In 1 846 the Revue des Deux Mondes warns that in one year in France there were 32,000 cases of abandonment, or one child out of thirty deprived of his civil status, in other words of his identity. And Georges Sand, who is moved by this, describes in The Country "Wtif the procedure by which the child is confided to a traveler who takes him in a carriage and leaves him in the middle of a field. The loss of identity remains linked to exclusion from a geographic group, to setting a trajectory in motion, to putting on the road a child "who has not yet reached the age of reason."
There remains the diference between the· "liberal" and the "mechanical," pure motivity, which comes from the machine and can thus be performed equally well by an ignoramus or an animal (Equicola 9 5 ) : "manual labor being considered in the (anthropocentric) society of the Renaissance as ignoble as it had been in the Middle Ages," as Anthony Blunt notes in his Artistic Theory in Italy, 1450-1600. In fact, the worker's body cannot be compared to a human model, which is ideally composed. Vitruvian man is essentially reasonable and harmonious, since he is contained in the circles and grids of Euclidean geometry-a symbol of social superiority since it is the geometry of the invader's, the dominator's, trajectory.
It is curious to see current debates on the treatment, abandonment, slaughter and vivisection of animals, but also on the blockbuster movies in which a large number of them are sacrificed. In this context, let us quote the response of a stuntman, a "double, " Mr. Dominique Zardi, who had been taken to task in a column entitled "The Martyrdom of the Animals," published in the newspaper France Soir : "Minor actors are in the same boat [as the animals] . They're also lesser members, shaken, bullied, cut of the screen . . . It's true I'm a tough little guy . . . But no animal would have done what I've done, and I've never hurt one animal, woman or child, since as everybody knows that's about the same thing."
The Boarding of Metabolic Vehicles
I 1 05