By making church property available to the nation, and by deciding to issue 1,200 million livres of assignats, the Constituent Assembly seemed to have provided itself with the means to settle the state's debts and thereby to improve public finances. Yet a fundamental problem had still to be resolved. Since the assembly had at the very first abolished the fiscal system of the Ancien Régime, it had to create a new one from the fragments. This task was to occupy it for a good part of the year prior to the adoption of a Constitution and the election of a new chamber. During this period, it had also to complete the decrees of August 1789 and thus finish the liberalisation of the country's economy, as well as its juridical unification. Finally, its almost total substitution of itself for the executive meant that it was responsible for dealing with the already disastrous consequences of its first monetary decisions.

The new fiscal system

The cahiers de doléances of 1789 were unanimous in identifying the collection of taxes as the tyranny most responsible for the people's sufferings. In many cases, its abuses were interpreted in the same fashion, namely, that the ministers, being free to do with the collected taxes as they wished, spent them in a wholly arbitrary manner, taking no account of the fact that the money came from the tax-payers.