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The return to favor of the pagan classics stimulated the philosophy of secularism, the appreciation of worldly pleasures, and above all intensified the assertion of personal independence and individual expression. Zeal for the classics was a result as well as a cause of the growing secular view of life. Expansion of trade, growth of prosperity and luxury, and widening social contacts generated interest in worldly pleasures, in spite of formal allegiance to ascetic Christian doctrine. Men thus affected -- the humanists -- welcomed classical writers who revealed similar social values and secular attitudes.

Renaissance man may indeed have found himself suspended between faith and reason.

Human experience, man himself, tended to become the practical measure of all things. The ideal life was no longer a monastic escape from society, but a full participation in rich and varied human relationships.

Those drafting it had heeded Napoleon’s exhortation to the creators of his constitution to ‘Write it in such a way that it is brief and obscure’.

assical memory laws defend the memory of all who suffered from crimes committed by the government or with its support. France has laws covering denial of the Holocaust, the Armenian genocide in the Ottoman Empire or the fact that the slave trade was a crime against humanity. The memory law proposed in Russia is fundamentally different. It intends, above all, to defend its memory of itself. More precisely, it intends to defend its memory of that régime which many consider criminal. After all, accusations of unleashing war and installing régimes of occupation are accusations levelled at Stalin and Stalinism.