To understand why this has happened in the past and is happening today, let us start by examining the word “violence”. In today’s context, it is used indiscriminately to refer to a broken shop window, a police officer injuring a demonstrator, a car set on fire, or shots fired at an unarmed crowd. This confusion tends to inaccurately place material damage and attacks on people, revolt and its repression, on the same level.
Brazilian archbishop Dom Helder Camara, an advocate of liberation theology, distinguished between three types of violence: the first, that of injustice that oppresses; the second, that of the revolt it provokes; and the third, that of repression. I would add one more form of violence: that of inequality, discrimination, social humiliation and precarious life. A social order can be violent even in its apparent tranquillity.
French history reminds us how often revolts, the injustices that fuel them and the repressions that answer them are closely intertwined. The storming of the Bastille on July 14, 1789, in the lead-up to the outbreak of the French Revolution, is one famous event. It was an act of armed insurrection by revolutionaries who rejected an oppressive absolute monarchy and saw the prison as a symbol of its abuses.
The defenders of the fortress fired on the assailants, killing about 100 people. After their capitulation, the Bastille governor, Bernard-Rene Jourdan de Launay, was killed, and his head impaled on a pike and paraded in the streets. In the following weeks, peasants started invading properties of the aristocracy, ransacking them and burning property deeds that recorded feudal rights.
These documents embodied the feudal domination peasants were subjected to. Three years later, on August 10, 1792, revolutionaries stormed the royal residenceod the Tuileries Palace, which led to the deaths of hundreds of Swiss Guards. In September, in a climate of panic in the face of foreign invasion, armed groups executed more than 1,000 prisoners, among them Catholic priests and criminals arrested for common crimes.
These outbursts of popular anger were rooted in the systemic violence of the ancien regime: privileges of birth, feudal oppression, tax inequalities, arbitrariness in the use of force and repression. Popular violence cannot be separated from that of a social order founded on domination. Throughout the 19th century, the same driving forces — fear and anger against those in power — continued to fuel collective violence.
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