The Girard Reader (22 page)

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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,"