THe revolt of Paris, in which culminated the nation-wide disturbances of 1789, and the general collapse of royal administration, confronted the members of the Third Estate with the problem of taking steps to protect property and restore some semblance of law and order to France.
In their turn, like the privileged classes before them, they were to find that they had started something they could not stop, and that a movement which they had envisaged as one of moderate constitutional and social reform was to become a revolution of a very different nature and scope. Their response to the new challenge was dictated by circumstances. All through the Revolution we find that theory plays little part in determining policies, though it has played much in their subsequent interpretation.