The history with which we are concerned ends at 9 Thermidor. It has enabled us to pursue, against the backdrop of a period rich in events and characterised by the lack of a stable system of government, an analysis of the behaviour of politicians. Given the extreme conditions of the revolutionary period, this behaviour appeared in something like its pure state. It may be summarised as a merciless struggle for power, and as the exercise of that power in the name of the citizens, even when they were its victims. Now, in this period those who held power owed their legitimacy, and ultimately their actual survival, to the mob. The rulers' policies had therefore to be approved by it. So it was that decisions were taken which seemed to be beneficial in the short term, even if in the long run they had disastrous consequences or were in fact contrary to the convictions of those who had made them.

The mechanism by which, from 1789 to summer 1794, the Revolution's basic dynamic was established, thus becomes plain. The gears were engaged when, in an attempt to guarantee their own popularity and to consolidate their power, the men who were in the majority in the Constituent Assembly undertook to honour all the debts incurred under the Ancien Régime. At the same time and for the very same reasons, they in fact dismantled the much-loathed fiscal system of the Ancien Régime, while also refusing to employ the force necessary to raise new taxes.