The apocalypse was over. Actually, the end of the world, as with most apocalyptic predictions, was a bit of a let-down. It was more like an ‘apocalypse without apocalypse’, to borrow Derrida's phrase, a catastrophe without a parousia to close history, leaving a premature ending with nothing but the boredom of a finality without end. The crisis after the apocalypse is the anxiety of normality.

From time to time, apocalyptic fevers would seize the imagination of humanity, particularly in the form of fin-de-siècle crises; the end of the eighteenth century was no different, except that this time it was to be an apocalypse without God, which meant that humanity had to pick up the pieces of its own shattered expectations and bear the guilt of its own failure. With a secular apocalypse, the command is not to wait but to act, to seize history as kairos and to force the apocalypse to appear in concrete reality – as Revolution or Terror, or in the form of Napoleon riding out on his horse as the Messiah or the Anti-Christ.