Life & Wisdom Quote by Jules Romains

Romains turns a whole discipline into a warning label. By calling history a "category of human phenomena", he strips it of grandeur and treats it like a specimen in a cabinet: observable, classifiable, and ominously predictable. The sting lands in that final clause, "tends to catastrophe". It is not that catastrophe is constant, or even inevitable; it's that the vector points that way. History, in this view, has a bias built into its machinery. Give human beings time, power, fear, pride, and bureaucracy, and the system drifts toward breakdown.

The line works because it dodges the comforting myth that history is progress with occasional setbacks. Romains, writing in a Europe that lived through the First World War and watched the interwar years curdle into another crisis, is allergic to triumphal narratives. His generation saw modernity promise order and deliver mechanized slaughter; saw mass politics claim the people while perfecting propaganda; saw "rational" states behave like panicked mobs. Catastrophe becomes less an accident than an emergent property.

Subtextually, Romains is also mocking our retrospective storytelling. We like history when it reads like a plotted novel, full of lessons and heroes. He offers a colder taxonomy: history is where the record concentrates the moments when ordinary error scales up into disaster. The aphorism is compact pessimism, but it's also a moral dare. If catastrophe is the tendency, what counts is the counterforce: institutions, humility, and memory strong enough to fight the drift.