Victor Hugo berates the general public for crediting everything they do themselves to their supposedly wonderful Government.
L’Homme Qui Rit (1869) is a novel by Victor Hugo, who took as his theme the miseries set in train by acts of arbitrary power; though his story was set in England during the reign of King James II (1685-1688), France in his own day, under Napoleon III, was uppermost in his mind. In this passage, Hugo takes a moment to reflect ruefully on the way that the public idolises the Power of the State.