What Is The Third Estate?

These principles become even more rigorous when it is a matter of dealing with privileged orders. I take “privileged” to mean anyone who falls outside the provisions of the common legal system either because he claims not to be subject to common legality at all or because he claims to have exclusive rights. We have provided sufficient proof of the fact that any privilege is by nature unjust, odious, and contrary to the social pact. A privileged class is to the Nation what individual advantages are to the citizen. Like them, it is not something that can be represented. But even this is not quite enough. A privileged class is to the Nation what harmful individual advantages are to the citizen. The legislator does his duty in sup-
pressing them. The parallel also serves to reveal a final difference, which is that an individual advantage that is harmful to others is at least useful to its owner, while a privileged class is a pestilence upon the nation that is forced to suffer its existence. To make the comparison more exact, one would have to compare a privileged class in a nation to a frightful disease devouring the living flesh of the body of its unhappy victim. With this in mind, it is easy to see why a privileged class might feel a need to cloak itself in all the honorable distinctions it can find.  A privileged class is therefore harmful not only because of its corporate spirit but simply because it exists. The more it has been able to obtain of those favors that are necessarily opposed to common liberty, the more it is essential to exclude it from the National Assembly. 

But if privileged individuals enjoy an estate that makes them the enemy of the common order, not the beneficiaries of simple distinctions that are almost indifferent to the law, then they should be positively excluded.

- What is the third estate? by Abbe Sieyes (Emmanuel Joseph Sieyes)

What Is The Third Estate? by Sieyes, a Roman Catholic clergyman, was published in January 1789, several months before the meeting of the Estates General at Versailles and proved very influential with the delegates.  The Estates being convened were those of the Clergy (First Estate), Nobility (Second Estate), and Commons (Third Estate).  The French monarchy, desperate to solve its financial crisis, was forced to call the Estates General together for the first time in more than 170 years.  What was to be the relative status of each estate was a subject of much controversy leading to the meeting, and during its first month.

The essay starts with this memorable line:

What is the Third Estate? Everything. What has it been hitherto in the political order? Nothing. What does it desire to be? Something.

Though Sieyes was a member of the First Estate, he was elected as a delegate of the Third Estate to the assemblage at Versailles.

While seeking the overturning of the existing system of hierarchy in France, Sieyes was a moderate in the context of what became the French Revolution, which plunged into violence and terror, though some historians, like Simon Schama, contend violence was an essential element from the start, leading to the ascension of Napoleon Bonaparte and a quarter century of European war.  However, whatever his intent, the dehumanizing rhetoric deployed by Sieyes was one of the earliest signs of the direction the Revolution would eventually take.

In the National Assembly (as the Estates General redesignated itself in 1789), Sieyes eventually lost influence because of his opposition to the abolishment of tithes and confiscation of Church lands.  He voted for the execution of Louis XVI though, unlike most, he avoided making any statement about why he cast his vote; he supported the Girondin and was not a Jacobin, though managed to kowtow enough during the height of the Terror to avoid the guillotine.  Years later, asked what he did during the Terror he responded, "I survived".

After the Jacobin Terror ended in 1794 with Robespierre's beheading, Sieyes served on diplomatic missions to The Hague and Prussia. In 1799, he became a member of the Directory, France's governing body, supporting the efforts of Napoleon to seize power the following year, retiring from politics soon after.  He died in 1836.  Sieyes was a survivor.