Life & Wisdom Quote by Raymond Queneau

“Religions tend to disappear with man's good fortune” lands like a casual aside, then keeps tightening the screws. Queneau isn’t staging a grand atheist manifesto so much as slipping in a dry, sociological punchline: faith isn’t defeated by argument, it’s outcompeted by comfort. The verb “tend” matters. It gives him plausible deniability while still aiming at a pattern he thinks he’s spotted: when life gets safer, longer, more predictable, the metaphysical emergency services get fewer calls.

The subtext is almost impolite in its reductionism. Religion, in this framing, is less revelation than risk management - a cultural technology for bargaining with chaos. “Good fortune” isn’t just money; it’s stability, public health, a future you can plan without superstition doing the heavy lifting. Queneau’s line also implies a reverse truth that stings harder: misfortune doesn’t merely coexist with religion, it recruits for it.

Context sharpens the cynicism. A French poet writing in the shadow of two world wars, watching modernity promise salvation through industry, science, and the welfare state - and watching those promises repeatedly fail. Queneau, tied to the OuLiPo spirit of formal play and intellectual mischief, liked ideas that behave like traps: simple on entry, complicated on exit. His sentence tempts progressive triumphalism (more prosperity equals less faith), then quietly exposes its fragility. “Good fortune” is fickle; so the disappearance is a “tend,” not a guarantee. The line reads as both diagnosis and warning: if belief recedes in peacetime, don’t be shocked when it surges back in the next crisis.