The Oath of the Horatii, by Jacques-Louis David, 1784. Louvre, Paris.
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Miscellany
Chronicler Jean le Bel wrote that during the Jacquerie, a popular revolt in France in 1358, peasants “killed a knight, put him on a spit, and roasted him while his wife and children looking on. After ten or twelve of them raped the lady, they wished to force-feed them the roasted flesh of their father and husband, and made them then die by a miserable death.”
Nothing is more unpredictable than the mob, nothing more obscure than public opinion, nothing more deceptive than the whole political system.
—Marcus Tullius Cicero, 63 BC







