The Age of Napoleon: The Story of Civilization, Volume XI

by Will Durant

Only less strong than the Industrial Revolution, but far stronger and more lasting than the “Son of the Revolution,” was the revolution that began in France in 1789 and then spread its effects through Europe in the replacement of feudal bonds and dues with individual rights, and the worldwide action of the rival hungers that found clearest voice in the French Revolution: the hunger for freedom —of movement, growth, enterprise, worship, thought, speech, and press; and the hunger for equality—of access to opportunity, education, health, and legal justice. These hostile hungers have taken their turn in dominating the history of modern man: the hunger for liberty, to the detriment of equality, was the recurrent theme of the nineteenth century in Europe and America; the hunger for equality, at the cost of liberty, has been the dominant aspect of European and American history in the twentieth century.