History is the most dangerous product which the chemistry of the mind has concocted. Its properties are well known. It produces dreams and drunkenness. It fills people with false memories, exaggerates their reactions, exacerbates old grievances, torments them in their repose, and encourages either a delirium of grandeur or a delusion of persecution. It makes whole nations bitter, arrogant, insufferable and vainglorious.

Valéry treats “history” not as disciplined scholarship but as the popular, politicized product of the mind—an intoxicant that distorts perception. By likening it to a dangerous chemical, he emphasizes its power to induce fantasies (“dreams”), emotional excess (“drunkenness”), and pathological collective states: nations come to live inside embellished memories, nursed resentments, and narratives of exceptional greatness or victimhood. The warning is double-edged: history can console and unify, but it can also manufacture identity through selective remembrance, turning the past into a moral arsenal. The passage anticipates later critiques of propaganda and nationalist mythmaking, urging skepticism toward stories of the past that flatter or persecute.