Complete servitude

Yesterday, a man was tried for crossing the Avenue des Champs-Élysées on foot. He hadn't run over anyone, he hadn't been guilty of speeding. He had simply taken advantage of a moment when he wasn't passing any cars on the roadway... But he was halfway across when, from the bank he had just left, an imperious whistle sounded. And when he reached the other bank, he was picked up by a police officer.
Hey! Hey, you, then, can't you read? They didn't bother putting up signs for puppies. I'll issue a report.
Indeed, here and there on the Avenue des Champs-Élysées, signs are posted bearing these words: "Pedestrian Crossing." This doesn't just mean that pedestrians have the right to cross at these level crossings, but also that they don't have the right to cross anywhere else.
For every sign must be interpreted in the most restrictive, prohibitive, and vexatious sense.
The judge acquitted the presumptuous pedestrian and declared that the police chief was going a bit too far.
But this little trial supports what we were claiming the other day: the more advanced a civilization is, the more perfected it is, the more it hinders human independence and the freedom of the citizen, through a heavy legacy of laws, regulations, conventions, prejudices, and social contracts which, accumulating, complicate the individual's life and ultimately make it impossible.
We believe we are moving towards liberation; we are engaging in a dreary physical, intellectual, and moral servitude. We enjoy an extremely sophisticated array of shackles, stretchers, blinders, and handcuffs, which is admired by civilized minds and leaves only the right to barbaric hearts to mourn an archaic freedom.
A savage, in a savage country, can go right, left, hunt game that belongs to no one, lie down on the grass, dress as he pleases, or not dress at all.
The first sign that civilization erects, as soon as man can write, reads: "No hunting," which in some countries means: "No eating."
Then one can read: "No trespassing." And this inscription soon becomes useless, since to the right and left there are walls and railings. It is forbidden to sit on the grass.
The man freed by civilization is forced to follow the highway and fall in line. From time to time, at crossroads, a peacekeeper stops the dreary trampling of the herd with a gesture, or forces it to turn around a gas lamp... From time to time, at crossroads, a war adjutant takes a portion of the herd, which then takes on the glorious name of troop and whose slavery is made clear externally by uniform, mechanical, and murderous movements.
There is not only compulsory servitude... (This is not a pleonasm, for we practice voluntary servitude.) The civilized person must dress like everyone else, think like everyone else (which is a way of not thinking at all), and restrain their spontaneous feelings in order to experience regulated feelings. For, for the civilized person, tyranny is in the law, but above all in fashion. And there is an inflexible fashion for the way we dress, think, judge, feel, have fun, or feel sadness.
No civilized man has freedom in his outward gestures or his innermost feelings. Worse still: through the interplay of hierarchies and social obligations, no civilized man is independent of other men.
You will reply to me: "Jean-Jacques Rousseau already wrote that."
If Jean-Jacques Rousseau wrote that, before the revolutions that made our chains heavier and tightened our shackles, he was very wrong to complain. For Jean-Jacques Rousseau could botanize in the woods bordering the Seine without climbing into them or breaking through the fence. And I suppose he walks along the Champs-Élysées, in the company of other deceased sages, without the shadow of a policeman, armed with the shadow of a stick, issuing him a ticket for having trampled the asphodel meadows in places that were not reserved by the shadow of a sign created by the shadow of a prefect for the passage of the shadow of pedestrians.

G. de la Fouchardière.