Mainstreaming the Anti-Royalist Fringe: The Abbé De Sieyès, What Is the Third Estate?, and the Extreme Left’s General Will in 1789

Historians are well acquainted with the Abbé de Sieyès’s famous pamphlet What Is the Third Estate? Sieyès’s 1789 tract exemplifies the French Third Estate’s anti-aristocratic struggle against the privileged orders, and historians everywhere incorporate Sieyès into their European history survey courses to explain to undergraduates what was at stake at the beginning of the French Revolution. This paper argues that Sieyès’s crucial role in the 1789 debate was not just as a popularizer of anti-aristocratic sentiment, but, more significantly, as the writer who mainstreamed fringe attacks against the monarchy using a modified Rousseauist conception of the general will. Sieyès’s anticorporatism was more extreme than the arguments of his likeminded peers who also wrote pamphlets championing the Third Estate’s cause (such as Lacretelle, Target, and Lanjuinais). His rabid antipathy toward the privileged orders, however, was less significant in setting him apart from his peers than his radical dissociation from the monarchy. Sieyès rejected his peers’ constitutional theories that recognized both the Estates-General and the King as having a proper role in interpreting the French nation’s general will. His popular pamphlet’s contention that the Estates-General alone could interpret the general will helped to normalize more radical anti-royalist pamphleteers’ arguments such as those in the anonymous Complaints, grievances, and remonstrances of N., bourgeois of Paris. In the Estates-General itself (and in the Constituante), Sieyès formed part of the extreme Left’s core leadership and reiterated prerevolutionary arguments that merged anti-aristocracy with attacks on the monarchy. Sieyès and a few key allies (Pétion, Tronchet, Lanjuinais, and Robespierre) thereby anchored the Jacobin Left’s wing of the National Assembly firmly in anticorporatism, antiroyalism, and confidence in the Assembly’s unique ability to interpret the People’s general will.