Emmanuel-Joseph Sieyes
Emmanuel-Joseph Sieyès, Count Sieyès (Fréjus, May 3, 1748 - Paris, June 20, 1836) was a French politician, ecclesiastical, essayist and academic, one of the theorists of the constitutions of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic era.
Biography
He was born in Fréjus, in the south of France, and trained at the Saint-Sulpice seminary, Paris, and at the Sorbonne. He was imbued with the teachings of John Locke, Étienne Bonnot de Condillac, and other political thinkers with a special preference for theology. A priest despite his few convictions, his apprenticeship allowed him rapid promotion to vicar general and chancellor of the diocese of Chartres. However, he was aware that not being a nobleman, he had few opportunities for promotion within the church.
In 1788, the convocation of the States General of France, after an interval of more than a century and a half, and the invitation of Jacques Necker to the educated people to present their points of view for the organization of the States General, It allowed Sieyès to publish Considerations on the means of action available to the representatives of France in 1789, where he laid the foundations of his political thought. He writes Essay on Privileges and the same year he publishes his celebrated pamphlet: “Qu’est-ce que le tiers état?” (What is the Third Estate?). He began with the answer to the question «Everything. What has been so far in the political order? Nothing. What is it that you desire? Be something». For these words, it was said that he was indebted to Nicolas Chamfort. The pamphlet was very successful, and its author was admitted to the most select clubs and societies in Paris. Despite being a priest, he chose not to sit with the clergy in the Estates General and was elected as the last (twentieth) of the representatives of the Third Estate for Paris.
Despite his poor oratorical ability, his influence was great. He was the promoter of the constitution of the National Assembly by the Third Estate, when it left the General Estates blocked by the nobility and the high clergy, on June 10, 1789, followed by the poor clergy and some nobles. On June 20, he is one of the drafters of the Ball Game Oath (Serment du Jeu de paume) by which the Assembly declares itself a Constituent Assembly and undertakes the drafting of the Constitution that will be approved in 1791. He also collaborated in the drafting of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen in 1789.
Within the Committee for the Constitution, Sieyès tends towards universal suffrage but opposes the abolition of titles and the confiscation of Church lands. He opposed the King's right of absolute veto, a veto which Honoré Mirabeau unsuccessfully supported. For most matters, he kept his opinions to himself in the Assembly, speaking very rarely and generally with oral brevity and ambiguity. He had considerable influence on the administrative division of the national territory into departments, but after the spring of 1790, he was eclipsed by others. He only once more he was elected biweekly president of the National Constituent Assembly. He resigned from the priesthood to obey the civil constitution of the clergy in 1790.
Excluded from the Legislative Assembly by the self-exclusive ordinance of Maximilian Robespierre, he reappeared in the Third National Assembly, known as the Convention (September 1792- September 1795), where he sat in the central part called "the plain" or "the swamp" (la plaine, le marais). Here his self-censorship was even more noticeable, partly out of disgust, and partly out of shyness. He later characterized his conduct during the Terror in the ironic phrase: J'ai vécu (I have survived). He voted for the death of Louis XVI, but not in the derogatory terms attributed to him. He was known to disagree with many of the provisions of the constitutions of the years 1791 and 1792, but he did little to improve them.
In 1795, he was a member of the Committee of Public Salvation for 6 months in which he advocated an expansionist policy. The same year, he went on a diplomatic mission to The Hague, and served as instrument in drawing up a treaty between the republics of France and Bavaria. He disagreed with the Constitution of 1795 (that of the Executive Directorate) in many important parts, and refused to serve as Director of the Republic. In May 1798 he went as French ambassador plenipotentiary to the court in Berlin, to try to induce Prussia to make common cause with France against the Second Coalition of European monarchies at war with France. His conduct was exemplary, but he did not get the desired result. The prestige that surrounded his name led him to be elected one of the five members of the Directory of France instead of Jean-François Reubell, in May 1799.
Already then he was preparing the fall of the Directory, and it is said[who?] that Emmanuel Sieyes considered the rise to power in Paris of characters as despised as the Archduke Charles and the Duke of Brunswick. He dedicated himself to undermining the Constitution of 1795. In this spirit he had the revived Jacobin club closed down, and sounded out General Joubert for a coup. Joubert's death at the Battle of Novi, and Napoleon's return from Egypt changed his mind, but he eventually came to terms with the young general. Sieyès was looking for a strong man capable of preventing the imminent return of the monarchists and thus saving what was left of the Revolution. Following the 18 Brumaire coup, Sieyès produced the perfect constitution he had so long planned for, only to be completely reshaped by Bonaparte, who thus delivered a coup within a coup.
Sieyès soon withdrew from the position of provisional consul that he had accepted after the coup de brumaire, but soon after became one of the three Consuls who governed during the Consulate of Napoleon Bonaparte, and was later appointed President of the Senate. After the abusive repression carried out under the pretext of the attack on the rue Saint-Nicaise, in Paris in 1800, he defended in the Senate the procedures by which Bonaparte had eliminated the Jacobin leaders. The Empire marginalized Sieyès politically, although he retained his position as senator until 1815. Some rumors[who?] connect Emmanuel's retirement with the acquisition of a fine estate in Crosne. During the Empire, which granted him the title of Count in 1809, he rarely emerged from his retirement.
At the time of the Bourbon restoration (from 1814 to 1830), he was banished from France for regicide and settled in Brussels. After the July revolution of 1830, he returned again. He died in 1836 in Paris at the age of 88. He is buried in the Père-Lachaise cemetery.
Member of the French Academy
After the activities of the French Academy were interrupted in 1793, the Academy of Moral and Political Sciences (Académie des sciences morales et politiques) was created in 1795 as part of the Institute of France (Institut de France), of which Sieyès will be a member. When the French Academy was re-established in 1803, Sieyès took over chair no. 31, vacated by Jean Sylvain Bailly. Sieyès will be expelled from the Academy in 1816, in line with the ostracism to which the governments of Louis XVIII and Carlos X will condemn him, and will be admitted again in 1832 after the accession to the throne of Luis Felipe I that put an end to the Restoration bourbon.
Work
- Des Manuscrits de Sieyès. 1773-1799 and 1770-1815 tomos I and II published under the direction of Christine Fauré with the collaboration of Jacques Guilhaumou, Jacques Vallier and Françoise Weil, Paris: Champion, 1999 and 2007.
- 1789, What is the Third State?, the most complete version is the third (May 1789), extended with respect to the previous and definitive ones in the opinion of Sièyes himself.
- Vues sur les moyens d'exécution dont les représentants de la France pourront disposer en 1789 (Ideas on the means of action available to the Deputies of France in 1789 (second edition, 1789).
- Essai sur les privilèges, Testing on privileges, 2.a ed. 1789.
About What is the Third Estate?
The plan of this writing is very simple.We ask questions: 1 What is the plain state? All. 2. What has been so far in the political order? Nothing. To become something.E.J. Sieyés What is the plain state? (1789)
In his text of January 1789, six months before the French Revolution, he sets an important precedent that will be taken up later when carrying out the radical change from an absolute monarchy to a social and legal State (prior to the current Social and democratic state of law).
The supremacy of the Law is manifested through the Constitution adopting the idea of Sieyes where a distinction is made between constituent power and constituted power: sovereignty resides in the people and the people in the exercise of sovereign power exercises the constituent power that it elaborates and approves the Constitution, and by means of the act of creation of the Constitution it creates the constituted powers, the legislative, the executive and judicial. The separation of powers, with parliament being the center of the system, as Montesquieu postulated, ceases to exist, now these powers are going to have diffuse borders, collaborating with each other and sharing faculties.[citation required]
The legislature is now not going to approve laws that contradict the Constitution, they are going to be below the Constitution and must respect the minimum values shared by all expressed in the Constitution, which is what gives rise to the legislature.
Legacy
The last two decades of the 20th century have seen a revival of interest in Sieyès's writings, which are being numerous studies in France, Spain, Germany, Italy, Russia and the United States. Analyzes of his work span fields as broad as political science, philosophy, law, history, metaphysics, and sociology, of which name he is considered the inventor.