According to historyaah, the National Assembly felt the duty to consecrate this new state of affairs on the night of August 4th. At the initiative of the nobles and the clergy, personal feudal rights were declared abolished (corvées, manimorte, etc.) and the real ones can be redeemed; the state and elected countries renounced their franchises; the clergy renounced tithing. Every division between classes and provinces fell: in a word, the whole old regime of privilege. If the night of August 4th was the death certificate of the old regime, the Declaration of the rights of man and citizen (August 26th) was the birth certificate of the new France. The Declaration of Rights has mostly been judged either with the criteria of an abstract ideologism or with those of an everyday realism and therefore pseudo-realism with respect to an exceptional situation: in the first case either one has tried to exasperate the contradictions implicit in the Declaration or have tried to mediate them in a harmony built a posteriori ; in the second it was considered that it was the inconclusive work of utopians, devoid of any sense of reality. In both cases, insufficient account has been taken of the historical contingencies in which the Constituent Assembly operated and with which all the apparent contradictions are explained. Thus the contrast between the affirmation of popular sovereignty, which postulates a monistic conception of political reality, and the declaration of individual rights of liberty, which postulates a dualistic conception and a state almost alien to the individual, is understood when the the fact that the Declaration is not only an abstract declaration of principles, but a concrete act of war against tyrants, a guarantee towards the monarchy, which one still cannot do without and which one distrusts.
Meanwhile, the first deep rifts appeared in the bosom of the assembly: the right, a constitutional monarchist, through the work of Mounier and Lally Tollendal, proposed the system of the double chamber, one of which was hereditary, and the recognition to the king of the absolute veto to fortify executive power and conservative forces; but the left, led by Barnave, by Alexandre and Charles Lameth and by Duport, resisted tenaciously. La Fayette’s attempts at compromise failed: the project of the upper house, in which a stronghold of the nobility and the counter-revolution was feared, was rejected, and the king, despite the splendid defense of Mirabeau, was granted only a suspended veto for two legislatures. This concession had been made to Louis XVI with the secret agreement that he would sanction the August decrees. The right excited the king to resistance; the regiment of Flanders was called to Versailles, which had the imprudence to trample on the tricolor; and the plan was raised to transfer the assembly to another city. Ready, as usual, was the revolutionary reaction. The Parisian crowd ran to Versailles, forced the king to sanction the August decrees and to move to Paris, a de facto prisoner of the revolution (5-6 October). Mounier and his friends emigrated. La Fayette, after the October days, in which he had been the mediator between the people and the king, became the arbiter of France and exercised a kind of moral dictatorship. Sincerely attached to the monarchy and the revolution, he could have reconciled both and founded a strong constitutional monarchist party. But the royal couple were not frank friends with him; and Mirabeau, while writing to La Fayette that he wanted to be his eminence gray, was trying to overthrow him at court. Reactionary riots which broke out in the South, by agents of the Count of Artois, kept the mistrust of the monarchy awake. Nonetheless La Fayette did much for the monarchical cause: demonstrations of dynastic loyalty were organized, Marat was silenced, that great intriguing duke of Orleans was sent to England, a ministry of Fayettists was created. The assembly resisted this monarchical wave: on 7 November it was decreed that no member of it could become a minister: it was a blow to the Mirabeau, which alone could save the court. But the decisive battle was waged in May 1790. Spain, having the England occupied Nootka Bay (British Columbia), asked for French help under the family pact. The left of the House railed against secret diplomacy, friendships and dynastic struggles and demanded the right of the assembly to declare war and conclude treaties. But La Fayette and especially Mirabeau defended the royal prerogative with such vigor that a compromise had to be made: the king would have had the right to propose war or peace, the assembly to decree it; the king would be in charge of foreign policy, the assembly would supervise him with a diplomatic committee. La Fayette celebrated the greatest triumph on the feast of the Federation on July 14, 1790, which symbolized the firm unity of the new France. Then his luck declined.
