WHAT IS THE THIRD ESTATE?
Abbe Emmanuel-Joseph Sieyes
As an ambitious clergyman from Chartres, Abbe Emmanuel-Joseph Sieyes was a member of the First Estate. Yet Sieyes was elected deputy to the Estates General for the Third Estate on the basis of his attacks on aristocratic privilege. He participated in the writing and editing of the great documents of the early revolution: the Tennis Court Oath, and the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen. The pamphlet for which he is immortalized in revolutionary lore was his daring "What Is the Third Estate?" Written in January 1789, it boldly confronted the bankruptcy of the system of privilege of the Old Regime and threw down the gauntlet to those who ruled France. In this document the revolution found its rallying point.
1st. What is the third estate? Everything.
2nd. What has it been heretofore in the political order? Nothing.
3rd. What does it demand? To become something therein....
Who, then, would dare to say that the third estate has not within itself all that is necessary to constitute a complete nation? It is the strong and robust man whose one arm remains enchained. If the privileged order were abolished, the nation would not be something less but something more. Thus, what is the third estate? Everything; but an everything shackled and oppressed. What would it be without the privileged order? Everything; but an everything free and flourishing. Nothing can progress without it; everything would proceed infinitely better without the others. It is not sufficient to have demonstrated that the privileged classes, far from being useful to the nation, can only enfeeble and injure it; it is necessary, moreover, to prove that the nobility does not belong to the social organization at all; that, indeed, it may be a burden upon the nation, but that it would not know how to constitute a part thereof.
The third estate, then, comprises everything appertaining to the nation; and whatever is not the third estate may not be regarded as being of the nation. What is the third estate? Everything!
PRIMARY SOURCE ANALYSIS:
1)Find at least 5 words you do not know. Underline them in the reading. Look up their definitions and write them below.
2)SOURCE: Who was Abbe Sieyes? Why was he writing this pamphlet?
3)ARGUMENTS:
- Identify Sieyes’ main point in writing this pamphlet.
- Identify at least 2 other important, convincing arguments he makes that support this main point.
4)PREDICTION: What do you think Sieyes’ pamphlet will do to help the Third Estate in France? Explain.