Isidore Stanislas Helman, The Opening of the Estates General (1789): This image represents the opening ceremony from May 5, 1789. On the left sit the First Estate, on the right, the Second Estate, and in the foreground, the Third.
Reading
For today, please read Hunt and Censer, pp. 34-35 and excerpts from Abbé Sieyès, What is the Third Estate? (1789) (Canvas).
What We are Doing Today
Abbé Sieyès wrote What is the Third Estate?, and the Third Estate declared itself a National Assembly. Had the revolution started? Or was it imminent?
Abbé Sieyès, What is The Third Estate? (1789): This pamphlet was the cause of much trouble.
Abbé Sieyès and What is the Third Estate?
Emmanuel Joseph Sieyès (1748-1836) was born in Fréjus, a small town on the Mediterranean that is part of the French Riviera. The son of a poor, low-ranking tax collector, Sieyès entered the priesthood mainly as a means of obtaining a better life. Very early on, he obtained a reputation as a bright student who did not possess particularly deep religious feelings. During his schooling, and as his career progressed in the Catholic Church, Sieyès became thoroughly familiar with a number of leading Enlightenment writers of his time. He eventually became a canon of the cathedral and chancellor of the diocese of Chartres (which possessed one of the most magnificent cathedrals in all of Europe).
As your textbook points out, Sieyès was not elected to represent the First Estate in 1788, but he did obtain a position as a deputy for the Third Estate as a representative of Paris. In January 1789, he wrote his famous pamphlet, Qu’est-ce que le tiers-état? (What is the Third Estate?). In this work, “seemingly abstract Enlightenment ideas about the economy, social relations, and constitutions made their way into the very specific political debates of the time” (p. 19). And while many deputies did not necessarily agree with Sieyès’ pamphlet, it opened up a number possibilities that many had never contemplated before. What is the Third Estate? ranks up there with Thomas Paine’s Common Sense as an early and extremely influential piece of revolutionary literature. The Third Estate was not inspired solely by What is the Third Estate? to declare itself a National Assembly. We must remember the Breton Club, Mirabeau, the new political press, and a host of other factors. But Sieyès was among the most important of those factors. What’s more, What is the Third Estate? helped encapsulate and crystallize a collection of often inchoate ideas that were already circulating among deputies of the Third Estate at the time.
Sieyès was nothing if not a survivor. He would go on to sit in the National Convention and vote for the execution of Louis XVI. He laid low during the Terror (when he was later asked what he had done during this period, he replied, “I lived.”) and only re-emerged under the Directory as a notable diplomat. He eventually became a Director in 1799, and from that position smoothed the way for Napoleon to seize power that year in the coup of 18 Brumaire. Along with Napoleon and Roger Ducos, Sieyès became a consul under the Consulate. Although he briefly served as president of the new Senate, he soon retired and spent most of the Napoleonic period at home. Because he was a regicide, Sieyès was not welcome in France after the Restoration, and he moved to Brussels where he remained until the Revolution of 1830. He died in Paris six years later.
Jacques-Louis David, Emmanuel Joseph Sieyès (1817): As a regicide, Sieyès was made to feel unwelcome in Restoration France, and he moved to Brussels. After Napoleon’s definitive overthrow, David (whom we will discuss at length later in this course) chose to go into a self-imposed exile in Brussels. It was in that city that one former revolutionary painted the other.
Potential Quiz Questions
1) On June 17, 1789, the Third Estate voted to change its name to “National Assembly.” According to the textbook, “the first decree passed by the Assembly took control over taxation and promised to work with the king to fix the principles ‘national regeneration.” Why did these series of acts constitute a “constitutional revolution”?
2) On what grounds does Sieyès claim the Third Estate constitutes the nation?
3) How does Sieyès define a nation? Why is the noble order not a part of the nation?
4) According to Sieyès, if the Third Estate is the nation, how must the procedures and voting of the Estates General be changed? (HINT: Sieyès’ suggestions on this point appear in different parts of the reading.)
5) In the matter of discussing and forming a constitution, who should have been consulted? How should this consultation have taken place?
History 114: The French Revolution and Napoleon 