Reflections on Violence

As everybody knows, if only from reading that seminal work by the originator of this column, The Machiavellians, the title of this week’s column is also that of a book by Georges Sorel (Réflexions sur la violence) which shocked French bourgeois readers at the turn of the century. He was neither the first, nor by a long way the last, of the apostles of violence. Today, we live in the shadow of other such apostles, from Lenin to Marighella to Che Guevara to Mao Tse-tung, et al.

The other day, when all France was speculating on the outcome of the presidential duel between Giscard d’Estaing and François Mitterrand, I found myself, in Paris, swimming against the tide of an oncoming demonstration mounted by the French Communist Party. The object of the exercise happened to be to express indignation over the alleged murder ofanIRA terrorist named Bobby Sands by the government of Mrs. Thatcher. But really the name was incidental, and the cause also. Since the exhilarating days of the Vietnam movement, themes for indignation have been scarce: the self-inflicted death of the young Irishman was a welcome event.

BC

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Brian Crozier

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As everybody knows, if only from reading that seminal work by the originator of this column, The Machiavellians, the title of this week’s column is also that of a book by Georges Sorel (Réflexions sur la violence) which shocked French bourgeois readers at the turn of the century. He was neither the first, nor by a long way the last, of the apostles of violence. Today, we live in the shadow of other such apostles, from Lenin to Marighella to Che Guevara to Mao Tse-tung, et al.

The other day, when all France was speculating on the outcome of the presidential duel between Giscard d’Estaing and François Mitterrand, I found myself, in Paris, swimming against the tide of an oncoming demonstration mounted by the French Communist Party. The object of the exercise happened to be to express indignation over the alleged murder ofanIRA terrorist named Bobby Sands by the government of Mrs. Thatcher. But really the name was incidental, and the cause also. Since the exhilarating days of the Vietnam movement, themes for indignation have been scarce: the self-inflicted death of the young Irishman was a welcome event.