microcivilization

— Yet according to Robb, who has written biographies of Victor Hugo, Honor de Balzac and Arthur Rimbaud, these microcivilizations were not formless planetoids waiting to be swallowed by a giant state, and their inhabitants didnt constitute a shapeless mass of human raw material, waiting to be processed by the huge, mutating machine of political interference and turned into the people conveniently known as the French.