and pacifying violence of all-except-one whose death would reconcile the community together. The victim who was persecuted as the source of disorder would then become venerated as the source of order and meaning for the community and seen as a god. This process of engendering and making possible human community through arbitrary victimization is called, within mimetic theory, the scapegoat mechanism. Eventually the scapegoat mechanism would be exposed within the Biblical texts who categorically reorient the position of the Divinity to be on the side of the victim as opposed to that of the persecuting community. All other myths, such as Romulus and Remus, for example, are written and constructed from the point of view of the community whose legitimacy depends on the guilt of the victim in order to be brought together as a unified community. By exposing the relative innocence of the victim within the scapegoat mechanism it is no longer able to function as a vehicle for generating unity and peace. Early life Girard was born in Avignon on 25 December 1923. René Girard was the second son of historian Joseph Girard. He studied medieval history at the École des Chartes, Paris, where the subject of his thesis was "Private life in Avignon in the second half of the 15th century" (""). In 1947, Girard went to Indiana University on a one-year fellowship. He was to spend most of his career in the United States. He received his PhD in 1950 and stayed at Indiana University until 1953. The subject of his PhD at Indiana University was "American Opinion of France, 1940–1943". Although his research was in history, he was also assigned to teach French literature, the field in which he would first make his reputation as a literary critic by publishing influential essays on such authors as Albert Camus and Marcel Proust. Career Girard occupied positions at Duke University and Bryn Mawr College from 1953 to 1957, after which he moved to Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, where he became a full professor in 1961. In that year, he also published his first book: (Deceit, Desire and the Novel, 1966). For several years, he moved back and forth between the State University of New York at Buffalo and Johns Hopkins University. Books he published in this period include (1972; Violence and the Sacred, 1977) and (1978; Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World, 1987). In 1966,