Montaigne

And furthermore, this freedom, of which Montaigne was the uncontested herald: did one really need to defend it with such obstinacy, now, in 1900? Surely, for so long now, all that had been taken for granted—had been humanity’s rightful possession, freed from all tyranny and servitude, sealed by law and custom? It seemed obvious that the right to have our own lives, our own thoughts, to express them freely through the spoken and written word, belonged to us as much as the breath that left our mouths or the beating of our hearts. The world unfurled before us with its numberless countries; we were neither prisoners of the state, nor yoked to the service of war, nor arbitrarily submitted to tyrannical ideologies. It seemed to our generation that Montaigne was simply rattling chains we thought long since broken, and we could never imagine that in fact Fate had reforged them for us, far stronger and crueller than ever before.