The French Revolution gives McGowan his clearest historical case study for watching a genuinely universalist form of enjoyment curdle back into a particularist one in real time. Under the monarchy, enjoyment had been almost entirely delayed: the Church regulated a bargain in which suffering in this life purchased enjoyment in the next, which is a large part of why the Church held the social position it did for as long as it did. The Revolution's opening proposal — liberty, equality, and solidarity — offered something with no clear precedent in prior history: an enjoyment built around the political recognition of those who had no stake whatsoever in the existing order. Emmanuel Sieyès's 1789 pamphlet on the Third Estate captured the position with three short, famous lines: the Third Estate, he wrote, is everything in practice, has so far counted as nothing in the existing political order, and wants to become something. The commoners did the work; the aristocracy and clergy kept the enjoyment. That imbalance, more than any single grievance, is what the Revolution set out to correct.

For a period, the radical wing of the Revolution genuinely pursued universal nonbelonging rather than a new form of belonging. The Montagnards saw the plain contradiction between proclaiming liberty and equality at home while continuing to profit from slavery in the colonies, and Maximilien Robespierre told the National Convention in 1791 that French liberty itself was incompatible with the continuation of colonial slavery; under Jacobin rule, France did in fact abolish it. But the same Robespierre who had earlier opposed both the death penalty and foreign war changed his position on both, and began directing the Revolution's energy toward identifying enemies rather than continuing to universalize nonbelonging — a shift that led him to execute his own former allies, Camille Desmoulins and Georges Danton, before the Revolution's more conservative faction had him executed in turn. War against the rest of Europe, which both Robespierre and the radical journalist Jean-Paul Marat had specifically feared, delivered Napoleon Bonaparte the military prestige that let him end the Revolution outright.

Napoleon's rise completes the arc from egalitarian to nationalist enjoyment. He reintroduced a rightist, exception-based structure of belonging organized around military victory and his own person; French subjects could once again enjoy belonging to a nation through his conquests rather than through the harder, more universal nonbelonging the Revolution had briefly offered. He tried to restore slavery in Haiti by force, and his 1804 legal code rolled back much of the Revolution's egalitarian promise, reducing wives, among other things, to the legal property of their husbands. The trajectory — aristocratic, to egalitarian, to nationalist — is the clearest illustration of how quickly a genuinely universalist enjoyment can revert to something structurally conservative the moment its leaders start looking for enemies rather than continuing to sit inside the harder, less satisfying position of shared nonbelonging.

There is a broader lesson buried in this history about why supplying people with correct information so rarely changes minds, whether in the eighteenth century or the twenty-first. Baruch Spinoza argued in the Ethics that an emotion can only be checked by a stronger, contrary emotion, never by knowledge alone, however true that knowledge happens to be. Freud reached the same conclusion from a clinical direction: in his short essay "Wild Psychoanalysis," he compares informing a patient of what they have repressed to handing out menu cards during a famine, and warns that supplying the missing knowledge directly tends to intensify the underlying conflict rather than resolve it, because the repression was never caused by a simple lack of information in the first place. Political consciousness-raising runs into the identical wall: a political position does not persist because its supporters lack the relevant facts, but because it delivers a form of enjoyment those facts do nothing to interrupt. The only thing that can compete with an existing structure of enjoyment is a more compelling structure of enjoyment — which is precisely what the Revolution's radicals briefly managed to offer, and precisely what its slide toward Napoleon eventually took away.