“I believe that someday it will be found out that peasants are people. Yes, beings in a great many respects like ourselves. And I believe that someday they will find this out, too – and then! Well, then I think they will rise up and demand to be regarded as part of the race, and that by consequence there will be trouble. Whenever one sees in a book or a king’s proclamation those words “the nation,” they bring before us the upper classes; only those; we know no other “nation”; for us and the kings no other “nation” exists. But from the day that I saw old d’Arc the peasant acting and feeling just as I should have acted and felt myself, I have carried the conviction in my heart that our peasants are not merely animals, beasts of burden put here by the good God to produce food and comfort for the “nation,” but something more and better. You look incredulous. Well, that is your training; it is the training of everybody.”
- Mark Twain, Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc, 1896
