Africans thus never experienced a lay republic, even though the regimes were almost everywhere democratic, with a balance of powers. That is why every African is at heart a hidden aristocrat, just as every French bourgeois was before the Revolution. The deeper reflexes of the present-day African are more closely tied to a monarchic regime than to a republican one. Rich or poor, peasant or urbanite, all dream of being a small or great lord rather than a small or great bourgeois. The quality of their gestures and attitudes, their manner of seeing things, whatever the caste, is lordly and aristocratic in contrast to bourgeois “pettiness.” There is still one revolution’s distance between African and Western consciences, in terms of instinctive behavior. These aftereffects of aristocratism would have been extirpated only if the African, in the course of his history, had become responsible for his own destiny within the framework of a republican regime. Western colonization, even when republican, could not change these facts. That also explains why many Blacks adjust perfectly to the manners of the British aristocracy.