Historians shifted in the last generation their view of the role of ideas in the French Revolution from the social interpretation to the politicalcultural one. According to the social interpretation, ideas were a reflection of a social structure determined beforehand; the rise of the bourgeoisie happened independently of revolutionary ideas. According to the political-culture interpretation, revolutionary ideas, culture, and experience were constitutive to the historic meaning of the Revolution as the first attempt in modern democracy. This political culture – made up of expressed and hidden meanings within revolutionary texts, symbols, holidays, images, and collective mentalities such as the obsession with conspiracy – was about a political imaginary world where no one had ever been and to which the Revolution wanted to lead, as much as it was about concrete interests, struggles for power, and ideological control.