As the National Assembly hands out new medals to heroic citizens, this series examines the changes in heroism in contemporary society. This time, the floor is given to the philosopher François Azouvi, for whom the victim now replaces the hero.
Arnaud Beltrame, a senior officer in the French gendarmerie, died with his throat cut in March 2018 in Trèbes, in the Aude, after having surrendered to a terrorist kidnapper in exchange for the release of his hostages. “In the thick of the action, Lieutenant-Colonel Beltrame illustrated military virtues in a dazzling manner, which deserves the respect and admiration of the entire nation,” declared President Emmanuel Macron a few hours after the hero’s execution.
The commemorative plaque installed in a garden of the IIIe arrondissement of Paris named in his honor offered another enlightening perspective with this very strange inscription presenting Arnaud Beltrame as a “victim of his heroism”. The strange formula has since been modified, but the initial choice reported on the first page of the philosopher’s new book From hero to victim (Gallimard) portrays the subject of contemporary mutations of heroism well.
“No doubt it was wanted to give the hero an extra heroism by making him a “victim of his heroism”, as if the mere qualification of hero insufficiently marked his value, writes François Azouvi. But can we imagine Malraux, on December 19, 1964, at the Pantheon, saying of Jean Moulin that he was a victim of his heroism? It is because we have changed worlds since 1964.”
The following shows how and why this anthropological upheaval occurs. “I encountered the theme in my two previous books, which were interested in the memory of the Second World War, the first on the victims of the Shoah and the other on the heroes, the resistance fighters,” explains Mr. Azouvi in an interview, reached in Paris. A historian and philosopher from the École des hautes études en sciences sociales, he has also written extensively on great thinkers (Kant, Descartes, Bergson, etc.).
“I realized while doing the two courses that the memory of the victims and that of the heroes intersected in the 1960s and 1970s. The memory of the heroes is very strong at the time of the war and the ten or fifteen years that follow and, conversely, the memory of the victims is rather diminished. The two movements then reverse, and the memory of the victims takes over. This is not specific to France. In all Western countries, yours too, in general, with exceptions, President Zelensky for example, the memory of the victims ends up taking over and becomes invasive.”
Burn so as not to go out
The documentation of the transition from the heroic model to the victim model is full of examples. The Shoah plays a central role in the process.
Jews, six million times murdered in the middle of the 20th centurye century, become paradigmatic because they died “absolutely for nothing”. But, from the Six Day War (June 1967), the Jewish “privilege” of the absolute victim is envied, and the capital of sympathy is squandered by the Zionists supported by “American imperialism”. Let’s say when the Israelis go over to the side of the strong. This movement is amplified with the Gaza war up to the recent accusations of genocide, to the point of comparing Israel to the Nazi Reich.
The colonized, women and children followed as categories of central victims, oppressed subjects who must then be liberated. This is said without François Azouvi denying the justness of the causes and the legitimacy of the demands for justice. The categories that were long separate and autonomous now merge in the theories of intersectionality postulating that discriminations based on race, gender and class are added together in certain people.
“The hero is a character that is offered for admiration,” says Mr. Azouvi. “It is a difficult requirement. There is something inherently elitist in this model. The world of heroes is a small world. On the contrary, the world of victims invites propagation. In this model, competition seems inevitable. Suddenly, when Jewish victims appear, other categories quickly come to say that they are not the only ones, some claiming to be more universal, more important. Palestinians become the absolute victims or poor black women in other systems.”
Religion without religion
The shelves of libraries and bookstores are beginning to overflow with scholarly books on the subject of this paradigm shift with eloquent titles: The Age of Victimization ; The Victims’ Society ; The time of victims ; Competition of victims… In a recent France Culture broadcast, François Azouvi was interviewed on the obsessive theme in the company of Pascal Bruckner, who has just published I suffer therefore I am. Portrait of the victim as heroAmerican essayists have been adding masses of this for decades.
François Azouvi’s analysis stands out in trying to explain this victimizing outburst by the mutations of the sacred and, more precisely, by the withdrawal of the religious in its institutional form. The victim plays in some way an absolute role of substitution. She is sacralized. She embodies the Good and the True.
“I was struck by the absolutely perfect concomitance between the shift to the victim model and the great fracture causing the West to lose its anchoring in religion. I said to myself that it is not possible that the two things are not related.”
Moreover, as soon as the victim appears in Western consciousness and becomes a category in its own right, it is almost immediately described as sacred. The professor sees this as the consequence of the withdrawal of religion.
“In a traditional religious system, there is no room for the victim,” he said. “In Christianity, there are martyrs. [qui choisissent leur sort] and heroes. Two models that we must resemble by surpassing ourselves. In past societies, the hero is fundamental. The Iliad celebrates heroes. Now this exemplarity is problematic. But with the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelensky, we are rediscovering admirable exemplarity no longer as a norm, but rather as an exception.
The professor then recounts that when President Hollande wanted to bring French people into the Pantheon, a report recommended that he favor women, as parity required, but also ordinary, average people. The idea was to allow everyone to identify with these ordinary citizens, while the Pantheon was precisely founded by the Republic to celebrate the extraordinary. The president did not follow this instruction and ultimately favored resistance fighters.
“A society where there are no more heroes is a difficult society,” says François Azouvi. “The victim who replaces him appears when we no longer know what to do with suffering. No society can do without giving meaning to misfortune. In religion, suffering is a condition for salvation, a redemption. When the system collapses, the victims are sacred. They are given religion without religion.”