Emmanuel-Joseph Sieyès

The abbé from Fréjus

Emmanuel-Joseph Sieyès was born on 3 May 1748 in Fréjus, a small cathedral town on the coast of Provence, the son of a modest local official. The Church was the usual road upwards for a clever boy without money or name, and he took it without much faith: after the seminary of Saint-Sulpice in Paris he was ordained a priest, though by his own later account he never had a vocation. What he had was a taste for philosophy — Locke, Condillac, the economists — and for setting ideas out in systems.

He made his career in church administration rather than at the altar. As secretary to the bishop of Tréguier, Jean-Baptiste de Lubersac, he followed him to Chartres, where he became vicar-general and a canon of the cathedral. In 1787 he sat for the clergy in the new provincial assembly of the Orléanais, one of the bodies the crown had just set up to share out taxes more fairly. He watched the privileged orders block every reform, and drew his own conclusions.

What is the Third Estate?

The pamphlet of January 1789

In August 1788 Louis XVI agreed to call the Estates-General for the following spring. Weeks later the Parlement of Paris ruled that it should meet as it had in 1614: three orders — clergy, nobility and commoners — each voting as one body, so that the two privileged orders could always outvote the third. France filled with pamphlets. Sieyès wrote several. The Essay on Privileges came out late in 1788; What is the Third Estate?, published in January 1789, made him famous almost overnight.

The Third Estate, he argued, did all the work that kept the nation alive: it farmed, made, traded and served, and filled every useful post. The nobility was a burden on it, a foreign body living off the nation, and the Third Estate alone was already a complete nation. It followed that the commoners' deputies need not settle for double numbers and a vote by head: they could speak for the nation by themselves. The pamphlet went through several editions in a few months and gave the deputies of 1789 their argument.

Naming the National Assembly

Paris voted late, after the Estates-General had opened at Versailles on 5 May, and Sieyès, a priest, was the last of the twenty deputies elected by the capital's Third Estate. By then the orders were deadlocked over whether credentials should be checked together or apart. On 10 June he moved that it was time to “cut the cable”: the commoners would invite the clergy and nobility to join them one last time, and go ahead without them. On 17 June, on his motion, they took the name National Assembly — a claim to speak for the whole nation, made by one order out of three.

Three days later, finding their hall locked, the deputies swore the Tennis Court Oath not to separate until France had a constitution. On 23 June the king ordered them back to their separate chambers; they stayed, and Sieyès gave them their line: “You are today what you were yesterday. Let us deliberate.”

That summer he sat on the committee charged with preparing the constitution, and wrote a long, reasoned draft of a declaration of rights. The Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, adopted on 26 August, was put together from several drafts, his among them, and its principle that sovereignty lies in the nation was one he had long argued. A distinction that shaped the constitution of 1791 was also his: all citizens had civil rights, but only some of them, the “active” citizens, should vote. The Assembly wrote it into law with a tax threshold. He was no democrat. When, in the decrees that followed the Night of 4 August, the Assembly abolished the Church's tithe without compensation, he protested that the deputies “want to be free, and do not know how to be just.” He was not heard, and for the rest of the Constituent Assembly his influence faded.

Regicide and silence

Barred, like every member of the Constituent, from the assembly that followed, he came back to politics when the monarchy fell. In September 1792 the Sarthe elected him to the National Convention, where he sat with the Plain, the uncommitted centre between the Girondins and the Mountain. At the king's trial in January 1793 he voted for death, against an appeal to the people and against a reprieve. Legend has him voting “death, without phrases”; the record has only “death”, and he always denied the rest. The vote that sent Louis XVI to the scaffold made him a regicide for the rest of his life.

Through the Terror he said as little as he could. In November 1793, as the campaign against Christianity reached its height, he told the Convention that he gave up his functions as a priest. He watched the Girondins, then Danton, go to the guillotine, and outlasted the fall of Robespierre without having done much to bring it about. Asked years later what he had done during the Terror, he is said to have answered: “I lived.”

Looking for a sword

From the Directory to the Coup of 18 Brumaire

After Thermidor the survivors of the Convention turned to him again. In 1795 he joined the Committee of Public Safety and went to The Hague to negotiate a treaty with the new Batavian Republic. But when the Convention wrote a new constitution that year it turned down his plans, and when he was elected one of the five Directors who would govern under it he refused the post. He sat instead in the Council of Five Hundred, and in 1798 went to Berlin as ambassador.

By 1799 the Directory was failing: at war again, short of money, and kept in place only by purging the councils. In May Sieyès was at last elected a Director, meaning to change the regime from within. He needed a soldier behind him — a sword, as he is supposed to have put it. His first choice, General Joubert, was killed at Novi in August. In October Napoleon Bonaparte landed from Egypt near Fréjus, Sieyès's birthplace, and the two men, who did not like each other, came to terms.

They planned the Coup of 18 Brumaire (9–10 November 1799) together. Sieyès and his fellow Director Roger Ducos resigned, Barras was persuaded to go, and the councils were moved out of Paris to Saint-Cloud on the pretext of a plot. When the deputies resisted on the second day, it was Bonaparte's grenadiers who cleared the hall. Three provisional consuls took over: Bonaparte, Sieyès and Roger Ducos.

Outplayed

Sieyès had a constitution ready, and much of it was adopted: lists of notables in place of direct elections, a Senate, a Tribunate that debated laws and a Legislative Body that voted on them in silence. But at its head he had put a Grand Elector, a figurehead with a palace and a large income who would appoint two consuls and could be “absorbed” into the Senate if he overstepped. Bonaparte mocked the post as a pig being fattened on a few millions, and took the place himself, as First Consul with most of the power. Sieyès gave way. He took a seat in the Senate, over which he presided at first, and accepted from the nation the estate of Crosne; in 1808 Napoleon made him a count of the Empire.

The Restoration did not forgive the regicide. Having served Napoleon again as a peer during the Hundred Days in 1815, he was banished in 1816 with the other regicides who had rallied to the Emperor, and went to live in Brussels. He came back to Paris after the revolution of 1830 and died there on 20 June 1836, aged 88, having outlived almost everyone who had sat with him in 1789.

Why he matters

Sieyès published little after 1789 and left a mass of unpublished notes. Yet his pamphlet and his motions of June 1789 did more than almost anything else to turn a meeting of the estates into a revolution. They gave it its central idea: that sovereignty belongs to the nation, not to the king or the orders, and that the nation's elected representatives speak for it. Ten years later the same man helped hand that nation to a general.