In The Coming of the French Revolution, Georges Lefebvre argued that “the Revolution of 1789 restored the harmony between fact and law.” For Lefebvre, fact was to be found in the economy, in modes of production and the social interests arising from them. Law was secondary. It consisted of the whole juridical apparatus and norms that legitimated the control of a dominant social class. Fact fundamentally defined social identity; law merely confirmed it.

This study has argued a different case. Law in the old regime, it claims, was constitutive of social identity. Corporate rights and privileges provided differential access to status, power, and wealth within the elite in such a way as to generate independent interests. Rather than legitimating the rule of a dominant class, the juridical framework of society fragmented the elite in such a way as to make a concerted defense of privilege ultimately impossible. And for this reason, in 1789 it was the legal and institutional basis of society that was overturned, not to allow a new class to establish its hegemony, but to transform the ground rules by which political power, analytically distinct from that generated by class relationships, operated within the state. For the men of the eighteenth century, law was very much fact.

The central issue of the French Revolution was how to create new juridical norms that would make both membership in the state and the exercise of political power accessible, principled, and equitable. The constitutional upheaval of 1789 involved a profound redefinition of public norms, of the legal conditions under which people would submit to political authority and the basic rules by which they would conduct their social activities.