"Peoples will be as before, the sheep sent to the slaughterhouses or to the meadows as it pleases the shepherds"
About this Quote
A lawyer’s pessimism rarely arrives dressed as poetry, but La Fontaine’s line lands like a legal brief written in blood. “Peoples” are plural and interchangeable, a mass noun with a pulse; the state of being “as before” isn’t comfort, it’s a verdict. The sentence turns on a simple pastoral image that most cultures treat as soothing: sheep, meadows, shepherds. La Fontaine flips the sentiment. The meadow isn’t freedom, it’s a different form of managed life, and the slaughterhouse isn’t tragedy so much as policy.
The genius is in the grammar of permission: “as it pleases the shepherds.” Power isn’t presented as ideological or even strategic; it’s capricious. Elites don’t merely decide, they indulge. That’s where the contempt lives, and it’s aimed at both sides: at shepherds who treat human beings as livestock, and at peoples who accept being herded, grateful for pasture until the truck backs up.
Context matters: a French lawyer spanning the Third Republic, the Dreyfus affair, World War I, and the rise of mass politics. In that era, crowds were newly mobilized by newspapers, parties, and nationalist mythmaking, while bureaucratic states gained unprecedented capacity to sort bodies into uniforms, prisons, and trenches. La Fontaine’s rural metaphor is a modern warning: mass society can look democratic on the surface while still operating on ancient terms of domination.
It works because it refuses the comforting narrative that history “progresses.” The line isn’t prophecy; it’s a diagnosis of recurring consent, reminding us that the pasture and the abattoir can share the same gate.
The genius is in the grammar of permission: “as it pleases the shepherds.” Power isn’t presented as ideological or even strategic; it’s capricious. Elites don’t merely decide, they indulge. That’s where the contempt lives, and it’s aimed at both sides: at shepherds who treat human beings as livestock, and at peoples who accept being herded, grateful for pasture until the truck backs up.
Context matters: a French lawyer spanning the Third Republic, the Dreyfus affair, World War I, and the rise of mass politics. In that era, crowds were newly mobilized by newspapers, parties, and nationalist mythmaking, while bureaucratic states gained unprecedented capacity to sort bodies into uniforms, prisons, and trenches. La Fontaine’s rural metaphor is a modern warning: mass society can look democratic on the surface while still operating on ancient terms of domination.
It works because it refuses the comforting narrative that history “progresses.” The line isn’t prophecy; it’s a diagnosis of recurring consent, reminding us that the pasture and the abattoir can share the same gate.
Quote Details
| Topic | Freedom |
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