The Daily Novel

Just in case some of you think I have gone on too much about God in the last few days, this is to let you know that my mind is already preparing itself for a long weekend in Paris starting next Friday. Long before I ever went there, Paris, for me represented one of the greatest days in the history of the world, back in 1789, when the people of Paris, rose up and in one blow, toppled the monarchy and knocked God off his perch.

Of course, my teachers told me that the French revolution, because it resulted first in rule by a succession of, what I would call agnostic fundamentalists, and then to the dictatorship of Napoleon, was evidence that violent revolution inevitably led to tyranny.

But as soon as I started to read the serious newspapers I noticed that the French of my youth, quite happily allowed their deputies to belong to religious political parties, so long as they did not try and get their Marxist opponents locked up in the Bastille. And that they had stayed firm to the revolutionary decision to keep God out of the state schools.

So the story of the French Revolution helped me to think for myself, and to challenge my teachers, and the preaching of the Daily Mail coming through my letter box.

My French friends are nearly all children of the secular tradition. If they were religious, they would insist on many Gods, including Descartes, Voltaire, Rousseau, Moliere, Flaubert, Sartres, Camus and Marcelle Marceau. They would also want some women, possibly Edif de Piaf, to provide the music, and Simone de Beauvoir, to keep all those rampant males in order.