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Analysis Of Emmanuel-Joseph Sieyes 'What Is The Third Estate'

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“Qu 'est-ce que le tiers état”/ “What Is the Third Estate” by Emmanuel-Joseph Sieyes was one of the French Revolution’s most momentous and prominent political texts, shaping the course of events in 1789. It is a pamphlet structured around three hypothetical questions and Sieyes responses. These questions are: What is the third estate? Everything. What has it been until now in the political order? Nothing. What does it want to be? Something.” In response to his own title “What Is the Third Estate”, Sieyès answered, “The Nation.” The pamphlet expressed the widespread feeling in France that although a small faction may be in control, the country rightly belonged to the working crowd. Sieyès’s pamphlet bound the Third Estate to action, provoking the crowds to take matters into their own hands if the aristocracy failed to give them complete respect. Sieyès disputed that the commoners made up most of the nation and did most of its work, so therefore were the nation. He longed the members of the Third Estate to plea a constitution and a superior political representation. The third estate became more convinced of its entitlement to liberty. Since that neither the king nor the first or second estates would consent to their request. They began to organize within themselves and recruit vigorously from …show more content…

The impact of “What is the Third Estate?” brought him substantial respect and popularity. In March 1789 he was elected to represent the Third Estate at the Estates-General. When the Third Estate formed as the National Assembly on June 17th, Sieyès personally introduced the motions to pledge this change. The rest of Sieyès’ political career never reached the heights of early 1789. He served in both the National Constituent Assembly and the National Convention, participating in constitutional discussions and drafting. In the end, however, Sieyès was not extreme enough for the revolution that he had helped unleash. He desired a constitutional monarchy and a bourgeois

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This goes back to his question about what creates a nation. His answer is that it contains both the nobles and citizens who live according to the common law and represent the government as a whole. In short terms, the Third Estate contains everything. Sieyès wakes people up that even though the leaders have different responsibilities, it does not exclude them from certain laws or put them above the laws. For a nation to function, all people must serve for the government and obey the laws no matter what position they serve in their

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This made the common people to rebel and change things to being more fair and better. The commoners that the Third Estate made up started to see that the First Estate and Second Estate were being treated better than them. The First State and Second Estate paid almost no taxes while the Third Estate had to pay a lot of tax. Since everyone has a right to liberty the Third Estate wanted to have the same amount of representation as the other two estates. They were always going to be outvoted because of each estate only got one vote.

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In order to repair this problem, Sieyes demands that the third estate have true representatives in the Estates-General selected by the people and an equal amount of representatives to the other two orders together. Both of these demands seem very reasonable, especially considering that the third estate made up about 95 % of the population of France. Additionally, as Sieyes also mentions in his pamphlet, why is it fair that the nobles and the clergy are simply born into a higher class and have more rights and advantages than the people who are born into the third estate? Everybody is born and created equally and should have an equal amount of rights. Descent is not a fair determining factor of class and representation.

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