The advantage of despotic regimes is that there is not the slightest danger of uncertainty. But their organizers always get out of hand, and concoct such overwhelming majorities that no one in their right mind believes them.

There must be a mineral drowsiness, an immense tedium in absolute power, in the permanent spectacle of the voluntary humiliation of those subjected. The late Franco regime was a very reluctant regime in ideological matters. Those who indoctrinated us children were mainly priests in black cassocks with a very faint fly-wing sheen.