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The article focuses on the resurgence of interest in the concept and history of property in recent research within the humanities. Topics include the diverse intellectual approaches to property from various historiographical perspectives, the genealogy of modern property rights, and the differences between property regimes of the Ancien Régime and post-Revolutionary France.

The article focuses on reevaluating the historical understanding of the Directoire period, once often simplified and devalued in comparison to the preceding revolutionary period. It mentions publications offer a more nuanced and varied perspective, challenging the notion of a stable post-revolutionary era and exploring diverse interpretations of the Directoire's nature within the context of republicanism, economics, culture, and its connections to subsequent regimes.

Thomas Paine share with the Montagnards and the popular movement in the French Revolution the same conception of the republic. It is based on the guarantee of the right to exist, based on an idea of freedom defined as equality of personal rights. In - stead, the Girondins and Condorcet whose political ideas are yet systematically as - sociated with his, highlight the unlimited freedom of the owner as the basis of society. Thomas Paine allows to reconsider the divisions from which historiography has fixed the meaning of the French Revolution. He reveals the contradictions of the standard narrative of modernity we have inherited. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]