Empathy and its Limits by Aleida Assmann

Author:Aleida Assmann
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781137552389
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan

5.4 Disability and capabilities: from injury to pensions to human rights

The distinction between empathy and sympathy can help us understand the shift from the realm of humanitarian law to the realm of human rights law in a number of specific ways. One is located in the politics of disability pensions for wounded veterans of the Great War.

Let me dwell on one emissary of empathy, understood as distinct from sympathy. I speak of the French Jurist René Cassin. In August 1914 René Cassin was a 26-year-old lawyer, born in Bayonne to a prominent Jewish family living in the south west of the country. The outbreak of war found him in Paris, from where he immediately journeyed south to join the 311th Infantry Regiment in Aix.4 In September he was promoted to the rank of corporal and served near St Mihiel. He remained in this sector, where, on 12 October, he was ordered to take a squad of 16 men and advance towards a German strongpoint near Chauvencourt on the outskirts of St Mihiel. German emplacements made such a probe suicidal. All 16 men in his unit were hit by flanking fire from well-entrenched machine guns and artillery. He himself was hit in his side, his abdomen, and his left arm. He knew that a stomach wound was almost always fatal. Cassin refused evacuation, but told a passing soldier to inform their commander of the strength of the German positions in his sector. In addition he begged this man, Sergeant-Quartermaster Canestrier, to write to Cassin’s father that he had died painlessly (which was a lie) and to send to his family a leather cigarette case, two gold 100-franc pieces and some small bills. Canestrier vanished, and so did Cassin’s valuables.

Clearly Cassin thought he would never survive. He asked a priest if someone could say Hebrew prayers with him. The priest replied that his prayers were for everyone, and gave him the benefit of his company.5 Somehow, he got through the night, and was then handed over to the French army medical services.

The way these units were organized in the early days of the war almost killed him. The rule was that on mobilization you reported to your regiment, in whatever region you were assigned. After battle, you returned to that site, either intact, wounded, or in a coffin. Cassin would not be treated in the north east of France, but in Provence, 600 kilometres away. He was sent by wagon and then by train south, and after a journey of several days arrived in the regiment’s hospital in Antibes on the Mediterranean. There, surgeons were astonished to see that he was still alive, despite the fact that his abdomen had been torn to shreds. Cassin had been wise enough to drink virtually nothing on the trip. They then told him that his case was critical, and that they did not know if he would survive more than a few hours. That meant they did not have time to anaesthetize him, but needed to operate immediately.

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