
as the French Revolution, often belong to both types. The persecutions in which we are
interested generally take place in times of crisis, which weaken normal institutions and favor
mob formation. Such spontaneous gatherings of people can exert a decisive influence on
institutions that have been so weakened, and even replace them entirely.
These phenomena are not always produced by identical circumstances. Sometimes the cause
is external, such as an epidemic, a severe drought, or a flood followed by famine. Sometimes
the cause is
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internal -- political disturbances, for example, or religious conflicts. Fortunately, we do not
have to determine the actual cause. No matter what circumstances trigger great collective
persecutions, the experience of those who live through them is the same. The strongest
impression is without question an extreme loss of social order evidenced by the
disappearance of the rules and "differences" that define cultural divisions. Descriptions of these events are all alike. Some of them, especially descriptions of the plague, are found in
our greatest writers. We read them in Thucydides and Sophocles, in Lucretius, Boccaccio, Shakespeare, Defoe, Thomas Mann, Antonin Artaud, and many others. Some of them are also
written by individuals with no literary pretensions, and there is never any great difference.
We should not be surprised since all the sources speak endlessly of the absence of difference,
the lack of cultural differentiation, and the confusion that results. For example the Portuguese
monk Fco de Santa Maria writes in 1697:
As soon as this violent and tempestuous spark is lit in a kingdom or a republic, magistrates
are bewildered, people are terrified, the government thrown into disarray. Laws are no longer
obeyed; business comes to a halt; families lose coherence, and the streets their lively
atmosphere. Everything is reduced to extreme confusion. Everything goes to ruin. For
everything is touched and overwhelmed by the weight and magnitude of such a horrible
calamity. People regardless of position or wealth are drowning in mortal sadness. . . . Those
who were burying others yesterday are themselves buried today. . . . No pity is shown to
friends since every sign of pity is dangerous. . . .
All the laws of love and nature are drowned or forgotten in the midst of the horrors of such
great confusion; children are suddenly separated from their parents, wives from their
husbands, brothers and friends from each other. . . . Men lose their natural courage and, not
knowing any longer what advice to follow, act like desperate blind men, who encounter fear
and contradictions at every ste
p. 1.
Institutional collapse obliterates or telescopes hierarchical and functional differences, so that
everything has the same monotonous and monstrous aspect. The impression of difference in a
society that is not in a state of crisis is the result of real diversity and also of a system of
exchange that "differentiates" and therefore conceals the reciprocal elements it contains by its very culture and by the nature of the exchange. Marriages for example, or consumer goods,
are not clearly perceived
____________________
1. Fco de Santa Maria,
Historia de sagradas concregaçøes
. . . ( Lisbon: M. L. Ferreyra,
1697); quoted by Delumeau,
La Peur en Occident
, 112.
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as exchanges. When a society breaks down, time sequences shorten. Not only is there an
acceleration of the tempo of positive exchanges that continue only when absolutely
indispensable, as in barter for example, but also the hostile or "negative" exchanges tend to increase. The reciprocity of negative rather than positive exchanges becomes foreshortened as
it becomes more visible, as witnessed in the reciprocity of insults, blows, revenge, and
neurotic symptoms. That is why traditional cultures shun a too immediate reciprocity.
Negative reciprocity, although it brings people into opposition with each other, tends to make
their conduct uniform and is responsible for the predominance of the
same
. Thus,
paradoxically, it is both conflictual and solipsistic. This lack of differentiation corresponds to
the reality of human relations, yet it remains mythic. In our own time we have had a similar
experience which has become absolute because it is projected on the whole universe. The text
quoted above highlights this process of creating uniformity through reciprocity: "Those who
were burying others yesterday are themselves buried today. . . . No pity is shown to friends
since every sign of pity is dangerous . . . children are suddenly separated from their parents,
wives from husbands, brother and friends from each other." The similarity of behavior creates confusion and a universal lack of difference: "People regardless of position or wealth are
drowning in mortal sadness. . . . Everything is reduced to an extreme."
The experience of great social crisis is scarcely affected by the diversity of their true causes.
The result is great uniformity in the descriptions that relate to the uniformity itself. Guillaume
de Machaut is no exception. He sees in the egotistical withdrawal into the self and in the
series or reprisals that result -- the paradox of reciprocal consequences -- one of the main
causes of the plague. We can then speak of a stereotype of crisis which is to be recognized,
logically and chronologically, as the first stereotype of persecution. Culture is somehow
eclipsed as it becomes less differentiated. Once this is understood it is easier to understand
the coherence of the process of persecution and the sort of logic that links all the stereotypes
of which it is composed.
Men feel powerless when confronted with the eclipse of culture; they are disconcerted by the
immensity of the disaster but never look into the natural causes; the concept that they might
affect those causes by learning more about them remains embryonic. Since cultural eclipse is
above all a social crisis, there is a strong tendency to explain it by social and, especially,
moral causes. After all, human relations disintegrate in the process and the subjects of those
relations cannot be utterly innocent of this phenomenon. But, rather than blame themselves,
people inevitably blame either society as a whole, which costs them nothing, or other people
who seem particularly harmful for easily identifiable reasons. The suspects are accused of a
particular category of crimes.
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Certain accusations are so characteristic of collective persecution that their very mention
makes modern observers suspect violence in the air. They look everywhere for other likely
indications -- other stereotypes of persecution -- to confirm their suspicion. At first sight the
accusations seem fairly diverse but their unity is easy to find. First there are violent crimes
which choose as object those people whom it is most criminal to attack, either in the absolute
sense or in reference to the individual committing the act: a king, a father, the symbol of
supreme authority, and in biblical and modern societies the weakest and most defenseless,
especially young children. Then there are sexual crimes: rape, incest, bestiality. The ones
most frequently invoked transgress the taboos that are considered the strictest in the society in
question. Finally there are religious crimes, such as profanation of the host. Here, too, it is the
strictest taboos that are transgressed.
All these crimes seem to be fundamental. They attack the very foundation of cultural order,
the family and the hierarchical differences without which there would be no social order. In
the sphere of individual action they correspond to the global consequences of an epidemic of
the plague or of any comparable disaster. It is not enough for the social bond to be loosened;
it must be totally destroyed.
Ultimately, the persecutors always convince themselves that a small number of people, or
even a single individual, despite his relative weakness, is extremely harmful to the whole of
society. The stereotypical accusation justifies and facilitates this belief by ostensibly acting
the role of mediator. It bridges the gap between the insignificance of the individual and the
enormity of the social body. If the wrongdoers, even the diabolical ones, are to succeed in
destroying the community's distinctions, they must either attack the community directly, by
striking at its heart or head, or else they must begin the destruction of difference within their own sphere by committing contagious crimes such as parricide and incest.
We need not take time to consider the ultimate causes of this belief, such as the unconscious
desires described by psychoanalysts, or the Marxist concept of the secret will to oppress.
There is no need to go that far. Our concern is more elementary; we are only interested in the
mechanism of the accusation and in the interaction between representation and acts of
persecution. They comprise a system, and, if knowledge of the cause is necessary to the
understanding of the system, then the most immediate and obvious causes will suffice. The
terror inspired in people by the eclipse of culture and the universal confusion of popular
uprisings are signs of a community that is literally undifferentiated, deprived of all that
distinguishes one person from another in time and space. As a result all are equally
disordered in the same place and at the same time.
The crowd tends toward persecution since the natural causes of what
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troubles it and transforms it into a
turba
2. c
annot interest it. The crowd by definition seeks action but cannot affect natural causes. It therefore looks for an accessible cause that will
appease its appetite for violence. Those who make up the crowd are always potential
persecutors, for they dream of purging the community of the impure elements that corrupt it,
the traitors who undermine it. The crowd's act of becoming a crowd is the same as the
obscure call to assemble or mobilize, in other words to become a "mob." Actually this term
comes from "mobile," which is as distinct from the word "crowd" as the Latin
turba
is from
vulgus
. The word "mobilization" reminds us of a military operation, against an already identified enemy or one soon to be identified by the mobilization of the crowd.
All the stereotypes of accusation were made against the Jews and other scapegoats during the
plague. But Guillaume de Machaut does not mention them. As we have seen, he accuses the
Jews of poisoning the rivers. He dismisses the most improbable accusations, and his relative
moderation can perhaps be explained by the fact that he is an "intellectual." His moderation may also have a more general significance linked to intellectual development at the end of the
Middle Ages.
During this period belief in occult forces diminished. Later we shall ask why. The search for
people to blame continues but it demands more rational crimes; it looks for a material, more
substantial cause. This seems to me to be the reason for the frequent references to poison. The
persecutors imagined such venomous concentrations of poison that even very small quantities
would suffice to annihilate entire populations. Henceforth the clearly lightweight quality of
magic as a cause is weighted down by materiality and therefore "scientific" logic. Chemistry takes over from purely demoniac influence.
The objective remains the same, however. The accusation of poisoning makes it possible to
lay the responsibility for real disasters on people whose activities have not been really proven
to be criminal. Thanks to poison, it is possible to be persuaded that a small group, or even a
single individual, can harm the whole society without being discovered. Thus poison is both
less mythical and just as mythical as previous accusations or even the ordinary "evil eye,"