A twelve-member Constitutional Committee is convened on July 14, 1789 (coincidentally the day of the Storming of the Bastille).

Its task is to do much of the drafting of the articles of the constitution.

It includes originally two members from the First Estate (Champion de Cicé, Archbishop of Bordeaux and Talleyrand, Bishop of Autun); two from the Second (the comte de Clermont-Tonnerre and the marquis de Lally-Tollendal); and four from the Third (Jean Joseph Mounier, Abbé Sieyès, Nicholas Bergasse, and Isaac René Guy le Chapelier).