Civilization will not attain to its perfection until the last stone from the last church falls on the last priest.

The line expresses an extreme anticlerical, anti-institutional view: “civilization” is imagined as reaching its highest stage only when organized religion and its clergy have been eradicated. Read rhetorically, it is less a literal program than a violent metaphor for the belief that ecclesiastical power obstructs reason, science, and social progress. In the French context, such language echoes the long tradition of Enlightenment and revolutionary hostility to the Church’s political authority. At the same time, the absolutism of “last stone…last church…last priest” signals polemical exaggeration—an attempt to shock, to dramatize the perceived incompatibility between modernity and clerical dominance.