JEAN-FRAN<;:OIS REVEL
53
longed ever further, into late adolescence, and various forms of education
are being made available to adults. At the same time, the tools of mass
communication have been multiplying and now shower us with words
and images to a degree inconceivable in the past. Whether it is to popu–
larize the news of a scientific discovery and the technical prospects it
opens up, to announce a political event, or to publish figures enabling
one to analyze an economic situation, the universal information machine
is becoming more and more egalitarian and generous, ceaselessly reducing
the old discrimination between the elite in power, who knew little, and
the common run of the ruled, who knew nothing. Now both know -
or can know - a great deal. The superiority of our century over preced–
ing centuries seems to be due to the fact that those in positions of au–
thority in all walks of life have increasingly had at their disposal a far
greater and more abundant fund of information and knowledge with
which to prepare their decisions, while the public is receiving an abun–
dance of information which should enable it to judge the correctness or
wisdom of those decisions. Such an auspicious convergence of favorable
factors should logically have engendered a prodigious improvement in
the human condition. But has this happened?
To answer "yes" would be frivolous. Ours has been one of the
bloodiest centuries in human history, marked by the vast scope of its op–
pressions, persecutions, exterminations. It is the twentieth century that
invented, or at least systematized, genocide, the concentration camp, the
extermination of entire peoples by organized famine, which conceived in
theory and instituted in practice the most advanced systems of bondage
that have ever been devised to crush such huge numbers of human beings.
These astonishing achievements would appear to undermine the notion
that our age has seen the triumph of democracy. And yet, in spite of ev–
erything, our age has seen just that, and for two good reasons.
Notwithstanding many setbacks, the century is moving toward its close
with a greater number of democracies, and these in far better working
order, than at any other moment of history. Furthermore , even though
flouted and abused, democracy has imposed itself on nearly everyone as
the theoretical norm. The divergences concern methods - the "false" or
"true" application of the democratic principle. Even if we deplore the
mendacious character of tyrannies that claim to operate in the name of a
supposedly genuine democracy or with the promise of a "perfect"
democracy forever just over the horizon, we must readily admit that the
species of dictatorial regimes that were founded on the explicit, doctrinal
rejection of democracy disappeared with the collapse of Fascism in 1945
and of Francoism in 1975. Those that remain are marginal.
Recently tyrannies have at least been reduced to justifYing themselves
in the name of a morality they violate and have been driven to verbal
