“The Americans are not French revolutionaries climbing onto the barricades”. The sentence is from Republican Senator Ben Sasse on Wednesday condemning the violent invasion of Congress by supporters of Donald Trump. What are the sans-culottes doing there you ask? The figure of speech is classic especially among the Republicans: “We are still not French”, said in essence the Republican senator, longtime opponent of Trump but trying not to cut himself off from his pro-Trump base. The implication is also that political violence as expressed Wednesday in Washington does not belong to American culture at all. But if the insurgency is indeed perhaps not as American as apple pie, political violence is a reality of American political culture at least as much as it is in France.

As usual, the former French ambassador to the United States Gérard Araud quickly reacted on Twitter to this Francophobic pique by pretending to be offended: “Yes, you are right Ben Sasse: we French are better than this band of amateur idiots ”.

But the essential is elsewhere. By storming the heart of the legislative power, the supporters of Donald Trump did not imitate the yellow vests degrading the Arc de Triomphe; they were following in the footsteps of American rebels who have also made the country’s history, often forgotten.

The episode that first comes to mind is that of the Wilmington Uprising on November 10, 1898. A rebellion of some 2,000 armed white men in this North Carolina port protesting against the local government, formed both white and black. This racial integration was unbearable to the supremacists white people and more broadly to the local elite who organized this uprising which left more than 60 dead among the blacks targeted. The insurgents forced the Republican mayor and several black elected officials to resign in order to set up a Democratic mayor (then a segregationist party). Although completely illegal, this reversal was not contested by the State of Carolina North nor by the federal authorities and thus became the only successful “coup” in history on American soil.

From the desire to forcibly reverse the outcome of the ballot box to racial conflicts, Wednesday’s violence is not unrelated to Wilmington then. But well beyond this episode, the riots are part of American history, from the famous “draft riots”, riots against conscription, in New York in July 1863, to the “Rodney King riots” in Los Angeles in 1992, obviously going through the civil rights protests in the 1950s and 1960s.

It is also during these episodes of violence that many American presidents have used the Insurgency Act, which gives them the power to deploy the armed forces on the national territory to put an end to disorders. The same text that Donald Trump wanted to invoke during the last summer, during the demonstrations of the Black Lives Matter movement across the country, raising the concern of many, up to his own Minister of Defense, Marc Esper who later told Military Times, “Worrying that these constant discussions about the Insurgency Act were going to take us in a very, very dark direction…”.

This position, among others, led to his being sacked by Donald Trump the day after the November election, but the idea that the outgoing president could play with political violence to pursue and achieve his aims has worried more. ‘a. Ten former defense ministers from both parties took the very rare initiative of publishing a joint column in the Washington Post, to denounce in advance any attempt to involve the armed forces “To resolve an electoral disagreement (what) would take us to dangerous, illegal and unconstitutional territory ”. Published on January 3, this column appeared to many to be overly alarmist. Three days later and after that fateful January 6, it only seems realistic.

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