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Contractualism gives a new meaning to the phenomenon of civil war, in particular compared to the treatment it had been given in the literature concerning the national interest and the art of governing. If political institutions are the result of a pact, i.e. of a free decision of the citizens, what about their dissolution? Is it the manifestation of a revolutionary legitimacy in which the original pact is being restaged or of the subject being in contradiction with itself? Comparing the opposed models of Hobbes and of Locke, the article seizes upon the question of civil war to differentiate, within contractarian theories, what is related precisely to the theoretical richness of the contract from what is related to more fundamental political options: the conception of human nature and the purpose of political association.