"Why so many French people are so unhappy with their work": the good leaves of Philippe d'Iribarne's book

The explosive legacy of an honor society

The French Revolution certainly rejected the rank linked to “blood” and only wanted to know what is in conformity with reason.

On the other hand, she had a very ambiguous attitude towards ranks, hierarchies and privileges.

Only the most radical wanted to see in it only a survival doomed to disappear.

(…) The rejection of the Old Regime did not lead to rejecting the values ​​of honor and nobility but to wanting to make them the good of all.

(…) Glory, an eminently aristocratic notion, has remained a cardinal value.

If, in a political register, the nobility has disappeared as an institution, the distinction between what is noble and what is low has persisted in a social register, with a permanent tension between a law which proclaims the equality of all and morals that refuse it.

A form of symbolic equality provides a subtle compromise between these antagonistic tendencies.

It is obtained when everyone is fully respected in their own privileges, however modest they may be...

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