Emile Durkheim was never indifferent to what he called “the principles of 1789.” He singled out Rousseau and Montesquieu as the forerunners of sociology, but they were also the two chief inspirations for the revolutionaries of the 1790s. Rousseau and Montesquieu initiated the discovery of society's laws of operation; the revolutionaries put these discoveries into practice. It was the task of sociology to reflect on this interaction. The revolutionaries learned from Montesquieu and Rousseau that social relations were based on convention. Because they were conventional – man-made – they could be remade. A people could learn that statues were only stone and that superstitious fanaticism could be given up for a more rational cult (even a Cult of Reason).