Learning was a basic requirement common to all men. The ‘bread of reason’, as Danton called it, was a vital commodity to be distributed to every child in the family, and which the Montagnards in their Declaration of Rights vowed to ‘put within the reach of all citizens’. It was, in the words of Condorcet, a collective debt which ‘society owes equally to all its members’. Understood as a fundamental human and social right, it followed that its provision should be made by the state free of charge: ‘Equal rights would have been consecrated in vain’, wrote Roux-Fazillac, ‘if all the citizens without distinction were not able to acquire the same knowledge.’ But it was also understood to be an individual obligation and hence compulsory in nature: Lakanal ruled that those deprived families who did not bother to send their children to school would not be entitled to welfare payments.