Transitional Justice in the French Revolution and Post-Apartheid South Africa (article)

After a century in which judicial reformers had foreseen the building of “temples to clemency,” and in which the desire for a more lenient and less “barbarous” judicial system had become part of the “common faith” of all who regarded themselves as enlightened, the rigorously punitive and retributive style of justice that emerged in the French Revolution took many contemporaries by surprise (Barry Shapiro, Revolutionary Justice in Paris, 1789-1790,

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1993, pp. ix-x). Indeed, witnesses from across the political spectrum, who had taken comfort in living in a century in which, as the future revolutionary leader Maximilien Robespierre (1763-1794) had put it in 1784, “the voice of reason and humanity resounds with so much force,” were shocked and dismayed to observe that the violent and inhumane behavior which was unfolding before their eyes was occurring in “such an enlightened century,” or “such an advanced age.” Thus, condemning an early revolutionary effort to deploy “public safety” arguments to justify judicial rigor, one conservative National Assembly deputy painfully noted that “it is at the end of the 18^th century that they dare to utter maxims which would scarcely find a place in the instructions given to the executioners charged with carrying out the judgments of [ancient tyrants like] Tiberius and Phalaris” (Shapiro, Revolutionary, pp. 8-9).

In contrast to the gut-wrenching and tragic sense of surprise induced by the judicial ferocity of the French Revolution, and indeed by the violence and bloodshed that marked the Revolution as a whole, the widespread surprise produced by the recent end of apartheid in South Africa was of an entirely different nature. For in a kind of reversed mirror image of the bloody ending of the supposedly refined and civilized 18^th century, the relatively peaceful “negotiated revolution” in South Africa provided an unexpected measure of uplift and hope at the end of what has frequently been described as the most violent and bloody century in human history.

How did the protagonists in South Africa’s transition to democracy largely manage to avoid the racial bloodbath and the emotionally satisfying but dangerously destabilizing quest for retribution and revenge that many expected would accompany any shift to black majority rule? How, that is, did South Africa avoid the pattern of radicalization and judicial “barbarity” fueled by righteous indignation which had been followed by countless other attempted transitions to democracy that had, in some sense, taken the French Revolution as a model over the past two centuries? How did “truth and reconciliation,” a process through which apartheid officials were granted amnesty in return for truthful testimony about their crimes, rather than civil war somehow become the face of the South African transition? Drawing on my recent work on the psychopolitical ramifications of the June/July 1789 confrontation between

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a rebellious National Assembly and Louis XVI’s royal government, I focus here on only one aspect of a very large problem: the question of the extent to which French revolutionary and South African protagonists were or were not emotionally and cognitively equipped to engage in meaningful and effective negotiations.

As I suggest in Traumatic Politics: The Deputies and the King in the Early French Revolution (2009), the intense degree of stress and anxiety to which the recently-elected representatives of what was then known as the Third Estate and their allies were exposed during a grueling three week period in which many if not most feared that they might at any moment be killed by royal troops induced a degree of traumatization that may well have had a lingering impact on some of the key political and constitutional decisions that they would be making over the next several months. In particular, I argue that those deputies who were traumatized during this three week period later fluctuated for months, as trauma survivors often do, between periods in which various forms of denial or “forgetting” of the frightening events just experienced predominated and periods in which various modes of intrusive and hyper vigilant repetition or “remembering” of these events were most prevalent. (See especially Judith Herman, Trauma and Recovery, 1992; Mardi Jon Horowitz, Stress Response Syndromes: PTSD, Grief, and Adjustment Disorders, 1997; and Daniel S. Weiss, “Psychological Processes in Traumatic Stress,” Handbook of Post Disaster Interventions [a special issue of Journal of Social Behavior and Personality], 1993 8: pp. 5, 14-18.)

This “dialectic of trauma,” as it has been termed by Judith Herman (Trauma and Recovery, p. 47), registered its political impact in alternating periods in which the threat posed by the king was, in turn, denied and then exaggerated. On the one hand, these deputies clung desperately to the idealized sentiments of loyalty and devotion to the monarchy which they had brought with them to Versailles for the meeting of what would become the National Assembly and, on the other, they were subjected to terrifying recollections or “flashbacks” of the threat that the Crown had recently posed and to overblown anticipations of the reappearance of this threat. Yet, in either case, whether in the throes of denying or reliving their traumatic experience, these deputies remained emotionally wedded

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to pre-revolutionary conceptions of their subordination to a powerful and imposing king. As a result, despite the dominance that they attained through the fall of the Bastille on July 14^th, they found it difficult to adequately adjust to the new political realities of a post July 14^th world in which a defeated and humiliated monarch was now, in fact, subordinate to them.

At the same time, undoubtedly preoccupied with this very humiliation, Louis XVI was, we can be quite sure, decidedly disinclined in the months following July 1789 to appreciate the extent to which what he would have seen as the deputies’ continuing efforts to demean him constituted a reaction to his own belligerent and potentially murderous course of conduct. Needless to say, this mutual lack of understanding and empathy, this mutual blindness to each other’s needs and sensitivities, was hardly conducive to the kind of fruitful and effective political communication and negotiation that, in laying the groundwork for some sort of workable accommodation between the deputies and the king, might possibly have slowed or even halted revolutionary momentum at this very early point in the revolutionary process.

Now, however relevant the notion of trauma may be to an understanding of the early French Revolution, its relevance is far more immediately apparent to an understanding of the impact of apartheid policies (and their segregationist precursors) on generations of victims and, in particular, to an understanding of the impact of the violent and often gruesome state policies that sought to destroy resistance to the apartheid regime. Yet, paradoxical as it may sound, I would contend that the French revolutionary deputies of 1789 were actually less prepared to manage and come to grips with the trauma to which they were exposed than were the African National Congress (ANC) negotiators who were able to reach the kind of accommodation with their political enemies that never emerged in the French Revolution. Though most of these exiled and/or imprisoned or formerly imprisoned, and in some cases tortured, negotiators had undoubtedly experienced more massive doses of trauma than had our 1789 deputies, they were also, I would argue, more equipped to overcome the difficulties that trauma survivors have in living in the present and adjusting to shifting realities.

When the 600 or so lawyers, government officials, business-

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men, and other “establishment types” who had been elected to represent the Third Estate left for Versailles in spring 1789, they had little inkling of what was in store for them in the coming revolutionary cauldron. Far from having any fears that state violence might ever be used against them, they were more concerned about the threat of popular violence and many welcomed the use of governmental force to contain that threat, for example in the repression of a serious late April riot in a Paris factory. Thus, as law-abiding “pillars of society,” who with extremely rare exceptions had never been in the crosshairs of the institutions of state power, these deputies were almost totally unprepared for the terrifying situation to which they would soon be exposed (Shapiro, Traumatic Politics, pp. 19-23). Indeed, they were especially unequipped to deal with the fundamental threat to their accustomed sense of safety that they would experience in that the ultimate source of that threat was an individual, Louis XVI, in whom they had previously invested strong feelings of trust and affection. For these deputies, the disruption of their view of the world as a safe, non-threatening environment would have been intensely disorienting, not only because of its almost total unexpectedness, but because of the confusing welter of emotions which tend to surface when there is an element of betrayal involved. In a very real sense, these deputies would act in the months to come as if they did not really know what had hit them.

Unlike the uninitiated and one might almost say virginal revolutionaries of 1789, the veteran activists and militants who negotiated their way to power in South Africa had no illusions about the life and death nature of revolutionary conflict and certainly were far too alienated from the apartheid state to have any kind of a sense of being “betrayed” by it. Having fought and suffered for decades as denizens of the world of revolutionary struggle and having been exposed, as a result, to many traumatic situations, ANC leaders were at least in a position, in a way that our French revolutionaries were not, to come under the influence of the process of “inoculation” that, according to trauma researchers, often allows individuals exposed to multiple and ongoing traumas to “work through” and eventually avoid or minimize the most disorienting symptoms generated by such exposure. (See Robert Ursano, Tho-

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mas Grieger, and James McCarroll, “Prevention of Posttraumatic Stress,” as found in Traumatic Stress: The Effects of Overwhelming Experience on Mind, Body, and Society, Bessel Van der Kolk, Alexander McFarlane, and Lars Weisarth, eds., 1996, p. 450; Richard Bryant and Allison Harvey, Acute Stress Disorder, 2000, p. 168.)

Additionally, South African revolutionaries had the benefit of knowledge accumulated over two centuries about the nature of modern revolution, and, if nothing else, images of what was likely to ensue if a viable accommodation was not reached were undoubtedly much more sharply etched in their minds than was true of the revolutionaries of 1789. In a similar but more pointed vein, ANC leaders also had access to the psychological insights embodied in the modern discipline of conflict resolution, and the contributions of mental health professionals, conflict resolution practitioners, and human rights activists to the success of the negotiating process as well as to the success of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission that flowed from the negotiations should not be underestimated. Hence, South Africa may well be at least one instance in which, as psychologist and conflict resolution practitioner Arlene Audergon puts it, awareness of how violent conflict is generated through the “dynamics of justice, terror, and trauma” can serve “to influence its prevention” (The War Hotel: Psychological Dynamics of Violent Conflict, 2005, p. ix).

In this regard, numerous accounts of the South African negotiating process suggest that the protagonists on both sides, whether or not any of them had actually undergone conflict resolution training, had effectively absorbed some of the major lessons of conflict resolution theory. Most significantly for purposes of this article, in contrast to the failure of our French revolutionary deputies to adequately comprehend and take into consideration the emotional blow experienced in July 1789 by the king and his minions, these accounts frequently highlight the extent to which the ANC negotiators were, as journalist Allister Sparks puts it, “sensitized… to white anxieties, particularly Afrikaner fears about their survival prospects under black rule” (Tomorrow is Another Country, 1995, p. 81).

The ANC’s capacity and willingness to accommodate such fears were most visibly reflected in, whatever his private feelings

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may have been, the legendary public non-vindictiveness and political acumen of Nelson Mandela who amazed the world by inviting three of his jailers to sit in the VIP section at his presidential inauguration in 1994, and by later inviting to lunch (for a kosher meal no less!) the prosecutor who had argued for the death penalty at the ANC leader’s trial in 1964. As Mandela wrote from prison in the 1970s to the radical youth of the Black Consciousness Movement, “today South Africa has almost three million Afrikaners who will no longer be oppressors after liberation but a powerful minority of ordinary citizens whose co-operation and goodwill are needed in the reconstruction of the country.” Though obviously understandable, he argued, any effort to denigrate and ultimately eradicate the Afrikaans language and Afrikaner culture as a whole would “be inviting endless strife” (Mandela, “Whither the Black Consciousness Movement,” in Kadar Asmal, David Chidester, and Wilmot James, eds. Mandela: In His Own Words, 2003, p. 7).

However, without minimizing the weight of anxieties relating to white cultural and, of course, economic interests and without dismissing the political impact of brilliant symbolic gestures, the most immediately relevant white survival anxieties surrounding the South African transition were the fears of government leaders that they and their underlings, especially in the police and the military, would eventually be facing the kind of criminal trials that disgraced former regimes usually face. In seeking to explain why “Nuremberg-style” trials did not occur in South Africa, the most salient point made by countless commentators is that the apartheid regime’s demise did not result from an outright capitulation or collapse; rather, its continued control of the levers of coercive force all the way through the negotiating process was the trump card that enabled it to succeed in making amnesty a central part of the historic compromise that emerged from this process.

Indeed, as much as Nelson Mandela has been marketed and deployed as an icon of forgiveness and reconciliation in efforts to present the granting of amnesty as an inspired and inspiring ideologically-driven choice rather than a grudging necessity, the essentially pragmatic roots of South Africa’s renowned Truth and Reconciliation Commission is revealed in Mandela’s reported private comment that “if he were to announce a series of criminal trials, he

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could well wake up the following morning to find his home ringed by tanks” (Martin Meredith, Coming to Terms: South Africa’s Search for Truth, 1999, p. 19). In this regard, what I have tried to do here is explore some of the emotional foundations of pragmatic decision-making and to suggest some of the reasons why African National Congress negotiators were better equipped, both emotionally and cognitively, than our French revolutionary deputies to make the pragmatic decisions that were necessary to facilitate peace and stability and, in particular, to accurately gauge what kind of concessions were required to accommodate the anxieties of their opponents. Though the bottom line details of the negotiations on amnesty remain secret, it would seem reasonable to assume that some assurances on this issue were a key governmental demand to which the ANC had to agree before the governing white National Party could even think about the possibility of submitting itself to a democratic election that it had no chance of winning.

Now the idea of amnesty was hardly unknown at the end of the 18^th century. Indeed, two weeks after the fall of the Bastille on July 4, 1789, the “patriot minister” Jacques Necker (1732-1804), foreshadowing Mandela’s efforts two centuries later to forestall “white flight” and encourage foreign investment, urged Parisian municipal officials to “make the day of indulgence and forgiveness arrive as soon as possible” in order to defuse the tension and uneasiness which, he stated, was “turning a large number of rich customers away from Paris and discouraging foreigners from coming here to spend their money.” Whether moved more by Necker’s tearful appeal to “this quality of kindness, justice, and mildness which distinguishes the French Nation” or by his economic pragmatism, the Paris Assembly of Electors immediately proclaimed that it “pardons all its enemies” (Shapiro, Revolutionary, pp. 63, 67). But this general amnesty lasted only as long as it took for a wave of popular protest to induce its retraction and, in any case, was repudiated the very next day by the National Assembly itself, as the ideas of clemency and forgiveness began their retreat into the deep shadows of French revolutionary history.

By contrast, the post-apartheid South African amnesty essentially fulfilled the function that it was designed to fulfill; that is to say, to serve as a bridge to a relatively peaceful transition and

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what is at least thus far, however deeply flawed, a stable and workable democracy. Clearly in this article I have only scratched the surface of providing a satisfactory explanation of the success of the South African negotiating process. After all, there have obviously been innumerable examples of acute political conflict in the recent past as well as in the present day in which the factors that I have focused upon here, inoculation against trauma and the availability of knowledge about revolutionary history as well as access to the psychological insights inherent in conflict resolution theory and practice, do not seem to have had much of an effect in encouraging peaceful accommodation.

Yet, in any future more comprehensive explanation of how South Africa was able to avoid the equivalent of the French Revolution’s Reign of Terror, it is hard not to see a large role being assigned to the extraordinary phenomenon of Mandela himself, who was able to parlay a deep well of personal resources into an enormous degree of moderating and statesmanlike influence over more radical followers by means of the credibility and mythical status that accrued to him through the suffering endured in 27 years of imprisonment. As much as such an idea goes against the grain of what generations of history graduate students have been taught about the basic insignificance of the “great man” (or “great woman”) in history, one can only hope for the emergence of other Mandelas in other places, perhaps even in the prisons of Israel. One can only wonder how history might have been different if a Mandela-like character had somehow emerged in the French Revolution.

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