"And in realms beyond words - in open air spectacles; in Rousseau's little opera, still playing in the 1780s: in the tear-soaked canvasses of Grueze - the phalanxes of citizens were lining up. Indeed their individual and collective personalities were, by the mid-1780s, already constructed. They were devotees of Nature, tender-hearted, contemptuous of fashion, scornful of the ostentation of the mighty, passionate in their patriotism and enraged at the abuses of despotism. Above all they were apostles of public virtue who saw a France on the verge of being reborn as a republic of friends. And it was with their arms linked, their pens busily scratching letters and their lungs rehearsing speeches and songs, that this army of young citizens watched as their government fell apart."
Simon Schama
Citizens – A Chronicle of the French Revolution
