In the classic historiography and legal interpretations, the administration project of 1789-1790 has been frequently obscured by a Weberian interpretation of modernization rationalized by the State. Criticized in the liberal historiography beginning in the nineteenth century as responsible for the territorial anarchy of 1793, it has been lastingly condemned as theoretical speculation, indeed, as a constitutional aberration. This interpretation is first of all the product of a collective trauma experienced by the revolutionaries themselves faced with political impasses, and territorial threats endured by the First Republic. Later, this interpretation was transformed in a literature incapable of thinking of local administration beyond the imperative of control envisaged by the model of the Nation-State. But no doubt this administrative project deserves to be analyzed anew by a fresh angle, free from the interpretative schemes of the nineteenth century, and associating, as with the men of 1789, the aspiration to self-government and rule of general law, an ideal of territorial federation and national unity.