Chapter 7 sets out the key components of State responsibility under international law and then uses a series of case studies to demonstrate that responsibility in practice. Responsibility for a State’s negligent failure to prevent a terrorist attack looks at the acts and omissions of the Russian authorities with respect to the school siege at Beslan in 2003. Three cases have been chosen to exemplify the direct perpetration of terrorism by a State. The first case is the bombing by French agents of the Greenpeace boat, Rainbow Warrior, by French agents in New Zealand in 1985. The second involves certain acts of Syrian authorities following the protests related to the Arab Spring, in particular the widespread and systematic torture and summary execution of opponents of the regime. The third case is the conduct of Russian forces in Ukraine following its invasion on 24 February 2022. Examples of State responsibility as accomplices to acts of terrorism are the responsibility of Liberia for the actions of the Revolutionary United Front (RUF) in neighbouring Sierra Leone during the civil war and the potential responsibility of Syria for the murder of former Lebanese Prime Minister, Rafik Hariri, in Beirut on 14 February 2005.

Transition to socialism meant that the relationships between domestic workers and their employers had to be reimagined. Rather than framing the relationship between domestic workers and their employers as a contractual one, the state now celebrated employers and domestics who treated each other “like family.” The economic nature of the relationship between Soviet families and their domestics puts into sharp relief the meaning of Stalinist socialism for domestic workers and their employers. Similar to capitalist countries, class inequality lay at the heart of domestic service in the Soviet Union. Yet, this inequality was less stark and more fragile. As a result, domestic workers were able to negotiate special bonuses, such as extended vacation time to visit families. However, in return domestic workers had to give up labor rights guaranteed by Soviet laws, such as days off or regular pay. The chapter demonstrates the limits of legal regulations within the household and the role of informal arrangements in domestic service.

Since modern tyrannies tend to be ideological in character, they rely heavily on rhetoric or propaganda. This chapter consists of eight speeches that illustrate different ways that rhetoric has been used to foster tyrannical or immoral and violent policies in modern politics. The speakers include Maximilien Robespierre, Vladimir Lenin, Joseph Goebbels, Adolph Hitler, Joseph Stalin, Mao Tse-Tung, and Deng Xiaoping.

The French Revolution began as a dispute between the French monarchy and its traditional elites about where power lay. Its roots became tangled in “enlightened” discussion of the political virtues of the “nation” and the “public,” and put forth thorny branches of bitter social hostility as real state bankruptcy loomed in the later 1780s. By the time the Estates-General met in 1789, wholly new demands for the excision of all privilege from the body politic were poised to bear violent fruit. Aristocratic treachery was the leitmotif of patriotic understanding of everything that happened subsequently, through years in which a new blueprint of society, levelled but also centralized, was painstakingly crafted; and in which that blueprint was hastily redrawn in war and upheaval to become a map of republican virtues. Deep-seated conflict was never pacified, while convictions that unanimity was natural branded all dissent as treason, producing an accelerating spiral into “the Terror” of 1793-94. Although revolutionary upheaval also brought cultural innovation and a genuine new spirit of individual liberty, for the rest of the decade, France wrestled to reconcile a society of survivors and victims. It slid slowly, despite continued military triumphs, towards the suppression of civil society by dictatorship.

The adoption of the policy of “terror” by the Convention in 1793-1794 emerged in large part from a position of relative weakness in the context of external war and internal unrest. While Jacobin deputies were prominent in revolutionary leadership, the policy was endorsed by deputies in the Convention. The “terror” policy was seen by those who perpetrated it as a temporary form of justice, albeit harsh justice, necessitated by war and revolutionary crisis. The Revolutionary Tribunal and the guillotine were designed as examples of spectacular violence, to show the strength of the revolutionary government, and intimidate counter-revolutionary opponents. The actual application of these laws was very uneven, and fell most heavily in frontier departments, and in those regions where there were armed uprisings against revolutionary government. By far the greatest number of deaths occurred in the context of the civil war in the Vendée.

Staël responded to the Terror with De l’influence des passions sur le bonheur des individus et des nations. Chapter 5 has two parts. First, I review Staël’s use of her sources: her private life, France’s public Revolution, and the texts of the moral philosophers. Cathartic for herself as a woman, Staël’s book is also a public stand on the Terror and a manifesto for the French Republic’s future. It draws on a startling range of texts, from Cicero through Condorcet. These sources reveal above all what Staël does not do; she systematically transforms them, reading, then flouting, two millennia of passion theory to construct her own new moral vision. Second, I review what Staël offers the French Republic: a way out of ping-pong coups d’état by grounding the Directoire in coalition and moral principle, precisely the vision of her partner Constant’s simultaneous brochures, on which we know she quietly collaborated.

Shakespeare’s White Others’ conclusion engages The Comedy of Errors to reaffirm how race always matters. I argue that The Comedy of Errors’ concern with mistaken identity resonates with the modern Black experience. While considering my book’s preoccupation with the effects of racism, othering, anti-Blackness, and racial profiling, I turn to Patricia Akhimie’s Comedy of Errors criticism to consider how one can be “bruised with adversity” not just physically, but also psychologically. The conclusion’s title plays on the name of Shakespeare’s comedy because, as I see it, anti-blackness and anti-Black racism position white people, including white others, in opposition to Black people in what feels like a comedy of (t)errors: a space that is a genre of its own and akin to Negro-Sarah’s funnyhouse environment in Adrienne Kennedy’s Funnyhouse of a Negro. Racial tribulation is a life sentence tied to the Black existence.

Called by P. B. Shelley ‘the master-theme of the epoch’, the French Revolution profoundly affected British literature, giving new energy to the nascent Romantic movement while dissolving the boundary between literature and politics. This chapter examines the polarisation of British public opinion in the aftermath of the Revolution and the contestation of its ideas in the 1790s ‘pamphlet war’. The chapter analyses eye-witness accounts of the Revolution by British expatriates such as H. M. Williams and the dilemmas faced by British radicals when war was declared and the Revolution took an increasingly violent course. Wordsworth’s autobiographical account of these conflicts in The Prelude (1805) is set against later imaginative reconstructions of the Revolution by Shelley, Carlyle and Dickens and the more indirect expression of revolutionary shock in Gothic fiction. The chapter concludes by noting the linguistic legacy of the Revolution experience, which created much of the political vocabulary by which we still discuss ideas of nationhood.

Primary party organisations were key engines driving the complex process through which mass repression spread across the USSR, providing the institutional framework in which the social tensions of the mid-1930s could become entangled with the political initiatives of the leadership. PPO records thus offer a unique vantage point for following the gradual transformation of ordinary, if tense, social conflict into a lethal political crisis. They also demonstrate the significant extent to which the party rank-and-file remained a distinct actor deriving its understanding of the repressions from its own lived experience as filtered through its political outlook, in this way placing its own mark on events. In industry, this experience consisted primarily of workplace conditions and the permanently tense relations between workers and managers.

By March 1793 revolutionary France was at war with Austria, Prussia and Spain, and Britain was preparing a naval blockade. The National Convention responded to this desperate military situation by imposing a levy of 300,000 conscripts. In the west of France the levy was the trigger for massive armed rebellion and civil war, known, like the region itself, as ‘the Vendée’. The insurrection resulted in terrible loss of life before it was finally crushed in 1794. Estimates have ranged from exaggerated claims of 500,000 rebel deaths to more accepted recent estimates of up to 170,000 insurgents and 30,000 republican troops. The rebellion and its repression left deep and durable scars on French society and politics. In republican historiography, the scale of repression of the rebellion has been seen as a regrettable but necessary response to a military ‘stab in the back’ at the moment of the Revolution’s greatest crisis, whereas right-wing politicians and historians from the west of France have applied the label of ‘genocide’ to the repression and therefore to one of the foundation acts of the first French republic. This chapter argues that ‘the Vendée’ was not a genocide: huge numbers of people were killed, but not because they were a distinctive Vendéan people nor because they were devout Catholics. This was instead a brutal civil war studded with examples of atrocity which would later be known as ‘crimes against humanity’ and ‘war crimes’.

“The Longest Day in Graignes,” recounts the three German assaults on the village on 11–12 June. The paratroopers rebuffed the numerically superior enemy, until they ran out of ammunition. The 17th SS Panzergrenadier Division also employed heavy guns, including artillery, against the village. The Germans damaged the twelfth-century Romanesque Church. Once they seized the center of the village, the SS troops proceeded to murder the village priest, Father Albert Le Blastier, and his aides for tending to wounded Americans. The Nazi troops terrorized other villagers. The Nazis also executed nineteen US prisoners, many of whom had been wounded in action. The length of the battle held the 17th SS Panzergrenadier Division back from its central mission, namely the recapture of the strategically vital port town of Carentan.

Civil war has beset France yet again. Victor Hugo reacts to the slaughter of the Commune in 1872 by telling – like Vergil, Lucan, and Augustine – a story from the past. Quatrevingt-treize is set during the Terror (1793) following the French Revolution. Paradigmatic characters and places instantiate ideologies that have mapped positions since ancient Rome. As in Augustine, no history has managed to overcome civil war. Christianity has merely enabled the shift to a new form of domination in monarchy. A new republic is needed that will refound France – a universal paradigm like Rome – on secularized Christian values that will finally bring new order to the world.

This chapter uses the financial records of the speculator Étienne Clavière to illustrate the normal workings of the eighteenth-century financial system and how that system came apart during the French Revolution, turning impunity into a political category. The 1780s witnessed a series of financial scandals and speculative bubbles, many of them organized by Clavière. These scandals delegitimized the last attempts to reform the old financial system, precipitating the outbreak of the French Revolution. Ensuing changes to the legal category of property rights, the issuing of the assignats in 1791, and the sequester of foreigners and foreign property under the Terror of 1793 broke the mechanisms of financial capitalism. The Terror, and especially the suspension of the Constitution of 1793 in favor of rule by penal code, marked the emergence of a new kind of purely political groups who existed outside the law, including various forms of financial criminals. The existence of a central bank in England meant that economic impunity became subordinated as a tool of political necessity; in France, economic impunity was coded as an enemy of political virtue. The Revolution was precipitated by financial scandals, tried to eliminate them, and ended up producing new ones.

Samson’s violence, his impulsive actions, his patriarchal threats toward Dalila, and his loathing of an ethnic Other make Samson Agonistes, it has been argued, the least modern of Milton’s last three major poems. Instead of the late equanimity of Adam and Eve in Paradise Lost, or the consistent temperance of the Son in Paradise Regained, Samson Agonistes highlights tensions over the modern, as well as between the ancient and the modern, prompting readers of all three poems into reflecting on their own ideas of the modern. Milton’s version of the Samson story calls the question: precisely because it is the third and last of his late poems, Samson Agonistes puts readers in an untenable place of dialectic and decision between the three late poems’ visions of modernity.

Don DeLillo’s fiction has long catalogued American fear and dread surrounding the future. While a select few texts, most memorably Underworld (1997) and Falling Man (2007), foreground a sense of narrative and cultural possibility, the future is often depicted as a lament. That sense of future vision is evident in his latest text – at the time of writing – Zero K (2016), which explores environmental decline and a shift from Underworld’s ideal of a democratic collective to a neoliberal embrace of necropolitics. Using both ecocriticism and a range of prior DeLillo scholarship, this chapter reads Zero K as a prescient warning of political upheaval and loss, and thus anticipates how hope and renewal can be located even in DeLillo’s late period writings.

This chapter traces the rise and fall of social rights in the French Revolution. In 1789, economic liberals proposed them, but failed to persuade the National Assembly to include them in its Declaration of Rights. Nevertheless, invocations of them persisted. Their advocates, however, imagined achieving them through the voluntary means of free markets and charity; the state might manage charitable endowments, but it was not to finance them with taxes. The latter prospect eventually gained ground by 1793. Still, the National Convention declared ‘society’ to be the duty-bearer of social rights in its new rights declaration, not the state. During the Terror (1793–4), officials frequently conflated charity and taxes in their efforts to finance social assistance, creating a sense of arbitrariness. Social rights, now associated with the Terror, were suppressed in the rights declaration of 1795. Henceforth, the Revolution’s fundamental problem of obligation was often recast as the problem of social rights.

Revisionist literature portrays a British counter-terror stretching across 1948–9, if not longer. This chapter shows how, in fact, counter-terror was ‘bureacratised’ in 1949, becoming far more controlled but also larger-scale, with ‘structural violence’ (slow-burn long-term reduction in life chances due to deportation, huts burned etc.) taking off as excess killings declined. Meanwhile, the insurgents tried, and failed, to establish main bases and larger forces. On failing, they switched to attempting to build multiple, local-based company-level forces, more indirect roots towards growing their strength. This sent incident levels soaring again. This chapter therefore revises the revisionist accounts, but just as importantly tells a cohrent story about the main-base strategy that the MCP hoped would set it on the path to victory, and its replacement strategy of building from more numerous, smaller base areas.