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Emmanuel Joseph Sieyès (3 May 1748 – 20 June 1836) (pronounced [sjejɛs] or [sijɛs]) was a French Roman Catholic abbé and clergyman, one of the chief theorists of the French Revolution, French Consulate, and First French Empire. His liberal 1789 pamphlet What is the Third Estate? became the manifesto of the Revolution that helped transform the Estates-General into the National Assembly in June 1789. In 1799, he was the instigator of the coup d'état of 18 Brumaire, which brought Napoleon Bonaparte to power. He was also the first to coin the term "sociologie" (French for "sociology") in an unpublished manuscript. Sieyès and his party "spoke the language of democracy", unlike Jean Joseph Mounier and his party the Monarchiens.
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Early life
Sieyès was born in Fréjus in the south of France, and was educated for priesthood in the Roman Catholic Church at the Sorbonne. While there, he became influenced by the teachings of John Locke, Étienne Bonnot de Condillac, the Encyclopédistes, and other political thinkers, all in preference to theology.
Despite this embrace of Enlightenment thinking, he was ordained to the priesthood, and was rapidly promoted to vicar general and chancellor of the diocese of Chartres.
What Is the Third Estate?
In 1788, Louis XVI of France proposed convocation of the Estates-General of France after the interval of more than a century and a half, and the invitation of Jacques Necker to writers to state their views as to the organization of the Estates, enabled Sieyès to publish his celebrated January 1789 pamphlet, Qu’est-ce que le tiers état? ("What Is the Third Estate?") He begins his answer:
- "What is the Third Estate? Everything. What has it been hitherto in the political order? Nothing. What does it desire? To be something."
This phrase, which was to remain famous, is said to have been inspired by Nicolas Chamfort. The pamphlet was very successful, and its author, despite his clerical vocation (which made him part of the First Estate), was elected as the last (the twentieth) of the deputies the Third Estate of Paris to the Estates-General. He played his main role in the opening years of the Revolution, drafting the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen, expanding on the theory of national sovereignty, popular sovereignty, and representation implied in his pamphlet, with a distinction between active and passive citizens that justified suffrage limited to male owners of property.
Impact on the Revolution
The contributions of Sieyès’s pamphlet were indispensable to the revolutionary thought that projected France towards the French Revolution. In his pamphlet he outlined the desires and frustrations of the alienated class of people that made up the third estate. In many senses of the expression, he was the force that ripped the band-aid off the Ancien Régime in France by arguing the nobility to be fraudulent and preying on an overburdened and despondent bourgeoisie. The pamphlet was essentially the rallying cry that united a hitherto neglectable class into an unheard-of political force outlining and stating grievances that for the first time were not to be overlooked in the convocation of the Estates General.
Whereas the aristocracy defined themselves as an elite ruling class charged with maintaining the social order in France, Sieyès saw the Third estate as the primary mechanism of public service. Expression of radical thought at its best, the pamphlet placed sovereignty not in the hands of aristocrats but instead defined the nation of France by its working classclarification needed, whose daily trials and tribulations “are the activities which support society”. The French Revolution could not have been what it was without this patriotic and radical message, more importantly one so eagerly dispersed by the rising revolutionary politics within the third estate.
In being perhaps the most daunting of his rhetorical repertoire, Sieyès essentially argued from the nobility's privileges that to establish the aristocracy as an alien body acting outside of the nation of France and deemed noble privilege “treason to the commonwealth”. As a consequence, the resulting conflict between the orders inspired the proper political sphere from which the revolution grew.
Perhaps most significant was the influence of Sieyès’s pamphlet on the structural concerns that arose surrounding the convocation of the Estates general. Specifically, the third estate demanded that the number of deputies for their order be equal that of the two privileged orders combined, and most controversially “that the States General Vote, Not by Orders, but by Heads.” The pamphlet took these issues to the masses and their partial appeasement was met with revolutionary reaction. By addressing the issues of representation directly, Sieyès inspired resentment and agitation that united the third estate against the feudalistic traditions of the Ancien Régime.
Assemblies, Convention, and Terror
Although not noted as a speaker (he spoke rarely and briefly), Sieyès had major influence, and he recommended the decision of the Estates to reunite its chamber as the National Assembly, although he opposed the abolition of tithes and the confiscation of Church lands. Elected to the special committee on the constitution, he opposed the right of "absolute veto" for the King of France, which Honoré Mirabeau unsuccessfully supported. He had considerable influence on the framing of the departmental system, but, after the spring of 1790, he was eclipsed by other politicians, and was elected only once to the post of fortnightly president of the Constituent Assembly.
Like all other members of the Constituent Assembly, he was excluded from the Legislative Assembly by the ordinance, initially proposed by Maximilien Robespierre, that decreed that none of its members should be eligible for the next legislature. He reappeared in the third national Assembly, known as the National Convention of the French Republic (September 1792 - September 1795). He voted for the death of Louis XVI, but not in the contemptuous terms sometimes ascribed to him.1 Menaced by the Reign of Terror, and offended by its character, Sieyès even abjured his faith at the time of the installation of the Cult of Reason, and afterwards he characterized his conduct during the period in the ironic phrase, J'ai vécu ("I survived").
Directory and intrigue
In 1795 he went on a diplomatic mission to The Hague, and was instrumental in drawing up a treaty between the French and Batavian republics. He resented the constitution of 1795 (that of the Directory), and refused to serve as a Director of the Republic. In May 1798 he went as the plenipotentiary of France to the court of Berlin, in order to try to induce Prussia to ally with France against the Second Coalition; despite his efforts, this was not to happen. His prestige grew, and he was Director of France in place of Jean-François Rewbell in May 1799.
Nevertheless, Sieyès was considering ways to overthrow the Directory, and is said to have taken in view the replacement of the government with unlikely rulers such as Archduke Charles of Austria and Karl Wilhelm Ferdinand of Brunswick (a major enemy of the Revolution). He attempted to undermine the constitution, and thus caused the revived Jacobin Club to be closed while making offers to General Joubert for a coup d'état.
Brumaire, Empire, and later life
The death of Joubert at the Battle of Novi, and the return of Napoleon Bonaparte from the Egypt campaign put an end to this project, but Sieyès resumed it by reaching a new understanding with Bonaparte. After 18 Brumaire, Sieyès produced the constitution which he had long been planning, only to have it completely remodelled by Bonaparte, who thereby achieved a coup within the coup - the Constitution of the Year VIII favored by the latter became the basis of the Consulate.
Sieyès soon retired from the post of provisional Consul, which he had accepted after Brumaire, and became one of the first members of the Sénat conservateur (acting as its president in 1799); pasquinades at the time linked this concession to the large estate at Crosne that he received from Napoleon.2 After the plot of the Rue Saint-Nicaise in late December 1800, Sieyès the senator defended the arbitrary and illegal proceedings whereby Bonaparte rid himself of the leading Jacobins.
During the Empire (1804-1814) Sieyès rarely emerged from his retirement. When Napoleon briefly returned to power in 1815 he was named to the Chamber of Peers. After the Second Restoration Sieyès was expelled from the Academy in 1816 by Louis XVIII. He then moved to Brussels, but returned to France after the July Revolution of 1830. He died in Paris in 1836.
Sieyès and the Social Sciences
1795 Sieyès became one of the first members of the class of moral and political sciences, the future Academy of Moral and Political Sciences of the Institute of France. When the French Academy was reorganized in 1803, he was elected in the second class replacing, in armchair 31, Jean Sylvain Bailly, who had been guillotined 12 November 1793 during the Reign of Terror. After the second Restoration, however, in 1815, he was expelled for his role in the execution of King Louis XVI, and was replaced by the Marquis of Lally-Tollendal, who was named to the Academy by a royal decree.
The recent publication of his unpublished works shows that he was the first to use the term 'sociologie' in 1780, although the term was some fifty years later again introduced as a neologism by Auguste Comte who helped to popularize the concept to refer to the science of society.3
See also
References
- ^ "La Mort, sans phrases" ("Death, without rhetoric") being his supposed words during the debate on Louis' fate
- ^ Crosne, Essonne, had belonged to the Abbey of Saint-Germain-des-Prés, with a seigneurie that descended in the family of Brancas; both came to the French State with the Revolution.
- ^ Des Manuscrits de Sieyès. 1773-1799, Volumes I and II, published by Christine Fauré, Jacques Guilhaumou, Jacques Vallier et Françoise Weil, Paris, Champion, 1999 and 2007
- This article incorporates text from the Encyclopædia Britannica Eleventh Edition, a publication now in the public domain.
External links
- Emmanuel-Joseph Sieyès at Find A Grave
- Encyclopaedia Britannica 1911: Emmanuel-Joseph Sieyes
- Emmanuel Joseph Sieyes, What is the Third Estate? (Excerpts)
- What is the third estate?
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| Persondata | |
|---|---|
| NAME | Sieyès, Emmanuel Joseph |
| ALTERNATIVE NAMES | |
| SHORT DESCRIPTION | French abbé and statesman |
| DATE OF BIRTH | 3 May 1748 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Fréjus, France |
| DATE OF DEATH | 20 June 1836 |
| PLACE OF DEATH | |
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- This page was last modified on 8 January 2009, at 03:47.
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