Paris 1958–2015: Terrorism, Reparation, and the Work of Decolonization

Abstract In the wake of the 2015 attacks claimed by the Islamic State on the satiric magazine Charlie Hebdo , the Bataclan theater, cafés in Paris, and the Stade de France in Saint-Denis, survivors were granted reparation based on an already existing legal framework. This article traces the history of compensation for terrorism in France back to a previous campaign of bombings carried out by Lebanese Hezbollah on iconic Parisian sites in 1985–1986 and, beyond the conjuncture of the late 1980s, to the Algerian War of Independence (1954–1962). While genealogies of human rights have so far focused on the aftermath of World War II and the history of the Holocaust, the paper uncovers the wars of decolonization as a key historical conjuncture for the emergence of contemporary humanitarianism and for the structuring of its fundamentally ambivalent discourse. A review of the successive arguments over how to draft, amend, and rewrite the reparation statutes in the late 1950s reveals how compensation was weaponized as an integral part of the “war on terror.” The paper then brings the analysis into the 1980s and the creation of a compensation fund as part of the 1986 Prevention of Terrorism Act. Reparations for terrorism emerge not only as a form of humanitarian intervention but also as a tool of counterinsurgency warfare in its own right. On a historiographical level, I draw on David Scott’s concept of “problem-space” to analyze the late 1950s and 1980s as imbricated conjunctures bearing an exceptional testimony to the history of the present.