Now there's nothing there. My history is blown away.

I don't see this as an upset. I bet everyone else in this gymnasium does, but I don't. History doesn't mean anything. It all comes down to who works harder during the year and who comes ready.

We're all in this together. We are called to help these people because they are our family as well.

Sartre smoked. Colette, George Sand, Marguerite Duras, [André] Gide -- they all smoked, ... We have a long history of great thinking here, [with] coffee and cigarettes.

You have to look at history as an evolution of society.

The crisis of history in France, is a crisis of social bond, a crisis of citizenship. A citizen is the heir of a past more or less mythified, but he makes his own, whatever his personal genealogy. Today, under the pretext that the country has undergone considerable changes, some would like to transform the past in order to adopt it to the new face of France. Nothing, however, will make the past anything other than what it was. To pretend to change history is a totalitarian project: One who has control of the past has control over the future, one who has control over the present has control over the past, as George Orwell wrote in 1984.