CLIVE E.HILL SIEYÈS, EMMANUEL-JOSEPH (1748– 1836)

CLIVE E.HILL SIEYÈS, EMMANUEL-JOSEPH (1748– 1836)

The French political theorist, political economist, and statesman Emmanuel-Joseph Sièyes’s main contribution to political and economic thought was his justification of what is often termed the modern republic: the constitutional order combining the rule of law, limited Government and law-making by representatives of the people within a commercial society. His most famous act was to persuade the members of the Third Estate in the Estates General of 1789, and members elected from the other two orders who would join them, to declare themselves representatives of the sovereign nation. The constitutional revolution thereby defined had been justified by Sieyès in three pamphlets written concurrently and published between the end of 1788 and the spring of 1789. The most influential, What is the Third Estate? (Qu’est-ce que le Tiers État?), appeared in January 1789. The two others are especially important in working out what Sieyès actually envisaged in proposing rapid and varied constitutional innovation: Essai sur les privilèges (Essay on priviledges) and Vues sur les moyens d’exécution don’t les représentants de la France pourront disposer en 1789 (Views on the Means of Execution that the Representatives of France will Have at their Disposal in 1789) . Sieyès subsequently published numerous commentaries on the course of the revolution, which

he retained some hopes of redirecting. The most notable include: Préliminaire de la constitution: reconnaissance et exposition raisonnée des droits de l’homme et du citoyen (Prologue to the Constitution: Recognition and Reasoned Exposition of the Rights of Man and Citizen) (July 1789); Dire de l’abbé Sieyès sur la question du veto royal à la séance

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du 7 septembre 1789 (Speech by the Abbé Sieyès on the Question of the Royal Veto); Letters to the Moniteur rebutting Thomas Paine’s view of republicanism (6 and 16 July 1791); Des intérêts de la liberté dans l’état social et dans le système reprèsentatif (The Benefits of Liberty in the Social State and the Representative System), published in the Journal d’instruction sociale, 8 June 1793; Du nouvel établissement public de l’instruction en France (Concerning the New Public Establishment of Instruction in France), published in the Journal d’instruction sociale, 22 June–6 July 1793; Opinion de Sieyès sur les attributions et l’organisation du constitutionnaire proposé le 2 thermidor (Sieyès’s Opinion on the Organization and Attributes of the Proposed Constitutional Jury), speech in the Convention, 5 August 1795.

In 1789 Sieyès made national sovereignty the watchword of the new revolutionary order. Shifting political language to his sense of this term was an enormous achievement. In the recent past national sovereignty had been used to justify possible divisions of political authority between kings and parlements, kings and estates, and between the king and the people. Sieyès severed the link with these corporatist perspectives on the body politic. National sovereignty now signified a unified but abstract being, the nation, as represented by a political body, the members of the self-proclaimed ‘national assembly’. The first aspect of national sovereignty highlighted by Sieyès was the representative system it entailed. The second was civil equality, because the nation could never maintain itself in the midst of privileged classes or castes. It became essential to reorganize France into equal administrative units under a central government and legislature. The nation thus became a homogeneous political entity standing above other political actors. Following Hobbes, Sieyès argued that a free and stable society could only be established if the sovereign reigned over all of the component parts of the political realm. Neither the people acting as a body, the landed proprietors, the monarch, merchants or capitalists, could be entrusted with ultimate political authority. National sovereignty did not, evidently, mean popular sovereignty. Sieyès was as implacably opposed to democracy as

he was to the sovereignty of a hereditary monarch. He continued to try to establish what

he called a ‘republican monarchy’ or ‘monarchical republic’ despite his belief that the national assembly had betrayed him, between the autumn of 1789 and the spring of 1790, by nationalizing the property of the Church, and by giving the King a suspensive veto over acts of law. It was ever more apparent as the decade progressed that there was a large gap between what Sieyès intended for France and the more popular philosophy imputed to him by many leading revolutionaries. Uncertainty about his actual beliefs came to a head after his involvement with Bonaparte in the creation of the Consulate in 1799. Although it is now clear that Sieyès was seeking to justify the kind of modern republic we would recognize today, what he meant by this has remained unclear. As a consequence, his influence over leading figures in nineteenth-century thought, such as BENJAMIN CONSTANT, has been understated. The miraculous recovery of Sieyès’s papers in the 1960s, now available for scrutiny in the Archives nationales de France, has enabled scholars to reassess his work. In the process they have restored him to the kind of prominence he enjoyed among contemporary political writers in the 1790s.

Sieyès was born in the small Provençal town of Fréjus, the son of an administrator in the service of the King. Although he felt no calling, Sieyès accepted his father’s demand that he enter the Church, arriving at the seminary of Saint-Sulpice at Paris in 1765. Ordained as a priest in 1772, Sieyès became, through paternal patronage, secretary to

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Lubersac, appointed in 1775 Bishop of Tréguier in Brittany. Five years later he followed Lubersac to a new diocese, Chartres, and became the Bishop’s vicar-general. In 1783 he was made a canon and in 1786 councillor to the assembly of the French clergy. In 1787

he was appointed representative of the clergy in the Provincial Assembly of Orléans, and in 1788 chancellor of the chapter at Chartres. His moderate clerical ascent ended in the autumn of 1788, when he began to outline the proposals for the Estates General that were to bring him national renown.

Sieyès was elected to the Estates General by the Third Estate of Paris, taking his seat on 25 May. On 10 and 15 June he presented two motions that led to the transformation of the Estates General into a National Assembly. On 14 July he was elected to the Committee charged with drafting a new constitution and was assigned the task of drawing up a declaration of rights. Despite becoming disillusioned with the Assembly, Sieyès was largely responsible for the territorial redivision of France into departments. As a member of the Directory of the Departement of Paris he was involved, in April 1791, in defending liberty of worship, and surfaced again in the National Convention, in which he voted for the death of the King. When the Terror began, until July 1794, he disappeared from active politics. During 1795, Sieyès served in foreign affairs, negotiating the Franco-Dutch Treaty in May of that year. Under the Directory he was elected to the Council of 500 but refused to serve as a minister. He did, however, agree to act as special envoy to the court of Berlin, where he remained for almost a year from May 1798. In the spring of 1799 he returned to the political stage once more, acting first as Executive Director and subsequently as president of the Directory from 18 June 1799. Acknowledging the need for a new constitution, and for the involvement of a leading military figure, he agreed to work with Bonaparte in planning what became the coup d’état of 9–10 November 1799. Having become one of three consuls, he was out- manæuvred by the more populist Bonaparte in the formation of the Consular constitution. Again he retreated into obscurity. In name he was made first president of the Senate, maintained his senatorial status throughout the Empire, and became a count in 1808. In reality he had retired to the comfortable estate granted to him for public service. After Waterloo he was exiled as a Bonapartist and regicide, and lived in Brussels until 1830. The revolution in France of that year allowed him to return to Paris, where he lived hand- to-mouth and largely in isolation until his death.

The seeds of Sieyès’s later ideas can be found in his first work, completed in 1775, the Lettres aux économistes sur leur système de politique et de morale (Letters to the Physiocrats concerning their Political and Moral System) . Despite being approved by the censor, for an unknown reason it was never published, although the most likely is Turgot’s fall from power. Sieyès continued to add notes to the manuscript for at least the next decade. As the title implies, it was an examination of the physiocratic diagnosis of the ills of the French state, as expounded by François Quesnay and Victor Riquetti de Mirabeau. Sieyès shared the view of the physiocrats that human society was best conceived as a means of better satisfying the subsistence needs shared by all of its members. Like them he recognized the importance of combating the tendency of modern commercial societies to become amoral arenas dominated by merchants, aristocrats or despots. Neither party had any faith in remedies associated with the restoration of classical republicanism, Christian charity or the community of goods. But Sieyès rejected the physiocratic claim that agriculture was the exclusive source of the net product, the

measure of wealth creation. Accordingly, he opposed the social order they favoured for modern France. In associating the rational exercise of authority with the landed class, the physiocrats were establishing what Sieyès called a ‘ré-privée’ rather than a legitimate society, which he called a ‘ré-publique’ They were creating an aristocracy from a contingent group in society, which had no natural right to exercise sovereignty. The physiocratic division of society into productive agricultural and sterile commercial and manufacturing classes was condemned as a vestige of feudalism. They were mistaken, he argued, because of the necessity of establishing a commercial society founded on the productive power of labour if modern states were to maintain order and defend. Sieyès claimed that the most important movement in modern history was ‘the conversion of the largest part of the toiling class, who were forced to provide personal services, into free artisans who produce tangible wealth’. This had been responsible for ‘the prosperity of modern nations’ and was in opposition to ‘all the different kinds of idleness’ epitomized by aristocracy. Sieyès outlined a conjectural history describing how a multitude became a democratically governed society before the progress of commerce and increasing size of the state made it necessary to establish a modern nation: a single body with a will, governed by ‘indirect democracy’ or the system of representation. Smith’s description of the natural progress of opulence, in Books III and IV of the Wealth of Nations, clearly played a large role in Sieyès work. At the same time he rejected Smith’s cautious approach to politics founded on the claim that the British constitution was on the whole suited to commerce. Sieyès held this to be insufficient, arguing that Britain’s was as aristocratic as France and consequently had as corrupt a constitution. Political procedures and constitutional mechanisms could be found that would genuinely increase the liberty and happiness experienced in society, while combating ‘the unfortunate descent into commercial greed’.

Sieyès claimed that he had ‘gone beyond Smith’ in ‘recognising the distribution of large professions or trades as the true principle of the progress of the social state’. What Sieyès meant by this was that the division of labour had altered the social structure of modern society and made imperative political change in accordance with this movement. Smith, because of his British prejudices, had failed to acknowledge that modern constitutions had to ensure ‘the representation of labour’. Sieyès explained that the division of labour was a representative system. Those who served the individual by producing goods were akin to those who made political decisions. Applying the division of labour to political life required the separation of powers, and an absolute distinction between the making of law and its execution. Law was to be made by legislators indirectly elected from the body of the people. The execution of law was to be overseen by a single representative, the Bourbon king. All of those involved in politics, as representatives, could lose their position if the national will asserted itself and judged them to be failing in carrying out their duties. Such a view of politics had two important consequences. The first was that the popular element of the constitution had to be limited to association with the abstract sovereign body or nation. Democracy was a flawed system of government because it was backward looking, and incompatible with the division of labour as it had developed in all walks of life. The second was that political stability was fostered by Sieyès’s representative system because of the division of labour. Commercial ties between individuals created groups with interests that were expressed through the representative system. In this way what Montesquieu had called

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‘intermediary powers’ were established between the government and the people; they were conducive to a culture of peace and moderation. In an argument reminiscent of Madison’s tenth Federalist, Sieyès argued that his republic was most suited to large states in which expansive commerce would be coupled with greater means of self-defence.

In all of his writings Sieyès argued that citizens had to become independent, but at the same time persuaded to recognize their need for social ties and the duties that accompanied them. One of the first roles he identified for national legislators was to enlighten men about their ‘happiness’. This entailed fixing the meaning of the term ‘industry’ to make apparent the difference between productive industry and Talse riches, those of secondary importance, and especially wasteful, destructive, or ruinous wealth’. When the revolution became more violent and unstable, he began to concentrate on protecting constitutional laws from the irrational acts of overpowerful legislators by means of a constitutional jury. Civic instruction also became the essential bedfellow of constitutional reform. While he shared the view of Condorcet, his fellow editor of the Journal d’instruction sociale, that the state ought to direct the intellectual, moral and physical education of its citizens, he was less optimistic about the individual’s capacity to reason independently and enlighten their own self-interest. Accordingly, it was necessary to establish institutions that would make the practice of certain social virtues habitual by instilling them in the general populace. The most important was a series of local and national fêtes to commemorate ‘the work of nature, human society, and the French Revolution’. Through these measures a more justly governed and egalitarian commercial society would develop.