ABSTRACT
Human history is what people have done or experienced, no more and no less, and what they have done or experienced in groups predominates. Earlier studies of traumatic reliving en groupe have all dealt with whole nations or whole continents composed by and large of the same people, or their descendants, from trauma to reliving to eventual re-reliving, so that some form of transmission of the traumatic impact could be tacitly supposed. A reliving has a pick of acceptable equivalents to any element of its traumatic original: thus many another outside threat to the Fourth Republic could have served as well as the one from the self-proclaimed committee of public safety in Algiers. At any rate, the inner imperative of traumatic reliving is a prime source of the notion of fate in imaginative literature, where it has been most powerfully rendered.
