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).

Many proposals for redefining the French state are floated, particularly in the days after the remarkable sessions of August 4–5, 1789, and the abolition of feudalism.

For instance, the Marquis de Lafayette proposes a combination of the American and British systems, introducing a bicameral parliament, with the king having the suspensive veto power over the legislature, modeled to the authority recently vested in the President of the United States.

The main controversies early on had surrounded the issues of what level of power is to be granted to the king of France (i.e.: veto, suspensive or absolute) and what form will the legislature take (i.e.: unicameral or bicameral).

The Constitutional Committee proposes a bicameral legislature, but the motion is defeated on September 10, 1789 (849–89) in favor of one house; the next day, they propose an absolute veto, but are again defeated (673–325) in favor of a suspensive veto, which can be over-ridden by three consecutive legislatures.

A second Constitutional Committee had quickly replaced the first, and includes Talleyrand, Abbé Sieyès, and Le Chapelier from the original group, as well as new members Gui-Jean-Baptiste Target, Jacques Guillaume Thouret, Jean-Nicolas Démeunier, François Denis Tronchet, and Jean-Paul Rabaut Saint-Étienne, all of the Third Estate.

Their greatest controversy faced by this new committee surrounds the issue of citizenship.

Will every subject of the French Crown be given equal rights, as the Declaration of Rights of Man and Citizen seems to promise, or will there be some restrictions?

The October Days (5–6 October) intervene and render the question much more complicated.

In the end, a distinction is held between active citizens (over the age of twenty-five, pay direct taxes equal to three days' labor) which have political rights, and passive citizens, who have only civil rights.

This conclusion is intolerable to such radical deputies as Maximilien Robespierre, and thereafter they never can be reconciled to the Constitution of 1791.

The guild system has become a target of much criticism towards the end of the eighteenth century. The guilds are believed to oppose free trade and hinder technological innovation, technology transfer and business development.

According to several accounts of this time, guilds have become increasingly involved in simple territorial struggles against each other and against free practitioners of their arts.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Adam Smith had been two of the most outspoken critics of the guild system had been and all over Europe a tendency to oppose government control over trades in favor of laissez-faire free market systems is growing rapidly and making its way into the political and legal system.

Smith had written in The Wealth of Nations (Book I, Chapter X, paragraph 72):

    It is to prevent this reduction of price, and consequently of wages and profit, by restraining that free competition which would most certainly occasion it, that all corporations, and the greater part of corporation laws, have been established. (...) and when any particular class of artificers or traders thought proper to act as a corporation without a charter, such adulterine guilds, as they were called, were not always disfranchised upon that account, but obliged to fine annually to the king for permission to exercise their usurped privileges.

The French Revolution sees guilds as a last remnant of feudalism.

The Le Chapelier Law, passed by the National Assembly on June 14 1791, during the first phase of the French Revolution, bans guilds as well as compagnonnage (by organizations such as the Compagnons du Tour de France) and the right to strike, and proclaims free enterprise as the norm.

The law had been advocated and drafted by Isaac René Guy le Chapelier.

Its promulgation enrages the sans-culottes, who call for an end to the National Constituent Assembly, which nonetheless will continue through the second phase of the Revolution.

The sans-culottes (French: literally "without breeches") are the common people of the lower classes in late eigteeenth century France, a great many of whom have become radical and militant partisans of the French Revolution in response to their poor quality of life under the Ancien Régime.

The name sans-culottes refers to their clothing, and through that to their lower-class status: culottes are the fashionable silk knee-breeches of the eighteenth-century nobility and bourgeoisie, and the working class sans-culottes wear pantaloons, or trousers, instead.

The sans-culottes, most of them urban laborers, serve as the driving popular force behind the revolution.

Many proposals for redefining the French state are floated, particularly in the days after the remarkable sessions of August 4–5, 1789, and the abolition of feudalism.

For instance, the Marquis de Lafayette proposed a combination of the American and British systems, introducing a bicameral parliament, with the king having the suspensive veto power over the legislature, modeled to the authority then recently vested in the President of the United States.