Modernity is born when the eyes that watch the world see in it “this chaos and this monstrous confusion,” but are not unduly alarmed—indeed, they are excited by the prospect of inventing a strategy for moving into that chaos, a new game that would make all that went before seem Ciceronian.⁸⁵ It is an impious view of which only mystics are capable (Pascal was foremost among them).

History, as we encounter it here, is “synoptic and simultaneous,” it is the immense borderless carpet where “the most diverse and distant events can be brought together and tightly knotted before our eyes,”⁸⁶ where events and comments on events and the inventions around events and the ghosts of events remain perpetually bound together in a bed of torture and of pleasure, where forms and forces cannot be separated, where the eye is always aware of the “terrible danger of touching symbols.”⁸⁷ Any judgment here is one thread lost among the tangle of knots in the carpet, and its only claim is that of adding its tenuous color to the overall weave.

Talleyrand: “There was something in Necker that prevented him from sensing, and fearing, the consequences of the measures he himself was taking. He was convinced he would have an all-powerful influence over the States General, that the members of the Third Estate in particular would heed him like an oracle, would see only through his eyes, would do nothing without his approval, and would not disobey him when using the weapons he himself was putting into their hands. An illusion that was bound to be short-lived. Once toppled from that peak where his own amour propre had placed him, and from where he had flattered himself into thinking he was controlling events, he withdrew to his retreat to grieve over those evils he had not wanted to cause, over those crimes his integrity viewed with horror, but from which, if he had been more expert and less presumptuous, he could perhaps have saved France and the world.

“His presumption made him totally incapable of seeing that the movement that existed in France at that time was produced by a passion, or rather by the excesses of a passion shared by all men—vanity. Among almost all nations, it exists only in an inferior form, and represents just one aspect of the national character, or else it is directed firmly toward one single object, whereas with the French, as with their ancestors, the Gauls, it is mixed up with everything and dominates all things with an individual and collective energy that makes them capable of the greatest excesses.

“In the French Revolution, vanity wasn’t the only guiding passion; it aroused other passions, which it summoned in support.⁸⁸ But these others remained subordinate; they took its color and its spirit, they acted on its behalf and for its ends. It gave the impetus and directed the movement to such an extent that it can be said the French Revolution was born out of vanity.”