SubStance

SubStance 32.3 (2003) 165-167

Burton, Richard D. E. Blood in the City: Violence and Revelation in Paris, 1789-1945. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2001. Pp. 395.

Blood in the City is a truly impressive work of cultural history: it traces, over a span of 150 years, the uses to which, in France, sacrifice and sacrificial logic were put by political and social groups. Burton's book, immensely learned, encyclopedic in scope, charts the bloodletting that marked political changeovers in France. From the first killings of de Launay and de Flesselles at the Bastille on July 14, 1789, to the post- World War II purges and executions (Pétain, Laval, Brasillach, and a host of others), French history is marked, Burton asserts, not by peaceful, constitutional change, but rather by the repetitious and quite savage execution-murder of scapegoats. Every political and social changeover is marked by the guillotining, strangling, shooting, hanging, and evisceration of individuals taken to be representative of a hated opposing order: these killings, following a Christian, if not Catholic model, are then held to be purifying of the social order. Not for nothing does the French national anthem, the Marseillaise, written during the Revolution, contain the words: "Qu'un sang impur / Abreuve nos sillons!" [May an impure blood / Drench our fields!].

Indeed Robespierre saw the extra-legal execution of the king as essential to the founding of the Republic: without it, a free Republic could not exist. By killing the (by definition, if not in fact) guilty scapegoat, the killers would unify and legitimize their movement, their political position, and their government. Burton stresses, however, that sacrifice works in the other direction as well: Robespierre and his cohorts may have executed the king, thereby legitimizing their Republic (at least in their own eyes); nevertheless the very people they opposed, the aristocrats and royalists, were then also free to view (as did Joseph de Maistre) the executed king as a scapegoat, one who died not for the establishment of the Republic, but rather, whose Christ-like death expiates the guilt of the entire nation (and thereby reaffirms the monarchy and Catholicism). And so it goes throughout modern French history: one group's scélérat, scoundrel, killed at the glorious moment of militant unity, becomes the opposing group's martyr, sacrificed for a great cause, expiating the sins of his or her killers and giving unity to the other side. In this way, it goes without saying, the cycle of violence can go on forever: every rat killed becomes a martyr; every martyrdom is answered with the execution of another rat.

One of Burton's most fascinating chapters (chapter 10: "Marble versus Iron") charts the symmetrical opposition between Right-wing, "ultramontane" [End Page 165] Catholics, with their fixation on scapegoats (Jews, Masons), and their bloody cult of the Sacred Heart (whose characteristic monument is Paris's Sacré Cœur, built, of marble, in the late nineteenth century) and, on the other side, secularizing Republicans, whose cult of iron and technology (the Eiffel Tower) represents a repudiation of all the Catholics stand for. But the larger point is that this opposition continues all the way through to 1945: the Right persecutes Dreyfus, but loses. The result: there is a general secularizing tendency throughout the later nineteenth century. Nevertheless, the Right, with its cult of suffering, guilt and atonement, temporarily gets the upper hand, and continues, on a much larger scale, the persecution of the Jews (Vichy), only to end, inevitably, purged by the Left. The Right purges (sacrifices) Communards and Jews; the Left, priests, fascists, collaborators of all types ("horizontal," literary, political). Each side's martyrs are the other side's scum. For all this, Burton does seem to stress the importance of the cult and practice of sacrifice on the part of reactionary Catholics: he devotes chapters to J. -K. Huysmans and Paul Claudel, both converts to Catholicism and, implicitly or explicitly, to political reaction. If there is a pseudo-Christian cult of the martyr on the Left, it's nevertheless the Right that really...