Between revolution and constitution there was, at the beginning, a fundamental link. Barely had the National Assembly declared itself representative of the sovereign nation than its members, insisting that they had been called “to fix the constitution of the realm, effect the regeneration of public order, and maintain the true principles of the monarchy,” swore, in the Tennis Court Oath, to remain assembled “until the constitution of the realm is established and strengthened on solid foundations.” With this bold act of defiance against royal authority, dramatic condensation of several decades' protests against arbitrary government and ministerial despotism, the assembly defined the accomplishment of a settled constitutional order as the essential purpose of its revolutionary actions. Yet the task of “fixing” the French constitution was to prove an extraordinarily problematic one: In confronting it, the revolutionary deputies created a radically new political dynamic. Unlike the American Revolution, which effectively translated the assertion of revolutionary will into the establishment of a stable constitutional order, the French Revolution opened a progressively widening gap between revolution and constitution that was to swallow up successive efforts to bring the revolutionary movement to its constitutional completion.

The ambiguities of the Tennis Court Oath

What did it mean to “fix” the constitution of the realm? The Tennis Court Oath clearly declared an end to despotic government, the substitution of a stable and predictable legal order for the disorder and uncertainty resulting from the tyrannical exercise of arbitrary will.