Inciting Class Warfare

Emmanuel Joseph Sieyès was a political player in all of the stages of what we commonly refer to as the French Revolution, even up to helping Napoleon overthrow the Directory on which he was serving in 1799 at the revolution’s end.  Before the Third Estate declared for itself a National Assembly and began leveling l’ancien regime, he wrote “What is the Third Estate?” and it was dispersed in pamphlet form to the educated and wealthier members of the third estate in France. 

The document’s tone was indignant and it made an appeal to logic by comparing the privilege and idleness of the aristocratic class to the political disadvantage and industry of the Third Estate.  It does not fail to subtly explore the economic possibilities of putting the Third Estate into government.  It reasons that the nobles ruled to their benefit and to the detriment of the deserving upper middle class.  He asks the question: “What is a nation?” and then answers with the idea that it is “a body of associates living under common laws and represented by the same legislative assembly, etc.”  When he follows up that general definition by calling out the nobles for being above the law that they make for the Third Estate he establishes the idea that the nobles and the Third Estate effectively belong to a separate class.  By making a distinction between the lands owning nobles and the other educated and productive people of France Sieyès sets up who is to be rebelled against. 

His arguments are not long winded and intricately set up; this serves to the document's advantage as it may spread to the new class of Frenchmen who are literate through business but do not have a huge humanistic education or idle time to spend examining a document.  He sums up his arguments and ideas into three questions with one word answers at the beginning of the pamphlet: What is the Third Estate? Everything.  What has it been in France’s political scheme? Nothing.  What does it want to become? Something. 

In the end his argument is not for the Third Estate to become something, but rather, everything.  He states that the Third Estate is like a strong man bound by a single chain, the aristocrats.  All that must be done to become strong and independently thriving is to break the chain.  His timely critique of the nobility in a time of economic hardship set the people in a revolutionary mindset when the calling of the Estates General was made a few months later.