The most known continuum damage theories for brittle structures are suitable to model the degradation of the material due to the deformation process and the consequent initiation of a macro-crack. Nevertheless, they are not able to describe the propagation of the crack that leads, eventually, to the breakage of the structure into parts that undergo rigid body motion. This paper presents a theory, formulated from formal arguments of Continuum Mechanics, that may describe not only the degradation but also the fracture of elastic structures. The modeling of such a discontinuous phenomenon through a continuous theory is possible by taking a cohesion variable, related with the links between material points, as an additional degree of kinematical freedom. The possibilities of the proposed theory are discussed through examples.