L'historien qui découpe la Révolution française en séquences et en régimes non seulement distincts, mais contradictoires, s'expose à être réfuté moins par des arguments proprement historiques que par l'espèce d'évidence qu'a possédée l'événement dans la conscience nationale : l'affrontement qui a si longtemps mis aux prises partisans et adversaires de la Révolution a bien eu son centre, et dans les deux camps, dans une perception unitaire de ce qui s'est passé en France entre 1789 et Bonaparte. L'idée du « bloc » fait d'abord partie de la pensée contre-révolutionnaire avant d'être l'objet d'une réappropriation républicaine, après Thermidor. Pourtant, elle est très tôt décomposée, dès Thermidor aussi, par une autre évidence : celle de la pluralité de l'héritage révolutionnaire. Dès 1796, Constant cherche à terminer la Révolution sur les acquis de 1789, Babeuf veut la reprendre sur l'exemple de 1793.

The French revolution may still present itself to the historian as a whole in many respects, despite its extreme diversity of events, as it contained within it, from the very moment of its onset, Something that constituted it as a unheralded mode of action and history: a temporal watershed produced by man's will. At the end of the spring and Summer of 1789, the French thoroughly refounded the social contract upon principles of rational will. To focus in on the radicalism of its founders, this article analyses the early elaboration of what, since 1789, has constituted democracy's political universe. In the Space of a few months, the radical elements in the revolutionary camp thus broke the chains of time, excluded the Monarch from the revolution, and defined the Ancien Régime as being against them. Now while the former monarchy's successor—the people—was radically different from it, it was nonetheless identical to it in the extent of its sovereignty: here we see one of the deepest links between the men of 1789 and their national past. The political voluntarism of 1789 excluded any possible Slippage between the law and its foundation, which is why it instituted no other means of preventing such slippage from occurring but the right to resist oppression, this latter threw back into question the whole of the Social contract, though the legitimate conditions of its exercice were never stipulated. The revolutionary maximalism of 1789 thus created a Space of infinite one-upmanship: the possibility to appeal to the people concerning a betrayal of principes. Of the two deepest questions the French Revolution bequeaths to history, that of the causes of 1789 and that of the drift from 1789 to 1793, the latter is thus perhaps less enigmatic than the former.