Emmanuel Joseph Sieyès: The Essential Political Writings

Front matter

Series E

Emmanuel Joseph Sieyès

Studies in the History of Political Thought

Foreword

Emmanuel Joseph Sieyès was much more than a political pamphleteer. No other intellectual exerted such an influence over the different phases of the French Revolution, and left his mark on so many areas of policy-making—from constitutional design and administrative organization, to educational theory, military strategy and diplomacy. The beginning and the end of the Revolution not only frame the rise and fall of Sieyés’s political career. Rather, instigating and terminating the Revolution were the major goals of his political life. Accordingly, his corpus entails theories of constitutional rupture and constitutional formation. For Sieyés, the legitimacy of the Revolution—as a political act that furthers human rights—was always predicated on the ultimate establishment of a stable, liberal political order.

Today, Sieyés is remembered primarily as a revolutionary agitator, especially through his concept of a forceful pouvoir constituant. But this narrow reading has produced a one-sided focus on Sieyés’s early writings. His comments on the Third Estate, his Essay on Privilege, and his Reasoned Exposition of the Rights of Man and Citizen have been reprinted, and circulated in many languages, since their first publication in 1788 and 1789, yet his later writings have remained almost completely unstudied. This volume, by contrast, presents a representative sample of his political writings from across the revolutionary decade. Aside from his reflections on the Third Estate and his Reasoned Exposition of the Rights of Man and Citizen—both of which appeared in 1789— it features the Controversy between Thomas Paine and Emmanuel Joseph Sieyès (1791), his essay Of the Gains of Liberty in Society and in the Representative System (1793), both of his Thermidorian Interventions (1795), and his Constitutional Observations of the Year VIII (1799).

This book arose in the course of the editors’ research into Sieyés’s political thought, and was inspired by the meticulously researched edition of the Groupe d’Etudes Sieyésienne, especially Christine Fauré, Jacques Guilhaumou and Jaques Valier. For their financial support, we would like to thank the Ernst Abbe foundation and the Friedrich Schiller University, Jena. The hospitality of the German Historical Institute in Paris (GHIP)—and their support in the form of a generous research grant—allowed us to study Sieyés’s manuscripts in the archives nationales. It was also incredibly helpful to be able to assemble our findings and our initial thoughts in the Forum du mardi: recherches en cours of the GHIP. Moreover, we are grateful to Michael Sonenscher for insightful comments on the relationship between Rousseau and Sieyès. For fruitful discussions of our topic we are thankful to Harald Bluhm, Roland Lhotta, Ulrich

X FOREWORD

Thiele, Daniel Schulz, Werner Greiling, Hans-Werner Hahn, Bernd Klesmann, and Marcus Llanque. Our thanks also to Jorn Leonhard for including our project in the “Studies in the History of Political Thought,” and for advising us with generosity from the outset. Finally, we would like to thank Felix Koch, who translated the texts of the later Sieyés from French into English, and James Wagner, Jonathan Green and Karen Hug, who lent us their advice on the nuances of English expression.

Oliver W. Lembcke and Florian Weber Hamburg and Berlin, March 2014

Note to the Reader

This book contains two sets of footnotes, one indicated numerically and the other alphabetically. The numeric footnotes are part of Emmanuel Joseph Sieyés’s original text whilst the alphabetic footnotes indicate the editors’ notes, with one exception: the alphabetic footnotes of the first chapter entitled ‘What is the Third Estate?’ are the original annotations by S.E. Finer.

Acknowledgements

‘What is the Third Estate?’ is translated from the original French version (‘Qu’ est-ce que le Tiers État?) by Mrs. M. Blondel. This text was first published in Emmanuel Joseph Sieyés, What is the Third Estate? Edited, with historical notes by Samuel E. Finer, with an introduction by Peter Campbell (London and Dunnow, 1963). The editors of this volume have made all reasonable efforts to trace the copyrights holder of the Pall Mall Press ’63 translation used for this chapter. Communications from copyright holders are welcome, so that the appropriate acknowledgements can be made in future editions, and to settle other permission matters.

‘Reasoned Exposition of the Rights of Man and Citizen’ is translated from the original French version (‘Reconnaissance et exposition raisonnée des Droits de l'Homme et du Citoyen’) by Marc Allan Goldstein. It was first published in Social and Political Thought of the French Revolution. 1788-1797. An Anthology of Texts, ed. Marc Allan Goldstein (New York et al., 1997), pp. 134-150.

‘Controversy between Mr. Paine and M. Emmanuel Sieyés’ is reprinted from The European Magazine and London Review, vol. 20 (1791), pp. 129-133. A French edition of this controversy (with a translation of Paine’s letter by his French companion Condorcet) can be found in Œuvres de Sieyes, ed. Marcel Dorigny (Paris, 1989), vol. 2, no. 29 and 30.

‘Of the Gains of Liberty in Society and in the Representative System’ is translated from the original French version (‘Des intérêts de la Liberté dans I’ état social et dans le système représentatif”) by Felix Koch. The essay was originally published on 8 July in the Journal de l'instruction social, vol. 2 (1793), pp. 33-48. It is reprinted in Œuvres de Sieyes, ed. Marcel Dorigny (Paris, 1989), vol. 3, no. 32.

‘Sieyés’s Views concerning several Articles of Sections IV and V of the Draft Constitution’ is translated from the original French version (‘Opinion de Sieyés, sur plusieurs articles de titres IV et V du projet de constitution’) by Felix Koch. This text is reprinted in Œuvres de Sieyes, ed. Marcel Dorigny (Paris, 1989), vol. 3, no. 40. A critical edition can be found in Paul Bastid, Les Discours des Sieyés dans les débats constitutionnels de l’an III (2 et 18 thermidor) (Paris, 1939).

‘The Opinion of Sieyés Concerning the Tasks and Organization of the Constitutional Jury, Submitted on the Second Thermidor is translated from the original

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS XIII

French version (‘Opinion de Sieyès, sur les attributions et l’organisation du Jury Constitutionnaire, proposé le 2 thermidor’) by Felix Koch. It is reprinted in Œuvres de Sieyes, ed. Marcel Dorigny (Paris, 1989), vol. 3, no. 41. A critical edition can be found in Paul Bastid, Les Discours des Sieyès dans les débats constitutionnels de l’an III (2 et 18 thermidor) (Paris, 1939).

‘Constitutional Observations’ is translated from the original French version (‘Observations constitutionnelles’) by Felix Koch. Sieyès never published this manuscript. It is available in Des manuscrits de Sieyès 1773-1799, vol. I, ed. Christine Fauré, Jacques Guilhaumou and Jacques Valier (Paris, 1999), pp. 519-526.

Introduction to Sieyès’s Political Theory

Oliver W. Lembcke and Florian Weber

Throughout his lifetime, Emmanuel Joseph Sieyès! never had the leisure to systematize a coherent political theory. Working in the medium of pamphlets and speeches, he learned how to harmonize dispassionate analysis with fervent polemics. Sieyés’s body of work consists of a bundle of such papers, the results of a long education in political thought and philosophy. The most important of these papers are presented in this volume, along with a preface introducing the reader to Sieyés’s life, political theory, and the context of his writings.

Some Notes on Sieyés’s Political Biography

Both the beginning and the end of the French Revolution are linked to Sieyès. His passionate rallying of the Third Estate and his calculated appeal for the Estates-General to transform itself into a National Assembly are as well known as his conspiracy with Napoleon, whom he saw as the guardian of the Revolution, yet whose ‘will to power’ he underestimated. His political fate was interwoven with that of the Revolution. Before 1789, and after 1799, he was a political nobody, leading the life of a reclusive hermit, absorbed in philosophical studies that were not meant for the outside world; his was a contemplative rather than political existence. Unlike other prominent revolutionary campaigners who promoted the Enlightenment prior to the Revolution (such as the Marquis de Condorcet, who belonged to the circle of encyclopædists and held leading positions at the Académie des sciences and the Académie francaise) or who guarded the legacy of the Revolution during the Restoration (such as Benjamin Constant, one of the leading liberals of the French Vormärz), Sieyés’s political influence was singularly limited to the decade of the Revolution.

His life prior to the Revolution was marked by resignation in the face of social immobility in a corporatist, estate-based society. His youthful hopes for

1 Sieyés’s works are cited as follows: Écrits = Écrits politiques, ed. Roberto Zapperi (Paris et al., 1985); Œuvres = Œuvres de Sieyés, ed. Marcel Dorigny, 3 vols (Paris, 1989); Manuscrits I = Des manuscrits de Sieyés 1773-1799, vol. I, ed. Christine Fauré, Jacques Guilhaumou and Jacques Valier (Paris, 1999); Manuscrits II = Des manuscrits de Sieyès 1770-1815, vol. II, ed. Christine Fauré, Jacques Guilhaumou and Jacques Valier (Paris, 2007).

This is an open access chapter distributed under the terms of the Cc BY-NC 4.0 license.

an ascent in the church hierarchy, which had moved his father to allow the talented pupil to pursue a religious career, proved to be illusory. In a letter to his father dated June 1773, Sieyés openly expressed his disgust at the spoils system: “I give as little credence to the promises of all those people as to the prophecies of the almanac. But because I cannot do otherwise, I act as though I believe them.” He offered a retrospective on the social confinement of his youth in an autobiography that he wrote in the third person and published anonymously

It is not surprising that in this situation, which disagreed with his temperament, he was stricken with a deep melancholy, accompanied by a great, almost stoic indifference with respect to his own person and future?

For Sieyès, the Revolution promised personal liberation from a life determined by outside forces. His deep hatred for the aristocracy, which can be seen in his polemical Essay on Privileges* and What Is the Third Estate? (see text 1 of this compilation), compelled him to advocate for the disenfranchised. When a newly revised version of the Third Estate was published under his name for the first time in May 1789—the text had been distributed as early as January, and had been reprinted multiple times—, the bourgeois Estate in Paris selected Sieyés as a representative to the Estates-General, an office that the clergy of the commune Montfort-l Amaury had denied him the previous March. The sweeping success of Sieyés’s polemics, which stood out in a torrential flood of late-1780s political pamphlets, stemmed from his unique zeal: the churchman became an undisputed spokesman for the bourgeoisie even before the session began. Like no other writer of his day, Sieyés united the visionary force ofa philosopher-legislator with the practical expertise of an administrative specialist. At once législateur and administrateur, Sieyés articulated a widespread anger against the old elites that, like a magnifying glass, focused inchoate popular ressentiment into a conflagration that consumed the ancien régime in the summer of 1789.

2 Octave Teissier (ed.), La jeunesse de l’abbé Sieyés. Documents inédits (Marseille, 1897), p. 8.— Unless otherwise indicated, all French and German citations have been translated by the editors.

3 Sieyés, Œuvres III, no. 36, p. 7 (‘Notice sur la vie de Sieyès, membre de la première Assemblée nationale et de la Convention’).

4 Sieyès, Œuvres I, no.1 (‘Essai sur les privilèges”).

Introduction To Sieyes’s Political Theory 3

In its initial phase, the Revolution of 1789 followed the logic of the Third Estate as if taking stage directions from a “script.”> Sieyès won over the revolutionary camp with his radical proposal to blow up the corporatist system of representation® and to entrust the drafting of a new constitution to the Third Estate. The success of his proposal can perhaps be seen most clearly in the convention's adoption of a title he had demanded as early as 1788: Assemblée nationale.”

This phase, in which Sieyés possessed the popular authority of a revolutionary prophet—Mirabeau® called him a new “Mohammed”?—,, did not last long. The revolutionary script written by Sieyès, that fierce critic of privilege, did not foresee the National Assembly’s total abolition of the feudal system, at least not in the rash way that the deputies caused the foundations of traditional social order to collapse on the night of 4 August 1789. In his speech of 10 August regarding the status of church lands, Sieyés criticized the elimination of the benefice system and the ecclesiastical tithe.1

He claimed that the National Assembly had deprived the First Estate of its material foundation, even though the clergy had a public educational mission and, unlike the aristocracy, did not lead a ‘parasitic’ existence. Like a didactic teacher reading renegade pupils the riot act, he reproached the Assembly: “You want to be free and do not understand how to be just!” In so doing, he exhausted his moral credibility among many of his supporters: “The Assembly didn’t know what had happened to it. The oracle of the Revolution had treated it as no deputy had ever before dared.”

5 William H. Sewell, A Rhetoric of Bourgeois Revolution. The Abbé Sieyés and What is the Third Estate? (Durham et al., 1994), p. 53.

6 Keith M. Baker, Inventing the French Revolution. Essays on French Political Culture in the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge, 1990), pp. 224-251.

7 Sieyès, Œuvres I, no. 2, p. 7 (‘Vues sur les moyens d’ exécution dont les Représentants de la France pourront disposer en 1789’).

8 Mirabeau and Sieyès entertained a close relationship at the beginning of the Revolution. Mirabeau was a prominent figure among the supporters of Sieyés’s constitutional ideas and his concept of national representation via a process of elections at different levels. On this see Michael Sonenscher, Sans-Culottes. An Eighteenth-Century Emblem in the French Revolution (Princeton and Oxford, 2008), pp. 47, 304.

9 Étienne Dumont, Souvenirs sur Mirabeau et sur les deux premières assemblées législatives (Paris, 1832), p. 295 and passim.

10 Sieyès, Œuvres II, no. u (‘Observations sommaires sur les biens Ecclésiastiques’).

11 Jean-Denis Bredin, Sieyès. La clé de la Révolution française (Paris, 1988), p. 197.

The public rebuke that greeted ‘Padre’ Sieyés, who seemed to have placed personal interests before his principles,!* did not lead to his departure from politics. Instead, he simply withdrew from public life—a life to which he did not feel called anyway, if his Biographical Notes are to be believed.1*

For Sieyès, public acclaim was merely a road to political relevance; most fundamentally, he saw himself as a framer of commissions and committees. Rarely, and only when the gravity of the situation demanded it, did he stand at the lectern of the National Assembly—as, for instance, in the debate of September 1789 on the royal veto, which, according to Sieyès, put the legitimacy of the new political order to the test. Thus despite the resistance that met his proposals (which, because of popular antipathy toward him, he occasionally allowed his allies to propose), he succeeded in putting his mark on the Revolution in three different respects. The Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen (text 2) as a founding document of bourgeois society; the dissolution of the old administrative system and the organization of the nation into territorial departments; the establishment of a post-corporatist system of representation based on elections!©—these are the three load-bearing columns of Sieyés’s new political architecture.

For this reason, Sieyés has rightly been called the father of the first Revolutionary Constitution of 1791. He was unable, however, to convince his compatriots on one crucial point: the role of the monarch. For Sieyés, the king symbolized the unity of the state and occupied the role of head of government, but held no further power to shape politics. In contrast to other variants of constitutional monarchy, Sieyés’s blueprint placed legislative power firmly in the hand of a democratically legitimated parliament. Sieyés advocated this position consistently, both in the fall of 1789, in opposition to demands for a royal veto, and in the summer of 1791, in opposition to Condorcet’s and Paine’s demands for a French republic in the wake of Louis XVI's attempted flight (text 3). He proffered his vision of constitutional monarchy one last time—once again unsuccessfully—during the debate on constitutional revisions!’ prior to

12 Sieyès, Œuvres II, no. u, p.1 and passim (‘Observations sommaires sur les biens Ecclésiastiques’).

13 Sieyès, Œuvres III, no. 36, p. 43 (‘Notice sur la vie de Sieyès, membre de la première Assemblée nationale et de la Convention’).

14 Sieyés, Œuvres II, no. 12 (‘Dire de l’ abbé Sieyés sur la question du veto royal’).

15 Sieyés, Œuvres II, no. 8 (‘Quelques idées de constitution applicables à la ville de Paris’).

16 Sieyès, Œuvres II, no. 12 (‘Dire de l’ abbé Sieyés sur la question du veto royal’).

17 Cf. Pierre Brunet, Vouloir pour la nation. Le concept de représentation dans la théorie de L'État (Paris, 2004), pp. 221ff.

INTRODUCTION TO SIEYES’S POLITICAL THEORY 5 the dissolution of the National Constituent Assembly.$ For his part, although he supported the new constitution, he saw it as precarious: destabilized by the compromise that resulted from the veto dispute. When the Revolution became more radical, his skepticism proved prescient. The outraged populace deposed the king on 10 August 1792, robbing the new constitutional order of its validity de facto. Sieyés accepted this overthrow with great sobriety. Claiming that the monarchy had been irreparably discredited in the public mind by Louis XVI's abuses, he declared himself a “republican by reason” and, in January 1793, voted for the death of the monarch. Subsequently, Sieyés did not play a major role in the National Convention's drafting of a new constitution.!9 At the behest of his allies, who deemed his criticism of Condorcet too vehement, his counterproposal to the Convention’s adopted constitution remained unpublished. Sieyés disliked the directly democratic elements of Condorcet’s proposal, which were irreconcilable with the fundamental principle of his constitutional theory—i.e. representation.?° When his plans for educational policy and a military constitution?! also failed, he declared himself weary of the enduring public hostility directed towards him, and draped himself in a “philosophical silence.”22

During the Reign of Terror, Sieyés disappeared from the political stage, although he continued to take part—silently—in the meetings of the Convention “in order to show that he had not emigrated,’ as he later explained to Wilhelm von Humboldt.?3

18 ‘Représentation et élections’ (1791), published in Pasquale Pasquino, Sieyés et l'invention de la constitution en France (Paris, 1998), pp. 171-173.

19 Sieyés was an opponent not only of the Robespierrists but also of the Feuillant wing of the Jacobin club. For his hostile relations with Duport and Barnave see Sonenscher, Sans-Culottes, pp. 304, 327.

20 On Sieyés’s distinctly modern theory of representation see Colette Clavreul, ‘Sieyès et la génése de la représentation moderne’, in Droits. Revue francaise de théorie juridique 6 (1986), pp. 45-56.

21 Sieyès, Œuvres II, no. 33 (‘Du nouvel établissement de l Instruction en France’); Sieyés, Œuvres II, no. 35 (‘Rapport du Comité de Défense générale pour organiser le Ministère de la Guerre’).

22 Sieyès, Œuvres III, no. 36, p. 39 (‘Notice sur la vie de Sieyès, membre de la première Assemblée nationale et de la Convention’).

23 Wilhelm von Humboldt, Tagebücher 1788-1798, vol. I, in Gesammelte Schriften, vol. XIV, ed. Albert Leitzmann (Berlin, 1968), p. 472.—As for how he escaped the furious guillotine despite being the target of Jacobin hostilities, he explained to Humboldt that a “revolutionary superstition” had prevented the Robespierrists from killing him. Had they executed the murderer of the king, it would have given the hated aristocrats “too much pleasure” (ibid.).

Sieyés’s experience of the Terror marked him deeply. His opponents’ machinations, which portrayed him as an enemy of the Revolution and damaged his reputation well beyond the French political elite, stoked up Sieyés’s contempt for the Jacobin leadership. Four years after Robespierre’s death, Sieyès still could not utter his name without adding “five or six epithets one after the other: the hideous, the ignorant, the childish, the ridiculous, the smug Robespierre.’** As late as 1832, while suffering from a fever, he instructed his attendants to tell Robespierre he was not at home.?5

As his confidant Constant later noted in his ruminations on the Revolutionary decade, the Abbé’s ire toward his opponents and his fear of their attacks were his dominant traits: “After hate, fear was his greatest passion. Always and everywhere he believed himself threatened.””6

Sieyés survived the Terror, but the rumors spread by the Jacobins to impugn his character—that he was an agent of the church and an enemy of the people, that he had colluded with the aristocracy, that he favored a British form of constitutional monarchy—made any resumption of his political career highly tenuous. For this reason, his return to the political stage was choreographed to coincide with the release of an autobiography intended to rehabilitate him as a public figure. He became a member of the Committee of Public Safety, which took charge of state business after Robespierre’s fall. Although he was not part of the new constitutional commission appointed in the spring of 1795, he supported it in an advisory capacity?’ Since reservations on both sides (Jacobins, Royalists) made cooperation difficult, it is not surprising that Sieyés was unsuccessful in winning majority support for his constitutional plans, despite two speeches before the Convention in which he criticized the commission for its anglophilic preference for a balance of powers (text 5), advocated the fusion of the legislative and executive branches, and proposed to install a “guardian of the constitution” (see text 6). Nevertheless, the parliament was as hostile to his proposals as the commission had been, and his bill was unanimously rejected. Beaten and humiliated, Sieyés saw his defeat as a personal disgrace. He interpreted his rejection by the Thermidorians, with whom he shared fundamental liberal convictions, as a flat insult. As a result, he refused to accept his election

24 Ibid.

25 Bredin, Sieyès, p. 737.

26 Benjamin Constant, Fragments des mémoires de Madame Récamier’, in Œuvre, ed. Alfred Roulin (Paris, 1957), pp. 931ff.

27 Cf. Sieyés, Manuscrits I, pp. 478-480 (‘Préface des 4 à 5 conférences que j’ ai eues avec le Comité des 11 dans les 1er jours de messidor, l'an 3, au sujet de la Constitution’).

INTRODUCTION TO SIEYES’S POLITICAL THEORY 7 to the Directory, the new executive branch of the Republic. Aside from his deputation to the parliament, he never held another political office.

This abstinence from politics in the early stages of the Thermidorian Republic turned out to be fortuitous. As an advocate of strong executive authority, Sieyès was not tainted by the stigma that soon befell the powerless new government, pulverized by hostilities from left and right.?8 Ironically, it was a near-fatal misfortune that returned Sieyès to the political stage. On 11 April 1797, he was the victim of an assassination attempt. But, providentially, he only got slightly injured. In the context of the ongoing political crisis fomented by the Royalists, republicans saw the attempt on Sieyés’s life as symbolic of the reactionaries’ attack of the Revolution. Emboldened by public sympathy and encouraged by a flood of condolences,” Sieyès once again grasped at power. After the showdown between the republican majority of the Directory (supported by the army) and the royalist majority of the parliament was decided in favor of the former, Sieyés leapt to the Directory’s defense, and proposed the deportation of enemies of the state. His fight against the royalists became a personal vendetta, one that allowed him to turn his back on his political principles in case of emergency. At that moment, he was constrained by neither the constitutional prohibition against the deployment of the army in the interior nor his egalitarian convictions about civil rights. The bourgeois class thanked him for it: in November 1797, Sieyés was elected president of the lower house of parliament, which had been “purified” of royalist opposition.

It was in this parliamentary role that he met Napoleon for the first time in December 1797, at a banquet honoring the general in the wake of the Treaty of Campo Formio. The two had much to discuss. As a public servant in the diplomatic corps of the Committee of Public Safety after Robespierre’s fall, Sieyés had developed an interest in European diplomacy. Moreover, he admired Bonaparte’s expansionary and hegemonic ambitions. The diplomatic expertise that Sieyès demonstrated in crafting peace with Holland led him to the office of French Ambassador to Prussia, which he assumed in June 1798.5° Specifically,

28 Bronsilaw Baczko, ‘L'expérience thermidorienne’, in The Political Culture of the French Revolution, vol. II of The French Revolution and the Creation of Modern Political Culture, ed. Colin Lucas (Oxford et al., 1987), pp. 339-370.

29 These letters can be found in the folder Sieyés (= 284 AP) of the Archives Nationales, Paris, box u, Dossier 2, sheet 3; henceforth cited as A.N. 284 AP u, 2(3).

30 For Sieyés’s time in Berlin see Marcelle Adler-Bresse, Sieyés et le monde allemand (Paris, 1977). For his influence on the contemporary German political debate, which is mirrored in Kant’s Perpetual Peace as well as Fichte’s The Closed Commericla State, see Isaac Nakhimovsky, The Closed Commercial State. Perpetual Peace and Commercial Society From the foreign minister Talleyrand instructed him to obtain Prussian neutrality in France's conflict with Austria. Ultimately, Sieyès was unsuccessful: he was unable to negotiate an agreement of reassurance in Berlin. But as France’s relations with European powers were generally deteriorating at this time, Sieyes’s failure did not damage his reputation in Paris. When he was summoned back to Paris in the summer of 1799, his reception did not lack pomp. He was considered a father of the Revolution and guarantor of its success. As the tensions with other European powers escalated into crisis, the people placed their last hopes for the Revolution in him; as Constant told Sieyés, “I believe in the Revolution, because I believe in you”?! Sieyés was elected to the Directory, where, alongside Barras, he became a strong leader. As a result of his successful suppression of the royalist opposition, he controlled majorities in both chambers of parliament, and skillfully pitted his enemies in the Directory against one another. It was not long, however, before Sieyés fell out of favor with the leftwing majority that had brought him to power. Driven by a paranoia spawned by the neo-Jacobins’ campaign of personal defamation against him, weary of the perpetual infighting among the various political factions, sobered by the incompetence of the government, which frequently resorted to illegal measures in order to maintain power, and further motivated to make amends for his failure in the Thermidorian constitutional debate, Sieyés arranged a coup d’état in order to put an end to the prevailing anarchy and to establish a new constitution. By 1799, he had learned his lesson: one cannot attain a stable majority with arguments alone. Hence, Sieyés forged coalitions in advance of his coup, filling key positions with confidants, and allied himself with Napoleon, putatively the most civilian of the military officers. The connection between the two amounted to an alliance of convenience. Sieyés possessed the trust of the political elite, and Bonaparte that of the army, on whose support—and here Sieyés held no illusions—the leadership of the government had long been dependent. In late 1799, each man needed the other. The task of steering the ship of state into calmer waters Bonaparte reserved for himself. Sieyés’s new constitution,

Rousseau to Fichte (Princeton and Oxford, 2011), ch. 1, pp. 15-62; see Jean Delinière, Karl Friedrich Reinhard, introducteur de Kant auprès de Sieyès, in Revue d'Allemagne 12 (1980), pp. 481-496 and also Michael Sonenscher, Before the Deluge. Public Debt, Inequality, and the Intellectual Origins of the French Revolution (Princeton and Oxford, 2007), p. 70, n. 139. Fichte even “served as an intermediary to help find a publisher for the German edition of Sieyes’s works’ (ibid., p. 38), which were translated by Johann Gottfried Ebel and prefaced with an introduction by Konrad Engelbert Oelsner.

31 Letter of gth July, published in Norman King and Etienne Hofmann (eds.), ‘Les lettres de Benjamin Constant à Sieyès, Annales Benjamin Constant 3 (1983), pp. 89-110.

INTRODUCTION TO SIEYES’S POLITICAL THEORY 9 which was drafted overnight after the successful coup d’ état, had support in both chambers of parliament, but was remodeled by Napoleon to serve his own ambitions. He hollowed out its liberal substance.

Sieyès had failed for the last time, and withdrew from politics. Bonaparte, who feared Sieyés’s influence and did not want to anger him, gilded his path of retreat. Sieyés received considerable properties from the state, was made an officer of the Legion of Honor in 1804, and in 1813 became a Grand Cross of the Imperial Order of Reunion. His overt penchant for honors and distinctions even led him to accept the title of comte in 1808.

Yet Sieyés was not granted the leisure to enjoy his wealth and fame without disturbance. After the return of the Bourbons, the murderer of the king had to flee into exile to Brussels. Only after the July Revolution did he return to Paris, frail and wearied. When he died in 1836 at the age of 88, he was nearly forgotten. Whereas the funeral for Constant in 1830 resembled a state ceremony, Sieyés’s burial rite involved only his closest family. He departed life in silence, a private man. His star had faded long ago, in the early days of the Napoleonic era.

Main Elements of Sieyés’s Political Theory

Evaluated solely in light of the principles of his constitutional theory and of his intentions to stabilize Revolutionary France, Sieyés failed as a politician. And yet, this curt assessment does not adequately represent his talent for reconciling political thought with practical action. No other practitioner so influenced the various phases of the Revolution as did Sieyés. Like Machiavelli, he aspired to enlist theory in the service of praxis. But whereas, in his retirement, Machiavelli reached for his pen, Sieyés wrote his major works as a politician in waiting. For him, writing was not a substitute for but a precondition of his political work. Although he read, studied, quoted and debated his entire life, his published writings all originated during the Revolutionary period: they represent his intellectual preparation for oncoming political engagements. “That he should have written merely theoretically about politics was out of the question for him in France,” as Wilhelm von Humboldt noted in his diary after a conversation with Sieyés.*? Yet, nevertheless, a theory of politics may be reconstructed from Sieyés’s writings. The main elements of his political thought may be sketched out in the following five categories: freedom and society, legal community, democratic sovereignty, political authority, and mixed government.