La violence vue d'en bas. Réflexions sur les moyens de la politique en période révolutionnaire

Violence as seen from Below: Reflections on Political Means during Revolutionary Periods. The celebration of the bicentenial of the French Revolution provides an oppurtunity to consider the central question of violence. Up until recently, historians have explained it either by the necessity of political response or by fear, a mobilizing phenomenon of collective psychology. The purpose of this article is to try to understand the archaic nature of the facts and to read the phenomenon as such. Jacques-Louis Menetra and Louis Simon, in Paris and in the West, indicate the ways in wich violence was subscribed to or refused; their work suggests the possibility of a three-fold explanation whereby terrorism would be the legacy of the Christian spectacle of death whose fascination is related to the "part maudite", and wherein important factors would be "victimary" (sacrificial) anthropology and the mimetic crisis, and a shift from avowal to disavowal of violence when the latter no longer demonstrates anything.Roche Daniel. La violence vue d'en bas. Réflexions sur les moyens de la politique en période révolutionnaire. In: Annales. Économies, Sociétés, Civilisations. 44ᵉ année, N. 1, 1989. pp. 47-65