Everything That Rises

In Paris, a New Reign of Terror?

The age of terror has come emphatically to the heart of Europe. That is the thrust of the weekend’s articles – the ones I read, at any rate – about the terror attacks in Paris. ISIS is not confining itself to Syria. The Paris attacks, an attack in Beirut, and the downing of a Russian jetliner over Egypt are parts in a single scheme. Unlike the Charlie Hebdo attacks, which targeted foes of radical Islam, these attacks targeted the pleasure-seeking French bourgeois, so as to induce unremitting terror in the city and in Europe as a whole.

All true – but it seems to me to miss a crucial point about terror and Paris, namely, that terror hasn’t lately arrived in Paris – main non: Paris is where terror in the modern sense began.

Twenty years ago, if you asked a liberal arts student to name a city associated with terror, it seems to me you’d have gotten Paris as your first answer (with Jerusalem and Tehran second and third). The reason, of course, was the French Revolution. It was in Paris that French revolutionaries carried out the Reign of Terror, so well known to so many through Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities. It seems to me our use of the term “terror” to describe acts of disordered violence against civilians goes back to 1789 and stops there.

The Reign of Terror lasted eleven months in 1793 and 1794 – just about as long as the eleven months from the Charlie Hebdo attacks to the attacks Friday evening. But this is not to say that this year’s terror attacks in Paris are akin to those of the Reign of Terror. It’s to say the opposite, in fact – if Philip Bobbitt’s arguments in Terror and Consent are to be credited.

Bobbitt, in a giant 2008 book (which I know only through thorough and exacting reviews) argued that the “war on terror” was different from previous wars, and that as the era of the nation-state was characterized by “nation-state wars,” so the era of the market state is characterized by “market-state wars” – otherwise known as wars of terror and wars on terror. Here is The Independent:

For Bobbitt, we live in a time of market states, when we are leaving behind the constitutional order of the nation state in favour of an era of opportunity, entrepreneurship and globalisation. But the same forces shaping this agreeable destiny “are also empowering the forces of terror, rendering societies more vulnerable and threatening to destroy the consent of the individual as the essential source of state legitimacy”. The book is “not so much about al Qaeda as about the larger phenomenon of 21st-century terrorism of which al Qaeda is only a herald”: namely, the groups for whom terror is a “permanent state of affairs”, whose genius is to “copy the decentralised, devolved… and privatised market state of the 21st century”. With both “states of consent and states of terror… evolving into market states”, the central question is which version will succeed. So historians “may one day see the Wars against Terror as an epochal war, an historical and constitutional characterization that can only be made retrospectively”.

1775 to 1789 was a period of fourteen years. 2001 to 2015 has been fourteen years. If it can be said that we are now in an age of terror akin to the “Age of Revolution” Eric Hobsbawm saw beginning in 1789, it may turn out that what happened in Paris in 2015 stands in relation to what happened in America in 2001 in the same way that happened in Paris in 1789 stands in relation to what happened in America in 1775.

In any case, if we are going to understand the age we are in, we need to consider the two events together, the way the American Revolution and the French Revolution are best considered together.