The Historical Evil Tour: How Sympathy for the Devil Maps Human Atrocity Through a Devil’s Eyes

Mick Jagger’s narrator isn’t the biblical Satan—he’s a witness to human history’s recurring capacity for cruelty. Jagger said the song was inspired by the French poet Baudelaire and a novel called The Master and Margarita, where the Devil strolls into 1930s Moscow as a charming observer. The Devil’s “sympathy” isn’t self-pity; it’s a taunt. He’s been there for every atrocity, and humans keep obliging him.

The name-drops are deliberate signposts of institutionalized evil. The Russian Revolution (1917) and the death of the Tsar’s daughter Anastasia point to ideological violence. The Nazi regime’s Blitzkrieg and the “bodies” left behind invoke organized genocide. The Kennedy assassination (1963) stands out because it’s a modern, media-saturated trauma—proof that the pattern didn’t end with world wars. Jagger later noted that the verses were meant to show the Devil as a “metaphor for the evil that men do,” not a supernatural monster.

The song almost wasn’t released. The band worried it would be read as Satanic worship, especially given the late-’60s occult panic. But the real allegory is more uncomfortable: evil isn’t a demon with horns. It’s us, repeating the same routines, and the Devil is just the guy keeping the scorecard.