" The servile rebellions, the regicide revolutions,
and those of the twentieth century have thus, consciously, accepted a burden of guilt which increased in
proportion to the degree of liberation they proposed to introduce. This contradiction, which has become
only too obvious, prevents our contemporary revolutionaries from displaying that aspect of happiness and
optimism which shone forth from the faces and the speeches of the members of the Constituent Assembly
in 1789. Is this contradiction inevitable? Does it characterize or betray the value of rebellion? These
questions are bound to arise about revolution as they are bound to arise about metaphysical rebellion.
Actually, revolution is only the logical consequence of metaphysical rebellion, and we shall discover, in
our analysis of the revolutionary movement, the same desperate and bloody effort to affirm the dignity of
man in defiance of the things that deny its existence. The revolutionary spirit thus undertakes the defense
of that part of man which refuses to submit. In other words, it tries to assure him
his crown in the realm of time, and, rejecting God, it chooses history with an apparently inevitable logic. "

― Albert Camus , The Rebel