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

Introduction
Terrorist 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

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).

Dedication

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