Terrorism in France with Dr. Chris Millington

Gary: Today's special episode is with Dr. Chris Millington, a longtime friend of the show, where we talk about his new book, The Invention of Terrorism in France: 1904 to 1939. Please enjoy.

Well, thank you for being on the show, Dr. Millington. Your book is fantastic, although I noticed that in the acknowledgements section there wasn't a special shout out to me, which I would think that having been on this podcast so many times that, you know, I kind of made you. But what's up with that?

Chris: I'll mention you in the next one.

Gary: All right. Your book is all about terrorism, but that word itself is so problematic. Can you even begin to explain the minefield you jump into when trying to define terrorism?

Chris: Yes. Well, I begin the book by asking the reader what does the reader think of when they read the word terrorism and terrorist? Because we all think we know what it is because we've seen enough of it in the news over the last 20 years to recognize or we think to recognize what is and what what isn't terrorism. And I think we could all agree to that terrorism, it's a really emotive term. It's got great contemporary resonance. So today we see debates about who is a terrorist, who isn't a terrorist. And that can have a great impact on understanding of conflict internationally and acts of political violence in domestic context too. So just to give you two examples, a much cited instance in the literature on terrorism is that Islamic inspired attackers are commonly labeled terrorists, whereas attackers who are white supremacists, for example, are not generally labeled terrorists by politicians and by the media. And currently in Britain, there has been a debate about whether the BBC, so the national news broadcaster should label certain groups terrorists or not involved in the Middle East conflict. And this is all because of the labels capacity and power really to delegitimize the courts and and as well as having very concrete legal ramifications for anyone who's convicted of terrorism. So it is a minefield, partly because it's such a powerful term and that can be used in a political sense, but in an academic sense as well the problem lies in the fact that there are so many different examples of groups using political violence throughout history, that it's difficult to find one definition of terrorism that fits them all. Now, this doesn't mean that terrorism can't be defined, because you can actually go and find about 250 definitions of terrorism out there in the scholarly texts on the subject. It's just the problem is finding a consensus that everyone accepts is the definition of terrorism. So if we take, for example, something as simple as the targets of terrorism generally today, we'd say that terrorists target civilians because they want to kill as many people as possible. But that wasn't always the case. So there were periods in history when attacks were much more targeted, when the victims were generally state officials or policemen or soldiers or heads of government. Now, does that mean that they weren't terrorists because they didn't kill civilians, according to our definition? So it all depends on your own definition. But what I try to do in the book is foreground what people in the past thought terrorism was, rather than impose a contemporary definition on a period that's just just not suited to it.

Gary: I think a lot of people view terrorism as a modern phenomenon. However, terrorism has a long history in France. Can you explain when terrorism, as we might understand it first appeared and what forms did it take?

Chris:   Yes, well, you're right that terrorism has a long history. In fact, you can find some historians who write that it stretches back to the dawn of time.  I'm not quite sure what that means. And that's not what I would do. I would say that terrorism, because for me, it's a label used to describe an act of violence. So you can only trace the history of terrorism as far back as the, the invention of the label. So, it's first used at the time of the French Revolution during the terror against counter-revolutionaries. And now of course, this was the policy of the French state at the time. So again, we have the problem of definition because we might not recognize that as terrorism today. And if we're thinking about our own understandings of terrorism, and if very broadly, we might say terrorism is the tactic of substate or non-state groups using violence not only to achieve political objectives, but also to communicate a political message beyond the victims of their attack. So to communicate to a broader audience. And this can communication element is seen as central to lots of definitions of terrorism. We begin to see the emergence of this sort of thing around the turn of the 20th century. And certainly it's at this time that the French seem to have begun to use the label terrorism more frequently, often to label Russian political groups. And, and it's to this period that historians of terrorism generally look for the emergence of what we might recognize in the 21st century as terrorism and terrorist groups. So, beginning with the anarchists of the 1890s, when the idea that to communicate your propaganda through action. So, propaganda by the deed, as it was called, was formulated by European anarchists. And this is considered at the time to be a new type of political action. And it's thought to be more effective than simply making speeches and printing pamphlets and speaking at meetings. And it's at this time that we see this propaganda of the deed put into action, with the assassinations of heads of state and other officials. In fact, the last decade of the 19th century has been termed the Golden Age of assassinations because so many people were killed in this way. But we do have a few civilian casualties as well. So, for example, in the French case, the anarchist bomber Émile Henry bombed a Parisian cafe in February 1894, and he killed one person and injured more than a dozen others. But we also have these assassinations taking place in France directed at the government as well. So in the same year, in June 1894, the French president is killed by an Italian anarchist. So what I think we see at this time is something that looks like our own terrorism, of course, defined in broadest terms. And by that I mean a spectacular act of political violence designed to terrorize an audience, designed to communicate a message to a broader audience. And now these attackers at this time, these anarchists, they  were generally considered to be lone actors, to use a modern term. And that wasn't always the case. They did have anarchist comrades who helped them, but they're generally considered to be lone actors and not part of an international conspiracy. This was actually an invention of counterterrorist efforts at this time, that there was this global network of anarchists looking to to overturn the social order globally, which we might consider to be a feature of our terrorism today. So, international terrorist networks. But I think if we're talking about something that begins to look a bit like what we think terrorism is, it's in this period.

Gary: The first chapter of your book goes into detail about the Russian bogeyman. Why were Russians so feared? What activities were terrorists involved in?

Chris:  Well, I think that's a good way of describing how the the French imagined the Russians at the end of the 19th century. So this is a period of great, well, as far as we can tell, great popular interest in Russia. So, Russia and France are moving closer together as allies. There are Russians coming to France, and there is an expatriate community in Paris and Russian products and gain some form of social and cultural capital in France. So it's popular to buy Russian fashion, for example, or smoke Russian cigarettes. But Russians are also known for their attraction or supposed attraction to political violence. So this idea, I trace this idea as emerging to about the 1860s, when we have the emergence in Russia of nihilism. So, this is interpreted outside Russia as a revolutionary political doctrine. Now, I think it's important to understand that within Russia itself, nihilism is not necessarily intended to be this violent political doctrine. It's more intended to be a way of life or philosophy of living in which you rebel against the system, but you don't necessarily take up arms to do this. But the important thing in France is, is that it is misinterpreted as a violent, revolutionary doctrine. And it comes to be seen by French political activists and particularly early anarchists, as a means of violent opposition in Russia, the Tsarist authoritarian regime. But also in France it can be used as a means of opposition to the bourgeois state as well. And now all of this is reported in France. So, the press is a huge source of information that I use in the book. And, and these events in Russia are being interpreted and mediated in France by the popular press. And it influences how the French come to understand terrorist action and its association with Russia and nihilism. Now, after the turn of the 20th century, we have widespread outbreaks of political violence in Russia. And so there are anti-state groups attacking the Tsarist regime, some of them demanding socialist revolution, some of them wanting more democracy. And this is all reported back in France as terrorism, partly because some of these groups themselves call themselves terrorists, but also because by this time the French tend to think, oh well, that's just what Russians do. That's how they act. And with the anarchist threat in France having receded at this time, terrorism begins to look like something that other people do, that Russians do, that foreigners do and not really something that French people do. It's something specifically Russian. And this is only, um, reinforced by the discovery now and again of bomb making factories in Paris, in amongst the Russian exile community. This is the way it's reported. So, you have these Russians who've perhaps escaped Tsarist repression in Russia. They've escaped to Paris. They are apparently living in communes, in Parisian apartment buildings, in very poor conditions, making bombs to then send back to their comrades in Russia. So this fear callers people's impressions that actually terrorism is something that you import to France and it's imported by the so so-called Slavic peoples who just have a predilection for violence and and so this is where we begin to see the development of an idea that terrorism is not really French. If anything, the French define themselves against these people. And terrorism is somehow alien to a French way of life, a French way of thinking, whatever you want to call it.

Gary: There have been quite a number of high profile terrorist attacks in the early 20th century France. Prime Minister Clemenceau in 1919 who survived, President Paul Doumer in 1932  who was killed. Then Foreign Minister Louis Barthou was killed alongside the President of Yugoslavia in 1934. Why was it so easy to kill French politicians and what motivated terrorists to attack them?

Chris: Well, I think to address the first part of the question. Um, I suppose I've given this some thought. I guess it was just easier to remain unknown to the authorities. Now, if we think about the way terrorists might be detected today. So, in the digital age, when much of our lives are online, we use methods of communication that could be accessed or put under surveillance. And we might, especially in the UK, be caught on camera wherever we go. We might consider it actually surprising that anyone can today can commit a successful terrorist attack without having already been discovered, especially if we add into the mix that some of these people go online to express their views on their intentions before they take action. Now, if we compare that back to the period I cover in the book, surveillance was much more rudimentary, I suppose, by our standards. But but it did still exist. So police forces kept watch on suspects, and they made or they were forced to make much greater use of spies and informers than counterintelligence agencies today or counter-terrorism agencies today. So this is what terrorism study scholars call human intelligence through the use of actual agents within groups. And that necessarily in the past played a greater role than the monitoring of communications. But but actually today, counter-terrorism experts tend to recognize that this human intelligence is more effective than the monitoring of communications. And in the end, I guess that both now and in the past, the authorities did their utmost to prevent attacks. But I suppose if someone is hell bent on doing this type of thing, it's a challenge to stop them. And it was even more of a challenge in the the 1920s and 1930s. As for the the motivations of these attackers, in the three cases that you mentioned, and in 1919, a young anarchist called Emile Cottin tried to assassinate the prime Minister George Clemenceau. His his explanation was that he wanted to take down Clemenceau, because Clemenceau was so instrumental in the repression of anarchism in France, and he had this personal sense of grievance against him for that reason. The man who killed President Doumer in 1932 is a Russian called Paul Gorguloff. Now he is a self proclaimed Russian fascist. He says he wants to kill Doumer, not because he has anything in particular against Doumer as a person, but because he thinks that France is the closest international ally of the Soviet Union. And so he thinks that to remove Doumer will weaken the Soviet Union. And in 1934, we have, as you mentioned, Louis Barthou, the French foreign minister, killed during an assassination in Marseille. He was actually or Barthou was actually sat next to the target of the assassination and was was shot by accident, I suppose we'd say, and then bled to death because he didn't receive the right medical attention. Now, some people argue that Barthou was, or some people at the time argued that Barthou was a target of the assassination, but I don't really think he was. I think he was just in the wrong place in the in the wrong time. But the assassin who acted in Marseilles was hoping to destroy the Yugoslav state by assassinating the head of that state. And so I think what I've just explained really demonstrates that terrorism is committed for a variety of political aims. It's part of broader political agendas. And terrorists don't really just kill for the fun of it. They don't kill people. They don't perpetrate their attacks with no end in mind. It's always part of a often a very carefully thought out political strategy.

Gary: A big theme of your book involves defining terrorism. You've talked about how scholars define terrorism, but you also discuss how the French people define terrorism. How did they perceive it?

Chris:  What I do is I use the term on French to try to encapsulate, on the broadest of levels, what I thought to be the central feature of the way the French perceived terrorism. Now it sounds, maybe sounds a bit clumsy this term on French, but I felt this better described ideas as terrorism than simply using the term foreign or non French. And now of course, the figure of the foreigner or the non French national looms very large in representations of the terrorist because, as I've explained, we have the Russian nihilist or the Russian anarchist of the early 1900s, right through to Spanish fascist agents in the late 1930s. The terrorist is also usually depicted as an immigrant, a resident in France, as a refugee or an asylum seeker, or an illegal alien or a spy. So any of these stereotypes or images are deployed to represent the terrorist, and he or she is often accused of abusing French hospitality by being in the country. And therefore the idea that terrorism was foreign or perpetrated by foreigners sparked debates over immigration control in the 1930, and debates about how many refugees should be allowed into the country. And in this sense, the French are in the 1930’s, they're confronting a challenge that had already been encountered in Great Britain and in the United States earlier in the 20th century. This idea that anarchists are immigrants. And so the French are supposed catching up with this in the 1930s. But as I said, I don't describe terrorism just as foreign because I think it was cast as on French as well. And what that meant was it was thought to be contrary to what we might call a French mentality. Now, this mentality, of course, rested on who you thought a true French person was. Or or more specifically, really what you thought the politics of a true French person was? So if you're on the right wing of politics, you generally think that terrorists are communists. They're being directed from Moscow, and their intent is to spread global revolution. And during the Second World War, right wingers also blamed London for directing terrorism in France. And now in both of these cases, conservatives, right wingers, extreme right wingers depict the terrorists harmful to the national interest. They say it's unpatriotic. It's a treacherous activity. And it's, no one who was truly French could do this. Now, when the terrorists are actually right wingers themselves, the conservative press trivializes their violence or doesn't discuss the motives of their attacks. Now, if you're on the left in France and you also consider terrorism to be an unFrench act. But you see, as the act of international fascism and you see its perpetrators as agents of Hitler or Mussolini or Franco in Spain, or a mysterious fascist international organization. And so, in this context, if you're on the left, you think that terrorists are trying to undermine Republican France, undermine the French nation and install a fascist dictatorship. And so when we're looking at attitudes to terrorism, we have to appreciate the differences in politics or the political meanings that are invested in terrorism and the terrorist. But we also have to recognize that there was this conjunction of ideas that true frenchness was was contrary to terrorism. So anyone who was truly French simply could not be a terrorist.

Gary: Your expertise is, of course, in the radical movements of interwar France. Tell us all about this period with its secret organizations, international espionage, and plots against the government.

Chris: Yet the period on which the book focuses really most is the interwar years, and especially the later interwar years, and this is generally understood as a time of undeclared civil war in France. So especially the period 1934 to 1944 has been called the French Civil War. Now, these are the years when, what we might call the great ideological battles in Europe and come to influence the character of French domestic politics. So, of course, when I refer to these ideological battles, I mean that broadly between the fascist right, the socialist or communist left and democrats in between and, and so on in France, on the right, we see the emergence of extreme right wing paramilitary groups, which are called the milice and who may or may not have been fascist, depending on which book you read and which definition of fascism you adopt. But they generally seek to bring down the Third Republic and replace it with something that they think is stronger so on the model of Hitler or Mussolini. On the left we have the communists and socialists who for much of the period these two parties are at each other's throats, because Moscow has directed the communists to treat the socialists as their enemies. And, but after 1934 they agree in alliance against the French fascists. And then we have the Third Republic, which is a democratic parliamentary regime which is struggling to function in the face of various political and economic crises, and whose parliament is generally paralyzed. Now, where this history of terrorism, I think, fits best into this storyline about radical movements in France is in 1937. So in late 1937, in September, we have a period of about two weeks in that year where we see how much France is embroiled in this age of extremes through instances of violence and plots and intrigues and secret agents, I suppose, which highlight the various political factions. So, the period begins on the 11th of September, 1937, when two buildings are blown up in Paris. And this attack is called terrorism in the press.  If you're on the right, it's an act of communist terrorism because the buildings that were destroyed where the headquarters of two employers unions. However, it was actually perpetrated by an extreme right wing group called, popularly known as La Cagoule. This was a terrorist group which was trying to spread fear of communist revolution in the hope that the army would step in and put down the Communist Party and overturn the Third Republic. So we have this fascist terrorist group committing this attack, and it's eventually exposed in November 1937. Now a week after these buildings are destroyed in the port of Brest in the west of France, its Spanish Francoist agents try to steal a submarine from Brest. So a Spanish Republican submarine is docked in Brest and it is boarded by what we can describe as Francoist pirates who want to steal the submarine and sail it back to a Spanish nationalist port. This again exposes the operations of foreign agents, and while turning out to be foreign terrorists in French politics, it shows that the Spanish Civil War is spilling over onto French territory, and it increases the feelings of insecurity at this time. And then a few days later, we have a Russian general who is in exile in Paris because of his anti-Soviet views, and he is kidnapped in broad daylight from a Parisian street. And he is well, it's thought that he is chloroformed and then transported to the northern coast of France and then shipped back to the Soviet Union, where he's imprisoned. But again, it shows that France is entangled in this ideological conflict in Europe. Again, it exposes the fact that France seems to be just the playground of terrorists, where these people can do whatever they want and perpetrate attacks, kidnap, kidnap immigrants, steal submarines and it all exacerbates a feeling of insecurity. But the the the one thing that seems to run throughout these is that it all seems to be an un French way of acting, and it shows that foreign powers are operating in France and or they are operating in France through their French servants or French lieutenants. And it does a lot to heighten fears at a time when France is fearing the oncoming war in Europe too.

Gary: You conclude by talking about how the collaborationist Vichy government painted the resisters as terrorists? How did this ideological battle play out, and how did the resisters go from being a dangerous radical to a hero?

Chris: Yeah. What we see in the during the war years when the French, as you say, living under this Vichy regime and the French have to contend too with the German occupier, we see that these ideas about terrorism that have developed in the previous decades fit themselves pretty well into the context of the war. So Vichy can quite comfortably portray the resistance as un French, as not truly French, because they are fighting against what Vichy would describe as the French national interest. And of course, Vichy defines this national interest itself. But also because it claims the resisters are being directed either by general de Gaulle in London or by Moscow. And so all these things that people have come to believe terrorism is and who terrorists are, Vichy can invest its own propaganda in these things. And it's actually the Vichy regime that passes the first law in French history to mention the word terrorism, which is in 1943. And now if we were trying to be objective, we might say, well, maybe the terrorists, sorry, maybe the resisters did fit some definitions of terrorism. If we think it is a form of political violence with an element of communication to it. Now, that is not a very popular opinion amongst historians, and it would take a brave historian to label the resistance terrorist purely because of the the moral connotations that go with the word. Now, the resisters themselves were very much aware that Vichy accusation had huge propaganda value, and it mounted a public relations campaign to try and get resisters to fight against the idea that they they were terrorists. So there is discussion about how resisters or supporters of the resistance should, wherever they hear anyone, describe the resistance as terrorists, they should try to argue against this accusation, whether it's in waiting for the train or in the queue at the bread shop, you must do whatever you can to combat this accusation of terrorism. So the resistance itself understood the power of the word to delegitimize its cause. And they themselves argued that Vichy was committing terrorism because Vichy was a foreign backed power. It was not really French, it was not truly representative of the true France. And so we see that this French idea of terrorism is quite neatly used by both sides in the war or during the war. Now, of course, the resister becomes the hero at the liberation. And now it's possible for the legal government of France to start branding its former enemies as traitors and terrorists. And it's here that the book ends by essentially arguing that the contemporary idea of terrorism in France today, we can generally trace it back to this period when, after the war, the resistance and the liberation government,  was so involved in connecting resistance and anti-terrorism with French democratic and republican values, that this has persisted until today.

Gary: What impact did all this concern of terrorism have on France and abroad?

Chris: Well, what I try to do is trace how what we might call, perhaps imperfectly, this thing that we now call terrorism first emerged. So not really the facts of terrorism. Although, and when I say the facts, I mean the acts of terror, although they did have some very consequential impacts, such as the assassination of the president, the assassination of the head of state of Yugoslavia, for example. But what I'm most interested in is how understandings of it changed and how the label was used and this whole labeling process. Now, the book uses incidents and case studies of terrorism to explore tensions within society at moments of attack. So over things such as gender, immigration and anti parliamentarianism. But don't think it's just a way to explore these deeper issues. So the discourse of terrorism also contributed to the way people understood other things as well. So if we take, for example, xenophobia and concerns over immigration, when a foreign terrorist attacked, the interpretations constructed around these attacks didn't just reveal deeper xenophobia, they also fed into this xenophobia. So the notion that foreigners were not just so-called job stealers, but they were also potential terrorists as well. And so this discourse of terrorism draws on all the discourses, but also contributes to these as well. And so, as I mentioned, the broader impact, I'd argue, is that by 1945, the French have this pretty developed, fairly solid notion of what terrorism is. And this framework of understanding can be deployed at later moments of terrorist violence, but invested with new meanings which are pertinent to the politics of the moment.

Gary: As you wrote this book, you must have been thinking about modern events as well. Ever since the September 11th, 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center in New York City, we really have been living in an age of terrorism. While 911 was the big event that inaugurated this new age. Virtually every European society has been hit with Islamic fundamentalist terrorism, as have other countries around the world. France, more than most countries, has suffered from these attacks. With the Toulouse mass shooting of 2012, the Charlie Hebdo shooting and the Jewish neighborhood shootings and the Bataclan massacre of 2015, the 2016 niece Lori attack, and the 2020 beheading of Samuel Paty being the most well known of them all. How do you believe France's experiences with past terrorism are impacting its current reaction to this new age of terrorism? Is it the same or different?

Chris: Yes. Well, when you list those attacks, it's quite depressing, actually, to think about how prevalent terrorism has been in France, particularly in recent years and especially since 911. The thing I might take issue with is whether we are living in an age of terrorism and whether this is new, because and I might ask whether terrorism today is actually much different to terrorism in the past. Aside from the fact that it seems to be or the number of victims seemed to be higher in particular. And I suppose when I was writing this book, I was thinking a lot about my own thoughts on terrorism and living in a society which we might or which certainly the UK government would say is threatened by terrorism. But I grew up in England, where at a time when the main threat from terrorism was actually from Irish paramilitaries, and so that influenced or that must have influenced the way I now think of terrorism. But it just goes to show that there was an age of terrorism before 911. And even if it was different, and I think it it shows that there is continuity and discontinuity in the history of terrorism too. But one of the things that got me interested in the project, first of all, was it was actually French responses to these recent attacks and namely, that the idea that terrorism was an attack on Republican values. So I think this was perhaps most famous when President Francois Hollande pitched himself as or pitched France as being at war with the terrorists, that the terrorists had declared war on French values, on Republican values, which are themselves framed as universal values. So it was very much represented as this existential clash between Western civilization and and terrorism. And this is actually a conception that begins to emerge in the period in the early 20th century. And so the striking thing for me today is that the way the French respond to more recent attacks, or the way they have responded to more recent attacks, is broadly in a similar way that they did in the 1930’s? Now, certainly the characters have changed,  so the bad guys have changed. But terrorism today is still framed as contrary to French values. It's still framed as being perpetrated by suspect immigrants or second or third generation French, but who are nevertheless described as never having really accepted France, never having really integrated into French culture. And I think that more broadly, this fits neatly with the Western idea that terrorism is an existential threat to the West and Western civilization, and it's sort of what the French were beginning to think in the early 20th century.

Gary: Finally, what lessons would you like the French people and its government to learn from past periods of terrorist violence that may help French society, lessons which perhaps are going unheeded?

Chris: Well, I'm not sure what lessons they might learn about terrorism. Perhaps it's a more general point that I think could be drawn from the study. And that is to and it's something we can all do. I think it's to be critical to think about the labels used by the press and government to describe things like terrorism. So when we hear something described as terrorism, and when we hear about something that we think should be described as terrorism but isn't, we might ask ourselves all, why is that? Why? Why is that word being used? What? What am I supposed to think when I hear that word? What does this this person want me to imagine? When I hear that a terrorist attack has been committed, and why? Or what might be the motivations or the agendas behind not describing something as a terrorist act? I think we have to ask as well. And again, it's about being critical when we think about terrorism. Ask ourselves, well, how do we know what terrorism is? Where is that knowledge come from? Why? If we hear about a terrorist, why might we imagine a certain type of person? And we need to challenge our own basic assumptions because we interpret the world around us through this sort of language. And so what we need to do is try and understand the origins of that language, and more importantly, the political ways in which that language is being used.

Gary: The book is The Invention of Terrorism in France: 1904 to 1939. Thank you very much for returning to the show, Dr. Millington.

Chris: Thank you.

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