Chapter 4 demonstrates that the recommendations that favoured state intervention were coupled with a different way of thinking about political power: its nature, its sources and its organisation. The intellectual éminence grise behind this was Nikolaos Saripolos, who, after coming to Greece and being elected to the Law School in 1846, was to become the country’s leading constitutional and international law scholar. Being mindful of the revolutionary tradition and fusing together several different intellectual currents (Rousseau, Doctrinaires, the monarchiens, Benjamin Constant), Saripolos changed the terms of constitutional thinking by drawing on the revolutionary idioms of natural rights and national sovereignty. This was a liberal, governmental discourse that spoke in terms of sovereignty as self-rule and of the state as a moral person with rights in the international arena. As the chapter demonstrates, for Saripolos – as well as for the economist Ioannis Soutsos – the state in the form it then took had become an obstacle to the formation of the nation and was undermining social cohesion.

The next major question the deputies faced was that of how to balance the powers of the legislative and executive offices in the new constitution. There were no self-evident answers to the questions of how powerful the legislature ought to be in relation to the king, or what role the broader public would have in legislative affairs. When Clermont-Tonnerre presented a report summarizing the content of the cahiers on 27 July, speaking on behalf of the Constitutional Committee, he noted that all of the cahiers demanded the “regeneration of the French Empire [l’Empire français],” but that they disagreed as to whether this regeneration required a new constitution or a simple reform of a few abuses.1 This lack of uniformity meant that the deputies could not simply derive the constitution directly from the cahiers. They would have to decide what the new constitution would be like. In addition, they faced widespread popular violence, both in Paris and in the provinces.

The decree putting the goods of the Church at the disposal of the nation was a major act with far-reaching implications. As Barère announced in his newspaper, Le Point du jour, on 2 November the Assembly had definitively established itself as a tribunal before which all the institutions of society would be judged.1 It had become a truly constituent body, one that could rid France of useless or pernicious institutions and establish those necessary for the public good. The political struggles of summer 1789 had determined who would lead the effort to reform France. The first phase had been a struggle between the Third Estate and conservatives in the Noble and Clerical orders over who would lead the Estates General. The second phase was the struggle between the king and the National Assembly to see who would establish the new constitutional order. Louis XVI had failed to see through essential reforms under his leadership.