Authors: RENÉ GIRARD
which is used to attribute almost any evil to almost any person. We should therefore
recognize in the poisoning of drinking water a variation of a stereotypical accusation. The
fact that these accusations are all juxtaposed in the witch trials is proof that they all respond to the same need. The suspects are always convicted of nocturnal participation is the famous
sabbat
. No alibi is possible since
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2. Girard here uses the Latin
turba
in the sense of "confused crowd," a crowd on the verge of becoming a mob. -
J. W
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the physical presence of the accused is not necessary to establish proof. Participation in
criminal assemblies can be purely spiritual.
The crimes and their preparation with which the sabbat is associated have a wealth of social
repercussions. Among them can be found the abominations traditionally attributed to the
Jews in Christian countries, and before them to the Christians in the Roman Empire. They
always include ritual infanticide, religious profanation, incestuous relationships, and
bestiality. Food poisoning as well as offenses against influential or prestigious citizens
always play a significant role. Consequently, despite her personal insignificance, a witch is
engaged in activities that can potentially affect the whole of society. This explains why the
devil and his demons are not disdainful of such an alliance. I will say no more about
stereotypical accusations. It is easy to see their character and their link to the first stereotype,
the crisis of undifferentiation.
I turn now to a third stereotype. The crowd's choice of victims may be totally random; but it
is not necessarily so. It is even possible that the crimes of which they are accused are real, but
that sometimes the persecutors choose their victims because they belong to a class that is
particularly susceptible to persecution rather than because of the crimes they have committed.
The Jews are among those accused by Guillaume de Machaut of poisoning the rivers. Of all
the indications he gives us this is for us the most valuable, the one that most reveals the
distortion of persecution. Within the context of other imaginary and real stereotypes, we
know that this stereotype must be real. In fact, in modern Western society Jews have
frequently been persecuted.
Ethnic and religious minorities tend to polarize the majorities against themselves. In this we
see one of the criteria by which victims are selected, which, though relative to the individual
society, is transcultural in principle. There are very few societies that do not subject their
minorities, all the poorly integrated or merely distinct groups, to certain forms of
discrimination and even persecution. In India the Moslems are persecuted, in Pakistan the
Hindus. There are therefore universal signs for the selection of victims, and they constitute
our third stereotype.
In addition to cultural and religious there are purely
physical
criteria. Sickness, madness,
genetic deformities, accidental injuries, and even disabilities in general tend to polarize
persecutors. We need only look around or within to understand the universality. Even today
people cannot control a momentary recoil from physical abnormality. The very word
"abnormal," like the word "plague" in the Middle Ages, is something of a taboo; it is both noble and cursed,
sacer
in all senses of the word. It is considered more fitting in English to replace it with the word "handicapped." The "handicapped" are subject to discriminatory measures that make them victims, out of all proportion to the extent to
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which their presence disturbs the ease of social exchange. One of the great qualities of our
society is that it now feels obliged to take measures for their benefit.
Disability belongs to a large group of banal signs of a victim, and among certain groups -- in
a boarding school, for example -- every individual who has difficulty adapting, someone from
another country or state, an orphan, an only son, someone who is penniless, or even simply
the latest arrival, is more or less interchangeable with a cripple. If the disability or deformity
is real, it tends to polarize "primitive" people against the afflicted person. Similarly, if a group of people is used to choosing its victims from a certain social, ethnic, or religious
category, it tends to attribute to them disabilities or deformities that would reinforce the
polarization against the victim, were they real. This tendency is clearly observable in racist
cartoons.
The abnormality need not be only physical. In any area of existence or behavior abnormality
may function as the criterion for selecting those to be persecuted. For example there is such a
thing as social abnormality; here the average defines the norm. The further one is from
normal social status of whatever kind, the greater the risk of persecution. This is easy to see
in relation to those at the bottom of the social ladder.
This is less obvious when we add another marginal group to the poor and outsiders -- the
marginal insider, the rich and powerful. The monarch and his court are often reminiscent of
the eye of the hurricane. This double marginality is indicative of a social organization in
turmoil. In normal times the rich and powerful enjoy all sorts of protection and privileges
which the disinherited lack. We are concerned here not with normal circumstances but with
periods of crisis. A mere glance at world history will reveal that the odds of a violent death at
the hands of a frenzied crowd are statistically greater for the privileged than for any other
category. Extreme characteristics ultimately attract collective destruction at some time or
other, extremes not just of wealth or poverty, but also of success and failure, beauty and
ugliness, vice and virtue, the ability to please and to displease. The weakness of women,
children, and old people, as well as the strength of the most powerful, becomes weakness in
the face of the crowd. Crowds commonly turn on those who originally held exceptional
power over them.
No doubt some people will be shocked to find the rich and powerful listed among the victims
of collective persecution under the same title as the poor and weak. The two phenomena are
not symmetrical in their eyes. The rich and powerful exert an influence over society which
justifies the acts of violence to which they are subjected in times of crisis. This is the holy
revolt of the oppressed.
The borderline between rational discrimination and arbitrary persecution is sometimes
difficult to trace. For political, moral, and medical
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reasons certain forms of discrimination strike us as reasonable today, yet they are similar to
the ancient forms of persecution; for example, the quarantine of anyone who might be
contagious during an epidemic. In the Middle Ages doctors were hostile to the idea that the
plague could spread through physical contact with the diseased. Generally, they belonged to
the enlightened group and any theory of contagion smacked too much of a persecutor's
prejudice not to be suspect. And yet these doctors were wrong. For the idea of contagion to
become established in the nineteenth century in a purely medical context, devoid of any
association with persecution, it was necessary for there to be no suspicion that it was the
return of prejudice in a new disguise.
This is an interesting question but has nothing to do with our present work. My only goal is to
enumerate the qualities that tend to polarize violent crowds against those who possess them.
The examples I have given unquestionably belong in this category. The fact that some of
these acts of violence might even be justifiable today is not really important to the line of
analysis I am pursuing.
I am not seeking to set exact boundaries to the field of persecution; nor am I trying to
determine precisely where injustice begins or ends. Contrary to what some think, I am not
interested in defining what is good and bad in the social and cultural order. My only concern
is to show that the pattern of collective violence crosses cultures and that its broad contours
are easily outlined. It is one thing to recognize the existence of this pattern, another to
establish its relevance. In some cases this is difficult to determine, but the proof I am looking
for is not affected by such difficulty. If a stereotype of persecution cannot be clearly
recognized in a particular detail of a specific event, the solution does not rest only with this
particular detail in an isolated context. We must determine whether or not the other
stereotypes are present along with the detail in question.
Let us look at two examples. Most historians consider that the French monarchy bears some
responsibility for the revolution in 1789. Does Marie Antoinette's execution therefore lie
outside our pattern? The queen belongs to several familiar categories of victims of
persecution; she is not only a queen but a foreigner. Her Austrian origin is mentioned
repeatedly in the popular accusations against her. The court that condemns her is heavily
influenced by the Paris mob. Our first stereotype can also be found; all the characteristics of
the great crisis that provoke collective persecution are discernible in the French Revolution.
To be sure historians are not in the habit of dealing with the details of the French Revolution
as stereotypes of the one general pattern of persecution. I do not suggest that we should
substitute this way of thinking in all our ideas about the French Revolution. Nonetheless it
sheds interesting light on an accusation which is often passed over but which
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figures explicitly in the queen's trial, that of having committed incest with her s
on. 3.
Let's look at another example of a condemned person, someone who has actually committed
the deed that brings down on him the crowd's violence: a black male who actually rapes a
white female. The collective violence is no longer arbitrary in the most obvious sense of the
term. It is actually sanctioning the deed it purports to sanction. Under such circumstances the
distortions of persecution might be supposed to play no role and the existence of the
stereotypes of persecution might no longer bear the significance I give it. Actually, these
distortions of persecution are present and are not incompatible with the literal truth of the
accusation. The persecutor's portrayal of the situation is irrational. It inverts the relationship
between the global situation and the individual transgression. If there is a causal or
motivational link between the two levels, it can only move from the collective to the
individual. The persecutor's mentality moves in the reverse direction. Instead of seeing in the
microcosm a reflection or imitation of the global level, it seeks in the individual the origin and cause of all that is harmful. The responsibility of the victims suffers the same fantastic
exaggeration whether it is real or not. As far as we are concerned there is very little difference
between Marie Antoinette's situation and that of the persecuted black male.
We have seen the close relationship that exists between the first two stereotypes. In order to
blame victims for the loss of distinctions resulting from the crisis, they are accused of crimes
that eliminate distinctions. But in actuality they are identified as victims for persecution
because they bear the signs of victims. What is the relationship of the third type to the first
two stereotypes? At first sight the signs of a victim are purely differential. But cultural signs
are equally so. There must therefore be two ways of being different, two types of differences.
No culture exists within which everyone does not feel "different" from others and does not
consider such "differences" legitimate and necessary. Far from being radical and progressive, the current glorification of difference is merely the abstract expression of an outlook common
to all cultures. There exists in every individual a tendency to think of himself not only as
different from others but as extremely different, because every culture entertains this feeling
of difference among the individuals who compose it.
The signs that indicate a victim's selection result not from the difference within the system
but from the difference outside the system, the
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3. I am grateful to Jean-Claude Guillebaud for drawing my attention to this accusation of
incest.
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potential for the system to differ from its own difference, in other words not to be different at
all, to cease to exist as a system. This is easily seen in the case of physical disabilities. The
human body is a system of anatomic differences. If a disability, even as the result of an
accident, is disturbing, it is because it gives the impression of a disturbing dynamism. It
seems to threaten the very system. Efforts to limit it are unsuccessful; it disturbs the
differences that surround it. These in turn become
monstrous
, rush together, are compressed
and blended together to the point of destruction. Difference that exists outside the system is
terrifying because it reveals the truth of the system, its relativity, its fragility, and its
mortality.