Sieyes, Emmanuel Joseph

se-yas', Emmanuel Joseph (1748-1836), a French writer. He was educated for the Jesuit priesthood and became connected with the famous Cathedral of Chartres. He is known as the Abbe Sieyes. When the call for the convening of the States General was announced in 1789, Sieyes startled the French by a pamphlet calling for the assumption of authority on the part of representatives of the people, or the Third Estate as they were called, in distinction from the nobility and clergy. He put three questions and gave three replies that have become historic. "What is the Third Estate? Everything. What has it hitherto been in politics? Nothing. What does it demand? To become something." It was at the Abbe's suggestion that the three estates sat together that the Third Estate might outvote or intimidate the other two. In the Assembly, to which he was sent, he stood silent, having no power of oratory, but none the less he was one of the thinkers of the Revolutionary period. Later, Napoleon Bonaparte seemingly won him over to his views. An account of Sieyes' timidity during the Reign of Terror, and of the way in which he discharged the duties of various important offices under the republic and the empire, his flight from France on the return of the Bourbons, and his final return to France and quiet death at last, would be of interest, but too extensive for the limits of this sketch. See French Revolution