Broadly speaking, the “historical” approach taken in I789—1790 faced one major obstacle: how to establish the “contractual” origin of any particular right.
Provided one went far enough, perhaps several centuries, back in time, it was obvious to everyone that violence played a part in the acquisition of most seigneurial rights, which stemmed from conquest and serfdom. If one followed this logic to the end, it was clear that the very idea of a contractual origin of property rights was pure fiction. For revolutionary legislators, most of whom were bourgeois property owners or at any rate people less destitute than the masses, the goal was more modest: namely, to strike a reasonable compromise that would reestablish society on a stable foundation without undermining property rights in general. They feared that any other approach would lead straight to chaos, to say nothing of threatening their own property rights.
A thing I didn’t know (because I have a Midwest American education in which we didn’t learn much about the French Revolution, except that it happened): The revolutionaries were rich people, what we would now call “New Money.”