"Civil war in the United Kingdom is inevitable", predicted Elon Musk in X on October 29 after the murder of a man in Uxbridge, stabbed to death by an Afghan migrant while walking his dog in West London. A few days earlier, in an interview with the newspaper Le Figaro on the twentieth anniversary of the 2005 riots, the former director general of the DGSE, Pierre Broshan, stated that France was on the verge of "internal confrontation". The theme of civil war haunts our time. Eric Benzecry's series "Fever" is proof of this.
What is a civil war? "An armed conflict between members of a community previously organized around shared values, but suddenly torn apart by social, political, ideological or religious differences considered too strong to be resolved through negotiation".
This is the definition given by the two authors of the book "Civil Wars" Jean-Christophe Buisson and Jean Sevilla, journalists and authors of numerous historical studies. Their previous joint work, "The Last Battle - Fighters of Honor and Missing Soldiers, from Antiquity to the Present Day", was a great success.
In an interview with the French newspaper L'Express, Buisson and Sevilla explain the reasons that give rise to these internal conflicts. History provides some answers. From religious wars to the Rwandan genocide, through the American Civil War, the Bolshevik Revolution, Yugoslavia, the Algerian War of 1990 and many other tragedies, the team of journalists and historians formed by Buisson and Sevilla recounts these collective conflicts, meticulously examining their escalating dynamics.
The authors deserve praise for not succumbing to sensationalism, given how easily the subject lends itself to fantasy. Their decision to include the Algerian War (1954-1962) in the table of contents, however, will be challenged. Of the twenty chapters, five are dedicated to France. Our country could fill an entire volume, so much so that its "history is the history of a long civil war", writes François Mauriac in his famous column "Notes" in L"Express. We don't want Buisson and Sevilla's book to end up in the "Current Events" section of bookstores.
L'EXPRESS: What is your definition of a civil war?
JEAN-CHRISTOPHÉ BUISSON AND JEAN SEVILLE: Armed conflict lasting from a few weeks to a few years, with periods of calm and terrifying intensity, between members of a community previously structured around shared values, but suddenly divided by social, political, ideological or religious differences that seem too deep to be resolved through negotiation. The motivation of at least one of the two protagonists leads them to consider the total destruction of the opponent in order to triumph.
Hence the extreme cruelty characteristic of civil wars, especially when they are linked to ethnic or religious tensions. It is also worth noting the obvious paradox: civil wars, at some point in their emergence or development, often lead to foreign intervention. Either one of the two sides believes that it is impossible to achieve victory alone, without external help, or it directly or indirectly serves a foreign state or nation.
L'EXPRESS: In the preface you mention the book by Serge Julli and Alain Geismar "Towards a Civil War", published in 1969, which, in your words, reads "more like a warning than a wish". Should your book be perceived as a warning?
BUISON AND SEVILLE: The truth obliges us to recognize that not all political groups have the same attitude towards the use of violence. Although there are far-right groups whose members do not hesitate to resort to violence, this is a marginal phenomenon, located outside the democratic parliamentary sphere. Despite the anti-fascist statements made by the National Assembly, this party, whatever we think of it and its platform, operates within institutional frameworks.
While on the far left, a multitude of more or less informal groups have made a habit of illegal and violent actions: in the National Assembly, the group "France Unrestrained" uses a strategy of provocation and insults that creates a climate of constant tension. In this case, the violence is verbal and symbolic, but it remains violence nonetheless. The radical left never forgets that, according to Marx, violence is the great midwife of history. So yes, some minority currents, although strongly present in France, dream of civil war. This calls for a warning.
L'EXPRESS: This summer, David Betz, a professor at King"s College London, published an article in Military Strategy Magazine on the risks of civil war, especially in Britain and France. His critics accuse him of wanting to "revive a myth dear to the far right". Isn't this theme omnipresent in the contemporary political imagination of the right?
BUISSON AND SEVILLE: It is true that the fear of a possible escalation of internal conflict is expressed more by the right than by the left, but reality is neither right nor left. The violence of the urban riots of 2005 and 2023 is not fiction. The violence of the "yellow vests" crisis in its final phase is not fiction.
The violence of some so-called environmental demonstrations, where police and gendarmerie officers become targets of demonstrators, is not fiction. The violence of jihadist attacks is not a right-wing "moral panic". Today, French society is so deeply divided that it is entirely reasonable to fear a spiral of violence whose outcome no one can predict.
L" EXPRESS: "The history of France is the history of a long civil war," writes François Mauriac in his "Notes" for L"Express. Don't the internal French unrest deserve a separate book?
BUISON AND SEVILLE: Certainly, but our book focuses not only on "struggles" but on civil wars - that is, very specifically, on episodes in which weapons were drawn and blood was shed. In France in the 20th century, the strikes of the Popular Front or, for example, the events of May 1968, were purely French moments of social struggle, but the weapons did not speak.
However, during the riots of February 6, 1934, shots were exchanged between the law enforcement agencies and demonstrators, which resulted in deaths and injuries, but this did not continue the next day. The civil war, on the other hand, is a chain of events that no one can stop.
L" EXPRESS: You dedicate five of your twenty chapters to France. How did you make your choice?
BUISSON AND SEVILLE: It was difficult, which is not a good sign. The fact is that the spirit of division is one of the characteristic features of the French people, who were originally Gallic, let's remember... That is why the history of our country is marked by internal conflicts of varying degrees of importance. But in order to adhere to the aforementioned definition, we excluded those events that are closer to rebellions or uprisings and which, although they could have shown a real rupture in society, eventually subsided or were channeled without escalating into a full-scale war.
Examples of this are the uprisings of Etienne Marcel in the Middle Ages, of the silk workers of Lyon in the 19th century and, as mentioned, the nationalist leagues of February 6, 1934 and the period of post-war purges. Instead, we included the eight religious wars that bled France, the Fronde (ed.: a series of civil wars in France between 1648 and 1653), the War of the Vendée, the Paris Commune and the end of French Algeria - all of them marked by horrific violent clashes among the French.
L'EXPRESS: In retrospect, was the Fronde a prelude to the French Revolution of 1789?
BUISON AND SEVILLE: No, not exactly. Because the Frondeurs, those of the first phase, known as the Parliamentary Fronde, and those of the second phase, known as the Fronde des Princes, fought against royal power without challenging the class society of which they were archetypes. The anarchy generated by the Fronde, paradoxically, only fueled the need for power that Louis XIV used to consolidate the absolute monarchy. In contrast, the Revolution of 1789, born of a stalemate within the Ancien Régime, was led by the bourgeoisie, which manipulated the masses to shake the system in its last days, a system that had been completely overturned.
L'EXPRESS: Which civil wars are still most deeply imprinted in our national memory? Do you include the Algerian War in this category? BUISSON AND SEVILLE: The Algerian War is probably not perceived as a civil war. Since it ended with the independence of the North African departments, and the media simply caricatured French Algeria, this dramatic conflict was undoubtedly considered a war waged against foreigners.
However, strictly speaking, under French law, all Muslims in Algeria were French citizens after the 1947 law, and the last remaining distinctions were abolished in 1958 with the abolition of the double electoral college. Thus, the final stage of the Algerian War was indeed a civil war in France, but with several points of conflict: loyalists versus independence fighters, independence fighters of the FN (National Liberation Front) versus independence fighters of the ANO (Algerian National Movement), blacks versus the government in Paris, and the "Secret Army" of France versus the Gaullists.
In the eyes of the French, perhaps the American Civil War or the Spanish Civil War symbolize civil war? Especially since the Spanish Civil War, widely discussed in literature and taught in high school, is imbued with a powerful ideological charge, with its emblematic slogan "No pasarán" being used in every possible context, even when there are no fascists around.
L'EXPRESS: "The repression of the Commune fueled the martyrdom of the left," you write. Which event fueled the martyrdom of the right so strongly? The War of the Vendée?
BUISSON AND SEVILLE: For part of the right in the 19th century, yes. But only for part. With the accession of Louis-Philippe in 1830, references to the martyrdom of the Vendée were limited to nostalgic ones for the Old Regime and the Restoration. The failure of the attempted uprising of the Duchess of Berry in the Vendée in 1832 sounded somewhat like a death blow to this painful memory as a spiritual and memorial driving force of "right-wing" political thought.
This was particularly relevant because the King of France, a staunch liberal and head of a constitutional monarchy, and also the son of Philippe-Egalite, a supporter of the Revolution, could not, by definition and conviction, associate himself with this counter-revolutionary memory. In the following century and a half, no event could claim to give rise to a right-wing martyrology: the purge was carried out by the Communist Party, but it was associated with a man with clear right-wing views - de Gaulle. And the repression of the last supporters of French Algeria was not based on strictly political criteria; in fact, it was again carried out by Gaullists.
On the other hand, one could consider right-wing intellectuals as martyrs: under the pretext that the Vichy regime claimed to adhere to conservative values, the right was held responsible and guilty for the horrors committed between 1940 and 1944, and for many years was disqualified and removed from power in publishing, academia and the media. And it has far from regained some of the positions occupied by the left since 1945, which feeds this feeling of "martyrdom" in it.
L'EXPRESS: Even if the Dreyfus affair does not quite fit your definition of a civil war, has it not had a greater impact on our collective imagination?
BUISSON AND SEVILLE: Yes, and not without reason. The Dreyfus affair gave birth to the concept of the intellectual in France and with it what we might call the idea of an intellectual civil war. This leads to significantly fewer physical casualties, because words do not kill directly, but can sometimes create tension, which in turn can lead to death.
The calls for murder, read or heard in the late 1890s, multiplied in the following decades (Aragon's poems called in 1931 for the "shooting of Leon Bloom" in his text "Red Front") and took the lives of real people such as the street vendor Marius Plateau or the socialist minister Roger Salengro.
L'EXPRESS: America has a penchant for apocalyptic narratives, many of which depict civil wars, both in films and in literature. How do you explain the omnipresence of this fantasy in American culture?
BUISON AND SEVILLE: The United States of America is a young nation, forged in violence (between settlers, against indigenous peoples, against the English and the Spanish), which experienced a horrific civil conflict during its formation (over 60,000 dead out of 3 million combatants!), and whose functioning, including its institutional structure, through a federal structure uniting states with radically different legal systems, allows or encourages division. It is logical that art exploits and cultivates this "familiar" theme!
L'EXPRESS: Didn't the storming of the Capitol in 2021 rekindle this fear?
BUISON AND SEVILLE: The problem with reality is that it often overtakes fiction. And sometimes it even surpasses it...
L'EXPRESS: What was the fundamental role of the Russian Civil War of 1917? How did Lenin exploit it?
BUISON AND SEVILLE: This introduced a new driving force in the process of provoking civil war: ideology. In this case, we are talking about communist ideology, which, in whole or in part, was at the root of many deadly "internal" conflicts of the 20th century: first in Russia, and then in China, Greece, Yugoslavia, Vietnam, Afghanistan, Yemen, Ethiopia, Angola, etc. Communism is undoubtedly a trigger or accelerator of civil war.
L'EXPRESS: Doesn't the German historian Ernst Nolte consider the Bolshevik experience to be the matrix of the "European Civil War" (the title of his book, published in 1987) until Hitler's defeat in 1945?
BUISSON AND SEVILLE: Yes, but this is a controversial thesis that assumes that there are no internal causes of conflict between its nations in Europe and in a sense denies the existence of statehood. Before 1914, European states fought each other, building their own identities (which included religious and even ethnic components).
And after 1945, given the 40-year existence of the Iron Curtain, the direct and indirect support provided by several European states to the belligerents in the Yugoslav wars, and the reluctance of some EU members to take action against Putin's Russia for fear of being effectively recognized as an enemy of the EU, we clearly see that the idea of a united Europe as a nation is unstable. Therefore, the term "European Civil War" is inappropriate.
L'EXPRESS: Given your overall vision of what is happening, can we say whether there is fertile ground for a fratricidal conflict?
BUISSON AND SEVILLE: All societies are inherently conflictual, since private interests rarely coincide and personal ambitions inevitably play a role. However, this conflict, fortunately, does not always lead to violence. First, because the enormous imbalance of power prevents those in a weaker position from confronting the enemy. Second, because difficulties can be resolved through mutual compromise or arbitration by an entity whose legitimacy is recognized by all the parties involved.
Fratricial conflicts arise precisely when the sense of brotherhood and belonging to a single community is undermined by the awareness of an irreconcilable contradiction that nothing can pacify and which force alone cannot resolve. This is especially true when no outside force is able to intervene and prevent an armed conflict between sworn enemies.
L'EXPRESS: What ends civil wars?
BUISSON AND SEVILLE: The victory of one side. Or the fatigue of the combatants. When too much blood has been shed, there comes a point when, if not reason, then at least the need to live a normal life, without risking it at every moment, prevails over hatred for the other.