The French Revolution is renowned for its attempts radically to transform everyday life. 1 Participants argued that the Revolution could not be made only on the street, in political tracts, in public meetings, or on the battlefield; it also had to occur when the ordinary citizen listened to music, got dressed, walked the streets of the locality, ate supper, spoke, sat down, or watched a play. Moreover, the Revolution could not be the work of a few; it needed to be lived by all. Contemporaries justified the rather counter-intuitive idea that a change in the political ordering of society required changes in clothing, language, calendars, weights and measures, theatre and street names, by arguing for the extraordinary power of signs and symbols. As one contemporary, Gastin, put it in 1799: 'The language of signs has always had a powerful effect on the spirit and the heart. Signs have a magical quality, which has, in all times, ruled men, leading them either into bondage or freedom.' 2 While political discourse reached the mind, another, Armand-Guy Kersaint, argued that signs and material things reached the heart: 'If I were to speak to men chosen at random and in need of education . . . I would focus on . . . the need to strike the spirit of the multitude with the help of buildings and monuments, at the same time as I attempted to convince them by reason.' 3 Signs were understood, then, to have a powerful pedagogic effect, one that could be harnessed to the cause of the revolutionary transformation of society and state. Properly conceived and used they could, as one scholar has recently put it, 'win more people to independence than will battles'. 4 Signs could either freeze the world in the old ways of subservience to the king, or convince people of the validity of the new principles of rationality, liberty, fraternity and equality. Once people were engaged in the revolutionary effort, signs could be used actually to regenerate the nation. The old styles that '[u]nder the empire of despots, the useless class of unemployed rich people had determined . . . blindly follow[ing] the vicissitudes of fashion' would, according to the Société populaire et républicaine des ART HISTORY .