Success Quote by Jean Genet

Genet’s line is a neat act of sabotage: it pulls the medals off the hero and pins them on the people doing the praising. He’s not denying conquest; he’s demoting it. The real engine of “heroism” isn’t what was taken, conquered, or survived, but how smoothly the story gets staged afterward - the speeches, monuments, schoolbook chapters, tasteful biopics. In other words, fame isn’t a reward for greatness. It’s the product of successful public relations.

The intent is theatrical because Genet is theatrical. As a dramatist obsessed with masks, ritual, and the glamor of power, he treats hero-worship as performance. “Tributes” isn’t just gratitude; it’s choreography: who gets to speak, what details get erased, which violences become “necessary,” which victims become footnotes. The subtext is darker: if tribute makes the hero, then heroism is available to anyone with the right chorus behind them. Moral accounting becomes less important than narrative control.

Context sharpens the bite. Genet wrote in a century that industrialized both conquest and commemoration: world wars, colonial collapse, and then the long afterlife of official memory. He also lived as an outsider - criminalized, queer, politically radical - attuned to how societies launder authority through ceremony. The quote anticipates our media era with unnerving accuracy. Today, “extent of conquests” looks like raw footage; “success of tributes” is the edit, the hashtag, the myth that sticks. The hero is the role. The tribute is the casting call.