An act of perpetual faith in reason and justice: a holy passion for the good and right, which possessed it, and made it devote itself to its work; like the statuary who seeing the fire in the furnace, where he was casting his bronze, on the point of being extinguished, threw his furniture, his children's bed, and even his house into the flame, preferring rather that all should perish than that his work should be lost.
Thus it is that the Revolution has become a date in the human mind, and not merely an event in the history of the people.

The men of the Constituent Assembly were not Frenchmen, they were universal men.

We mistake, we vilify them when we consider them only as priests, aristocrats, plebeians, faithful subjects, malcontents or demagogues.
They were, and they felt themselves to be, better than that,--workmen of God; called by him to restore social reason, and found right and justice throughout the universe.

None of them, except those who opposed the Revolution, limited the extent of its thought to the boundaries of France.

The declaration of the Rights of Man proves this.