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From Left Bank to West Bank

Paul Berman draws a clear route from Victor Hugo's partisans to al-Qaeda in Terror and Liberalism

Martin Bright

Sunday April 20, 2003

The Observer

On 25 February 1830 Victor Hugo's play Hernani was performed to the most extraordinary scenes of riot and disorder in Paris. The subject of the now-forgotten work was the attempted assassination of a king by a Romantic Spanish outlaw hero, Hernani, who ends his days in a suicide pact. The play had been banned by the official censor, but on the first night Hugo gathered around him a gang of long-haired young bloods known as the Romantic Army, who fought pitched street battles to force the authorities to allow the play to go ahead. Hugo partisans all wore a badge bearing the Spanish word for iron, hierro, to identify them and mark their steely determination to fight the forces of conventional bourgeois liberalism.

For Paul Berman, the play is an early expression of the terrorist mentality. 'Murder as rebellion, suicide as honour, murder and suicide as the joint emblem of human freedom - those were Hugo's themes.' These, he argues, in a compelling challenge to modern liberal attititudes, are also the common thread in the terrorist mindset that links early anarchists and Bolsheviks in Russia to the hijacking and urban terrorism of the PLO and the Baader-Meinhof gang in the 1970s.

More radically, Berman also sees a link to the terrorism of al-Qaeda. The doomed assassin Hernani is not just the model for the classic anarchist or Marxist political terrorist, he is also a model for Mohamed Atta.

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At times Berman trips over the ingenuity of his own argument. The Romantic impulse of Victor Hugo's Hernani, glorying in death, assassination and suicide, mutates in Terror and Liberalism into every ideological monster of the twentieth century, including the totalitarian regimes of Stalin, Hitler and Mussolini. To follow Berman's logic, the nihilistic suicide bombers of the Palestinian occupied territories are indistinguishable from the torturers of the concentration camps, a connection made by few but the most extreme representatives of the Israeli state.

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After the Second World War, a kind of Cold-War liberal historiography sprang up, lumping together Communism, Fascism and Nazism as "enemies of liberty." Which of course they were; but the point of this historical "school" was that the differences between these movements were not significant, or not so significant as to require different political or moral (or military) responses. Historical particularity was sacrificed to the supposed political exigencies of the day.

Here is his present thesis:

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'Murder as rebellion, suicide as honour, murder and suicide as the joint emblem of human freedom - those were Hugo's themes.' These, he argues, in a compelling challenge to modern liberal attititudes, are also the common thread in the terrorist mindset that links early anarchists and Bolsheviks in Russia to the hijacking and urban terrorism of the PLO and the Baader-Meinhof gang in the 1970s.

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No doubt there are some weak links between the Romantic heroes and early Russian revolutionaries. The figure of Bazarov in Turgenev is an example, as are the real-life members of Narodnaya Volya. But there are so many points of difference that the similarities pale. Atheism was the state ideology in Russia, something unlikely to occur under Al-Quaeda. Similarly, Soviet ideology insisted upon human equality, a doctrine which will seldom find favour among Nazis.