ABSTRACT
The French Revolution of 1789 was one of those cosmic events that reshaped the history of Europe and, beyond it, of the entire world. The revolutionaries' attempted restructuring occurred in the context of the social tensions, economic limitations and intellectual assumptions inherited from the society of the old regime, producing not consensus but conflict, over the exercise of public authority, over the nature of political participation, over the redefinition of the use of property or over the place of religion in a new public order. These conflicts became progressively more severe until France was engulfed in a fierce civil war. This chapter discusses the new order that the revolutionaries created in the two years after 1789, outlining some of its basic structures and also showing its inherent instabilities. It describes the search for the right variant on the revolutionary restructuring that would terminate the strife and create the bases for a political consensus.
