But yeah I probably already spoke about that but I was struck a few years ago when I read Les Déracinés by Barrès (it's about the dreams, success and misfortunes of a bunch of young men from the Lorraine region going "up" to Paris in the 1890's) at just how some things didn't change that much. You could probably rewrite it pretty faithfully by just swapping the Third Republic bureaucracy with EU technocracy, the newspaper boom and the rush to journalism as a way to climb the social ladder and push political agendas with Internet and influencers, the national mourning of Victor Hugo to today's obsession in celebrities, the Panama Canal scandal for the Panama Papers, and Lorraine / Paris for globalization insiders and outsiders. Barrès was a nationalist ambiguous with his choice of political labels (not a lot of sympathy for the Republic overall) but I guess it's sort of part of the demonstration.
We've come a long way with regards to literacy, education, public health, rational discourse etc... but never to the point of reaching that utopia of "Athens without the slavery" (which itself has been subjected to some extreme romanticism).
