Chapter 20
THE STORY OF A REAL MAN
14 July 1952. Today is the anniversary of the French Revolution, the taking of the Bastille. There’s no mention of this in any of the papers, even though the schoolbooks teach us that the bourgeois French Revolution was a rightful precursor of the Great Socialist October Revolution, and thus a necessary stepping stone. But of course this iron causality, the succession of societal orders, where the latter is raised upon the ruins of the former, the former enriching the soil from which the more progressive order springs, is not required of the journalist. It is, rather, the Hegelian and Marxist ‘historical necessity’ which makes use of nations and entire eras of humanity as mere necessary stadia, by which the grand process of world events ascends the spir
