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.