Clergyman and political theorist of Third Estate sovereignty
A clergyman and political theorist, Sieyès linked the Third Estate to the nation in his 1789 pamphlet What Is the Third Estate? He helped bring the National Assembly into being and later sat with the Plain in the National Convention. Near the end of the Directory he participated in the coup of Brumaire and helped establish the Consulate.
Revolutionary choices and political context
Sieyès’s What Is the Third Estate? sharply posed the question of who represented the nation in a society of orders. He linked the nation not to privileged estates but to the Third Estate that produced and paid taxes, giving the National Assembly language for claiming sovereignty apart from the king.
Representation was not the same as direct democracy. Sieyès held that the nation formed its will through representatives, a view in tension with several popular movements of the Revolution. His part in the Brumaire coup at the end of the Directory shows what could follow when a search for stability through constitutional design joined military force. He links the Revolution’s beginning to establishment of Napoleon’s Consulate.