Everything that happens now will happen in the light of history. It is not a midday luminary, but a corpse-candle to the intellect; at best, it is a secondhand lunar light, error-breeding, sand-blind and parched. Camille Desmoulins, 1793: ‘They think that gaining freedom is like growing up: you have to suffer.’ Maximilien Robespierre, 1793: ‘History is fiction.’
