Sieyès, EMMANUEL JOSEPH, COMTE, who, as the Abbé Sieyès, figures prominently in the French Revolution, was born, the fifth child of an honest bourgeois family, at Fréjus, May 3, 1748. He had his education from the Jesuits at Fréjus and the Doctrinaire Fathers at Draguignan, and first wished to be a military engineer, but was condemned to the clerical calling by the weakness of his health. He studied theology at Saint-Sulpice, where his originality and boldness of speculation caused no small misgiving to his masters, and completed his course at the seminary of Saint-Firmin. He became canon in the diocese of Trégnier (1775), next chancellor and vicar-general of the diocese of Chartres, and was sent by the latter to the Chambre Supérieure of the Clergy of France. Between the dissolution of the Assembly of Notables and the reunion of the Constituent Assembly he published three famous pamphlets which carried his name over the length and breadth of France: Vues sur les Moyens d'Exécution (1788), Essai sur les Privilèges (1788), and, the most famous of all, Qu'est-ce que le Tiers-Etat? (January 1789). His answer to the last question was 'Everything; 'What has it been hitherto?' was his next question; its answer, 'Nothing.' 'What does it desire to be?'—'Something.' He was elected one of the deputies for Paris, and it was on his motion (June 10, 1789) that the tiers-état sent a final invitation to the noblesse and clergy to join them, with the intimation that if they refused they would constitute themselves into the States-general. Seven days later the National Assembly was formed, the name being due to the suggestion of Sieyès. After Mirabeau made his memorable answer to the king's messenger, the Marquis de Dreux-Brézé (June 23), Sieyès reassured the members with the characteristically quiet words, 'Gentlemen, you are to-day what you were yesterday.' The deadly enemy of privilege, cold, inflexible, fearless in logic and trenchant in phrase, Sieyès gained great influence, and the division of France into departments for administrative purposes, declared in the last two months of 1789, was mainly his work. He took part in the memorable declaration of the Rights of Man (August 26, 1789), and opposed the royal veto, during the great debate on which question Mirabeau invoked the counsel of Sieyès as that of a man 'whose silence and inaction I regard as a public calamity.' But he kept aloof from Mirabeau's alliance, opposing his policy alike in the last measure and in his refusal to the Assembly of the right of nominating the Regent in the event of the king's death. He was elected to the National Convention, sat in the centre, voted for the king's death sans phrase (though he afterwards denied adding these words to the one word mort); but as the Revolution grew sank into 'philosophic silence,' his heart filled with disdain alike at its illogical excesses and the bombastic rhetoric of its leaders. Asked long afterwards what he had done during the Terror, he is said to have replied, 'J'ai vécu.' He opposed the new constitution of Year III. (1795), and declined a seat on the Directory named by the new Corps Législatif, which entered on its functions on the 27th October of that year, but had a share in the coup d'état of 3d September 1797 (17th Fructidor). In 1798 he went on mission to Berlin, was elected to the Directory in 1799, and now, like Barras a traitor to the Republic, he plunged into a web of dark intrigues with a view to find a soldier who would be content to be an instrument. Bonaparte returned from Egypt on October 25, 1799, and together they plotted the revolution of the 18th Brumaire (November 9, 1799), the result of which was the institution of the Consulate of Sieyès, Bonaparte, and Roger Ducos. Once more he drew upon his skill as a framer of constitutions, his final effort being a masterpiece of complexity beyond the calculating machine of Pascal, its aim to break the force of democracy by dividing it, to triumph over the passions of men by cunningly balancing them the one against the other. But he soon discovered in his new ally a master. Finding himself befooled by Bonaparte, he threw up his consulship in disgust, his last illusion shattered for ever. His fall was somewhat gilded over by the title of Count, a sum of 600,000 francs, and the estate of Crosne. The presidency of the senate was offered him later, but declined. He wrapped himself in morose meditations during the Empire, filled with silent irony and scorn for that humanity which had so little realised his views. Exiled at the Restoration, he lived in Belgium for fifteen years, returned in 1830, and after a long illness in which his mind often wandered to the Terror and the sinister name of Robespierre, died at Paris, June 20, 1836.
The influence of Sieyès upon the Revolution is clear enough, but the man remains wrapped in shadow. He was reserved and solitary from his youth, but we may write over against this that he was passionately fond of music, and that a woman once said of him, 'Quel dommage qu'un homme si aimable ait voulu être profond!' He believed absolutely in the infallibility of his own abstractions: 'Polity is a science I have completed,' he said to Dumont. Rigorous in everything—in nothing more than in the closeness of the bond between logic and language—he would have reduced to a merciless and inflexible system every aspiration of mankind. But he revealed a fundamental want of insight into the nature of man in thinking that masses of men could ever be governed by bare reason alone. For human nature remains much more complex than the subtlest calculations, the factors in the process obscure, the conclusion still uncertain. Sieyès was himself a creature all head, to the complete exclusion of heart, exactly what he wanted his human puppets to be, and the end of all his scheming was discomfiture and a name in history to inspire respect, not sympathy.
See E. de Beauverger (1851), Mignet's Notice historiques sur Sieyès (1853), Sainte-Beuve's Causeries du Lundi (vol. v.), and a work on Sieyès by Bigeon (1894).