The cutting edge of a popular drive for educational reform during the early years of the French Revolution was a demand for an abolition of the old royal academies. The attack upon such established institutions of learning grew out of their own backwardness, a new insistence on equality, and the revolutionary determination to put an end to the privileged corporations that were believed to have limited opportunity and discriminated against able men in the arts and sciences. As early as 1789, Louis David was leading a rebel group seeking to reform the Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture from within. This institution held a monopoly in the arts and was cordially hated by struggling artists. Ultimately, in order to abolish it, David led his fight into the Jacobin clubs, the Paris Commune, and into the National Assembly itself.