In Ancient Greece there was a practice or rite of casting out someone like a beggar or cripple or criminal in the face of some natural threat or disaster.  There are traces of a far older tradition in Syria when a goat would be invoked in the purification rites for the king’s wedding – a she-goat was driven out into the waste with a silver bell on her neck.  More recently, but before the Greek custom developed, the Old Testament, Leviticus 16:8, said that ‘And Aaron shall cast lots over the two goats, one lot for the Lord and the other lot for Azazel.’  The goat of the Lord was sacrificed, and the high priest by confession transferred the sins of himself and the people to the goat that was permitted to escape in the wilderness – where its fate would depend on what sort of predators it may have to contend with. 

There was a form of atonement.  The goat that escaped became the ‘scapegoat.’  The traditions or rites might be said to prefigure the role of the Son of God being offered up to redeem mankind by atoning for its sins.  A scapegoat is one who is punished for the sins of others.  This ancient Middle Eastern rite has become a universal custom involving people rather than goats.

But the term has got much wider than that – a scapegoat now is not just one that has to answer for the sins of others; it has to answer for all the problems and failings of what might be called the host people.  So, in the most gruesome example, the Nazis held the Jews responsible for all the lesions on the German people, moral or economic.  The war had been lost only because of the failings of some generals and because Socialists and Communists had stabbed the nation in the back.  Once the German people got released from the hold of these forces of evil, it could realize its potential for the first time, and nothing could stand in its way.  The German character was not just innately good – it was superior; therefore, the reason for any failings had to be found elsewhere.  The notion of scapegoat was vital to the perversion of what passed for thought under Hitler.  It is the natural first base for a weak and insecure person who is a moral coward.  It is also the kind of sloppy thinking that attracts insecure people, edgy commentators and journalists, and weak governments.

Scapegoats played a far smaller role in the French Revolution.  Pitt’s gold – bribes from the British government led by Pitt – came to be a convenient source of all of the discontents of the people, and the aristocracy and church were loathed and attacked.  They had been principal pillars of the ancien regime that had failed and that was being rejected and replaced, and large parts of the aristocracy and of the church were opposed to those seeking to advance the objects of the Revolution.  The émigré royals and nobles were a real and not just imagined threat, or one conjured up for the purposes of propaganda.  The aristocracy was no more of a scapegoat than the clergy.

There were even reasons to fear the capacity of the inmates of prisons to harm the Revolution – the September Massacres in Paris were manic and brutal, but they were not fashioned just out of malice.  The driving force of the massacres was not from on high in the government, but in the mob in the form of the sections of the Commune of Paris.  Even the killers in their panic or blood-lust felt the need to employ some form of trial in a quest to find the real threat to the nation – not just to the Revolution, but to the sovereignty of the nation.  What we find it hard to follow is the relief felt and the welcome given to those who were spared or acquitted.  There were elements of formality and benevolence in the brutal carnage that led David Andress in The Terror to say:

Prompt justice was done, with sound practical considerations in hand.  That is the real horror.  It is easy to come to terms with the idea of irrational carnage carried out by sadistic mobs: such facts fit neatly into the concept of a radically different, almost subhuman crowd, safely distanced from the self-image of the observer.  Far less comfortable is the realization that bloody murder could be committed by upright citizens in the name of the country’s freedom.  If we quite fairly object that the victims of September were not, in fact, the active partisans of a fatal plot gainst Paris, we must also agree that believing them so was a mistake shared almost unanimously everywhere from the Legislative Assembly to street-corner tavern.

If on that occasion the blue-collar crowd, the sans-culottes, showed a need for some kind of procedural check on their enthusiasm, a big problem with what we would now call the political class is that they found it so hard to check that enthusiasm.  They had not had enough experience of what we call party politics and political in-fighting to allow them to tolerate differences in points of view.  You are either for us or against us; you have to decide; and you might lose your head if you decide the wrong way. 

They were not experienced or mature enough to be able to put up with doubt or uncertainty on what they saw as matters of principle that they also saw as having nation-forming consequences.  They were in a way the sad victims of the kind of political absolutism that they believed that they were escaping.  If Flaubert said that inside every revolutionary you will find a policeman, it may because what you first find is an intolerant zealot – a fanatic.  This is one reason that what we call faction fights were so lethal then.  People getting together to oppose those in government were, almost by definition, conspiring against the nation.  Division was bad in itself.

Nor does it make much sense to look for the role of scapegoats in the Russian Revolution.  The convoluted theories of Marx would lead to serious differences of view upon implementation at the best of times.  They were predicated on classes being in a conflict that was terminal, and the theories had an apocalyptic and prophetic air that commanded an adherence that was most devout among those who did not understand the theories – which meant most Communists, let alone Russians.  To that you must had the cold egomania of Lenin, who hardly gave the theories a chance, and the manic paranoia of Stalin, who could not care less, and you see that it hardly helps us in our inquiries to ask if the kulaks may have been seen as scapegoats.  The thinking that determined who might be targeted by regimes led by Lenin or Stalin – or, for that matter, Mr Putin – may be something that just passes our understanding.

A scapegoat may afford a kind of out for a regime, but suspects are at least a potential threat to it, at least ‘suspects’ in the terms that we are about to see.  There is no reason why one person may not fulfil the criteria of more than one category.  An aristocrat may have passed through a journey in time from being an enemy, to a threat, to a suspect, to a scapegoat.  One of the infamies of Hitler was his treatment of the Jews as scapegoats.