A Rhetoric of Bourgeois Revolution: The Abbé Sieyes and What is the Third Estate?

by William H. Sewell Jr.

What Is the Third Estate? was the most influential pamphlet of 1789. It did much to set the French Revolution on a radically democratic course. It also launched its author, the Abbé Sieyes, on a remarkable political career that spanned the entire revolutionary decade. Sieyes both opened the revolution by authoring the National Assembly’s declaration of sovereignty in June of 1789 and closed it in 1799 by engineering Napoleon Bonaparte’s coup d’état.
This book studies the powerful rhetoric of the great pamphlet and the brilliant but enigmatic thought of its author. William H. Sewell’s insightful analysis reveals the fundamental role played by the new discourse of political economy in Sieyes’s thought and uncovers the strategies by which this gifted rhetorician gained the assent of his intended readers—educated and prosperous bourgeois who felt excluded by the nobility in the hierarchical social order of the old regime. He also probes the contradictions and incoherencies of the pamphlet’s highly polished text to reveal fissures that reach to the core of Sieyes’s thought—and to the core of the revolutionary project itself.
Combining techniques of intellectual history and literary analysis with a deep understanding of French social and political history, Sewell not only fashions an illuminating portrait of a crucial political document, but outlines a fresh perspective on the history of revolutionary political culture.

Genres: History, Academic

248 pages, Hardcover

First published December 1, 1994

About the author

William H. Sewell, Jr. is Professor of Political Science and History at the University of Chicago.

Reviews

[Makayla MacGregor · Rating 1 out of 5]

I found it to be much more tedious and repetitive than other readings we had, though his ideas were still fascinating to contemplate.

[Bernard English · Rating 4 out of 5]

To begin with, there is a nice brief historiographical overview of the French revolution in the introduction. A bit repetitive, but Sewell really brings out the importance of the essay "What is the Third Estate?" Oddly though, I found the most interesting ideas and quotes from his unpublished "Letters to the Economists," though I think it is usually translated as "Letters to the Physiocrats," unless these are two separate works. To his credit, Sieyes went beyond the Physiocrats and identified a far greater scope of economic activity than just land husbandry. Sewell also has many direct quotes from unpublished notes Sieyes collected over the years. They show very nicely how a published work is just a snapshot of a writer's thoughts on a topic and that there may be much vacillating before an author decides on his (possibly temporarily) final thoughts on a topic. One example of this is Sieyes' struggle to come up with a definitive demarcation between citizens and non-citizens or exactly who constituted the third estate. This revolutionary's contempt for the masses also comes through in the terms he uses in his unpublished works for his compatriots: "he spoke of them as instruments of labor, working  machines, biped instruments, moral and intellectual nullities, passive beings." Sieyes, apparently not the first, appreciated the importance of work or bourgeois values as opposed to aristocratic (feudal?) values. But in his notes he directly contradicts the thesis of "What is the Third Estate?" by denying that the nation is united in work. Sewell writes that according to Sieyes there are actually two peoples, "those who perform the painful manual tasks" and "those who administer or govern labor (directors of labor)." Sewell writes that like many subsequent scholars who wrote about economics, Dickens, Marx, Engels, and others, Sieyes's account was simply not based on the actual conditions of business in France. "The fact that the knowledge necessary for production was possessed by uneducated and unenlightened classes--peasants, workers, and artisans--so contradicted his theoretical framework as to be invisible to him." But Sieyes has some sympathy with the downtrodden workers and in one of his unpublished notes he suggested a bizarre breeding program of primates to create a species which wouldn't suffer so much from the labor needed in modern economies:

"What Sieyes offers as a solution to the troubling duality of the working nation is a rather shocking fantasy: the production of new species of 'anthropomorphic monkeys' to accomplish the 'passive labors,' to be supervised by 'negroes.'" Whites of course would become the "directors of work." The moral point was that "inferior species would have 'fewer needs' and above all would be 'less capable of exciting human compassion.' They could be exploited, in other words, with a clear conscience." This from the man who wrote "What is the Third Estate? Everything."

Not only this, but he also recommended a multi-stage pyramidal voting which effectively removed the average person's ability to choose his leader. Sieyes's shifting views and odd writing style, for example, using Turgot's term "available class," not widely used then or now, for those who are suited or have the available time to dedicate themselves to the public make his texts hard to follow. The challenges of reading his texts go way beyond this, at least for me. And so A Rhetoric of Bourgeois Revolution was very helpful in bringing out Sieyes's role not only in the French revolution but also in subsequent years.

[Andrew · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book has a narrow but significant purpose: to elucidate both the manifest content of perhaps the most influential pamphlet of the French Revolution and also the latent or hidden ambivalences which to some degree represent the unresolved tensions of not only bourgeois revolutions, but the revolutionary tradition stemming from 1789 as a whole. I think Sewell executes his task marvelously well, but this book should not serve as an introduction to the French Revolution. Given the relative obscurity of Sieyes next to the more notorious Jacobins, it is unlikely that a novice will seek it out, of course. If you have been intrigued by Sieyes or by the question of how bourgeois the French Revolution really was, on the other hand, you will find this a rich and stimulating study.