CHAPTER 5
Vengeance
VENGEANCE is an integral part of both the Red and the White terror in revolution. There is, of course, vengeance without terror, just as there is violence without terror. But for there to be terror there must be vengeance and violence. While vengeance, fired by quasi-religious fervor, belongs to the inner recesses of terror, violence pertains to its instrumentation. With the breakdown of sovereignty and the rule of law, revolutionary moments see a reversal in the vector of vengeance: from being directed outward in order to foster in-group solidarity it turns inward, with the result that it fosters discord and internecine strife. Indeed, revolution is open season for vengeance in vital precincts of political and civil society on both sides of the friend-enemy divide. It is wrought in the name of master and slave, God and World Reason, hearth and nation, idealized past and millenarian future. During the climacteric of the revolutionary moment, the terrorists embody the avenging gods: historical revenge for the injustices of a refractory past and divine revenge for the impieties “upon this bank and shoal of time.”
Like terror, vengeance is complex, multiform, polyvalent, and opaque, and it, too, belongs to the domain of violence. Especially in the First World, in this début de siècle, the word-concept of vengeance, again like that of terror, has negative connotations and resists sympathetic understanding.
While terror defies the ideological equipoise of historians, vengeance tests their teleological innocence. In the progressive imagination—as well as in the liberal persuasion—it is disvalued for being un-civilized, heathen, and archaic. This construction is largely a function of vengeance being implicitly measured against the legal system of the modern state, to the clear advantage of the latter: on one side benighted vengeance, on the other enlightened justice. In particular, the constitutional state’s judiciary is valued for being the province of independent and rational judges sworn to apply codified laws and to publicly pass sentences subject to review and redress. By contrast, vengeance is depreciated for being irrational, uncontrolled, without end, and beyond appeal. Besides, it is frowned on for being “turned toward the past, not the future” by virtue of putting retribution or retaliation ahead of deterrence and rehabilitation. Whereas legal punishment is viewed as “mediated, measured, and personalized,” vengeance is portrayed as “instant, unbound, and willful.”1
This antithesis is, of course, overdrawn. On the eve of 1789 and 1917, apart from the coexistence of overlapping legal and vengeful spheres in France and Russia, state justice was not entirely free of the avenging logic, nor was revenge pure savagery. Even in a linear perspective, which tacitly celebrates the advance from vengeance to the rule of law, it is worth noting that “vengeance is possible ‘only in society, not in nature,’ … and that it is socially determined behavior.”2 In primitive, tribal, and peasant societies vengeance is anything but unwitting, blind, and dark: the selection of victims is not haphazard, nor is the place, time, and method of revenge and re-revenge. No doubt, “vengeance can be just, but it is not justice.”3 The reparation of injured life, honor, property, or power is guided by punitive principles compatible with bolstering the solidarity of the in-group without, however, severing relations of reciprocity with the out-group.
Still, when all is said and done, and notwithstanding rules and rituals, avenging violence, even when contained, has many of the brutal features of the justice system in an advanced ancien régime. As the unifying and centralizing state tightened its monopoly on the legitimate use of violence and administration of criminal justice, it not only proscribed but also appropriated and adapted some of the ways of traditional vengeance. In the new theater of punishment, with its staged rack, stake, and scaffold, spectators were prone to view torturers and executioners as “symbol[s] of forbidden vengeance.” Indeed, initially public penal retribution “served to seal the transfer of vengeance from private persons to the state.” The state’s judicial system “rationalized” vengeance by breaking the “vicious circle” of deliberate revenge and re-revenge, thereby also eliminating the danger of escalation. At the same time, by virtue of the consecration of the state’s political and legal authority, this rationalized vengeance was invested with a religious sanction. In due time, to “take the law into one’s own hands” was to invite not only legal sanction but moral, social, and religious reprobation. Far and wide vengeance came to be represented and perceived as the blind and naked justice of the “prehistory” of the modernizing Western world as well as of all “uncivilized” and “decivilized” societies far and wide.4
In revolutionary moments, however, vengeance ceases to be a system for the ritualized regulation and control of violence governed by precepts of social solidarity and reciprocity, to become a powerful force for disorder as well as a ferocious agency in the struggle for sovereignty and domination. Broadly speaking, “the traditional system of regulated vengeance runs amuck when it becomes swept up in a social or historical context … which bursts the bounds of its retributive universe and practice.”5 It was in the logic of the situation that in 1789 and 1917 vengeance should have become problematic, inasmuch as the collapse of the state, including the judiciary, gave free rein to individual drives as well as folkways which were thought to have been tamed by the “civilizing” process.
Whether one condemns, justifies, or simply excuses the eruption of avenging furies in revolutionary seasons, one can find arguments to back each position embedded in the age-old, highly ambiguous Western tradition concerning vengeance in general. This tradition comprises three different attitudes to vengeance: glorification as a deserved punishment of offenders; condemnation for its brutality and attendant unending cycle of willful violence; and appropriation and mastery of it for purposes of social control.
Certainly vengeance is not proscribed by the Decalogue, nor does it figure among the Seven Deadly Sins. Indeed, the idea and precept of vengeance occupy a notable place in the Hebrew Bible: the proverbial avenging principle—eye for eye, tooth for tooth, foot for foot, life for life—is set down in Exodus (21:23–25), Leviticus (24:19–20), and Deuteronomy (19:21). These Jewish Scriptures expound a religion of vengeance centered round a vengeful God at the same time that they set rigid limits rather than give a free course to violence. In refinement of the ancient lex talionis, and aiming for symmetrical reprisals, the Hebrew Bible distinguishes between proper or wise vengeance and improper or sinful revenge. While the injunction against private vengeance for personal motives is categorical, there is some latitude when it comes to avenging injury to the immediate family and the people of Israel. Indeed, by history and tradition, Jews entreat God to punish the foes of His children by wreaking a messianic vengeance. The faithful, with “a two-edged sword in their hand,” praise the Lord for their victory over Israel’s enemies: “To execute vengeance upon the heathen, and punishments upon the people/To bind their kings with chains, and their nobles with fetters of iron” (Psalm 149: 6–8). But ultimately the Jewish Scriptures declare the right of unqualified and incontestable vengeance to be a divine prerogative, reserved to the almighty and wrathful Hebrew God.6
Although the New Testament has its own share of ferocious preachings, on this point the two Scriptures converge. The Lord’s enunciation in both the Romans (12:9) and the Hebrews (10:30) that “vengeance is mine, I will repay” is at once a pledge of intervention by God in heaven and a ban on retribution or retaliation by Man on earth. There is certainly no gainsaying the severe restrictions on personal vengeance in the Christian Scriptures: “You have heard how it was said: Eye for eye and tooth for tooth. But I say this to you … if anyone hits you on your right cheek, offer him the other as well” (Matthew 5:38–39). But with time, while the Church was lenient with individual sinners whose vengeance it reined in, it became distinctly avenging in dealing with the sinful collectively. The Book of Revelation, probably one of the more influential books of the Holy Bible, is permeated with a wrathful and vengeful spirit, its savageries directed against one and all, except the small number of the elect. And the Church was unremittingly harsh toward misbelievers and heretics, such as Jews, Muslims, and Protestants. The sempiternal cry for revenge against the Jews, blamed for the death of Jesus, perhaps best illustrates the force of the avenging tradition in the Christian worlds, all the more so since the apostles of the Protestant Reformation never even considered repudiating it.
In any case, in the Sacred Writings—in the Judeo-Christian tradition—vengeance is an urgent and perplexing rather than adventitious theme. The Scriptures seek to set limits to a socially and psychologically conditioned avenging impulse or drive which is only too human but also paradoxical and freighted with inhumanity.
Of course, the idea of vengeance was very much alive in classical Greece. Aristotle was not out of season when he held that “to take vengeance on one’s enemies is nobler than to come to terms with them; for to retaliate is just, and that which is just is noble.”7 Thucydides was of a more critical mind. In The Peloponnesian War he was troubled by the pernicious fallout of vengeance. In his chapter on the “revolution” in Corcyra he highlights the escalation of dehumanizing violence which found its consummation in revenge and re-revenge. For Thucydides the defining characteristic of the war between the city-states, at its apogee, was its close interpenetration with civil strife, with the two opposing factions in each city-state appealing for help from outside. This two-tiered friend-enemy dissociation, typical of revolutionary moments, fostered the politics of suspicion along with preventive violence in both camps. A first-hand observer, Thucydides claimed that having aligned their commonwealth with Athens against Sparta, the Corcyreans massacred “those of their own citizens” whom they charged, often disingenuously, with “conspiring to overthrow … democracy.” With time, “in city after city … the passions of civil war” fueled a “violent fanaticism,” with the result that in the “struggles for ascendancy nothing was barred.” In Thucydides’ telling, the political leaders of the time eventually carried revenge to such extremes that it became even “more important than self-preservation.” He distinguished between those driven to vengeance by material “misfortune” or “ungovernable passions” and those who, in “their hour of triumph,” thirsted for revenge for having “been arrogantly oppressed instead of wisely governed … in the past.” In terms of governance, this disparate rush to vengeance at once reflected and fostered “the breakdown of law and order” to the point of undermining “those general laws of humanity which are there to give a hope of salvation to all who are in distress.”8
In addition to figuring prominently, since days of old, in theology and history—though history soon tended to lose it from sight—vengeance has also been a “central preoccupation of European literature and drama.”9 Homer, then Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides in ancient Greece; Seneca in early imperial Rome; Dante in the late Middle Ages; Shakespeare and Racine in the dawn of modern Europe—all at one and the same time capture, dramatize, and influence the ethical and social debates surrounding the issue of vengeance, which in their constructions become prisms dispersing light on the trials and tempers of their times and homelands. But given the pervasiveness and variability of vengeance, most of these writers found it “impossible to discuss [vengeance] without ambiguity and internal contradictions.” At all times tragedy in particular is without a “coherent attitude to vengeance.” Indeed, to press it for “either a positive or negative theory of vengeance is to misapprehend the essence of the tragic.” On the stage the different protagonists “espouse or condemn vengeance with equal passion, depending on their changing positions on the chessboard of violence.”10
Nevertheless, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries some of the greatest dramatic tragedies squarely confronted the mounting strain between personal and public vengeance as the centralizing state sought to establish its monopoly on the prescription, administration, and enforcement of justice. Evidently, the long-term objective was to supersede the code of vengeance with the rule of law. With the fusion of throne and altar in both Catholic and Protestant lands, the theater of the time portrayed and validated the divine presumption of the nascent legal authority, ultimately vested in the anointed kings. Shake-speare’s Hamlet is emblematic of this preoccupation with the moral and psychological aspects of the tension between, on the one hand, profane, wrongful, and illegal private revenge and, on the other, sacralized, just, and justiciable public vengeance. Hamlet is a morality play, with a distinctly unresolved moral: “to revenge or not to revenge.”11 It is a mirror of Elizabethan England, where quite understandably the precept of revenge “retained an attraction for a considerable portion of the population” at the same time that it was denounced for being unlawful, immoral, and irrational.12
At the same time and for the same reasons, philosophers and political thinkers began to be even more forthright in their censure of personal vengeance. They looked to earthly vengeance becoming the province of political and legal authorities that were recognized for being at once legitimate and anointed. Francis Bacon, Shakespeare’s contemporary, characterized “[r]evenge … [as] a kind of wild justice” and urged that “the more man’s nature runs to [it], the more ought the law to weed it out.” While he allowed for revenge “for those wrongs which there is no law to remedy,” he claimed that it was the measure of “superior” man to forbear vengeance, not least because it is without end. Unlike “public revenges,” which Bacon viewed with indulgence, “private revenges” were pernicious by virtue of being the doing of “man that studieth revenge,” thereby keeping “his own wounds green, which otherwise would heal.” Indeed, men of vengeance are as “vindictive … as they are mischievous” and not uncommonly they delight “not so much in doing the hurt, as in making the party repent.”13
This drive for forced repentance was equally abhorrent to Montaigne. His faith in Christianity shattered by the wanton cruelties of the wars of religion and the Spanish conquest of the Americas, as well as the clergy’s inability or unwillingness to intercede on behalf of the natives, he ascribed them to the conceit of cultural supremacy and the spiritual maiming of blind faith which caused aborigines to be demonized as the inferior “other.”14
Not unlike Hannah Arendt in the wake of the Second Thirty Years War, Montaigne looked to the Europeans’ unseemly conduct overseas for clues to their conduct at home. He stressed that judging by what he “had been told,” there was “nothing barbarous and savage” about the indigenous peoples of South America. They were barbarians only in the sense that “each man calls barbarism whatever is not his own practice,” all the more if he has lived a cloistered life. At first sight the other’s ways and rites of war seem uncivilized, in particular in his treatment of prisoners whom they eventually kill in the presence of a “great assembly” and then “roast and eat in common and send small pieces to their absent friends” as an act of “extreme revenge.” But the vengeance wrought by the Portuguese, partners in the war of conquest, was no less extreme: they buried their prisoners up to “the waist” and shot “the rest of their body full of arrows” before finally hanging them. Of course, Montaigne deemed it more savage to torture and eat a man “still full of feeling … than to roast and eat him after he is dead.” In all conscience Montaigne noted that only yesterday the French had blinked at terrible outrages “not among ancient enemies but among neighbors and fellow citizens, and, to make matters worse, on the pretext of piety and religion.”15
Convinced of humanity’s predisposition to extreme violence, Montaigne was deeply troubled by an apparent reversion from mere killing to the willful infliction of moral and physical cruelty. He was less concerned with soldiers killing in battle to “avoid an injury to come, not to avenge one already done,” than with victors perpetrating extreme atrocities after the end of hostilities to satisfy “their appetite for vengeance.” For Montaigne, “all that [was] beyond plain death” was “pure cruelty” and emblematic of a refusal to forego vengeance for clemency, even at the expense of the victor’s reputation.16
Montaigne’s profound disquiet about Christianity’s share of responsibility for the rampant crimes against humanity of the recent religiously charged conflicts and colonial conquests was shared a century and a half later by Montesquieu. He contended that since vengeance was a source of political immoderation and despotism in the commonweal, it was important to “put an early end to … [it] after a republic has successfully destroyed those who sought to subvert it.” In Montesquieu’s judgment, clemency and moderation were preferable to unforgivingness and severity, all the more so since there was no inflicting great punishments or, for that matter, carrying through great political changes, “without putting exorbitant powers in the hands of a few citizens.” Indeed, there was the danger of the “avengers establishing a tyranny under the pretext of avenging the republic.”17
Both the Enlightenment faith in human nature, reason, and progress, and the conservative reaction against the avenging Furies of the French Revolution, led nineteenth-century thinkers increasingly to condemn vengeance. In particular, Hegel, Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche conceded its universality and persistence at the same time that they looked for its decline and ultimately its extinction, above all in what they took to be the civilized—European—world, in which vengeance was being driven back by morality and the law.
It is “wondrous strange” that Nietzsche, one of modern Europe’s most influential if enigmatic philosophers and cultural critics, should have pondered the phenomenon of vengeance with such uncharacteristically visionary overtones.18 He judged the “avenging instinct” to have had such a “strong grip on humanity … [that it] left its mark on metaphysics, psychology, historical representation, and, above all, morality.”19
For Nietzsche, the basic root of vengeance is memory, which he set to probing concurrently with Freud, though in a different key.20 He at once appreciated and deplored man’s phenomenal capacity to remember, or not to forget. In fact, Nietzsche considered this innermost memory a “festering sore” which he allegorized as a “tarantula,” or a poisonous spider, and equated with the spirit of vengeance.21
In Nietzsche’s reading, the ideal-typical and primary carriers and executors—individual and collective—of this spirit of vengeance are persons of resentment (ressentiment). They, above all, store up feelings of injury, weakness, inferiority, degradation, inadequacy, and envy stemming from defeats or slights which they claim to have suffered unjustly at the hands of those stronger and of higher status than themselves. Normally the instinct of avenging resentment sustained by this feeling of repressed and latent insufficiency functions as “an instinct of self-preservation.”22 But the pervasively anguished men of resentment clamor to quench their grinding thirst for vengeance. And when they do have the opportunity to do so, they pass all bounds. Nietzsche’s summary formulation is striking, all the more so because it takes account of the weight of memory: “Disappointed arrogance, suppressed envy, perchance the arrogance and envy of your fathers: in you they break forth as a flame and frenzy of revenge.”23
At the same time that he empathetically discerned the mainsprings of the warrant for vengeance, Nietzsche voiced his forebodings about its built-in dangers. Ever the caustic critic of the Enlightenment, he was, above all, troubled by the speciousness of the avengers’ high-principled self-representation which, to boot, ran counter to his own values. Convinced that “men are not equal … [and] shall [never] become so,” Nietzsche warned against the “preachers of equality.” He saw “vengefulness … leap forth from behind … [the] talk of justice” and cautioned that those who “call themselves ‘The Good and the Righteous’ … lack naught but power to become Pharisees” in their own right. Nietzsche was particularly wary of “folks of all kindred and descent” who are driven by a strong “impulse to punish,” inasmuch as “[f]rom their faces peer the hangman and the bloodhound.”24
Strange to say, and perhaps inadvertently revealing himself, Nietzsche allowed himself to muse upon freeing humankind from the miasma of vengeance: “For to deliver man from vengeance: that I consider to be the bridge to the highest hope and a rainbow after long and violent storms.” It is worth noting that Nietzsche himself italicized his meditated vision.25 The words chosen to express it are no less telling in that he looked to deliver humankind from vengeance, which was a profane aspiration, rather than to redeem him, which would have implied “the way of repentance” so antithetical to his contempt for the Christian ethos.26 In any case, his imagined bridge was to lead from a world enslaved to vengeance to a world in which there would be neither space nor time for avenging persecution.
Max Scheler, in reaction to Nietzsche, held with the Christian ethos relating to the weak, the sick, and the poor. In addition, Scheler broached the problem of ressentiment less as a social-cultural than a social-psychological critic. But whatever their ethical and methodological differences, Scheler, like Nietzsche, fixed on the link between ressentiment and vengeance. For Scheler, ressentiment was “a lasting mental attitude caused by the systematic repression of certain emotions and affects.” In and of themselves the feelings in question “are normal components of human nature.” But when repressed, they veer toward “revenge, hatred, malice, envy, the impulse to detract, and spite.” Nonetheless such malignant emotions, even when inflamed, turn into ressentiment only if they are “suppressed” as a consequence of being “coupled with the feeling that one is unable to act them out—either because of weakness, physical or mental, or because of fear.” Evidently Scheler, like Nietzsche, made a special point of fixing on what Ernst Bloch later called gestaute Wut, or pent-up rage or fury.27 Scheler insists, however, that this rage is inherently “re-active” by virtue of being induced by others, rather than self-actuating and open to a new future. In particular, among the weak and impotent “the desire for revenge,” which is coupled with anger and rage, is not a self-actuating “emotional reaction” but is precipitated or triggered by a prior “attack or injury.” For the individual, “vengeance” restores “damaged feeling[s] of personal value, … injured ‘honor,’ or … ‘satisfaction’ for … endured … wrongs.”28
But, of course, even when personal, vengeance is rarely either a purely individual or a terminal affair. In fact, it is distinctly group-based and self-perpetuating, each retribution calling forth another reprisal. As previously noted, unless domesticated and regulated, vengeance, even when ritualized, is a vicious circle of reciprocal and interminable violence. With time the judicial system seeks to “rationalize” this peculiar violence by reducing if not eliminating it altogether. To be successful, this system requires a strong political authority. Indeed, any major breakdown of this authority necessarily entails a decline and collapse of the rationalization of vengeance.29
In spite of all its ambiguity and the disapproval of leading thinkers, vengeance still had some fine moments during the long nineteenth century in Europe and its overseas colonies: at the same time that the practice of “an eye for an eye” persisted in the pre-modern provinces of the United Kingdom and the Continent, Britain took revenge for the Indian Mutiny of 1857 and France clamored for revanche after its defeat by Prussia in 1870–71. Nor is there any denying that the avenging temper left a considerable imprint on the international conflicts and civil wars as well as the revolutions and counterrevolutions of the General Crisis and Thirty Years War of the twentieth century. Vengeance animated not a few of the bayonet charges on the killing fields of the Very Great War, and during the Second World War vindictive retribution informed the fire bombing of Dresden as well as the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. From the outset Hitler left no doubt that National Socialist Germany meant to take revenge for the defeat of 1918 and the shame of Versailles. In July 1941 Churchill vowed that Hitler having begun the indiscriminate bombing of cities, the British could “mete out to the Germans the measure, and more than the measure, that they have meted out to us”;30 after December 7 of that same year Americans rallied to the avenging call to “Remember Pearl Harbor”;31 and in 1944 Moscow’s chief propagandist encouraged the sorely tried soldiers of the Red Army to exact “not an eye for an eye, but two eyes for one.”32 This epoch’s tempestuous vindictive rage culminated in the Judeocide, which was triggered and largely driven by the vengeful fury of the Third Reich’s failing military fortunes.33 Since 1945 the murderous cycle of revenge and re-revenge has helped to poison and draw out the wars of decolonization; the Anglo-Irish and Arab-Israeli conflicts; the racial strife in South Africa; and the ethnically, religiously, and culturally freighted violence in Russia, ex-Yugoslavia, Turkey, Algeria, Rwanda, Sierra Leone, Somalia, Sudan, Zaire/Congo, Kashmir, and Timor. Meanwhile in certain precincts of the First World there is a recrudescence of the ever-latent retributive passion and reason, increasingly “acted out” both inside and outside courtrooms, and before television cameras.
There is something universal and persevering about vengeance, with due allowance for enormous socially and culturally defined variations and politically conditioned fluctuations. Of course, some historical situations are more conducive to the discharge of vengeance than others. In Europe since early modern times, in particular revolutionary moments have favored the return of “repressed” vengeance, the breakdown of the state’s monopoly of legitimate violence and justice creating an expansive space as well as a fertile soil for the eruption of avenging furies. Such times of trouble are choice forcing houses for the resurgence of retributive and vindictive vengeance for historic wrongs, for setbacks in foreign and civil war, and, especially in the countryside, for hateful intrusions of the peremptory state and the corrupting city. Vengeance is wrought for reasons—real or imagined—of religion, culture, politics, and ideology, as well as in the name of family, community, class, and nation. In some instances it is governed by time-tested rules and rituals, in others it is wild and blind, and in still others it is organized and militarized.
On this score the revolutionary moments of 1789 and 1917 were prototypical. The paralysis of centralizing sovereignty entailed the disintegration of the legitimate and independent administration of justice. This dual breakup was all the more fatal because the return of traditional vengeance coincided with the surge of founding violence mixed with wild vengefulness. In turn, government sought to reclaim the monopoly of all violence by reestablishing an effective judicial system: in the words of Michelet, “a revolution which wants to endure must, above all, wrest the sword of justice from its enemies.”34 Since the agents of this “violence to end violence” were self-styled avengers driven by a burning belief system and missionary zeal, it was both fierce and unconditional.
In this guise vengeance was a “natural” rather than “social” phenomenon, driven by a broad range of aggressive and destructive impulses charged with unreason and unrestraint. Although conditions of fractured sovereignty were also open season for individual vengeance, they fostered, above all, a vengeance whose agents and reasons were collective. Even more than traditional vengeance in normal times, this out-of-the-ordinary vengeance was careless about the responsibilities and intentions of its victims, overconfident in the achievement of symmetry in the retributive exchange of “a tooth for a tooth,” and specious in charging others with taking the first step. Michelet was sensitive to this complexity in his treatment of the Vendée. After noting the explosion of hatreds and avenging Furies in the opposing camps in which there was less reason “to fear death than torture,” Michelet frowned upon the “sorry debate about which side initiated this cycle of cruelties and committed the most horrible crimes.”35
NOTES
1. Raymond Verdier in Verdier and Jean-Pierre Poly, eds., La vengeance: Études d’ethnologie, d’histoire, et de philosophie, vol. 3 (Paris: Cujas, 1984), pp. 151–52; and Gérard Courtois in Courtois, ed., La vengeance, vol. 4 (Paris: Cujas, 1984), pp. 9–11, 29.
2. Hans Kelsen cited in Verdier and Poly, eds., La vengeance, vol. 1, p. 37, n. 4. See also Courtois, ed., La vengeance, vol. 4, pp. 11–12, 23–24.
3. Hegel cited in Jean-Philippe Guinle, “Hegel et la vengeance,” in Courtois, ed., La vengeance, vol. 4, p. 212.
4. René Girard, La violence et le sacré (Paris: Grasset, 1972), ch. 1; and Verdier and Poly, eds., La vengeance. vol. 3. The questionable religious “ontology” underlying René Girard’s thesis about the central and sacralizing role of the victime émissaire does not negate the heuristic value of his discussion of the violence of foundation.
5. Courtois in Courtois, ed., La vengeance, vol. 4, p. 27.
6. See André Lemaire, “Vengeance et justice dans l’ancien Israel,” in Verdier and Poly, eds., La vengeance, vol. 3, pp. 13–33; and Israel Jacob Yuval, “ ‘Extra Synagogam nulla salus’: Le sort des chrétiens dans l’eschatologie juive,” in Florence Heyman, ed., Lettre d’information du Centre de Recherche Français de Jerusalem 12 (December 1995): pp. 33–39.
7. Cited in John Kerrigan, Revenge Tragedy: Aeschylus to Armageddon (Oxford: Clarendon, 1996), p. 22.
8. Thucydides, The Peloponnesian War, trans. Rex Warner (New York: Penguin Classics, 1954), bk. 3, ch. 5: “Revolution in Corcyra.”
9. Kerrigan, Revenge Tragedy, passim.
10. Girard, Violence, p. 29.
11. Peter Mercer, Hamlet and the Acting of Revenge (London: Macmillan, 1987), p. 4.
12. Linda Anderson, A Kind of Wild Justice: Revenge in Shakespeare’s Comedies (Newark, Del.: University of Delaware Press, 1987), p. 17. See also Pietro Marongiu and Graeme Newman, Vengeance: The Fight against Injustice (Totowa, N.J.: Rowman and Littlefield, 1987), ch. 5.
13. Bacon, The Essays (New York: Penguin, 1985), pp. 72–73 (“Of Revenge”).
14. See Judith N. Shklar, Ordinary Vices (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1984), ch. 1.
15. Montaigne, “Of Cannibals,” in The Complete Works of Montaigne: Essays, Travel Journal, Letters, trans. Donald M. Frame (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1957), pp. 146–59, esp. p. 152 and p. 155.
16. Montaigne, “Cowardice, Mother of Cruelty,” in Montaigne, Complete Works, pp. 523–30, esp. pp. 524–25, 530.
17. Montesquieu, Esprit des lois, bk. 12, chs. 4 and 18.
18. Heidegger claims, extravagantly, that Nietzsche’s reflections on vengeance may well provide the key to “his way of thinking, and hence to the inner core of his metaphysics.” Martin Heidegger, Was heisst Denken? (Tübingen: M. Niemeyer, 1954), esp. p. 38.
19. Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari, Nietzsche Werke: Gesamtausgabe, VIII, 15 (30) 2 (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1972), p. 219.
20. See Paul-Laurent Assoun, Freud et Nietzsche (Paris: Presses Universitaires, 1980), esp. pp. 212–20; and Gilles Deleuze, Nietzsche et la philosophie (Paris: Presses Universitaires, 1962), p. 131, n. 2.
21. Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, Ecce Homo, bk. 1, ch. 6, in Walter Kaufmann, trans./ed., Basic Writings of Nietzsche (New York: Modern Library, 1968), pp. 685–87; and Nietzsche, “Thus Spake Zarathustra” (London: J. M. Dent, 1933), pp. 90–92. See Gilles Deleuze, Nietzsche, pp. 131–34, esp. p. 133; and Arno J. Mayer, “Memory and History: On the Poverty of Remembering and Forgetting the Judeocide,” in Radical History Review 56 (Spring 1993): pp. 14–15, 20.
22. Cited in Gerd-Günther Grau, Ideologie und Wille zur Macht: Zeitgemässe Betrachtungen über Nietzsche (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1984), p. 245.
23. Nietzsche, Zarathustra, p. 90.
24. Ibid., pp. 90–91.
25. Ibid., p. 90.
26. Cf. Heidegger, Was heisst Denken? p. 44.
27. Max Scheler, Ressentiment (New York: Schocken Books, 1972), pp. 45–46, 48; and Ernst Bloch, Erbschaft dieser Zeit (Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 1962), p. 116.
28. Scheler, Ressentiment, p. 46 and pp. 48–49.
29. Girard, La violence, pp. 28–29, 39.
30. Cited in Robert Rhodes James, ed., Winston S. Churchill: His Complete Speeches, 1897–1963, vol. II (New York: Chelsea House, 1974), pp. 6448–52.
31. John D. Dower, War without Mercy: Peace and Power in the Pacific War (New York: Pantheon, 1986).
32. Cited in Mayer, Why Did the Heavens Not Darken? The “Final Solution” in History (New York: Pantheon, 1988), p. 422.
33. Ibid., ch. VIII and pt. 3.
34. Jules Michelet, Histoire de la Révolution française, 2 vols. (Paris: Robert Laffont, 1979), vol. 1, p. 262.
35. Ibid., vol. 2, p. 489.