Between 1789 and 1791 the National Assembly, also called the Constituent Assembly because it wrote a constitution, rebuilt France almost from scratch. Much of what it did lasted for centuries. Some of what it got wrong helped wreck the settlement it hoped to create.

Remaking the state

The old patchwork of provinces, each with its own laws and privileges, was replaced in 1790 by 83 departments of roughly equal size, most named after rivers or mountains rather than old lordships. Each was meant to be small enough that a citizen could ride to its capital in a day. Hereditary nobility and titles were abolished in June 1790. Internal customs barriers fell, weights and measures were set on the path to the metric system, and judges were now elected. Protestants gained full civil rights in December 1789, and in September 1791 France granted Jews equal citizenship, the first European country to do so; the Sephardic Jews of the southwest had been recognized in January 1790.

Money and the Church

The debt had not gone away. In November 1789 the Assembly nationalized the lands of the Church to pay the state's debts, and issued assignats, notes backed by those lands that soon circulated as paper money. Printed in ever greater amounts, assignats lost almost all their value by 1796.

The Assembly then reorganized the church itself. The Civil Constitution of the Clergy (July 1790) required that priests and bishops be elected by local voters and paid by the state, and it redrew dioceses to match the new departments. In November 1790 clergy were ordered to swear an oath to the constitution. About one half of the parish clergy refused, along with all but a handful of bishops, and in 1791 Pope Pius VI condemned the Civil Constitution. France now had two churches: "constitutional" priests who had sworn and "refractory" priests who had not, often defended by their parishioners. Many historians call this the revolution's gravest mistake. It turned devout peasants, especially in the west, against the new order and gave the king a cause of conscience.

Who counts as a citizen?

The Constitution of 1791 made France a constitutional monarchy with a single elected Legislative Assembly and a king who could delay laws with a suspensive veto. It divided men into "active" citizens, who paid enough tax to vote, at least three days' wages a year, and "passive" citizens, who kept civil rights but had no vote. About 4.3 million men qualified as active, perhaps three in five adult men, and those who chose the deputies faced a higher bar still. Women, servants and the poor were left out. Robespierre, a young lawyer from Arras, argued in vain that this betrayed the Declaration's promise of equality. The Le Chapelier Law of June 1791 banned guilds, and also workers' associations and strikes, in the name of free individuals bargaining freely.

The colonies tested the Declaration most sharply. Planters lobbied hard to keep slavery off the agenda, and the Assembly wavered even on the rights of free men of color. In August 1791 enslaved people in Saint-Domingue rose in revolt, the beginning of the revolution that would create Haiti.

The flight to Varennes

Louis XVI accepted the new order in public and loathed it in private, above all the church reforms. On the night of 20 June 1791 the royal family slipped out of Paris in disguise, heading for the eastern frontier where loyal troops waited. They were recognized and stopped in the town of Varennes and brought back under guard. The king had left behind a declaration denouncing the revolution.

The Assembly, hoping to save its constitution, claimed he had been kidnapped. Many Parisians did not believe it. On 17 July a crowd gathered on the Champ de Mars to sign a petition for the king's removal, and in the Champ de Mars massacre National Guardsmen fired on the petitioners, killing dozens. The shooting split the patriots. Moderates who wanted to keep the monarchy left the Jacobin Club to form the Feuillants, while the radicals who stayed began to speak openly of a republic.

Worked example: designing the vote

Imagine you sit in the Assembly in 1791. The Declaration says all men are equal in rights. Yet you fear that poor and unlettered voters will be steered by priests, lords or demagogues, and you believe people with property have a stake in order. Sieyès offers a distinction: everyone holds natural and civil rights, but voting is a public function, entrusted to those able to exercise it independently.

Robespierre answers that if rights are natural, a tax bill cannot take them away, and that a constitution resting on the Declaration cannot then sort citizens by wealth. Notice that both men start from the same text. Their fight is over how fast and how far its logic should run. Nearly every later democracy faced the same argument as it widened the vote, first to poorer men, then to women, then to younger people and to groups once shut out by race or religion.