All the same, more than two centuries ago an economic, political and social earthquake overturned the form and structure of a world with foundations so old that it seemed to embody the plan of an eternal God. We now know that the Supreme Being—a veritable succubus battening on humanity—was a fraud perpetrated by priests and princes that was meant to lend an ineffable character to the order of social precedence and regulate the status of masters and slaves.
The French Revolution put an end to an economy based for nearly seven thousand years on agriculture and the appropriation of land. God died on the scaffold along with the hapless Louis XVI, destroyed as the symbol that he embodied. The twin peaks of the monarchic and divine principle—crown of a hierarchical pyramid whose cohesion was the guarantor of an unshakeable tyranny—were thus chopped off. Once deprived of the sacrosanctity of its summit, the decapitated pyramid was bound to collapse, no matter how hard ideological dictatorships from Robespierre to Mao might strive to restore its unified and mythical structure.
The fall of the ancien régime and the rejection of its monarchic and religious totalitarianism signaled the triumph of the ideas of liberty, equality and fraternity. Thanks to the Revolution of 1789 the thinking of the Encylopedists—the Diderots, d’Alemberts, D’Holbachs, Chamforts, Rousseaus, Voltaires, and Mesliers—achieved concrete form and fueled the project of moving from dream to reality.
The hope of achieving a genuinely human life aroused a collective fervor never before seen in history. For the first time, perhaps, human beings sensed that living is not the same thing as surviving and that any existence worth the name does not consist in scrabbling for subsistence day after day like the birds, who as Louis Scutenaire says, “eat only in great fear.”
Survival is indeed the concern of the animal and not the human world.