Blood in the City: Violence and Revelation in Paris, 1789-1945 (review)

Blood in the City is a truly impressive work of cultural history: it traces, over a span of 150 years, the uses to which, in France, sacrifice and sacrificial logic were put by political and social groups. Burton’s book, immensely learned, encyclopedic in scope, charts the bloodletting that marked political changeovers in France. From the first killings of de Launay and de Flesselles at the Bastille on July 14, 1789, to the post- World War II purges and executions (Pétain, Laval, Brasillach, and a host of others), French history is marked, Burton asserts, not by peaceful, constitutional change, but rather by the repetitious and quite savage execution-murder of scapegoats. Every political and social changeover is marked by the guillotining, strangling, shooting, hanging, and evisceration of individuals taken to be representative of a hated opposing order: these killings, following a Christian, if not Catholic model, are then held to be purifying of the social order. Not for nothing does the French national anthem, the Marseillaise, written during the Revolution, contain the words: “Qu’un sang impur / Abreuve nos sillons!” [May an impure blood / Drench our fields!].