History is written by learned men, and so it is natural and agreeable
for them to think that the activity of their class supplies the basis of
the movement of all humanity.
Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace
The heroism of the French town of Le Chambon-sur-Lignon, in the Haute-Loire, which managed to shelter, feed, and speed to safety more than five thousand refugees in Vichy France, many of them Jewish children, is by now enshrined in the annals of resistance to Nazism. Books and films have celebrated the many acts of quiet bravery that made this uncommon rescue possible.
Here I want to emphasize the particularity of these acts in a way that, though it may diminish the grand narrative of religious resistance to anti-Semitism, at the same time enlarges our understanding of the specificity of humanitarian gestures.
Many Le Chambon villagers were Huguenot, and their two pastors were perhaps the most influential and respected voices in the community. As Huguenots, they had their own collective memory, from at least the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre forward, of religious persecution and flight. Well before the Occupation, they had manifested their sympathy for the victims of fascism by sheltering refugees from Franco’s Spain and Mussolini’s Italy. That is, they were well disposed both by conviction and experience to sympathize with the plight of refugees from authoritarian states, and with Jews in particular as a biblical people. Translating that sympathy into practical and, under Vichy, far more dangerous acts of assistance, however, was not so simple.
Anticipating the arrival of Jews, the Huguenot pastors began trying to mobilize the clandestine shelter and food they knew would be required of their parishioners. With the abolition of the Free Zone in southern France, both pastors were arrested and taken off to concentration camps. In this menacing setting, the wives of the two pastors took up their husbands’ work and set about lining up food and shelter for Jews within their community. They asked their neighbors, both farmers and villagers, if they would be willing to help when the time came. The answers often were not encouraging. Typically, those they asked expressed sympathy for the refugees but were unwilling to run the risk of taking them in and feeding them. They pointed out that they also had a duty to protect their own immediate family and were fearful that if they sheltered Jews, they would be denounced to the local Gestapo, who would put them and their entire family at grave risk. Weighing their obligations to their immediate family and their more abstract sympathy for helping Jewish victims, family ties prevailed, and the pastor’s wives despaired of organizing a network of refuge.
Whether they were ready or not, however, the Jews began to arrive, and to seek help. What happened next is important, and diagnostic for understanding the particularity of social (in this case, humanitarian) action. The pastors’ wives found themselves with real, existing Jews on their hands, and they tried again. They would, for example, take an elderly Jew, thin and shivering in the cold, to the door of a farmer who had declined to commit himself earlier, and ask, “Would you give our friend here a meal and a warm coat, and show him the way to the next village?” The farmer now had a living, breathing victim in front of him, looking him in the eye, perhaps imploringly, and would have to turn him away. Or the women would arrive at the farmhouse door with a small family and ask, “Would you give this family a blanket, a bowl of soup, and let them sleep in your barn for a day or two before they head for the Swiss border?” Face-to-face with real victims, whose fate depended palpably on their assistance, few were willing to refuse them help, though the risks had not changed.
Once the individual villagers had made such a gesture, they typically became committed to helping the refugees for the duration. They were, in other words, able to draw the conclusions of their own practical gesture of solidarity—their actual line of conduct—and see it as the ethical thing to do. They did not enunciate a principle and then act on it. Rather, they acted, and then drew out the logic of that act. Abstract principle was the child of practical action, not its parent.
François Rochat, contrasting this pattern with Hannah Arendt’s “banality of evil,” calls it “the banality of goodness.”1 We might at least as accurately call it the “particularity of goodness,” or, to appropriate the Torah, an example of the heart following the hand.
The particularity of identification and sympathy is a working assumption of journalism, poetry, and charitable work. People don’t easily identify with or open their hearts or wallets for large abstractions: the Unemployed, the Hungry, the Persecuted, the Jews. But portray in gripping detail, with photographs, a woman who has lost her job and is living in her car, or a refugee family on the run through the forest living on roots and tubers, and you are likely to engage the sympathy of strangers. All victims cannot easily represent one victim, but one victim can often stand for a whole class of victims.
This principle was powerfully at work in the most moving memorial for Holocaust victims I have ever seen, an exhibition in the great town hall of Münster, where the Treaty of Westphalia was signed in 1648, ending the Thirty Years’ War. Street by street, address by address, name by name, the fate of each and every Jewish family (some six thousand of them) was depicted. There was usually a photograph of the house in which the family lived (most still standing, as Münster was largely spared Allied bombing), the street address, sometimes an identity card or a carte de visite, photographs of the family individually and together (at a picnic, a birthday party, a family photo-portrait), and a note as to their fate: “murdered at Bergen-Belsen,” “fled to France and then Cuba,” “migrated to Israel from Morocco,” “fled to Lodz, Poland, fate unknown.” In quite a few cases there were no photographs, just a dotted rectangle indicating where a photograph would go.
It was, above all, a municipal exhibition for the citizenry of Münster. They could stroll from street to street, as it were, and see the Jews who had been their neighbors or those of their parents and grandparents, their houses, their faces—often reflecting happier moments—beaming out at them. It was the powerful particularity, the individuality, and its massive repetition that made it so memorable in the literal sense of the word.2 How much more moving it was than many of the other ubiquitous collective memorials to Jews, homosexuals (“On this street corner, homosexuals were assembled for transport to the concentration camps”), handicapped, and Gypsies (Roma and Sinti)!3
Perhaps the most stunning thing about this exhibition, however, was the very process by which it was created. Hundreds of Münster citizens had worked for more than a decade, combing records, authenticating deaths, tracing survivors, and writing personal letters to the thousands they could track, explaining the exhibition they were preparing and asking if the respondents would be willing to complete the record and to contribute a photograph or a note. Many, understandably, refused; many others sent something, and a good many came to Münster to see for themselves. The result spoke for itself, but the process of tracing family histories, locating survivors and their children, and writing them personal letters as star-crossed neighbors across the void of history and death itself was a cathartic, if not cleansing, recognition of a shared and tragic history. Most of those preparing the exhibition were not even born when the Jews were scourged, and one imagines the thousands of painful conversations and recollections the process touched off among the generations in Münster.
The job of most history and social science is to summarize, codify, and otherwise “package” important social movements and major historical events, to make them legible and understandable. Given this objective and the fact that the events they are seeking to illuminate have already happened, it is hardly surprising that historians and social scientists should typically give short shrift to the confusion, flux, and tumultuous contingency experienced by the historical actors, let alone the ordinary by-standers, whose actions they are examining.
One perfectly obvious reason for the deceptively neat order of these accounts is precisely because they are “history.” The events in question simply turned out one way rather than another, obscuring the fact that the participants likely had no idea how they would turn out and that, under slightly different circumstances, things might well have turned out very differently. As the saying has it, “For want of a nail, the shoe was lost; for want of a shoe the horse was lost; for want of a horse the rider was lost; for want a rider the message was lost; for want of the message the kingdom, was lost.”
Knowing what in fact happened, unlike the participants, can’t help but infect the story and drain much of its actual contingency. Think for a moment of someone who takes his or her own life. It becomes almost impossible for the suicide’s friends and relatives not to rewrite the dead person’s biography in a way that presages and accounts for the suicide. It is, of course, entirely possible that a brief chemical imbalance, a momentary panic, or an instant tragic insight may have led to the act, in which case rewriting the entire biography as leading up to suicide would be to misunderstand that life.
The natural impulse to create a coherent narrative to account for our own actions and lives, even when those lives and actions defy any coherent account, casts a retrospective order on acts that may have been radically contingent. Jean-Paul Sartre gives the hypothetical example of a man torn between the obligation of staying and caring for his ill mother or leaving for the front to defend his country. One could substitute the decision to go on strike or stay in the factory, the decision to join a demonstration, etc.) He can’t make up his mind, but the day, like an on-rushing train, arrives, and he must do one thing or the other, though he still hasn’t decided. Let’s say he stays with his sick mother. The next day, Sartre writes, he will be able to tell himself and others why he is the kind of man who would chose to stay with his sick mother. He must, having acted, find a narrative that accounts for what he did. This does not, however, explain why he did what he did; rather, it retrospectively makes sense of—creates a satisfying narrative for—an act that cannot be explained in any other way.
The same could be said for the momentous, contingent events that have shaped history. Much history as well as popular imagination not only erases their contingency but implicitly attributes to historical actors intentions and a consciousness they could not possibly have had. The historical fact of the French Revolution has, understandably, recast virtually all of French eighteenth-century history as leading inexorably to 1789. The Revolution was not a single event but a process; it was contingent on weather, crop failures, and the geography and demography of Paris and Versailles far more than on the ideas scribbled by the philosophes. Those who stormed the Bastille to free prisoners and seize arms could not possibly have known (much less intended) that they would bring down the monarchy and aristocracy, let alone that they were participating in what later would come to be known as “the French Revolution.”
Once a significant historical event is codified, it travels as a sort of condensation symbol and, unless we are very careful, takes on a false logic and order that does a grave injustice to how it was experienced at the time. The townsmen of Le Chambon-sur-Lignon, now held up as moral exemplars, appear, more or less monolithically, as acting on Huguenot religious principles to aid the persecuted, when, as we saw, their bravery had more complex and instructive wellsprings. The Russian Revolution, the American Revolution, the Thirty Years’ War (who knew in year five that it would last another twenty-five years?), the 1871 Commune of Paris, the U.S. civil rights movement, Paris in 1968, Solidarnosc in Poland, and any number of other complex events are subject to the same qualifications. Their radical contingency tends to be erased, the participants’ consciousness is flattened and too often inoculated with a preternatural knowledge of how things turned out, and the tumult of different understandings and motives is stilled.
What “history” does to our understanding of events is akin to what a television broadcast does to our understanding of a basketball or ice hockey game. The camera is placed above and outside the plane of action, rather like a helicopter hovering above the action. The effect of this bird’s-eye view is to distance the viewer from the play and apparently slow it down. Even then, lest the viewer miss a crucial shot or pass, actual slow motion is used to further slow the action and allow the viewer to see it in detail again and again. Combined, the bird’s-eye perspective and slow motion make the players’ moves seem deceptively easy to viewers, who might fantasize mastering such moves themselves. Alas, no actual player ever experiences the actual game from a helicopter or in slow motion. And when, rarely, the camera is placed at floor level and close to the action in real time, one finally appreciates the blinding speed and complexity of the game as the players experience it; the brief fantasy is instantly dispelled.
The confusion in seeing military causation is to confuse the parade ground with the battle where it is a question of life and death.
Leo Tolstoy
The tendency to tidy up, simplify, and condense historical events is not just a natural human proclivity or something necessitated by schoolbook history but a political struggle with high stakes.
The Russian Revolution of 1917 was, like the French Revolution, a process in which the many and varied participants had no knowledge of the outcome. Those who have examined the process minutely agree on several things. They agree that the Bolsheviks played a negligible role in bringing it about; as Hannah Arendt put it, “The Bolsheviks found power lying in the street and picked it up.”4 The events of late October 1917 were marked by utter confusion and spontaneity. They agree that the collapse of the tsar’s armies on the Austrian front and the subsequent rush home of soldiers to participate in spontaneous land seizures in the countryside were decisive in breaking tsarist power in rural Russia. They agree that the working class of Moscow and St. Petersburg, while discontented and militant, did not envision owning the factories. Finally, they agree that on the eve of the revolution, the Bolsheviks had precious little influence among workers and no influence whatever in the countryside.
Once the Bolsheviks had seized power, however, they began developing an account that wrote contingency, confusion, spontaneity, and the many other revolutionary groups out of the story. This new “just so” story emphasized the clairvoyance, determination, and power of the vanguard party. In keeping with the Leninist vision in What Is to Be Done, the Bolsheviks saw themselves as the prime animators of the historical outcome. Given the tenuousness with which they ruled from 1917 to 1921, the Bolsheviks had a powerful interest in moving the revolution out of the streets and into the museums and schoolbooks as soon as possible, lest the people decide to repeat the experience. The revolutionary process was “naturalized” as a product of historical necessity, legitimating the “dictatorship of the proletariat.”
The “official story” of the revolution was being elaborated almost before the real revolution was consummated. Just as Lenin’s idea of the state (as well as of the revolution) resembled that of a well-oiled machine run from above with military precision, so were subsequent revolutionary “reenactments” conducted along the same lines. Lunacharsky, the cultural impressario of early Bolshevism, devised a huge urban public theater depicting the revolution, with four thousand actors (mostly soldiers) following a choreographed script, canons, ships on the river, and a red sun in the east (simulated by searchlights) as civic instruction for 35,000 spectators. In public theater, literature, film, and history, the Bolsheviks expressed a vital interest in “packaging” the revolution in a way that eliminated all the contingency, variety, and cross purposes of the real revolution. After the generation that had experienced the revolution firsthand and could compare the script with its own experience had died, the official version tended to prevail.
Revolutions and social movements are, then, typically confected by a plurality of actors: actors with wildly divergent objectives mixed with a large dose of rage and indignation, actors with little knowledge of the situation beyond their immediate ken, actors subject to chance occurrences (a rain shower, a rumor, a gunshot)—and yet the vector sum of this cacophony of events may set the stage for what later is seen as a revolution. They are rarely, if ever, the work of coherent organizations directing their “troops” to a determined objective, as the Leninist script would have it.5
The visual depiction of order and discipline is a staple of authoritarian stagecraft. Amid rural famine, urban hunger, and growing flight to the Chinese border, Kim Jong-Il managed to stage massive parades with tens of thousands of participants in a tableau meant to suggest a united populace moving in unison to the baton of the “Dear Leader” (fig. 6.1).
This form of theatrical bluster has a long lineage. It can be found in the early twentieth century in “mass exercises” organized by both socialist and right-wing parties in large stadiums as displays of power and discipline. The minutely coordinated movements of thousands of uniformed gymnasts, like those of a marching band in close-order drill, conveyed an image of synchronized power and, of course, of choreography scripted by a commanding but invisible orchestra conductor.
The pageantry of symbolic order is evident not only in public ceremonies such as coronations and May Day parades but in the very architecture of public spaces: squares, statuary, arches, and broad avenues. Buildings themselves are often designed to overawe the populace with their size and majesty. They often seem to function as a kind of shamanism, as a symbolic makeweight of order against a reality that is anything but orderly. Ceau
escu’s Palace of the Parliament in Bucharest, 85 percent complete in 1989 when the regime fell, is a case in point. The “legislative assembly” resembled an opera house, with ringed balconies and a hydraulically lifted podium for Ceausescu at the center. The building’s six hundred clocks were all centrally controlled by a console in the president’s suite.
Figure 6.1. North Korean military parade. Photograph © Reuters
A great deal of the symbolic work of official power is precisely to obscure the confusion, disorder, spontaneity, error, and improvisation of political power as it is in fact exercised, beneath a billiard-ball-smooth surface of order, deliberation, rationality, and control. I think of this as the “miniaturization of order.” It is a practice we are all familiar with from the world of toys. The larger world of warfare, family life, machines, and wild nature is a dangerous reality that is beyond a child’s control. Those worlds are domesticated by miniaturization in the form of toy soldiers, dollhouses, toy tanks and airplanes, model railroads, and small gardens. Much the same logic is at work in model villages, demonstration projects, model housing projects, and model collective farms. Experimentation on a small scale, where the consequences of failure are less catastrophic, is, of course, a prudent strategy for social innovation. More often, however, I suspect that such demonstrations are literally for “show,” that they represent a substitute for more substantive change, and that they display a carefully tended micro-order designed in large part to mesmerize both rulers (self-hypnosis?) and a larger public with a Potemkin façade of centralized order. The greater the proliferation of these small “islands of order,” the more one suspects they were erected to block one’s view of an unofficial social order that is beyond the control of elites.
The condensation of history, our desire for clean narratives, and the need for elites and organizations to project an image of control and purpose all conspire to convey a false image of historical causation. They blind us to the fact that most revolutions are not the work of revolutionary parties but the precipitate of spontaneous and improvised action (“adventurism,” in the Marxist lexicon), that organized social movements are usually the product, not the cause, of uncoordinated protests and demonstrations, and that the great emancipatory gains for human freedom have not been the result of orderly, institutional procedures but of disorderly, unpredictable, spontaneous action cracking open the social order from below.