A massacre is an event of killing people who are not engaged in hostilities or are defenseless. It is generally used to describe a targeted killing of civilians en masse by an armed group or person. The word is a

loan In finance, a loan is the tender of money by one party to another with an agreement to pay it back. The recipient, or borrower, incurs a debt and is usually required to pay interest for the use of the money. The document evidencing the deb ...

of a French term for "butchery" or "carnage". Other terms with overlapping scope include

war crime A war crime is a violation of the laws of war that gives rise to individual criminal responsibility for actions by combatants in action, such as intentionally killing civilians or intentionally killing prisoners of war, torture, taking hostage ...

, pogrom, mass killing, mass murder, and extrajudicial killing.

Etymology

''Massacre'' derives from late 16th century Middle French word ''macacre'' meaning "slaughterhouse" or "butchery". Further origins are dubious, though the word may be related to Latin ''macellum'' "provisions store, butcher shop". The

Middle French Middle French () is a historical division of the French language that covers the period from the mid-14th to the early 17th centuries. It is a period of transition during which: * the French language became clearly distinguished from the other co ...

word ''macecr'' "butchery, carnage" is first recorded in the late 11th century. Its primary use remained the context of animal slaughter (in hunting terminology referring to the head of a stag) well into the 18th century. The use of ''macecre'' "butchery" of the mass killing of people dates to the 12th century, implying people being "slaughtered like animals". The term did not necessarily imply a multitude of victims, e.g. Fénelon in ''Dialogue des Morts'' (1712) uses ''l'horride massacre de Blois'' ("the horrid ''massacre'' at he chateau ofBlois") of the assassination of Henry I, Duke of Guise (1588), while Boileau, ''Satires XI'' (1698) has ''L'Europe fut un champ de massacre et d'horreur'' "Europe was a field of ''massacre'' and horror" of the

European wars of religion The European wars of religion were a series of wars waged in Europe during the 16th, 17th and early 18th centuries. Fought after the Protestant Reformation began in 1517, the wars disrupted the religious and political order in the Catholic Chu ...

. The French word was loaned into English in the 1580s, specifically in the sense "indiscriminate slaughter of a large number of people". It is used in reference to the St. Bartholomew's Day massacre in '' The Massacre at Paris'' by Christopher Marlowe. The term is again used in 1695 for the Sicilian Vespers of 1281, called "that famous Massacre of the French in Sicily" in the English translation of ''De quattuor monarchiis'' by Johannes Sleidanus (1556), translating ''illa memorabilis Gallorum clades per Siciliam'', i.e. ''massacre'' is here used as the translation of Latin '' clades'' "hammering, breaking; destruction". The term's use in historiography was popularized by Gibbon's '' History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'' (1781–1789), which used e.g. " massacre of the Latins" for the killing of Roman Catholics in Constantinople in 1182. The Åbo Bloodbath has also been described as a kind of massacre; this was a mass punishment carried out on the Old Great Square in

Turku Turku ( ; ; , ) is a city in Finland and the regional capital of Southwest Finland. It is located on the southwestern coast of the country at the mouth of the Aura River (Finland), River Aura. The population of Turku is approximately , while t ...

on November 10, 1599, in which 14 opponents of the Duke Charles (later King Charles IX) in

Finland Finland, officially the Republic of Finland, is a Nordic country in Northern Europe. It borders Sweden to the northwest, Norway to the north, and Russia to the east, with the Gulf of Bothnia to the west and the Gulf of Finland to the south, ...

were decapitated; in the Battle between Duke Charles and Sigismund, Duke Charles defeated King Sigismund's troops in the Battle of Stångebro in

Sweden Sweden, formally the Kingdom of Sweden, is a Nordic countries, Nordic country located on the Scandinavian Peninsula in Northern Europe. It borders Norway to the west and north, and Finland to the east. At , Sweden is the largest Nordic count ...

in 1598 and then made an expedition to Finland, where he defeated the resistance during the Cudgel War and executed the estates in Turku without consulting Finland's leading nobles. An early use in the propagandistic portrayal of current events was the " Boston Massacre" of 1770, which was employed to build support for the

American Revolution The American Revolution (1765–1783) was a colonial rebellion and war of independence in which the Thirteen Colonies broke from British America, British rule to form the United States of America. The revolution culminated in the American ...

. A pamphlet with the title ''A short narrative of the horrid massacre in Boston, perpetrated in the evening of the fifth day of March, 1770, by soldiers of the 29th regiment'' was printed in Boston still in 1770. The term ''massacre'' began to see inflationary use in journalism in the first half of the 20th century. By the 1970s, it could also be used purely metaphorically, of events that do not involve deaths, such as the Saturday Night Massacre—the dismissals and resignations of political appointees during

Richard Nixon Richard Milhous Nixon (January 9, 1913April 22, 1994) was the 37th president of the United States, serving from 1969 until Resignation of Richard Nixon, his resignation in 1974. A member of the Republican Party (United States), Republican ...

's Watergate scandal.

Definitions

Robert Melson (1982) in the context of the " Hamidian massacres" used a "basic working definition" of "by massacre we shall mean the intentional killing by political actors of a significant number of relatively defenseless people... the motives for massacre need not be rational in order for the killings to be intentional... Mass killings can be carried out for various reasons, including a response to false rumors... political massacre... should be distinguished from criminal or pathological mass killings... as political bodies we of course include the state and its agencies, but also nonstate actors..." Similarly, Levene (1999) attempts an objective classification of "massacres" throughout history, taking the term to refer to killings carried out by groups using overwhelming force against defenseless victims. He is excepting certain cases of mass executions, requiring that massacres must have the quality of being morally unacceptable. The term "fractal massacre" has been used to refer to two different types of event: * the fracturing of Aboriginal tribes by killing more than 30% of the tribe on one of their hunting missions, and * many small killings adding up to a larger

genocide Genocide is violence that targets individuals because of their membership of a group and aims at the destruction of a people. Raphael Lemkin, who first coined the term, defined genocide as "the destruction of a nation or of an ethnic group" by ...

Etymology

Definitions

See also

References

Notes

Citations

Sources

Further reading