War, Violence and Modernity (2):

Revolutionary Violence and

Terrorism

Dr Chris Pearson
http://www.youtube.com/watch?
v=1lKZqqSI9-s
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-14458424
 Questioning violence
• Violence provokes questions and
judgements
• Are we living in a particularly violent age:
compare Malesevic and Pinker
• Political and religious ideologies,
economic injustice, new technologies; has
violence taken on new forms in the
modern age?
 Lecture outline
• State-initiated violence and coercion:
Punishing criminals
Revolutionary violence (terror)
• Violence against the state:
Crowds and ‘mobs’
Terrorism
 Interpreting violence

• Are humans violent creatures?

• Rousseau, Discourse on Inequality (1755) –
humans naturally peaceful – society and
property corrupt and makes them violent
• Hobbes, Leviathan (1651) – life in the state
of nature is violent and short. A strong
state is needed to ensure order
• Different interpretations of violence today
 The State and Violence
‘We have to say that
a state is a human
community that
(successfully) claims
the monopoly of the
legitimate use of
physical force within
a given territory.’

Max Weber (1864-1920)

 Punishing crime in the post-
Enlightenment era
• Ancien régime France; severe punishments –
public execution – frequently handed out
• Influence of Enlightenment thinking – Cesare
Beccaria’s Of Crimes and Punishments (1764)
and Jeremy Bentham
• Punishment should match the crime
• Rational actors would obey the law to avoid
punishment
• 1791 penal code put this principles in place
 Foucault on Crime
• Discipline and Punish
(1975)
• Move from public
violence against the
body (ancien régime)
to “correction” of the
criminal in prison
(post-
Enlightenment)
 Criminal justice system less
violent but more coercive?
• Criminologists and prison create the
“criminal”
• Law-abiding members of working class
distance themselves from the delinquents;
the cost of committing crime becomes too
great
• Prison/penal system a form of social
control
• Criminal justice system less violent but
coercion and social control remain
Source: www.amnesty.org/en/death-penalty
 State-sponsored revolutionary terror

• Terror ‘organized violence by

revolutionary groups or regimes that
intimidates and terrifies the general
population.’ (Fitzpatrick, Russian
Revolution [1994], p.11)
• Has characterized modern revolutions
• Begun in revolutionary France
Background to the Terror
• Revolutionary wars
going badly – la patrie
en danger
• Armed uprising in the
Vendée
• Revolts across France
• Marat – hero of the
sans-culottes –
assassinated in his
bath
 The reign of Terror (1793-94)
• Driven by Committee of Public Safety
• Law of Suspects (17 September 1793)
empowered watch committees to arrest
anyone who ‘either by their conduct,
their contacts, their words or their
writings, showed themselves to be
supporters of tyranny, of federalism, or
to be enemies of liberty.’
Execution of Marie-Antoinette, 17 October 1793
 The Terror unfolds
• Repression in the provinces – drownings
in Loire river at Nantes
• Genocide in the Vendée?
• All social classes affected
• Republic of Virtue or the Great Terror –
law of 22 Prairial (10 June 1794) – high
(or low) point of Terror legislation
• Terror winds down in late July/August
1794
 Explaining the Terror
• Republican/socialist view- the terror a
regrettable if necessary defence of the
revolution against counter-revolution
during a time of war – Mathiez, Soboul
• Conservative view from Burke onwards:
revolution a time of mob rule and chaos
• Revisionists (Furet, Schama): the Terror
inherent within revolution not an
aberration
 Robespierre on terror
‘Terror is nothing but
prompt, severe,
inflexible justice; it is
therefore an emanation
of virtue; it is not so
much a specific principle
as a consequence of the
general principle of
democracy applied to
the homeland’s most
pressing needs.’
 The Bolshevik use of terror
• Destroy external and internal enemies of
the Communist party
• Cheka created December 1917 – mass
arrests and executions during Civil War
• Randomness increased feelings of terror
• Revolutionaries treated terror as
essential to safeguarding revolution
 Terror as class warfare
• Marxist twist to the terror; members of
particular classes – kulak, capitalist etc –
deemed counter-revolutionary (over-
rode individual circumstances)
• Stalin: ‘liquidate the kulaks as a class’
• Soviet bureaucracy planned terror –
modern and “rational” state practices
(Gregory, Terror by Quota, 2009)
 The purges of 1936-8
• Letter denouncing
counter-
revolutionaries of
various stripes
• Opposition leaders
Lev Kamenev and
Grigorii Zinoviev
convicted of
murdering Kirov in
first show trial
Sergei Kirov
The Gulag
• Vast system of prison
and labour camps
• Brought to world’s
attention by
Solzhenitsyn’s The
Gulag Archipelago
(1973)
• Gulag’s population
grew massively
between 1937 (0.5
million) and 1939 (1.3
million)
 Interpreting Soviet Terror
• Totalitarian perspectives: see Terror as
intrinsic to Communist ideology
• Conquest blames Stalin (a ‘monster’) and
faith in absolute ideology
• Fitzpatrick – purges part of revolutionary
terror
• Meyer – reaction to counter-revolutionary
violence
Collective violence against the state
• Collective violence long been a part of Western
societies
• Struggles over power – resisting, obtaining,
defending power
• Urbanization shapes forms of collective violence
and protest
• Modern protest – complex organization and
centred on obtaining rights
• See Tilly, ‘Collective violence in European
Perspective,’ (1979)
 The Paris Commune (1871)
• An example of protest against the state
• Protesters seize control of army canons
and town hall
• Introduces political, social and economic
reforms
• Lauded by Karl Marx
• But brutally repressed by the French army
Ilya Repin, Meeting at the Mur des Fédérés (1883)
Conservative reactions to the Commune

• Fear of violent,
politically active, and
de-feminized women
• Fear of the irrational
and violent crowd –
Gustave LeBon’s The
Crowd: A Study of the
Popular Mind (1896)
The 9/11 attacks on New York
 Defining terrorism
• ‘The pursuit of political goals through the
systematic use of terror alone’
Townshend, Terrorism (2002)
• Fear that the terrorist act creates goes
beyond physical damage caused
• Terrorism is (in part) ‘symbolic violence’
Law, Terrorism: A History (2009)
 Histories of terrorism
• Stretches back to ancient times - Sicarii
opposed Roman rule over Judea
• But it has become ‘one of the defining
phenomena of the modern era’ (Law,
Terrorism, 2009)
• Huge variety of terrorist groups in modern
age – cut across political spectrum – KKK,
Baader-Meinhof gang, al-Qaida
Andreas Baader: ‘The anti-imperialist struggle and sexual
emancipation go hand in hand. Fucking and shooting are
the same thing!’
 Terrorism and modernity

• New causes to fight for and against –

nationalism, colonialism, communism,
fascism, anarchism
• Role of modern technologies and
communication networks
• Attacks on Western modernity (although
groups like al-Qaida use modern
technologies)
 Interpreting terrorism
• ‘One person’s terrorist is another’s freedom
fighter’
• Michael Burleigh, Blood and Rage (2008):
terrorists criminals, insane, ‘morally squalid’;
stresses importance of counter-terrorism
• Law, Terrorism: A History (2009): terrorism
‘part of a process of rational and conscious
decision-making within particular political and
cultural contexts.’