Girard's conservative thought is addressed to the experience of 1968; For him, modernity is just another "sacrificial crisis". Nothing in this logic, however, prevents it from being applied to such cases as the "constitutive" violence in Yekaterinburg, Katyn or Chechnya. Justifying the use of local violence instead of global violence, this model does not define the boundary between them. From the history of wars or from their own divorces, everyone knows how small conflicts grow into big ones. In politics and in life, the problem is the self-restraint of violence, which in Girard's examples is set by ritual and tradition. African kings were rolled in shit during the change of power; the Russian tsars were killed one by one; The presidents of democratic countries, having changed according to the calendar, go to each other for cocktails. But today, says Girard in his book on ancient texts, there is no less violence and persecution than ever before. And what about the illusions that justify violence? Read this book and test its logic with recent examples from life and literature.

Alexander Etkind

Scapegoat

Chapter I: Guillaume de Machaut and the Jews

The French poet Guillaume de Machaut wrote in the middle of the XIV century. His work "The Court of the King of Navarre" is undeservedly little known. Of course, the main part of it is just a long poem in the courtly style, stereotyped in style and theme. But its beginning is amazing. It describes an intricate series of catastrophic events at which Guillaume is supposedly present until terror forces him to shut himself up in his own home to await death or the end of unspeakable ordeals. Some of these events are completely unbelievable, others only partially. And yet, when reading this story, one gets the impression that something real really happened.

Signs appear in the sky. Stone rain kills people. Entire cities were burned by lightning strikes. In the city where Guillaume lives (he does not say in which one), people die in great numbers. Some of these deaths are caused by the malevolence of Jews and their Christian accomplices. How did the villains manage to inflict such huge damage? They poisoned rivers, sources of drinking water supply. But heavenly justice stopped these atrocities, revealing their instigators to the population, which exterminated them all. And yet people continued to die, in increasing numbers, until one spring day Guillaume heard music and the laughter of men and women in the street. All the terrible things had passed, and courtly poetry had resumed.

The modern critical approach, since its inception in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, has been to distrust texts blindly. In our age, many brilliant minds believe that the further progress of critical insight requires increasing distrust. Thanks to the interpretations and reinterpretations of many generations of historians, texts that until recently seemed to be carriers of authentic information have now fallen under suspicion. On the other hand, epistemology and philosophy are experiencing a radical crisis, which contributes to the undermining of what was once called historical science. All intellectuals, accustomed to eating texts, gave themselves up to disappointed reflections on the impossibility of any reliable interpretation of them.

At first glance, it may seem that Guillaume de Manu's text is vulnerable to modern skepticism towards historical texts. However, after a little reflection, even today's readers will highlight real events through all the implausibility of the narrative. They will not believe in heavenly signs, nor in accusations against the Jews, nor will they treat all improbable topics in the same way; they will not put them on the same level. Guillaume did not invent anything. Of course, he is a gullible man and reflects hysterical public opinion. But this does not make the countless deaths described by Guillaume, caused, apparently, by the famous Black Plague, which devastated the north of France in 1349 and 1350, any less real. Equally real is the beating of Jews, justified in the eyes of the murderous crowds by rumors of water poisoning, which circulated almost everywhere. The general horror of the disease gave these rumors enough weight to unleash a massacre.

Here is a passage from the "Court of the King of Navarre" that speaks of the Jews:

Then the lying one appeared, Insidious, renounced, Abominable Judea, Evil, unfaithful, Who hates good and loves all evil. She has a lot of gold and silver, And she promised so much money to the Christians, That wells, rivers and springs, Who were clean and healthy, They were poisoned in many places. Many have lost their lives because of this, For many have made use of these springs; And that's why they died suddenly. There were a million of them, Who died because of this in the village and in the city. That's how it happened This is a fatal misfortune. But He who reigns high and sees far away, Who governs everything and foresees everything, He did not want to hide this treason and exposed it. And proclaimed it so widely, That they lost both life and property, For all the Jews were destroyed: Some are hanged, others are boiled, Others drowned, others chopped off A head with an axe or a sword, And many Christians are with them They died shamefully. [1]

Medieval communities were so afraid of the plague that they were frightened even by its very name; They tried not to pronounce it for as long as possible and not even to take the necessary measures, which aggravated the perniciousness of the epidemic. They were so helpless that to admit the truth meant for them not so much to confront misfortune as to submit to its corrupting action, to renounce even the appearance of a normal life. The entire population willingly succumbed to this blindness. A desperate desire to deny the evidence favored the hunt for scapegoats.

In Animals Afflicted with the Plague, La Fontaine remarkably conveys this almost religious reluctance to utter a terrible word, that is, to unleash the pernicious power of the disease within the community:

Plague (since we have to call it by name)...