The Biopolitics of Dignity

A few days after the shocking attacks on the offices of Charlie Hebdo in January 2015, several French political leaders called for the revival of the “crime of national indignity” as a possible sanction against terrorists of French citizenship. As the prime minister Manuel Valls put it, such a measure—backed up, according to surveys, by 76 percent of the French population—would “mark with symbolic force the consequences of the absolute transgression that a terrorist act constitutes” (Clavel 2015). Under French law, national indignity did indeed have a particular history and signification, one that was not simply “symbolic” but in fact quite concrete. As the historian Anne Simonin (2008) shows, “national indignity” was invented in 1944 by the legal experts of the Resistance as an exceptional measure to punish, retroactively, the supporters of the Vichy regime who had collaborated with the Nazi occupiers and promoted anti-Semitic legislation. Between 1945 and 1951, around one hundred thousand citizens were South Atlantic Quarterly