There are still people for whom a strike is a scandal: i.e., not only a mistake, a disorder, or a misdemeanor, but a moral crime, an intolerable action which in their eyes is an offense to Nature. Inadmissible, scandalous, revolting are the words used by certain readers of Le Figaro about a recent strike. This is a language which dates, in fact, from the Restoration and which expresses its profound mentality; that was the period when the bourgeoisie, only recently in power, operated a kind of crasis between Morality and Nature, giving the one the protection of the other: fearing they would have to naturalize Morality, they moralized Nature, pretended to identify the political and the narural order, and ended by declaring immoral everything which contested the structural laws of the society they were determined to defend. To Charles X's prefects as to Le Figaro's readers today, a strike seemed first of all a challenge to the inscriptions of moralized reason: to strike is "to defy the world," i.e., to infringe less a civic than a "natural legality," to attack the philosophic basis of bourgeois society, that mixture of morality and logic which is common sense.

For the scandal proceeds from an inconsistency: a strike is scandalous because it affects precisely those whom it does not concern. [...] to set striker against taxpayer is to constitute the world into a theater, to derive from the total man a special actor, and to oppose these arbitrary actors to each other in the lie of a symbolic structure which pretends to believe that the part is merely a perfect reduction of the whole.