Pires que les bêtes
Worse Than Beasts

Summary/Abstract: According to classical French, man is an animal but not a bête: the two words are not at all synonymous. A study on a quatrain by the baroque poet Claude Guichard emphasizes a paradoxical argument which is recurrent in the seventeenth century about the particular nature of human beings: within the animals, man is the only species that shows some aggressiveness towards itself. The characteristic of man is not the aptitude for thinking, but an increase in ferociousness or nonsense.

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