The Tennis Court Oath (David) – pre-Romantic, near-unanimous, almost totally middle-class and with no popular violence – above all was considered the forerunner of the 1789 revolution and also showed that national sovereignty was made up of each individual's personal will. David's painting also portrays the monk Dom Gerle alongside the Protestant pastor Jean-Paul Rabaut Saint-Étienne, symbolising a new era of religious tolerance. The wind blowing through the windows and billowing the curtains also symbolises the wind of Revolution blowing through France. The first engravings showing "The Tennis Court Oath" only appeared in 1790, the year David convinced the Jacobin Club to launch a national
Tennis Court Oath This oath would prove vital to the Third Estate as a step of protest that would eventually lead to more power in the Estates General, and every governing body thereafter. The Oath signified for the first time that French citizens formally stood in opposition to Louis XVI, and the National Assembly's refusal to back down forced the king to make concessions. It was foreshadowed by, and drew considerably from, the 1776 United States Declaration of Independence, especially the preamble. The Oath also inspired a wide variety of revolutionary activity in the months afterwards, ranging from rioting across the French countryside