Each phase in the French Revolution was marked by the emergence of a new vision of France’s future, of the kind of nation that would embody the French people’s essential principles and core qualities. During the first phase, the emphasis of reformers was on equality before the law. Drawing on Enlightenment thought, the members of the National Assembly who drafted the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen concentrated on identifying the rights shared by all French citizens and on eliminating legal distinctions that privileged one group within French society over another. During the Second Revolution, leaders such as Robespierre aimed for a far more radical remaking of France, seeking to change not only France’s laws, but its social and cultural values as well. Under the Directory and later under Napoleon, a conservative backlash set in, as French elites sought to reinforce traditional social and economic hierarchies, even as elements of the revolution were incorporated into the new French state.