Michel Foucault in an interview dating back to 1977 declares :
A fear haunted the second half of the eighteenth century: it is the dark space, the screen of darkness that obstructs the full visibility of things, people, truths. To dissolve the fragments of the night that oppose the light, to make that there is no darker space in the society, to demolish these dark rooms where the political arbitrariness, the whims of the monarch, the religious superstitions, the plots of the tyrants and the priests, the illusions of the ignorance, the epidemics are fermented.
M. Foucault, « L’œil du pouvoir », in Dits et écrits II, 1976-1988, Paris, Gallimard, 2001
This shows that the Enlightenment, in the middle of the 18th century, considered secrecy in many of its forms, and in particular the political form, as an enemy. At least according to Michel Foucault’s (1929–1984) analysis.
