Emmanuel Joseph Sieyès: The Essential Political Writings

Abstract

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 Sieyès'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 Sieyès, 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, Sieyès 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 Sieyès'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 Sieyès's political thought, and was inspired by the meticulously researched edition of the Groupe d'Études Sieyèsienne, 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 Sieyès'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

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