« Paradoxically, it is in relation to the past that we must look for the reasons for the revolutionary invention. This is evidenced by the known fact that its actors, conscious of inventing and anxious to find historical examples, have constantly compared themselves, in very contradictory ways, to the men of Greek or Roman antiquity, thus breaking with Judeo-Christian antiquity. In this claimed past, they drew a whole vocabulary now consecrated (Republic, Senate, Convention), but by exhumanizing exemplary facts subject to their political strategies. »

« "Public" opinion ceases to be the expected source of legitimacy, observers acknowledge that the prevailing opinion counts first. They then forge the expression of "dominicy opinion" to describe this bizarre configuration that begins to control public life. »

« This is a region which, in 1789, did not exist and which, in a few years, from the spring of 1793, was forged, in the heat of the tragic events of civil war and repression, an identity stronger than that of many French provinces with a millennia-old past. »