War & Peace Quote by Tahar Ben Jelloun

There is a deliberate provocation in Ben Jelloun’s opening question: it sounds like a victory lap prompt, then swerves into indictment. The real target isn’t just “petty, bourgeois regimes” as a political category; it’s the postwar promise of moral renewal that curdled into managerial normalcy. By framing the era “since the end of the Second World War,” he invokes the grand narrative: never again, human rights, decolonization, the welfare state, European integration. Then he punctures it with a poet’s blunt metric of failure: not tyranny alone, but the triumph of the average.

“Bourgeois” here is less about income than temperament: risk-averse, comfort-seeking, obsessed with order and propriety. Pairing it with “petty” shrinks these regimes from historical actors into small-minded administrators of the status quo. The sting is in the repetition of “average, mediocre,” a rhythmic flattening that mimics what he’s condemning: a world where the highest ambition is to keep the machine running.

Context matters. Ben Jelloun writes from the fault line between postwar European self-congratulation and the lived aftershocks in the Maghreb: authoritarianism dressed as modernization, cultural policing, corruption presented as stability, and Western democracies content to applaud themselves while trading principles for “security.” The subtext is an accusation of complicity. We didn’t just drift into mediocrity; “we have allowed” it. That “we” implicates citizens, intellectuals, and democracies that prefer comfort to consequence.