The word « Government » was formally established for the first time by the Constitution of Frimaire Year VIII to replace the term « Executive » used in the Revolutionary constitutions. Precisely because of this change, it possessed a legal voluntarism – the initiative of the law and a regulatory power assigned to the Consuls – that the Revolutionaries had been inclined to deny to the Executive, entrusting these, rather, to an elected and representative Legislature. The historiography, above all that of legal specialists, has long concluded that this change in attitude and practice represented a critical reevaluation of the Revolution – a kind of revolutionary governmental nihilism that would have produced, by a reaction in 1799, an excess of governmental power. It was in a sense necessary : the re-interpretation of theRevolution implied a condemnation of the Third, Fourth, and Fifth Republics, compared less favorably to the Fifth Republic. Yet the constitutional debates of the Revolution reveal a persistent concern to inaugurate « the power of government » with the aid of the administration. This contributed to the uniformity of the Nation : it controlled men under the impulse of centralizing power of a general administration. In this sense, the « government » was very much a part of the constitutional thinking of the revolutionaries ; indeed, the revolutionaries aimed to make administration an integral part of constitutionalism.