Emmanuel-Joseph Sieyès Essay ⋆ Political Science Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

Emmanuel-Joseph Sieyès (1748–1836), better known as the Abbé Sieyès, is the writer of the key text of the French Revolution (1789–1799), What Is the Third Estate? (1789). An ungifted orator, Sieyès nonetheless led the fight for radical reform in the name of the French people’s national sovereignty, calling for the dissolution of the entire French social and political system, including the Estates General that would meet in 1789 after Parisians stormed the Bastille, a medieval fortress serving as a state prison. Later Sieyès laid the ground for French military leader Napoleon Bonaparte’s coup d’état of 1799.

Born into a large family in Fréjus, France, Sieyès acceded to his parents’ wishes and spent his youth preparing for the priesthood. In his ten years at a Parisian seminary, he was far more likely to be found studying British political philosopher John Locke, French political scholar Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and writings on political economy than the scholastic writers pushed upon him by his tutors. Sieyès nevertheless entered the priesthood in 1773. While moving up the church hierarchy, he was named a representative in the Provincial Assembly of Orléans, where he took up the plight of the poor with increased urgency as France’s economy faltered in the 1880s. Sieyès made few friends and was ill at ease, in fact, with his social inferiors in the Third Estate (those not members of the nobility or clergy). Tired of the intransigency of the French social order and his inability to effect any change, he made plans to emigrate to America, but these plans were interrupted by the explosion of open political debate in 1788. Sieyès soon made his mark with the publication of two revolutionary pamphlets, but it was his third that pushed him to the front of events in 1789. In What Is the Third Estate? he upended the notion of the “nation” as it was thought hitherto in France. Sieyès argued that the Third Estate, rather than the upper classes or the monarchy, was the true French nation upon whose backs the other orders of society rested. The nation should be empowered through the only legitimate form of government, which was for Sieyès a representative legislature. He called for the disbanding of the Estates General, arguing that because the Third Estate represented the whole of the French nation, it could, on its own, form a national assembly, which is exactly what occurred on June 17, 1789. The National Assembly, by Sieyès’s account, would represent the interests of “passive citizens,” such as the nobility and the poor, who would play no “active” role in political power.

Outflanked by those who called for the destruction of the aristocracy, Sieyès would soon lose political power, returning to prominence only at the end of the Reign of Terror (1793– 1794), a period marked by conflicts between rival political groups and mass executions of those opposed to the revolution. After the republican coup of 1797, Sieyès was for a time the president of the Council of Five Hundred, the lower house of the French legislature. In 1799 he became convinced of a need for a strong executive to balance the ineffective councils. Turning to Napoleon to strike the blow necessary to change the constitution, Sieyès inadvertently helped end all hope of a republican government. His power under Napoleon was marginal, and later Sieyès was exiled to Belgium as a regicide upon the return of the monarchy in 1815. He returned to France in 1830, dying six years later, his legacy forever tied to the revolution and the widespread aspiration for national sovereignty his writings helped unleash.

Bibliography:

Bredin, Jean-Denis. Sieyes: La clé de la Revolution française. Paris: Éditions de Fallois, 1998.
Forsyth, Murray. Reason and Revolution:The Political Thought of the Abbé Sieyès. New York: Holmes and Meier, 1987.
Sewell,William H., Jr. A Rhetoric of Bourgeois Revolution:The Abbé Sieyès and What Is the Third Estate? Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1994.
Sieyès, Emmaneul Joseph. Political Writings: Including the Debate between Sieyès and Tom Paine in 1791, translated by Michael Sonenscher. New York: Hackett, 1998.
Des Manuscrits de Sieyès. 1773–1799,Tome I et II, edited by Christine Fauré, Jacques Guilhaumou, Jacques Vallier, and Françoise Weil. Paris: Champion, 1999.

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