On this day in 1789, after days of argument, France's National Constituent Assembly approved seventeen articles: the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen. What interests me is what happened next in the painters' workshops. Look at the picture below. The text is not printed on a page; it is cut in gold into two dark tablets, arranged in two columns, with a preamble above. Two tablets. That shape is Moses coming down the mountain, and everyone who saw it knew that instantly.
Around the tablets, the rest of the old wardrobe. A woman in red and blue with a broken chain in her hand, on the left. A winged figure in white and pink pointing a sceptre at a radiant triangle with an eye inside it. A laurel garland down the middle, and a fasces with a red cap on top. Nothing here was invented in 1789. The eye in the triangle, the chain, the laurel, the bundled rods: all of it borrowed, all of it centuries old, all of it legible to people who could not read the seventeen articles themselves.
That is not a criticism of Le Barbier, who painted this version. A brand-new idea has no images of its own yet. You dress it in the oldest clothes you can find so that a stranger passing the frame knows, before reading a word, that something is being handed down. The gold letters are the news. The tablets are the reassurance.
Fabien, the first article opens with the line everyone half-remembers: men are born and remain free and equal in rights. Lafayette drafted early versions with Jefferson looking over them, borrowing phrasing from the Virginia Declaration — so the words, like your laurel and chain, were partly second-hand too, and none the worse for it.
Fabien, the Assembly's own procedure has the same flavour: they fought through the seventeen articles one at a time, then set the preamble aside for later, on the sensible ground that you cannot write the introduction until you know what you have said. The words above the tablets came last.