Sieyes, Emmanuel Joseph (1748–1836)

The Abbé Sieyes is best known for his 1789 pamphlet What is the Third Estate?, which set the constitutional agenda for the new French National Assembly. His rhetorical attacks on aristocratic privilege, alongside his promotion of the Third Estate, political representation and popular sovereignty, marked him as a first-rate political thinker. His writings also had a practical impact. Yet he had trained as a priest, only entering political life in 1788. His subsequent fate became intertwined with that of the Revolution. Ironically, Sieyes, who helped ‘open’ the revolution, also played a part in its conclusion, laying the ground for Napoleon’s coup d’état of 1799.