INTRODUCTION

The downfall of an authoritarian or totalitarian regime can unleash very strong emotions, positive as well as negative. After the liberation in France, or after May 8, 1945, in other German-occupied countries, popular joy was everywhere. In 1989, the fall of the Berlin wall triggered similar enthusiasms. At the same time, transitions can trigger furious vindictive emotions against the leaders and agents of the former regime. In this chapter, I explore the mechanisms by which emotions may shape the legal proceedings of transitional justice. In doing so, I face a methodological difficulty. Although I have no doubt whatsoever that emotions mattered in these cases, the question is whose emotions? One possibility is that everybody – legislators, judges, and the population at large (except for the collaborators) – were in the grip of the same emotions. Another is that the retributive emotions, as I shall call them, were found mainly among the ordinary citizens, and that other, more cool-headed actors, concerned with preempting and preventing popular violence or motivated by electoral calculations, simply responded to them. Often, the truth is likely to lie somewhere in between. Because of lack of evidence I sometimes have to elide this problem by means of suitably ambiguous formulations.

In Section II, I provide a selective overview of the emotions and those of their features that will prove most relevant for my purposes here.