the unrising sun of 1793

"About forty years [~1870] ago a good woman, who kept the boarding house where I took my meals, related to me an anecdote about her father, a simple workingman of Nantes, which greatly impressed me. This man was very young when the [French] Revolution broke out. He accepted it with enthusiasm; took part in the struggle of the Jacobins against the Vendéeans; witnessed with regret the imperial regime destroy the democratic liberties so dearly bought; and at each revolution, in 1814, in 1830, in 1848, believed that the ideal republic, dreamed of in 1793, was about to be reborn. He died during the second Empire more than ninety years old  and at the moment of death, raising to heaven a look of ecstasy, was heard to murmur: 'Oh sun of '93, I shall die at last without having seen thy rays again.' This man, like the first Christians, lived in the hope of the millennium."

-- French Historian M. Gabriel Monod, Preface to Contributions à l'histoire religieuse de la révolution française, Albert Mathiez, 1907, cited in The Heavenly City of the Eighteenth-Century Philosophers, Carl L. Becker, 1932,  p. 158-159.