On December 8, 2015, French President François Hollande announced plans to posthumously award the Legion of Honour to the one hundred and thirty victims of the terrorist attacks of November 13 at the Bataclan concert hall and the surrounding area. The institution’s Grand Chancellor disagreed. Since its creation on May 19, 1802, by Napoléon Bonaparte, the Légion d’honneur has rewarded service members and civilians for distinguished service to France. The innocent people barbarically slain in the name of jihadism deserved France’s respects, but in a thousand other ways than by awarding them a medal reserved for acts of heroism. In the end, Hollande backed down and, on July 1, 2016, created the National Medal of Recognition for Victims of Terrorism, the fifth highest decoration in protocol order of precedence. The news of this award was received coolly by some of the public and within the armed forces. It meant that those hurt or killed by fanatics were afforded higher honors than those bestowed on people who fought to defend France. Here were more symptoms of a very contemporary confusion that already sparked debate in the immediate post-war period between members of the Resistance and those sent to the camps: Is suffering torture more worthy than performing feats of valor? Are the unfortunate more heroic than the brave? In another example of this conflation, the municipal government of Paris wanted to honor Arnaud Beltrame, the police officer who offered himself — and ultimately his life — in exchange for a hostage in the southern French town of Trèbes on March 24, 2018. The plaque read “For Arnaud Beltrame, victim of his heroism.” His family protested and the wording was changed. 
Persecution is among those “Christian virtues that have gone mad,” to quote Chesterton. That the son of God came to Earth as a crucified slave to save humanity and elevate the poor and dispossessed was outrageous to men of antiquity, and also to Nietzsche, who was a big fan of strength and aristocracy. Jesus preached not for the rich and the mighty but for the meek and the fallen. With his characteristic blend of gentleness and aggression, he set in motion the ideal of rebellion against the powerful that would shape the entire Western world, including the great secular doctrines of modernity. What is Marx’s working class if not the body of Christ formed into a revolutionary bloc to upend history and create the perfect society? What are minorities in “wokeism,” if not so many Christ-like effigies for us to stop and revere? Their misfortune legitimizes them, especially when that misfortune is pluralized through “intersectionality,” Kimberlé Crenshaw’s concept of a crossroads where several forms of oppression meet. (The more, the better, for this mentality.) Hierarchies must be inverted and the vanquished elevated above the brutes. Where the victor says, “might makes right,” conversely, the victim says, “my weakness is my weapon and my right.” This quasi-sacredness of the vulnerable is one of the great prerogatives of civilization. We are the beneficiaries of this revolution, for better and for worse. It is this revolution that, over the past two millennia, has promoted compassion and sympathy and solidarity into high ethical ideals, and made possible women’s rights, children’s rights, the rights of exploited and enslaved and oppressed and colonized people, and their emergence into the public arena a reality. But a perverse strategy has grafted itself onto this undisputed leap forward, with both countries and individuals enthusiastically identifying as victims. This trend seems more entrenched in rich countries, whose citizenry is devoted to material pleasures and structurally dissatisfied with its lot. On both sides of the Atlantic, our current pantheons are comprised only of the oppressed and the crushed. They alone are eligible for our sympathy, and new victims — and categories of victimhood — are identified each day. It has become our great democratic passion — even the privileged want to play the maligned. Freedom, the ability that each of us possesses to lead our lives as we see fit, has above all become the right to indulge in self-pity. The word “victim” is polysemic. To be robbed or to be hurt in an accident is not the same thing as to be raped or to be tortured. But within the cult of victimhood there is no gray — only black and white. Everyone, especially since World War II, has aligned their own condition with that of the most afflicted. Traditionally, victim status has been accorded by historians or the courts: the former described the reality of a massacre, the latter confirmed that reality and drew conclusions from it. The road to recognition was long and often paved by countries or governments. But today, in a time of impatience distended by social media, people hurry the process along by crowning themselves martyrs. The French Revolution’s lists of grievances set the precedent. But consider the phenomenon of what might be called grievance studies, these recriminatory departments in American universities that break down into a myriad of social groups who dub themselves martyrs from the outset. Armenians, Jews, enslaved people, colonized people, Harkis (the Algerian soldiers who enlisted in the French army during the Algerian War), and gays had to wait around impatiently for a long time before being recognized. We no longer have the courage to wait; we want to identify as pariahs now. What does it mean to be a victim? Is it a narrative identity we adopt and expect others to confirm? Is it a pathology of recognition, the desire to be identified without having to introduce oneself? The intense hero-idealism of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries has been replaced by the intense victim-idealization of the twenty-first, at the risk of mass-producing false martyrs who crowd out the real ones. It has become the alibi of killers, such as Vladimir Putin, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, and Hamas, who rely on some ancient wrong to drape themselves in the mantle of martyrdom as they commit their crimes. After 1945 and the Holocaust,
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