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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
What is it that leaves us shell shocked in the face of the massacres carried out in New York on 9/11 or in Paris on 13 November 2015? How are we to explain the intensity of the reaction to the attacks on Charlie Hebdo? Answering these questions involves trying to understand what a society goes through when it is subjected to the ordeal of terrorist attacks. And it impels us to try to explain why millions of people feel so concerned and shaken by them, even when they do not have a direct connection with any of the victims.
In Shell Shocked, sociologist Gérôme Truc sheds new light on these events, returning to the ways in which ordinary individuals lived through and responded to the attacks of 9/11, of 11 March 2004 in Madrid and 7 July 2005 in London. Analysing political language and media images, demonstrations of solidarity and minutes of silence, as well as the tens of thousands of messages addressed to the victims, his investigation brings about the complexity of our feelings about the Islamists' attacks. It also uncovers the sources of the solidarity that, in our individualistic societies, ultimately finds expression in the first person singular rather than the first person plural: 'I am Charlie', 'I am Paris.'
This timely and path-breaking book will appeal to students and scholars in sociology and politics and to anyone interested in understanding the impact of terrorism in contemporary societies.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2017
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Table of Contents
Dedication
Title page
Copyright page
Preface to the English edition
Notes
Acknowledgements
Introduction: Terrorist attacks as a test
Testing social bonds
From one terrorism to another
The materials for a book
Note on sources cited
Notes
Part I: What is happening to us
1: Under attack
9/11 live: Accident, terrorist attack, or act of war?
The view from Europe: From Western solidarity to a cosmopolitan perspective
Notes
2: Experiencing your ‘own’ 9/11
11 March attacks like a ‘new 9/11’
7 July 2005, a ‘British 9/11’?
Notes
3: To show, or not to show, violence
The place of the dead
The ethics of iconographic decisions
Notes
4: Demonstrating solidarity
The attacks as a ‘time to demonstrate’
Why demonstrate after an attack?
Notes
5: Observing silence
A ritual of collective mourning
A problem of moral equivalence
Notes
Part II: What touches us
6: Terrorist attacks and their publics
From written reactions to the concerned publics
In what capacity an attack concerns us
Notes
7: The meanings of ‘we’
Above and below the level of the nation
World cities and the test of terrorism
Notes
8: The values at stake
Reactions to terrorist attacks as value judgements
The banal pacifism of the Europeans
Notes
9: The attacks in persons
The singularization of the victims
Reacting as a singular person
Notes
10: Solidarity in the singular
The attachment to place
The coincidence of dates
The homology of experiences
Notes
Conclusion: ‘There's something of Charlie in all of us’
Notes
Afterword to the English edition
Note
Selective bibliography
General works
On 9/11
On the 11 March 2004 attacks in Madrid and the 7 July 2005 attacks in London
On death, collective mourning and the relation to suffering in the Western world
On Europe
Index
End User License Agreement
List of Tables
Table 1. Nationalities of those killed in each attack.
Table 2. Main image-types published on the front pages of newspapers in Spain, in the rest of Europe and the United States on 12 March 2004.
Table 3. Main image-types published on front pages in Europe and the United States on 8 July 2005.
Table 4. Proportion of immigrants born in Spain, by metropolitan area of France, in 2009.
Table 5. Typology of modes of participation in the public of a terrorist attack (in parentheses, the impulse of the reaction).
List of Illustrations
Figures 1, 2 and 3. Front pages of the
San Francisco Examiner
(US) and the
Charleston Gazette
(US), 12 September 2001, and front page of
Newsweek
(US), special issue of 24 September 2001.
Figures 4 and 5. Covers of
Paris Match
, 2730, 20 September 2001, and 2731, 27 September 2001.
Figure 6. Message placed in the Atocha station after Madrid bombings.Archivo del Duelo, DP-2294. The final comment, ‘QUE VERGUENZA’, means ‘the shame of it!’
Figures 7 and 8. Front pages of
Tulsa Word
(US), 12 September 2001, and
El Mundo
(Spain), 12 March 2004.
Figures 9 and 10. Front pages of the
New York Daily News
and
New York Post
, 12 March 2004; the photographs were taken by Christophe Simon (AFP) and Paul White (AP) respectively.
Figure 11. Cartoon by Chapatte published in
Le Temps
(Switzerland), 12 March 2004.
Figures 12, 13 and 14. Detail of the front page of
El Nuevo Herald
(US, Miami), 12 March 2004, showing a photo take by Emilio Naranjo; the front page of
Libération
(France), 12 March 2004, showing a photo taken by José Huesca; and the front page of
El País
(Spain), 12 March 2004, showing a photo taken by Pablo Torres Guerrero.
Figure 15. Eight front pages of daily papers published on 12 March 2004 showing the photograph by Pablo Torres Guerrero that was disseminated by Reuters.
Figures 16 and 17. Front pages of
La Vanguardia
(Spain), 15 July 1986, and
ABC
(Spain), 18 October 1991.
Figure 18. Drawing left in the Atocha station after the Madrid bombings. Archivo del Duelo, DP-0291.
Figures 19 and 20. Photo by Emilio Naranjo circulated by Associated Press and Reuters; and El Greco's
La Trinidad
(1579).
Figures 21, 22, 23 and 24. Front page of the
Diario de Sevilla
, 12 March 2004; Ntra Señora de la Hiniesta Dolorosa (Seville); photo of the Madrid in Memoriam project; and synthetic image available on various Catholic Internet sites.
Figures 25 and 26. Covers of
Paris Match
, 2930, 13 July 2005, and 2410, 3 August 1995.
Figures 27 and 28. Front pages of
Le Parisien-Aujourd’hui en France
and the
Gazeta Poznańska
(Poland), 8 July 2005.
Figure 29. Graphical representation of the factor analysis of correspondences applied to messages written in response to the Madrid bombings from June 2004 to March 2005.
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
Start Reading
Preface
CHAPTER 1
Index
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Dedication
For Adélaïde
and Louis
Copyright page
First published in French as Sidérations. Une sociologie des attentats © Presses Universitaires de France, 2016
This English edition © Polity Press, 2018
The translation of this work was supported by funding from the REAT Research Project, granted by the ‘Attentats-Recherche’ committee of the Centre national de la recherche scientifique (CNRS).
Polity Press
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Cambridge CB2 1UR, UK
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All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-2033-6
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-2034-3 (pb)
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Truc, Gérôme, author.
Title: Shell shocked : the social response to terrorist attacks / Gérôme Truc.
Other titles: Sidérations. English
Description: Malden, MA : Polity Press, [2017] | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2017019475 (print) | LCCN 2017025984 (ebook) | ISBN 9781509520367 (Mobi) | ISBN 9781509520374 (Epub) | ISBN 9781509520336 (hardback) | ISBN 9781509520343 (pbk.)
Subjects: LCSH: Terrorism–Psychological aspects. | Terrorism–Social aspects. | Toleration. | Cultural pluralism.
Classification: LCC HV6431 (ebook) | LCC HV6431 .T78513 2017 (print) | DDC 363.32501/9–dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017019475
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
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Preface to the English edition
Perhaps, following a recent terrorist attack, you have taken to Facebook or Twitter to express your feelings and your support for the victims; perhaps you have even gone to the places where the terrorists struck in order to reflect, because you lived next door or were passing through the city, and then perhaps you left a short message, a candle or a bouquet of flowers; perhaps you also went out onto the streets to take part in a demonstration in homage to the victims, or to observe a minute's silence. Or perhaps you behaved in quite the opposite way: perhaps you felt that everyone was overdoing it; perhaps you waxed indignant at what you thought were inappropriate reactions; perhaps you found the litany of ‘I am …’ statements on social networks (‘I am Charlie’ and so on) depressingly conformist, and remarked that we do not do as much for those who die every day in Syria or trying to reach Europe via the Mediterranean. It is probable, moreover, that you have successively adopted both of these positions in reaction to two different attacks; and that the people around you – friends, relatives, colleagues – reacted differently. Perhaps you tried to argue with some of them; you may perhaps have discovered that you did not share the same view of things, that the very definitions of these attacks and their causes were not as obvious to others as to you; and, as a result, perhaps you discovered how difficult it was to talk about it.
The reason is that terrorist attacks are not conducive to balanced discussions or to a sense of perspective. They are moments of social effervescence, of surging emotions, in which people get worked up and their positions harden. Each of us reacts to them immediately and viscerally, and we often cannot admit – let alone understand – that others, even more in our own circles, do not share our feelings. We lack the tools to grasp fully what is at stake, to understand what happens to us collectively and individually at such moments. The social sciences are generally dismissed as useless in such circumstances, since this is no longer a time for scholarly quibbles but one for taking moral and political positions. With or against terrorists: you just have to choose your side, and that's that. Comments are then reduced to generalities, in which we mix reflections on what we are and what we should be, about the ‘trauma’ suffered by the social body as a whole and the ‘resilience’ it is supposed to show; meanwhile, ‘cultural conversations’1 about the causes of terrorism replace empirically based explanations. The risk is therefore that we will be sucked into the maelstrom – to use the metaphor that the sociologist Norbert Elias took from Edgar Allan Poe2 – created in the wake of terrorist attacks and that, for lack of perspective, we will gradually be drowned in it.
This risk is especially great since such attacks happen again and again. I am writing these lines a few hours after the Manchester Arena bombing, just over a month and a half after the attacks in Stockholm and two months after the attack in Westminster, while the Berlin attack is barely six months old and the first anniversaries of the attacks in Nice and Orlando have not yet arrived. More than ever, therefore, we need a ‘sociology of terrorist attacks’ to understand the effects of this type of attack on our societies better, and to help us to face them: this is what this book proposes.
At its heart is an inquiry conducted over several years into the reactions to the 9/11 attacks and those on Madrid in 2004 and London in 2005, from which I review a whole series of questions that arose in France following the attacks on Charlie Hebdo and the Hypercacher in January 2015. The manuscript was completed one month to the day before the attacks of 13 November 2015. Despite the scale of that later attack – which meant that some French journalists regretted having hastily described the attack on Charlie Hebdo as a ‘French 9/11’ – I did not consider it advisable to postpone the publication of this book. This was because, irrespective of the train of events, the sociological mechanisms that my investigation have laid bare remain fundamentally the same. It is precisely in this respect that sociological analysis offers a valuable perspective which makes it possible to look at the news differently – just as the news sometimes makes it possible to perceive the usefulness of this analysis better.
It will undoubtedly be better understood today, at a time when European societies are being subjected to an unprecedented series of suicide bombings, why it was necessary to begin this work with two chapters which scrutinize how the attacks of 9/11 were experienced on either side of the Atlantic and the role played by the analogy with this event in the perception of subsequent attacks in Europe, as elsewhere across the world. Although 9/11 took place over fifteen years ago, it marked a fundamental shift not only in the modalities of terrorism but also in the relationship of Western societies to terrorist acts, so that we cannot understand the way those societies now react to these acts without taking that initial event into account.
And if the reference to 9/11 seems to be less ubiquitous than it once was in commentaries on the attacks now facing Western societies, analogical thinking is still clearly in evidence. When Andy Burnham, mayor of Manchester, reacts to the bombing which has just plunged his city into mourning by recalling the precedent of the London bombings in 2005, he prescribes at the same time a particular form of behaviour to his fellow citizens: ‘I was in the Home Office as a minister on that day and I remember how London felt on that day. I remember it very vividly. What I would say to people is, London pulled together. And in exactly the same way Manchester, in its own unique way, will pull together and we'll stand strong and stand together.’3 Warding off any risk of division where it might arise, calling for unity: that is the function of political speech. But the fact remains that, behind such language, each citizen harbours his or her own feelings, opinions and reactions. Such is the role of sociological analysis, then: to see what is going on beyond political discourse, and to embrace the reactions of ordinary citizens in their plurality in order to shed light on what produces those reactions.
So I went again to the scene of the attacks of 13 November 2015 in Paris as well as those of 14 July 2016 in Nice to observe in situ the expressions of people's feelings. I found the same words as those left in New York, Madrid and London, words which constitute the raw material of this book. Short, impersonal messages, in the form of exhortations or incantations: ‘Never again’, ‘No to terrorism’, ‘Peace for all’, etc. Long letters in the first person, in dense handwriting. Invocations of the values of freedom, equality and fraternity, but also, and perhaps even more, calls for love, life and peace. Quotations from the Qur'an or the Bible, the Dalai Lama or John Lennon. ‘We will not forget you’, ‘We are united’ and ‘We are not afraid.’ Messages from foreigners who, in the name of their country or city, stand in solidarity with the victims and the city that has been struck. But also a solidarity that is expressed in the singular – ‘I am Paris’, ‘I am Nice’ – and on other scales: ‘I am French’ or ‘I am human.’ As I write these lines, I know that similar messages are now accumulating in Manchester. Assembled together, these utterances of ‘we’ and ‘I’ form the response of a society to the test, the ordeal, of terrorism. This book suggests an approach to understanding this response and a method for analysing it. In its own way, it is also a part of it.
Paris, 23 May 2017
Notes
1.
Mahmood Mamdani,
Good Muslim, bad Muslim: America, the Cold War, and the roots of terror
(New York: Doubleday, 2004).
2.
Norbert Elias,
Involvement and detachment
, revised English edn (Dublin: University College Dublin Press, 2007).
3.
http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/politics/general-election-manchester-bombing-attack-10479733
.
Acknowledgements
This book is the result of a doctoral thesis in sociology at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, supervised jointly by Daniel Cefaï and Louis Quéré. I would like to thank both of them for the intellectual generosity and attentiveness with which they followed my work. I have learned a huge amount from them. My thanks also go to my viva examiners: Yves Déloye, Jean-Louis Fabiani, Marie-Claire Lavabre and Étienne Tassin, whose remarks were invaluable when it came to producing this book.
My research would not have been possible without the support of a number of people and institutions. I am thinking first of the Casa de Velázquez, and I would like to thank its former director, Jean-Pierre Étienvre, as well as Xavier Huetz de Lemps and Stéphane Michonneau. I am immensely grateful to Cristina Sánchez-Carretero, who gave me access to the Archivo del Duelo, and Randall Collins, who invited me to come and work with him at the University of Pennsylvania. Thanks also to Stéphane Grimaldi and Marie-Claude Berthelot, of the Mémorial de Caen; to Meriam Lobel, of the 9/11 Tribute Center; and to my friend Guillaume Fournié, who greatly facilitated my periods of research in the London Metropolitan Archives.
This work benefited from exchanges of ideas with many researchers, and the help that some of them gave me. In this respect, thanks to Alexandra Bidet, Luc Boltanski, Mathieu Brugidou, Bruno Cautrès, Clément Chéroux, Vincenzo Cicchelli, Alain Cottereau, Béatrice Fraenkel, Sarah Gensburger, Liora Israël, Sandrine Lefranc, Denis Peschanski and Max Reinert. I was also lucky enough to have attentive and reliable reviewers, starting with my two intellectual travelling companions, Pierre-Marie Chauvin and Fabien Truong, to whom this book owes a great deal. Thanks also, for their observations and advice, to Sabine Chalvon-Demersay, Arnaud Esquerre, Christine de Gemeaux, Claire Lemercier, Étienne Nouguez, Paul Pasquali and Thibaut de Saint Pol.
In conclusion, I would like to express my deep appreciation to those who made it possible for this book to see the light of day: Jean-Luc Fidel, for having helped me turn thesis into book; Serge Paugam, for having so kindly and enthusiastically agreed to publish it; Monique Labrune, for her confidence in me; Julie Gazier, for her patience and her meticulous revision of the manuscript; and my relatives, finally, for their support – especially to the grandparents of Louis, thanks to whom he will not have suffered too much from the final touches to the manuscript that took up so much of his father's attention, and to Adélaïde, whom I can never thank enough.
IntroductionTerrorist attacks as a test
The silence was heavy, that night, contrasting with the never-ending bustle that is usually to be found in this area of Paris, both by day and by night. In the glow from candles and street lights, they had gathered there in the cold of January, brandishing pens and pencils, the front pages of newspapers and placards with ‘I am Charlie’ written on them. First there were just a few hundred of them, gathered in the late afternoon around the statue in the centre of the square, some looking meditative and all of them serious; eventually, by nightfall, there were tens of thousands filling the whole of the Place de la République and its adjacent streets. And thousands of others just like them, across France's major cities. All aghast and outraged. Shocked. Terror-stricken. Never before had a reaction of such magnitude been observed in France following a terrorist act. Soon, therefore, questions came tumbling out: how was it that the French had taken to the streets so rapidly and in such large numbers? What about the fact that the slogan immediately repeated by all of them, ‘I am Charlie’, was formulated in the first person singular, and not plural, as had happened after 9/11 with ‘We are all Americans’? And was there even any sense in comparing this with the 9/11 attacks?
So the journalists turned to the sociologists, but they struggled to get any in-depth answers from them. In the fifteen years since 9/11, the sociologists, ultimately, had found very little to say – either in France or indeed in the US. Of course, in the US you find shelves full of works in bookshops and libraries devoted to the events of 9/11. But they are mainly journalistic narratives, collections of photos, the testimonies of survivors, discussions of the official report on the attacks, and technical arguments claiming to find support for the idea that it was all a conspiracy, together with investigations into Al-Qaeda and its networks. One searches in vain for a book that would study how American society and the rest of the world responded to the attacks, exploring the causes behind the solidarity shown towards the victims and analysing its intensity and scope. In short, a properly sociological book. Admittedly, studies do exist on specific aspects of 9/11 – the way it was treated in a certain newspaper or on a certain television channel, its impact on defence and security policies, on the aeronautics industry, etc. – but these studies were published in academic journals, meant for specialist audiences. The situation is the same when it comes to the two major attacks that have since been carried out on Western countries, preceding those that shook France in January 2015, namely the attacks of 11 March 2004 in Madrid and 7 July 2005 in London: there are as many books by experts on terrorist networks, essays by journalists, and narrative accounts as one could wish for; but when it comes to sociological analyses, there are virtually none. Indeed, the mother of a victim of the London attacks, in her preface to one of the very few academic books published to date on this event, laments this silence on the part of social scientists.1
Though I do not claim that it will fill this gap all by itself, my book looks back at the European reactions to the 9/11 attacks, and those in Madrid and London, so as to provide a certain perspective for what the French experienced in January 2015 and to come up with answers to the questions that arose then. Each of its chapters begins with a salient feature of the events of January 2015 and then sheds light on this by drawing on the results of an investigation into those three previous Islamist attacks in Western territory – an investigation that lasted several years. This book therefore proposes a sociology of terrorist attacks, rather than a sociology of terrorism as such.2 It focuses on the attacks as events, on the way that ordinary individuals experience them and how they react to them, rather than on terrorism as a sociopolitical phenomenon, which is already the subject of many studies. The approach taken here is a quiet, ‘cool’3 appraisal of the effect an attack has on society: it aims to understand, compare and explain, but in no way to judge or deplore, as people are frequently all too quick to do, ‘in the heat of the moment’. For the attacks are not very propitious moments for reflection, for a distanced view: people feel they are being called on to take a stand and choose sides. And as Emmanuel Todd's detailed analysis of the demonstrations that followed the attacks of 2 January 2015 will have demonstrated,4 it is sometimes very difficult for a sociologist to remain objective in this area.
Testing social bonds
My book begins with a naive question, one which may seem morally aberrant: why is it that an attack does not leave us indifferent? Why do we feel concerned by it when we are not victims ourselves, and do not personally know anyone who is? Why is it that we are shell shocked when we learn what has happened? Of course, it seems natural to us: we must be Charlie! How could we not be? How can we fail to be shocked when journalists and cartoonists are shot down by Kalashnikovs in our own country? So we have to be Charlie. And that, indeed, is what we all are: the front pages of the newspapers say as much. However, it rather quickly becomes apparent that some people are not Charlie, or not as much as other people would like them to be … Then begins the hunt for who is or is not Charlie. Understanding what happens to a society when it lives through such moments requires us, first of all, to take a step back from our own reactions, as members of this society. We need to ask ourselves: what exactly are we reacting to? In other words: to what extent do media coverage of the attack and the way the authorities themselves react impact on our own reaction? And we must also ask: what makes us react in this particular way? What emotional springs are thus set in motion by the event?
This approach means considering the attack, from the sociological point of view, not only as an ordeal, but also as a test.5 With it, a twofold uncertainty arises: an uncertainty that initially attaches, of course, to the attacked state, its ability to protect its citizens adequately and ensure peace on its territory,6 but an uncertainty that also attaches, at the same time, to society itself. In striking some of its members, the attack calls into question the link uniting them to those who are not directly affected. Will the latter show concern for the fate of the victims? Will they feel solidarity? Or will they in fact demonstrate indifference? Or worse: will they actually take the side of the terrorists responsible for the attack? An attack, in this sense, reveals what we are most attached to – the things and the people that are dear to us, the values to which we collectively hold – which is at the same time that by which we are most attached to one another, i.e. what connects us to others, with whom we feel that we form a single community.7 In short, it is a moment of truth for social cohesion.
But the reactions to the attacks that will be discussed in this book overflowed the borders of the countries where they occurred, sometimes to a significant degree. They are thus an occasion for us to investigate the role played by the sense of national belonging in reactions to an attack: not that we should necessarily minimize its importance, but rather so as to locate its rightful place among other emotional mechanisms that it may tend to obscure. For however significant the bond of nationhood may be, it is not – and has never been – the only link that connects us to others and is able make us sensitive to their plight. A foreigner may have felt that he or she was ‘Charlie’ for the same reason that a French person did, although this reason had nothing to do with the fact that one was French and the other not. And if a normative viewpoint will lead us to consider that no French person can fail to be ‘Charlie’, the fact remains that some French people felt more affected than others by the attack on 7 January 2015, and that it is unlikely (but not impossible) that this was because they felt more French. Conversely, behind some of the facile rhetorical responses that speak of a ‘global emotion’ involving ‘the whole world’ following an attack, there may be first and foremost the emotions of people who, throughout the world, are responding to a tragedy that has struck their home country.
To produce a sociology of terrorist attacks, then, involves asking what connects us to each other and makes us sensitive to the fate of others, in our own society as well as beyond its borders. In other words, it involves reconnecting with one of the founding questions of sociology, that of the relationship between individuals and groups, and of the mechanisms of solidarity in modern societies. This is a question which all classic writers in the discipline have had to face, starting with Émile Durkheim.
From one terrorism to another
The time when Durkheim was working on his first big book, The Division of Labour in Society,8 was already marked by terrorism – not in those days Islamist, but anarchist. Before the ‘bin Laden decade’9 which marked the beginning of the twenty-first century, Europe experienced in the 1890s a ‘decade of the bomb’10 during which there was a series of attacks using dynamite (which had just been invented) targeting kings, presidents, ministers, judges, government buildings and public places. Durkheim defended his thesis and published The Division of Labour in Society right in the middle of the wave of attacks then hitting Paris, just a year after Ravachol's attacks in March 1892 and a year before the assassination of President Sadi Carnot by Caserio, on 24 June 1894.11
From 1891 to 1894, there were press articles on anarchist terrorism almost daily: not only information on attacks, arrests, potential threats and false alarms, but also editorials, and interviews with or portraits of anarchist figures. This terrorism was described in terms that vividly recall the language sometimes employed today about Islamists. One example is the attack on the Café du Terminus, at the Gare Saint-Lazare on 12 February 1894, carried out by Émile Henry: it featured in Le Temps – the forerunner of Le Monde – where it was called ‘the continuation of the savage war declared by the sect on modern society’.12 Like today's Islamist terrorism, anarchist terrorism in the France of that time represented the main threat to the social and republican order, and as such preoccupied Durkheim as he was writing The Division of Labour in Society.13 And, as today, this threat hung over a society riven by inequality, where the ‘social question’ seemed more urgent than ever.
There is, from the sociological point of view, an undeniable continuity in the problematic of terrorism: regardless of the cause defended by the terrorists, the way that their attacks put society to the test remains fundamentally similar. Writing against those who see The Division of Labour in Society as a now outmoded work, the American sociologist Edward A. Tiryakian has pointed out that the way American society reacted to 9/11 is a very clear illustration of the phenomenon that Durkheim portrays in that work under the name ‘mechanical solidarity’.14 Faced with the attack, Americans more than ever had the feeling of being united. This reaffirmation of national cohesion, an American ‘we’ that for a while took precedence over the singular ‘I's that compose that community, was particularly reflected in the flourishing, in public space, of a symbol that was, as it were, erected as a totem: the Stars and Stripes. According to an often-quoted statistic, branches of Walmart sold 116,000 in the course of 11 September 2001 and 250,000 more the next day, almost twenty-five times more than in a normal period,15 and a fifth of Internet searches in the hours following the attacks were looking for downloadable and printable versions of the flag.16
But Durkheim's analysis has found echoes in other places, too. Edward A. Tiryakian notes that, in the wake of the attacks, he received many emails of support from foreign researchers (French, German, Italian and so on), who had spontaneously written to him to express their condolences to the American people, and that his colleagues from other disciplines experienced the same phenomenon. History does not relate whether Durkheim himself received telegrams from US sociologists in August 1914, when Germany declared war on France, but he would probably have seen this, as Tiryakian suggests, as the demonstration of a solidarity that was not just mechanical, but organic – based on social differentiation rather than a sense of community, and spreading to an international scale, and perhaps thereby comprising the material for a new sociological study.17 In one sense, it is a similar extension of Durkheim's analysis that I am putting forward in this book. Its raw material, in fact, is very similar to the messages I referred to just now.
The materials for a book
Essentially, this book relies on an atypical, unprecedented source: the countless messages that people addressed to the victims of the attacks of 9/11, Madrid and London, to express their solidarity. Just a few words or several pages long, collected on the actual sites of the terrorist attacks or on Internet sites, sometimes sent to newspapers or embassies that were asked to forward them, composed a few hours or days after the attacks, or sometimes several months or years later, these messages help us grasp at the individual scale the mechanisms of the collective response to the attacks, and thus to put into perspective what is nowadays observed, in such circumstances, on social media. What ordinary people say in order to show their support for victims, and the way they say it, if we pay proper attention, reveal how it is that they feel affected by the event, what sense of ‘us’ it involves, and how the meanings of ‘I’ and ‘we’ are related when attacks put us to the test.
However, one still needs to have the means to dominate the overwhelming plethora of relevant documents, tens of thousands in number, so as not only to identify a few cases that stand out from this mass, but to characterize the mass as a whole. So the heart of this book consists of an exhaustive analysis, using textual statistics software, of a corpus of nearly 60,000 messages written in reaction to the attack in Madrid, from the ‘Archivo del Duelo’, an archive created by researchers at the Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas.18 Its results have enabled me to develop an original grid of analysis and then explore other post-attack messages: those from the ‘London terrorist attack 7 July 2005: memorials to victims’ holdings in the London Metropolitan Archives, the messages from Operation ‘Fraternally’, an archive consulted at the Mémorial de Caen shortly before it went off to the United States to join the collections of the National September 11 Memorial & Museum, the ‘visitor cards’ of the 9/11 Tribute Center in New York, and finally a few scattered reactions collected here and there on the Internet.19 In addition, I have worked my way through press archives (both in print and broadcast), and summarized the studies that have been published on the way the media treated the 9/11, Madrid and London attacks. The study could not have been complete without this, since the mass of individuals who were not directly victims or witnesses of the attacks actually reacted less to the attacks themselves than to what they perceived of them via the media.
This explains the architecture of my book. The first part, ‘What is happening to us’, explores the various facets of events comprised by the Islamist attacks in Western territory. Their treatment in the media is set in the context of all the operations of ‘framing’ to which they were subjected, on the part not only of journalists, columnists and intellectuals, but also of politicians and political institutions. Insofar as they impose definitions of the ‘we’ under attack, we will see that these operations convey the injunction to show solidarity and to feel concerned: these injunctions guide the reactions of ordinary people, but can also arouse their criticisms. While this first part of my book thus focuses on the question ‘What are we reacting to?’, the second turns to address the question ‘What made us react that way?’ Entitled ‘What touches us’, this part analyses what it is that generates the widespread emotion that finds expression in the face of the attacks, the vectors through which we identify with their victims and the reasons why we are indeed sensitive to their fate. In so doing, this second part highlights the role played in our reactions to the attacks by a sense of being concerned that goes beyond the different senses of ‘we’ which media and political discourses emphasize rather unevenly, and exacerbates the sense of ‘I’. Messages addressed to victims, as we shall see, are abundantly cited in support of the analysis. Giving them as large as possible a place in this book is also a way of paying tribute to those modest voices that, behind the din of bombs and Kalashnikovs, create great upwellings of solidarity.
Note on sources cited
Endnotes provide references to the following sources:
Mémorial de Caen, OF (Opération ‘Fraternellement’)
: messages from Operation ‘Fraternally’, consulted at the Mémorial de Caen and now held at the National September 11 Memorial & Museum, in New York.
Archivo del Duelo, DP (Documentos de Papel)
: documents on paper posted in the stations of Atocha, El Pozo and Santa Eugenia, in Madrid, from March to June 2004, consulted at the Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas in Madrid and now held at the National Railway Museum in Madrid.
Archivo del Duelo, FD (Fotografías digitales)
: photographs taken in the stations of Atocha, El Pozo and Santa Eugenia, in Madrid, from March to June 2004, consulted at the Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas in Madrid and now held at the National Railway Museum in Madrid.
Archivo del Duelo, EP (Espacio de Palabras)
: digital messages recorded from June 2004 to March 2005 via a computer set up in the stations of Atocha, El Pozo and Santa Eugenia, in Madrid, and the website
masceranos.com
, consulted at the Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas in Madrid and now held at the National Railway Museum in Madrid.
London Metropolitan Archives, LMA/4469 /
… : documents from the collection ‘London terrorist attack 7 July 2005: memorials to victims’ available from the London Metropolitan Archives.
9/11 Tribute Center, VC (Visitor Cards)
: messages written from September 2006 to June 2009 (date when the holdings were consulted) by visitors to the 9/11 Tribute Center in New York.
Notes
1.
Marie Fatayi-Williams, ‘Foreword’, in A. Closs Stephens and N. Vaughan Williams (eds.),
Terrorism and the politics of response
(London and New York: Routledge, 2009), p. xii.
2.
The term ‘attack’ (
attentat
) is used here in the sense, now current, of ‘terrorist act’ – that is, a random act of violence whose aim is to terrorize a population for political purposes, even though it initially had a much broader sense, as shown by the expression ‘attack on modesty’ (
attentat à la pudeur
, meaning ‘molestation’). It was long used as a generic term, the scholarly equivalent of ‘crime’ (the French dictionary
Littré
defines an attack (
attentat
) as a ‘criminal enterprise, against the law’), accompanied by a figurative use – now almost never found – designating an act that contravenes reason or violates morality (see Gilles Malandain, ‘Les sens d'un mot: ‘Attentat’, de l'Ancien Régime à nos jours’,
La Révolution Française
, 1, 2012, available online:
http://lrf.revues.org/368
).
3.
See Louis Quéré, ‘Pour un calme examen des faits de société’, in B. Lahire (ed.),
À quoi sert la sociologie?
(Paris: La Découverte, 2002), pp. 79–94.
4.
Emmanuel Todd,
Who is Charlie? Xenophobia and the new middle class
, tr. Andrew Brown (Cambridge: Polity, 2015).
5.
On the notion of ‘test’ (in the sense of ‘ordeal’) in sociology, see Yannick Barthe et al., ‘Sociologie pragmatique: Mode d'emploi’,
Politix
, 26 (103), 2013, pp. 175–204. [The French word used by Truc for ‘test’ is
épreuve
: it can mean an ‘ordeal’, a ‘trial’, or something which ‘puts X to the test’; I have used ‘test’ because the author is here partly drawing on the work of Luc Boltanski, where
épreuve
is generally translated as ‘test’. (Translator's note)]
6.
Dominique Linhardt, ‘Épreuves d'État: Une variation sur la définition wébérienne de l'État’,
Quaderni
, 78, 2012, pp. 5–22.
7.
See Alexandra Bidet, Louis Quéré and Gérôme Truc, ‘Ce à quoi nous tenons: Dewey et la formation des valeurs’, in J. Dewey,
La formation des valeurs
, tr. A. Bidet, L. Quéré and G. Truc (Paris: La Découverte, 2011), pp. 5–64.
8.
Émile Durkheim,
The division of labour in society
, 2nd edition, ed. Steven Lukes, tr. W. D. Halls (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013). The book was first published as
De la division du travail social
, in 1893.
9.
See ‘La décennie Ben Laden’,
Le Monde
, special issue, July–September 2011.
10.
Rick Coolsaet, ‘Au temps du terrorisme anarchiste’,
Monde diplomatique
, 606, September 2004, p. 26.
11.
John Merrimann,
The dynamite club: How a bombing in fin-de-siècle Paris ignited the age of modern terror
(Boston, MA, and New York, NY: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2009).
12.
‘Nouvel attentat anarchiste’,
Le Temps
, 14 February 1894, p. 1.
13.
Larry Portis, ‘La sociologie consensuelle et le terrorisme: De la propagande par le fait à Unabomber’,
L'Homme et la Société
, 123–4, 1997, pp. 57–74 at p. 57. (See also Larry Portis, ‘La terreur et la sociologie’,
Divergences
, 14, 2008, available online:
http://divergences.be/spip.php?rubrique347
.) There are traces of this view in
La psychologie des foules
by Gustave Le Bon, published 1895 (English tr.
The crowd: A study of the popular mind
(Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977)), and in Gabriel Tarde: see in particular Gabriel Tarde, ‘Les crimes de haine’,
Archives d'Anthropologie Criminelle
, 9 (51), 1894, pp. 241–54.
14.
Edward A. Tiryakian, ‘Durkheim, solidarity, and September 11’, in J. C. Alexander and P. Smith (eds.),
The Cambridge Companion to Durkheim
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), pp. 305–31.
15.
See for example Julian E. Barnes, ‘As demand soars, flag makers help bolster nation's morale’,
New York Times
, 23 September 2001, available online:
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/09/23/business/nation-challenged-proud-spirits-demand-soars-flag-makers-help-bolster-nation-s.html
.
16.
Bradley S. Greenberg and Linda Hofschire, ‘Summary and discussion’, in B. S. Greenberg (ed.),
Communication and terrorism: Public and media responses to 9/11
(Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press, 2002), p. 320.
17.
Tiryakian, ‘Durkheim, solidarity, and September 11’, pp. 316–17.
18.
See Cristina Sánchez-Carretero, Antonio Cea, Paloma Díaz-Mas, Pilar Martínez and Carmen Ortiz, ‘On blurred borders and interdisciplinary research teams: The case of the “Archive of Mourning”’,
Forum: Qualitative Social Research
, 12 (3), 2011, available online:
http://nbn-resolving.de/urn:nbn:de:0114-fqs1103124
.
19.
I will return at greater length to these messages and the method used to analyse them in due course.
Part IWhat is happening to us
We do not know what is happening to us, but this is precisely what is happening to us: the fact that we do not know what is happening to us.
José Ortega y Gasset
1Under attack
There's been a massacre at the Charlie Hebdo offices. They say a dozen people have been killed … The circumstances are still vague. Nobody has any further details. You turn on the radio, the television; you look for news online. You ask the people around you, and phone round for information. Your day has been interrupted; you've already realized that things aren't going to follow their usual course today. This is the main characteristic of a terrorist attack: it ‘brutally disrupts our tacit expectation that our environment will provide stability and continuity’.1 Suddenly, without warning, violence, death and destruction break into the peaceful course of our lives, and radically undermine the ‘routine grounds’2 of our activities.
This phenomenon has probably never been as brutally clear as on 11 September 2001, since the terrorist attacks carried out on that day represented ‘a radical transformation of the ordinary forms of terrorism’:3 rightly or wrongly, these attacks seemed to come from nowhere – there had been no warning signs, and they did not fall within the context of any familiar historical struggle. This was not true of the periodical Charlie Hebdo, which had been the focus of threats after it published caricatures of Muhammed. Likewise, the Spanish initially thought that the train bombings on 11 March 2004 were yet another ETA attack. And even before the 7 July 2005 attack in London, the British had had time to take on board the idea that, sooner or later, they would be targeted by Islamists. So it is impossible to understand the reactions produced by these attacks in Europe – the reason why, for example, the Charlie Hebdo shootings were seen as a ‘French 9/11’ – without having first taken the trouble to examine how the attacks on 11 September had been experienced on either side of the Atlantic. We need to focus on what was involved in this initial attack if we are to understand every new Islamist assault that occurs in a Western country.
9/11 live: Accident, terrorist attack, or act of war?
Even if some terrorist attacks come as less of a surprise than others, every attack, at the time it is carried out, creates a new and uncertain situation that needs to be defined. What is happening? What do I now need to expect? What should be done? Answering these questions requires what the American sociologist Erving Goffman calls a ‘framework’,4 i.e. ‘a cognitive and practical structure for organizing social experience, enabling us to understand what is happening to us and to take part in it’.5 A framework is not just an interpretation, a representation or an after-the-event narrativization of what has happened. It becomes apparent in the very course of ongoing events, by way of describable activities – the framing operations – that help us to explain the events, specify which people are concerned by them, and decide on the best way to react to them. As one case of uncertainty as to the framework of a particular situation, Erving Goffman takes the example of the blackout that, on 30 November 1965, plunged the north-eastern United States into darkness: ‘With the lights failing all over New York, the individual does not know whether there has been a technical failure, an enemy attack, or sabotage.’6 It was exactly this same uncertainty that marked the first hours of 11 September 2001. When, a few seconds after 8.46 a.m., New Yorkers suddenly heard the noise of a loud explosion coming from the south of Manhattan,7 and turned to look at the towers of the World Trade Center, they realized that the north tower was on fire. But the vast majority of them did not at that time know what had led to the blaze.
11 September 2001, 8.46 a.m.: The need to define a situation
The event instantly reached American newsrooms, which thereupon kept their cameras permanently trained on Manhattan. CNN was the first national channel to interrupt its programme, a few seconds before 8.50 a.m., to broadcast a static shot showing a thick cloud of smoke rising from the upper floors of the north tower of the World Trade Center into the clear blue sky of that Tuesday morning.8 Superimposed on the image were the words ‘World Trade Center Disaster’. At this stage, CNN journalists had no reliable information at their disposal. They spoke of ‘something devastating’ and mentioned the possibility of a plane crashing into the tower only as a hypothesis, stemming from ‘unconfirmed reports’.
At the same time, CNN reporters were roaming the streets of Manhattan looking for eyewitnesses. The first hours of live media coverage of 9/11, on both television and radio, in the United States as in the rest of the world, would give a great deal of space to these eyewitness accounts gathered in the streets.9 But these were partial and often contradictory: some people swore that the tower had imploded from within and confirmed that they had heard reports of a bomb, while others stated that they had seen a plane flying in over Manhattan at a very low altitude just before the explosion in the tower. But at that time, nobody had access to any image that would enable this to be confirmed with certainty.10 So there was a plethora of hypotheses as to what kind of plane had been involved: a small tourist plane such as a Cesna, or an airliner, maybe a Boeing? In the former case, it might be an accident, but in the latter, it might have been a hijacked plane. Furthermore, the weather conditions, which on that morning were perfect, did not make an accidental crash seem likely.
Suddenly, at 9.03 a.m., just as one witness was on air stating that he had seen a big plane embedding itself in the north tower of the World Trade Center, a plane in flight surreptitiously appeared on the image for a fraction of a second, then vanished. The picture was interrupted for a moment, then the screen showed a ball of fire. The static shot broadcast by CNN did not distinguish between the Twin Towers, and so it was some time before the journalists gathered what had just happened: initially, they thought there had been a second explosion in the same tower. Then, when they realized that it was in fact the south tower that was now on fire, they again mentioned the possibility of a plane crash, but only as a hypothesis that needed to be verified. The framework of the developing situation was still very ill-defined.
However, this framework would become clear over the next half hour, as experts (especially those from air security and the FBI) were contacted by journalists, and press releases were issued by Associated Press and Reuters. The hypothesis of a hijacked plane gained ground, while an accident started to seem increasingly unlikely. Journalists were now talking in terms of a probable ‘terrorist act’. At 9.29 a.m., President Bush, speaking from Emma Booker Elementary School in Sarasota, Florida, where he was visiting, made a brief statement in which he spoke of a ‘national tragedy’ and an ‘apparent terrorist attack on our country’. Barely eight minutes later, at 9.37 a.m., journalists reported a new explosion, this time at the Pentagon, Washington. Less than one hour after the first plane had crashed, there was no further room for doubt: these were not accidents, and the United States was the target for several coordinated attacks.
The event now became international in its scope. In Europe, it was the middle of the afternoon, and TV channels interrupted their programmes to give way to special editions in which they broadcast, live, the images supplied by American channels, in particular CNN. France 2 was the first channel to do so in France, at 3.33 p.m. (9.33 a.m. New York time, in other words just after President Bush's speech, and before the explosion at the Pentagon): this was just a few moments earlier than TF1. On all the television channels, journalists immediately spoke of terrorist attacks, and said the Twin Towers had been struck by airliners, probably hijacked by terrorists. For example, Élise Lucet, presenting the special edition on France 3, emphasized right from the start that President Bush himself was ‘talking very clearly in terms of a terrorist action, and not an accident’.11 The video of the second crash, involving United Airlines Flight 175 flying into the south tower of the World Trade Center, was immediately broadcast on a loop (at normal speed or in slow motion), continuously on TF1, and five times in ten minutes on France 2.
To make the developing event as intelligible as possible, journalists endeavoured to relate it to precedents or warning signs, so as to elucidate its causes, shed light on its meaning, and make conjectures as to its consequences.12 This was also one way of assessing the extent to which this event marked a complete ‘break’ with the past, and of giving some idea of its more or less ‘historic’ character.13 On all the French television channels, from the first moments of live transmission, one attack already carried out by Islamists on the World Trade Center in February 1993 was mentioned. Christian Malard, on France 3, justified this comparison, pointing out that the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine (DFLP) had just claimed responsibility for the attacks. And, mentioning Al-Qaeda as another possible line of inquiry, he also referred to the attacks on the American embassies in Tanzania and Kenya in 1998, as well as the explicit threats to the United States uttered by the Al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden – whose name was starting to circulate in the media less than one hour after the first crash.
These first thoughts were, however, formulated while the towers of the World Trade Center were still standing. They no longer seemed adequate once these towers had been reduced to dust, and journalists had started to estimate the number of deaths at 40,000 or 50,000, while only an hour earlier, shortly after the crash of the second aeroplane, they had gone no further than a few ‘hundred deaths’ (the aircraft passengers).14 One historical precedent then quickly emerged, overshadowing all others in the US media: the attack on Pearl Harbor.
‘The Pearl Harbor of the twenty-first century’
It's a familiar story. On 11 September 2001, in the evening, before going to bed, President Bush noted in his private diary: ‘The Pearl Harbor of the twenty-first century took place today.’15 He was simply recording what had, in the course of the day, imposed itself on the United States as the dominant interpretation of the situation: these attacks were not only an attack on the United States, but nothing less than a ‘new Pearl Harbor’. It would be wrong to think that this analogy was a way of narrativizing 9/11 after the event. It played a major role in the course of events on the actual day: it made it possible both to determine the nature of what was happening (an unexpected act of aggression on the US), to point to those responsible (external enemies) and to allow people to surmise what the outcome would be (military retaliation).
This comparison of 9/11 with Pearl Harbor, the validity of which has sparked much debate,16 may, with the benefit of hindsight, appear relevant in many ways: in both cases the United States were attacked by surprise, and by air (the use of hijacked planes rather than bombs was an element which clearly distinguished the 9/11 attacks from others); and the human toll of the two attacks turned out to be on a similar scale (nearly 3,000 deaths for 9/11, just over 2,400 for Pearl Harbor). The analogy nevertheless tends to overlook the fact that the 9/11 attacks mainly hit a civilian target, the towers of the World Trade Center, while the target of the Japanese attack of 7 December 1941 had been military. In so doing, the analogy undeniably helped to underpin the way the 9/11 attacks were viewed as true ‘acts of war’.
The term ‘war’ emerged in public discourse only after the crash of American Airlines Flight 77 into the Pentagon and the collapse of the first of the two towers of the World Trade Center (the South Tower), at 9.59 a.m. If it had merely been a matter of President Bush's first speech, forty-five minutes after the first crash, and the comparisons being ventured at that stage by journalists with the attack on the World Trade Center in February 1993, or with the attacks on US embassies in 1998, the 9/11 attacks should have been seen as criminal acts – just like the most murderous attack in the United States before 11 September 2001, namely that perpetrated in Oklahoma City on 19 April 1995 (168 dead), whose author – Timothy McVeigh – was tried and executed by the Federal Government on 11 June 2001, three months to the day before 9/11. But the path followed was very different, and for that reason it was predictable that, even ten years later, bin Laden – named by the United States as the main figure responsible for 9/11 – would not be arrested and tried as Timothy McVeigh had been, but executed as part of a military operation. This too was the result of the way 9/11 was, from the very first hours of the event, viewed as an act of war rather than as a criminal act.
That same day, the political scientist Robert Kagan, a leading neoconservative intellectual, wrote a summons to war in which he stated that resorting to law and justice would be inappropriate in the face of the attack that had just been suffered by the United States:
