Republican nostalgia, the division of labour, and the origins of inequality in the thought of the Abbé Sieyès

ABSTRACT

The Abbé Sieyès is usually portrayed as a thoroughly modern thinker and a critic of the nostalgic Classical Republicanism of some of his contemporaries, in favour of a “modern republicanism”, founded upon the division of labour and commercial sociability in a nation composed of equal labourers and producers. But Sieyès’s unpublished manuscripts suggest he, in fact, regarded modern labourers as unskilled “Machines du Travail”, dulled by work and incapable of exercising the duties of citizenship, a critique grounded in a critical account of commercial society as compared to the ideal republican polity. Where most scholars regard this as either a simple contradiction or a passing juvenile nostalgia, this paper argues that, influenced by Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Sieyès consistently sought to counteract the degrading effects of the inequalities generated by commercial society and the division of labour. It was on this basis that Sieyès sought to construct a new political system which would reconcile participatory politics with representative government, enabling all citizens to enjoy a life of Active Citizenship. Based on these insights, this paper reinterprets Sieyès’s political project as an attempt to reconcile the classical conception of citizenship with the demands of a commercial society.

KEYWORDS:

• Republicanism
• Emmanuel-Joseph Sieyès
• Jean-Jacques Rousseau
• inequality
• division of labour
• French revolution

In 1789, an incendiary pamphlet appeared in France entitled What is the Third Estate?, written by a largely unknown writer named Emmanuel-Joseph Sieyès. In its soaring polemical assault upon the Ancien Régime, Sieyès’s pamphlet proclaimed the Third Estate to be the true French nation, a community of producers united by their common labour, and excluded the parasitic aristocracy from citizenship on the grounds of its idleness.¹

This radical theory of labour as the foundation of citizenship, and the attack on human inequality which it underwrote, remains Sieyès’s best-known contribution to the history of political thought. But an undated note amongst Sieyès’s papers hints at a disquieting contradiction in his thought. In this note, simply entitled “Slaves”, Sieyès appeared to entirely contradict his claim in What is the Third Estate? that the nation represented a single people united by their common labour, and instead argued that:

Since a great nation is necessarily composed of two peoples, the producers and the human instruments of production; the intelligent people and the workers who have only passive strength; educated citizens and auxiliaries who have left neither the time nor the means to receive education; would it not be desirable, especially in countries that are too hot and too cold, for there to be a middle species between men and animals, a species capable of serving man for consumption and production?²

If this, as William H. Sewell Jr has noted, “explicitly denies the central premise of [Sieyès’s] great pamphlet: that the Third Estate, which is also the French nation, is one people united by work”,³ the direction which the note took was more unsettling still.

To resolve this apparently inevitable division of the people into “citizens” and “auxiliaries”, Sieyès outlined a plan for the breeding of “another species that has fewer needs and is less apt to excite human compassion”,⁴ to be achieved through “The crossbreeding of  …  races” (particularly Black slaves and various species of apes).⁵ By doing so, Sieyès claimed, it would be possible to create a new species whose needs would be those of an animal but its capabilities those of a man and which could thus serve as perfect “instruments of production”.⁶ This would then enable the creation of a new hierarchy of races and species, such that “From then on, the citizens, the heads of production would be whites, the auxiliary instruments of labour would be the Negroes, and the new races of anthropomorphic apes would be your slaves”.⁷ As Sieyès admitted, this vision was “extraordinary” and “immoral”. But, he claimed, “I have meditated upon it for a long time, and you will find no other way, in a great nation, especially in very hot and very cold countries, of reconciling the directors of works with the simple instruments of labour”.⁸ Only by introducing a new order of domination could – white – citizens be evacuated from the realm of work, ensuring their liberation from material exigency and the reconciliation of the terrible inequality engendered by the division of labour required in any large society. It was a dark and inhumane fantasy of racism, eugenics, and enslavement, and of a society far less free than the feudal world which Sieyès had made his name decrying.

This note has deeply troubled those of Sieyès’s scholarly interlocutors who have attempted to grapple with it. It is not clear whether it was written before the revolution or during its early stages, and its extreme racism seems to run contrary to Sieyès’s lifelong commitment to abolition.⁹ The note’s place in Sieyès’s wider thought is, therefore, confusing, but has not received considerable scholarly treatment. Giulia Pacini has demonstrated that, though immediately shocking, the more fantastic and dystopian element of Sieyès’s proposal is not entirely incongruous with similar eighteenth-century writings. Analogous proposals for human–animal crossbreeding (typically with an anti-Black racial cast) could be found both in the realm of political theory, as in Diderot’s 1769 La Rêve de d’Alembert, and in the natural sciences, in the works of Charles Bonnet, Jean-Baptiste-Claude Delisle de Sales, Benoît De Maillet, and even the Comte de Buffon.¹⁰ For Pacini, the note is, therefore, best understood as a piece of juvenilia which Sieyès ultimately surpassed.¹¹ For William H. Sewell Jr, on the other hand, the note reflects a persistent tension in Sieyès’s thought between its putative democratic aspirations and Sieyès’s unwillingness to enfranchise the uneducated masses, culminating in his turn to an exclusionary representative republicanism.¹² More radically, the Marxist political theorist and historian Domenico Losurdo argued that the note was entirely consistent with Sieyès’s mature thought, and reflected a eugenicist fantasy of preparing a race of “natural slaves” to support the commercial accumulation of a capitalist elite, allowing the “disposal” of both white wage-slaves and African chattel slavery.¹³

It is, indeed, clear that this manuscript is neither merely a simple fantasy nor a strange satire, since its central concern – that the demands of the modern economy divided one great nation into two irreconcilable classes – was repeated by Sieyès in a number of more pragmatic proposals.¹⁴ As a consequence, it cannot simply be ignored as a disturbing piece of writing whose principal concerns were ultimately abandoned by a mature thinker later reconciled to a more egalitarian vision of human life. Yet if the three abovementioned interpretations all contain elements of truth, this paper seeks to expand upon their analysis of both this uniquely unsettling proposal and what has sometimes been taken to be a wider defence of economic and political inequality in Sieyès’s writings. In particular, it argues that their accounts are not able to fully reconcile this proposal with Sieyès’s wider political thought because they do not read it alongside Sieyès’s often-ignored account of the degradation of human nature in the transition from antiquity to modernity and of the deleterious rise in inequality engendered by the rise of private property and the division of labour. For Sieyès, although the rise of modern commercial societies had generated unprecedented prosperity (and thus human freedom from want), this had not occurred without trade-offs. The intensity and dehumanising nature of modern labour had, he argued, rendered most moderns ill-educated dependents, their minds dulled by drudgery, and made them unfit for citizenship. As this paper argues, it is only within this context that we can fully understand Sieyès’s note on “Slaves”.

Read in this light, Sieyès’s speculations about a species “less apt to excite human compassion” can be understood as an attempt to solve the problems which arose, as Rousseau argued in Émile, from the fact that “The pity we have for the misfortune of others is not measured by the quantity of misfortune, but by the feelings that we attribute to those who suffer it”.¹⁵ As Rousseau explained, though the suffering of a horse or sheep may be as great as that of a human being, we assume that animals lack the capacity to understand that their feelings are comparable to our own and so disregard and even accept their suffering in service of our ends. “By extension”, he argued, “one thus hardens oneself as to the fate of men; and the rich console themselves for the harm they do to the poor, by supposing them stupid enough not to feel it”.¹⁶ Or, as Rousseau had put it earlier, in the Discourse on Inequality, from the first moment that men began to perceive their superiority over animals, they had begun “preparing to claim the first rank as an individual”, inaugurating the instrumentalization of animal and man alike which had laid the foundation for the inequalities of the modern world.¹⁷ As this article demonstrates, Sieyès shared in Rousseau’s belief that the supposedly degraded conditions of modern labourers were not their inevitable lot in life, but a product of commercial modernity and the inequality which it had produced, undermining man’s capacity for fellow-feeling. This, in turn, justified the entrenchment of inequality, and undermined the possibility of a community of equal citizens.

By resituating Sieyès’s morbid eugenic fantasy in the note “Slaves” in this context, we can recognise that its dystopian speculations serve, at first, to conceal the Rousseauvian moral logic which underwrote Sieyès’s proposal. The note’s central purpose, therefore, was not to consider the possibility of introducing a still greater form of inequality built upon racial hierarchy and genetic engineering, but to underline the necessity of acting to mitigate the problems arising from the degradation of man in commercial society (although this itself suggests rather a lot about the racial assumptions embedded in Sieyès’s worldview). For Sieyès, those problems were encapsulated by the paradoxical dynamic that an economy based in the division of labour rendered most men unfit for full citizenship, even as it annihilated the case for hereditary inequality. Consequently, the classical foundation for republican citizenship, that a small caste of hereditary citizens would be supported by a mass of slaves excluded from the polis, was rendered impossible. Contemporary morality demanded the admission to citizenship of those who Sieyès, in line with many contemporaries, believed lacked the education or leisure time to participate in politics without becoming clients of the rich. If the note “Slaves” represented one attempt to resolve this problem and find a new foundation for human liberty in a form of non-human slavery, it was a solution which Sieyès came to reject. We might also note that this shares a certain resemblance with contemporary proposals to liberate humanity from work, via automation or robotics, albeit with anthropomorphic rather than mechanical slaves. Although Sieyès would ultimately move beyond such fantasies, he would not abandon the concerns which underwrote them. Instead, they would come to inspire a new political system in which participation in the Primary Assemblies would form the basis of a new common civic life within a representative system, albeit one concomitant with a reduction in the scope of political activity.

The reduced dignity of the human race

Historians of political thought have long portrayed Sieyès as an unalloyed champion of the modern world, and an advocate of individual rights, representative government, and commercial society against the nostalgic republicanism of his contemporaries. As both Murray Forsyth and Pasquale Pasquino argue in their seminal works on Sieyès, he was the archetypal figure in the transition from “Classical” to “Modern” republicanism, who rejected the idea of a return to “ancient liberty” in favour of a representative social order generated by the division of labour and focused on the protection of individual liberty.¹⁸ Sieyès’s work has even been dubbed “the death knell of Classical Republicanism in France”.¹⁹ Yet, in a remarkable manuscript, written prior to the revolution, entitled “Simplification morale et politique”, Sieyès voiced a startling critique of commercial society, grounded in its inferior ability to satisfy man’s true needs compared to the societies of the ancient world.²⁰ In the note, Sieyès argues that, “In our society, founded upon private property, Garat observes that “the weak man becomes stingy and the energetic soul becomes greedy”, because our happiness is always in perspective, in meeting a desire, and not acquiring an object”: this society, focused on the relentless acquisition of material goods, could not provide for true human happiness. By contrast:

It is certain that a common property, cultivated not by helots, but by the citizens themselves for a few hours a day, would give, in addition to the exercise of moderate work, the obligation to limit oneself to a pattern of simple consumption and physical enjoyment,  …  at the same time, among men to whom no great privileges are dispensed or discouraged, a spirit of competition and general emulation, carries all towards moral happiness, forming as many heroes, geniuses, and gods as citizens.²¹

If a society based on communal property and the simple habits of the classical Greeks could forge a nation of heroes, geniuses, and gods, the prospects of the modern world were much bleaker. Urging his reader to “Change the scene [and] consider our European nations”, he laid out a grim vision of a degraded world:

the great body of the people reduced to the condition of brutes, the rich forced to die of boredom over pleasures destroying health, ignorance or misguidedness obscuring moral happiness, and the soul exalted only, in a small number, by the lure of exclusive, Gothic and feudal vanities.²²

In linking the decline of human happiness and virtue explicitly to property and to the production of luxuries for the rich, it is clear that Sieyès was writing in the tradition of Rousseau, echoing his famous condemnation of modern society founded upon private property in the “Discourse on Inequality”.²³

If this complaint was remarkable among the writings of a thinker generally regarded as the critical figure in a transition away from the reverence for the ancients which had long characterised republican thought,²⁴ it was not an isolated one. In another unpublished manuscript, entitled “Grèce. Citoyen – Homme”, Sieyès again starkly condemned the modern world. “Happy Greece!”, he declared, “All my researches frustrate me, and I return to you, finding, in the tableaus which you offer me, the true image of man in the state of society. Alas, that we have degenerated! What degradation among my fellows!”²⁵ The tone of this note, as Sewell has noted, was closer to Rousseau’s prose than Sieyès’s usually precise language, and its content was equally unusual.²⁶ Continuing, Sieyès declared that, although

I believe that none would disagree if I said that there were no more citizens, since there is no longer a society governing itself in all the purity of original liberty  …  if I complained that I saw no more men, they would cry out.²⁷

Nonetheless, he argued, it was simply true that as there were no more citizens, there were no true men either. Across Europe, there remained “only a small number,  …  of free and thinking heads who perpetuate the reduced dignity of the human race”. Everywhere the wealthy were “the slave[s]  …  of great men, enemies of [their] fellows  …  contemptible animals  …  trained in social antics empty of meaning”,²⁸ the great mass of the poor no more than “producers of the pleasures of others with barely enough income to sustain their suffering and needy bodies, [an] immense crowd of bipedal instruments, without freedom, morality, or intellectuality, possessing only unskilled hands, and an absorbed soul, only serving them to suffer”.²⁹

Critically, as in “Simplification morale et politique”, Sieyès explicitly contrasted this degraded state to the superior form of life embodied by antiquity, writing that “The qualities of man are to be sociable and non-servile, to be able to become an integral part of a society, or a citizen [and] to keep in his soul the spirit of equality”.³⁰ True humanity consisted in the ethical and moral life of a citizen equal to one’s countrymen. That this was the central argument of the manuscript is, above all, evinced by its title, to which the word “Grèce” was clearly a later insertion to a piece originally simply titled “Citoyen – Homme”, asserting the inextricability of citizenship and humanity.³¹ Likewise, in another unpublished note entitled “Democracy”, Sieyès described democracy as “a vast soil of fermentation and political potential. It is there that man is worth all he can be worth, and that the state brings together all that it can bring together”.³² Without such conditions, it was questionable whether one could truly be human at all. That this was the state of the modern world, he argued, was all but unavoidable. As he wrote, pessimistically, in his plan for a work entitled Considerations on the human race in 1772–1774, his own age was “a time when the greater part of humanity, seems to have forsaken its rights to despotism, without the possibility of their return”.³³ These manuscripts do not fit with the conventional understanding of Sieyès, and, despite the temptation to do so, they cannot be written off as mere youthful idealism. Though two predate the revolution, Sewell has demonstrated that “Grèce. Citoyen – Homme” (the only one of these texts he discusses) is collected among Sieyès’s early revolutionary manuscripts, whilst the note “Democracy” was written in 1799, towards the end of Sieyès’s political life.³⁴

It is, moreover, not at all clear that these sentiments can be brushed off as a stirring of Rousseauvian idealism with little impact on Sieyès’s wider project, as Sewell suggests. Nor can they be disregarded as a condemnation of the Ancien Régime since Sieyès continued to criticise what he saw as the shallowness and moral deficiency of commercial society even after its destruction. In his famous 1789 speech on the royal veto, for example, he declared that:

Modern European peoples resemble the ancients very little. Among us, it is all a matter of commerce, agriculture, industry, etc  …  we care more about consumption and production than happiness  …  the productive faculties of man are all; we hardly know how to profit from the moral faculties, which could, nevertheless, be the most fertile source of real happiness.³⁵

This passage’s sharp differentiation between the ancients and moderns has often seen it mobilised as evidence of Sieyès’s modernism,³⁶ but the concluding condemnation of modernity’s failure to provide for men’s true, moral happiness suggests that, if the ancient world’s institutions were not suited to modernity, nor were the modern world's own institutions. As Sieyès continued, the consequence of this loss of a moral understanding of human happiness was that “[w]e are forced to see, in the great majority of men, little more than labouring machines”.³⁷ Indeed, if man’s decline in commercial society affected all classes – even the aristocrats dying of boredom – it was the poor who suffered the most, reducing ordinary workers to “brutes” or soulless “bipedal instruments”.

Across all of these works, we find the same basic principle which underwrote Sieyès’s division of the nation into “two peoples, producers, and human instruments of production”³⁸ in the note “Slaves”; that the demands of labour reduced the vast majority of men to a state of extreme degradation, which stripped them not only of their ability to be citizens, but also of their very humanity. Drawing on Smith’s conception of the immiserating and psychologically deleterious effects of repetitive labour, Sieyès argued that commercial society rendered the vast mass of the people incapable of achieving the heights to which humanity might aspire in a community of citizens. As he argued in both the note “Slaves” and later in the manuscript “The Nation” which quoted from it, moreover, this was a necessary consequence of the division of labour, which relegated the mass of the population to mindless manual work as “instruments of production”. It is as an extension of this account of the diminished moral and intellectual faculties of the moderns that we should read Sieyès’s infamous distinction between “Active” and “Passive” Citizens, rather than as a mere desire that voters be educated property-holders, as many of both Sieyès’s supporters and critics have suggested.³⁹ For Sieyès, whilst all citizens were entitled by birth to a set of negative rights guaranteed by the law for the maintenance of their property and person, it was mistaken to think that all were entitled to an active political life.⁴⁰

In particular, as he had argued as early as What is the Third Estate?, and began to fully outline in the constitutional debate of 1789, it was necessary to exclude “those  …  whom a servile dependence keeps attached, not to any kind of work, but to the arbitrary will of a master” arguing that where, “Among the ancients, the state of servitude in a way purified the free Classes [and] The Citizens were all able to exercise their political rights [so] Every free man was an Active Citizen”, this was not possible in modern France, where the expansion of citizenship to include ordinary labourers, whilst more humane, also demanded a reduced vision of citizenship.⁴¹ In particular, he argued, children, foreigners, and “Women, at least as they are now”, but also “anyone dependent on a master”, as well as small farmers and farmworkers who were, “in their present condition, too dependent to be able to vote freely in favour of their own order” had to be excluded from voting.⁴² They would be relegated to the category of “Passive Citizens”, which thus excluded the vast majority from political participation on the grounds that they were ill-equipped to govern and, at worst, remained psychologically shackled to feudal or commercial relations of mastery and whose participation in politics might thus reintroduce the political domination of wealthy patrons and seigneurs.

The distinction between Active and Passive Citizens was certainly not incompatible with eighteenth-century republican ideals: indeed, both Rousseau and Kant at times gestured towards a similar division of the body politic.⁴³ But, as William Sewell has argued, it is entirely possible to view it as little more than a politically acceptable gloss on the introduction of two distinct orders in the state, citizens and subjects.⁴⁴ At times, Sieyès appeared prepared to concede this point, admitting in his draft for the constitution of 1799 that “the political association is truly composed only of the active citizens, the true shareholders in the social enterprise”.⁴⁵ Yet this appeared to introduce a contradiction into his thought since, though far from being a slave, like a slave a Passive Citizen was excluded from the political life of the nation. As Sieyès wrote, in strikingly Civic Humanist language, in 1794, “man must be free or be a slave”, and slavery or servitude consisted not only in being the property of another, but in any relationship by which one lived under someone else’s will.⁴⁶ That description applied perfectly to the Passive Citizen, granted only a set of minimal, non-political rights in exchange for contributing his labour to the community. In his more candid manuscripts, Sieyès was willing to admit that the distance between Passive Citizenship and subjection was not as great as he could publicly admit. As he wrote in the manuscript “The Nation”, whilst he had no desire “to divide men into Spartans and Helots”, he was entirely willing to countenance a division into “citizens and working companions” and perhaps even to reintroduce indentured servitude.⁴⁷

It is tempting to view this as a mere contradiction, as Sewell does, and to argue that, in distinguishing between Active and Passive Citizens, Sieyès betrayed the universalist claims of his own project in favour of a defence of the power of the rich. But, as this section has attempted to show, if this was the case, for Sieyès it was a problem whose roots lay not in the natural order of things, but in the nature of commercial modernity. As he had argued in “Simplification morale et politique”, it was possible that universal, free labour on communal property could sustain all citizens, without the ceaseless toil which reduced most men to “the condition of brutes”, enabling them to overcome the dependency and degradation which prevented them from enjoying the active political life which defined true human flourishing. It would, therefore, appear startling that Sieyès would argue that, for all its corrosive impact, abandoning commercial society was impossible. Yet this was exactly what he did, writing that

as there is no way to return the nations of today, all based on exclusive property and striving towards greater prosperity and greater wealth, to their ancient forms, allow moralists their complaints and regrets, but let us be political and direct them nonetheless towards morality.⁴⁸

In the face of a choice between relegating the majority of his countrymen to brutalisation, degradation, and servitude or abandoning the benefits of commercial society, Sieyès appeared, at first, to choose the latter. Yet, as the next section shows, there is a considerable body of evidence to suggest that this was not how Sieyès himself understood his project. Rather, Sieyès viewed the inequality of political rights which arose from man’s degradation in commercial society as only a temporary expedient on the road to universal active citizenship, affected without having to recreate the social and economic conditions of antiquity.

Regenerating the body politic

Indeed, it is quite clear from Sieyès’s writings that, although willing to countenance a temporary restriction on citizens’ rights, he was aware of the contradiction introduced by proposing a system of Passive Citizenship whilst condemning any system of political privilege. That he saw the system of Active versus Passive Citizenship as an imperfect one, designed for a nation in need of regeneration, is suggested in an elliptical passage at the end of the preface to the Declaration of the Rights of Man, in which he introduced the system. There, Sieyès wrote that:

If one had to author a Declaration of Rights for a new People, four words would suffice; Equality of civil rights;  …  [meaning] equal protection for each Citizen, in his property and his liberty; and equality of political rights  …  But when the men to whom we wish to present their rights have been tested by centuries of misfortune, it is permissible  …  to choose among the consequences of a principle.⁴⁹

What is so important about this remark is that it highlights the extent to which Sieyès adhered to Montesquieu’s scepticism about the notion that there was any “perfect” form of government applicable to all states which could be designed by human reason. Taking these remarks into account has quite dramatic implications for how we understand Sieyès’s entire approach to politics, suggesting a belief that constitutions could only be written with the conditions of the nation they were in mind for, echoing both Montesquieu and the Rousseau of the Considerations on the Government of Poland.⁵⁰

In the case of France, emerging from “centuries of misfortune” under despotism, it was not possible to follow to the letter the prescriptions one might make for an ideal government. Some principles would have to be sacrificed if the cost of their implementation would be ruinous in practice, and universal suffrage was one of them. Yet throughout his career, Sieyès also made clear his discomfort at doing so. In 1789, he argued that, since much of the nation was unfit for citizenship, “[w]ithout a doubt, it is up to the constitution, and good laws to reduce this  …  class, bit by bit, to the smallest number possible”.⁵¹ Thus, as he had argued in What is the Third Estate?, whilst the corrupted nature of society as it was meant that “It would be a grave misjudgement of human nature to entrust the destiny of societies to the endeavours of virtue”, politics could be fortified against the corrosive influence of self-interest, and civic virtue could be gradually restored if the state was

constituted in such a way as to ensure that  …  the will of the majority cleaves consistently to the public good, even during those long periods when public manners are in a state of decadence and egoism seems to be the universal rule.⁵²

In the ancient world, liberty had been guaranteed by virtuous conduct; in the commercial world of the eighteenth century, this could no longer be relied upon, but it could, perhaps, be replicated by a good constitution.

Sieyès was far from the first thinker to argue that the constitution might serve to regenerate the nation by nurturing the mores and establishing the institutional arrangements necessary for republican government. As Michael Sonenscher and Istvan Hont have shown, he was considerably influenced by Rousseau’s posthumously published works, which provided thinkers like Sieyès with the intellectual tools to work out how it might be possible to realise the republican principles of The Social Contract in a large modern state like France.⁵³ It was critical, moreover, that, like Rousseau, Sieyès believed this had to be done without restoring the social, political, and economic arrangements of Antiquity, which were fundamentally unsuitable for the large nations of the eighteenth century. Today it may seem absurd to suggest that anyone in the eighteenth century had any intention of undertaking the seemingly impossible task of transforming France into a confederation of small city states and agrarian communities. Many, however, feared that this was precisely what some revolutionaries hoped to do, seeking to turn back time and introduce “Rousseau’s appalling system, concerning the difficulties of exercising the general will without slavery, confederations and the destruction of the cities”.⁵⁴ Indeed, whilst Madame Roland would insist in her memoirs that Anacharsis Cloots’s denunciation of her husband, Brissot, and Buzot for a conspiracy to do so was baseless, the fear that they might had animated France in the mid-1790s, even before the Terror.⁵⁵ It was in this context that Sieyès argued forcefully and consistently against the possibility of such a project.

For Sieyès, a return to the antique polis, which had depended upon a set of economic conditions which no longer existed, was both impossible and undesirable. As he explained in a forceful essay entitled “Gouvernement par procureur”, “In the ancient republics, government could be non-representative firstly, because [the republics] were small, and secondly (and this was the most important reason) because there were no citizens but the available inhabitants, with the rest being slaves”.⁵⁶ As Sieyès had already explained in 1789, in opposition to several proposals to do so, it was an absurd fantasy to imagine that one might break France up into a series of smaller republics in which the participatory democracy of the ancient world might be possible. To do so would be to “do nothing less than to cut up, than to fragment, than to tear France up into an infinity of small Democracies, united only by the bonds of a general confederation”.⁵⁷ Such a policy, however, would not only prevent the formation of a single national will, but would also provoke economic disaster by reintroducing the byzantine provincial regulations of the Ancien Régime, undermining the prosperity gained from an effective division of labour.⁵⁸ What was more, it would be ultimately futile, as such small and disunited states would have no chance of survival in a competitive international environment.⁵⁹

Even if such a policy were not absurd, moreover, it was simply not possible to recreate the social structure of the ancient republics, whose liberty had rested upon the labour of a mass of enslaved non-citizens ruled over by a minority of citizens, devoting their full energies to civic participation and the military arts.⁶⁰ Not only was this economic model inhumane, but it was also outdated: the perfection of the division of labour promised the perfection of production through the specialisation of labour. Yet the rise of a society founded in the division of labour had also eliminated the conditions of leisure which had made the participatory democracy of the Athenian agora possible.⁶¹ The modern world was, therefore, infinitely more humane in its rejection of slavery, and the vast mass of men freer than ever before, but this came at the price of a greatly reduced freedom for those who had once lived a life of perfect liberation, not only from mastery, but also from the exigencies of labour. It came at the price of the extinguishing of the bright flame of ancient freedom which had illuminated the European imagination since the renaissance.

In this, Sieyès, in fact, followed Rousseau’s argument in The Social Contract that “Citizens can be perfectly free only if the slave is utterly enslaved.  …  modern peoples, you have no slaves, but are yourselves slaves; you pay for their freedom with your own”.⁶² If Sieyès was guided by the same analysis of the causes and effects of inequality in a modern commercial society as Rousseau, he thus also shared in Rousseau’s belief that such a society would have to find a solution particular to its own conditions. In other words, where many of Sieyès’s contemporaries believed that the freedom described in The Social Contract could be achieved through a nostalgic Classical Republicanism, Sieyès more keenly observed what Michael Sonenscher has described as Rousseau’s attempt to “promote human freedom under the aegis of the division of labour”.⁶³ It was, perhaps, for this reason that Sieyès’s friend Konrad Oelsner remarked that the true heir of “the undying author of Emile, the true man of reason [who was] found far more in his considerations on the Polish constitution than in his Social Contract” was not Robespierre, but Sieyès.⁶⁴ Likewise, reading Sieyès in this light might help us to understand why J.G. Fichte, usually taken to have been a far more radical disciple of Rousseau than Sieyès, believed that “it [was] really unmistakable, that if both [he and Sieyès] had started from the same point, then both [had] also worked towards a shared goal and view”.⁶⁵ In his writings on Poland, Rousseau had presented the means to “giv[e] to a large kingdom the solidity and vigour of  …  a small Republic”⁶⁶ via a project of civic regeneration and the adoption of a new institutional basis for free government.⁶⁷ If Sieyès departed from Rousseau’s design in some critical ways, he nonetheless held to the same essential task.

Traditionally, historians have argued that Sieyès’s rejection of any possibility of a return to the model offered by the ancient republics led him to embrace a uniquely modern vision of citizenship based on commercial sociability and individual liberty, but which rejected political equality.⁶⁸ Yet, as we have already seen, he himself declared his commitment to reducing the class of Passive Citizens as far as possible. What this might suggest, instead, is that Sieyès would have turned to some means of liberating the people from the degrading effects of labour, but there are few if any traces of such a plan. Indeed, Sieyès considered and explicitly rejected the possibility of a system of communal property in “Simplification morale et politique”. There were only two potential exceptions to this general resistance to an economic solution: one was an oblique proposal for the redistribution of land in What is the Third Estate, proposing to grant small farmers permanent tenancy on seigneurial land to transform them into “simple freeholders  …  eminently fit to uphold the nation’s interests”.⁶⁹ The other was the proposal with which this essay began, the purpose of which is now thrown into far sharper relief. Sieyès’s fantastic proposal for the breeding of slave races was an attempt to reconcile his dual critique of modernity and antiquity, and to enable the entire French people to “become an integral part of a society, or a citizen”, without relegating some significant portion of the population to slavery. However, it is also clear, as both Pacini and Sewell argue, that Sieyès moved quite quickly beyond this solution. Whether he abandoned it for its inhumanity or impracticality (or both), it is, however, clear that he did not move beyond the concerns which underwrote it, or abandon his belief that the inequality generated by the division of labour should be rectified. As Sieyès clearly recognised, in the modern world it would be impossible to do this by recreating the conditions of Antiquity and reintroducing slavery, direct democracy, and a limited citizenship. Instead, it was to this end that Sieyès proposed a system he termed “Political Adunation” as the best means by which to regenerate the body politic and achieve the conditions necessary to establish a republic in a large commercial society.

Political adunation and “good democracy”

Although Sieyès used the term “Adunation” in a number of his published works, its meaning remains mercurial, and Sieyès never provided a clear definition of it. As Sieyès first used the term in the context of his proposal for a redivision of France’s territorial administration, “Adunation” has often been taken to simply refer to administrative reorganisation to break down traditional regional interests in the process of making the French “one great people under the same laws”.⁷⁰ The word itself, which had previously been used primarily theologically, referred to the union of the apostles around Christ, and sometimes the integration of smaller states into France; a definition which provides little indication as to what it meant to Sieyès.⁷¹ If we study Sieyès’s use of the term closely, however, it is clear that, although the process of “Political Adunation” did encompass the destruction of the maze of local privileges, rights, powers, and political systems which had constituted the France of the Ancien Régime, it also entailed a positive programme. It referred, in this sense, to the process by which the French people could transform itself from a mere aggregation of individuals or interests into a single body – a nation – just as Rousseau had highlighted the difference between the “will of all” and the “general will”.

If it was not obvious what this meant in the context of territorial re-division and the constitutional debates of 1789, more light was shed on the matter in 1793, when Sieyès returned to the term in his proposals for a new system of national education in the Journal d’Instruction Sociale. Now, Sieyès situated Adunation as the twin of another process which he termed “assimilation”, whereby the French people could be shaped into a coherent political body. On the one hand, this involved a process of civic and moral education, facilitated by a new co-educational national school system. Such an education would be focused not only on a “literary” education, but also man’s “physical and moral” elements, concerned with both preparing the individual for work and also with the “perfection of the individual,  …  [and] the amelioration of the species”.⁷² As Oelsner noted, in his 1799 Exposé Historique des Écrits de Sieyès, this lay at the heart of Sieyès’s project for national regeneration, by teaching citizens the virtues needed to break the servile habits formed by centuries under despotism.⁷³

Alongside this formal education in the nation’s schools, however, Sieyès also hoped to introduce a complex series of national fêtes, celebrating everything from the glories of the revolution, the sovereignty of the people, and the rights of man to the memory of the people’s ancestors, animals, agriculture, motherhood, and the coming of age of new citizens.⁷⁴ As Sieyès suggested in conversation with John Quincy Adams, when both were ambassadors in Berlin, this was the great advantage of the many public ceremonies of the young American republic, and he lamented “that it was a great error in France not to have adopted such a custom”.⁷⁵ Such a civic cult would make it possible to harness the French people’s “enthusiasm and imagination” to overcome the selfish individualism and mental degradation produced by commercial society, and instead inscribe love of the republic in men’s hearts, allowing them to become true citizens.⁷⁶ This secondary element of France’s civic education was intended to reduce the number of Passive Citizens without having to overturn the entire social order and, as Sieyès’s disciple Charles Théremin noted, was particularly concerned with the amelioration of the social and political position of women.⁷⁷ In his private notes, Sieyès sometimes described a regime oriented towards this re-education as an “Ethocracy”, concerned with promoting virtue among “demoralised men”.⁷⁸

If this education would enable the assimilation of the whole people into a common civic culture and fit demoralised men for citizenship, it would be complemented in the political realm by the creation of the complex political system which Sieyès revealed only slowly over the course of his career. The first stage of this system was the reorganisation of the nation into a system of uniform subdivisions of no more than forty leagues, the citizens of which would gather in the Primary Assemblies. The small size of these new territorial units would ensure that members lived close enough to one another to meet in person with some regularity, making it possible to ensure “the non-influence of credit, of riches, etc., in a word, for all the ideas comprised in the expression political Adunation”.⁷⁹ Thus, Sieyès wrote, “The art of assimilating individuals [into the citizenry] depends upon the conception of the primary assemblies”, because they represented the “first political framework” into which they were integrated.⁸⁰ The life of the Primary Assembly would enable genuine discourse, debate, and political contestation in order to select representatives best capable of meeting their interests in a way which was not simply a blind vote. To Sieyès, this deliberative process was the very essence of democracy, and he argued that “It is not the day before, when each is at home, that the democrats most jealous of freedom form and fix their particular opinions, to be then brought to the public square”.⁸¹ Citizens could not form an authentic “General Will” (and thus guide their representatives to do the same nationally) by periodically voting for delegates and then returning to their private lives. Rather, only by coming together could they form an authentic common will and enjoy what he had described in “Grèce. Citoyen – Homme” as the true human experience, by “becom[ing] an integral part of a society, or a citizen”.

What this would not entail was the restoration of the direct democracy which had characterised the ancient republics. Rather, as Sieyès explained, in the note “Democracy”, “The public establishment is not democracy, it is a body raised by democracy, on the basis of democracy for the public need”. It followed from this that:

it is wrong to confuse democracy, which is a mode of social existence, and the political action of all towards the public need, this political machine which combines  …  all the means necessary to satisfy common needs. Democracy is in the citizens and in their mass; in the public establishment, on the contrary, there can only be unity and organization.⁸²

Building upon this logic, moreover, Sieyès argued that “those who want to democratize each political action in the body of the public establishment” might “as well  …  democratize each civil or industrial action among the mass of citizens. To democratize justice, the police, war, finance, etc., one may as well democratize the art of footwear”. What introducing direct democracy to new arenas of political life had in common with democratising the production of shoes might seem unclear. But, as Michael Sonenscher has argued, such claims were common in Sieyès’s writings, and rested upon his idiosyncratic interpretation of the division of labour as a political system as much as an economic one.⁸³ For Sieyès, since the decision to hire someone to make one’s shoes did not constitute an alienation of the right to make shoes oneself, nor did delegating political administration and legislation to professionals constitute a permanent abrogation of one’s rights as a citizen. In this, Sieyès of course departed from Rousseau’s famous condemnation of representative government, but he did so to achieve distinctly Rousseauvian ends.

Representation would allow the integration of the small territorial units whose citizens were united in the Primary Assemblies with one another by the construction of a tiered system of uniform administrative subdivisions, each represented by an electoral assembly selected from below and selecting the members of the assembly above, beginning in the Primary Assemblies and ending in a unitary national government.⁸⁴ This was not a federation, but it combined the kind of small-scale localised participation promised by French federalists with a single national representative government. Such was the true aim of the system of Adunation, which would thus culminate in the transformation of a heterogenous people into a political whole, the Nation, self-organised as a representative state. Beginning in the Primary Assemblies, officials at all levels would be selected via a tiered system of elections sometimes termed “Graduated Promotion” (a term itself taken from Rousseau), in which service at each level was a prerequisite for the next.⁸⁵ As Sieyès would first suggest in his famous debate on monarchy with Tom Paine, such a government could best be visualised as a “pyramid” or “triangle”, with the people, deliberating in the Primary Assemblies, forming its base and culminating in a point, housing their collective will.⁸⁶ The same image would grip Sieyès for the next decade, and pyramidic constitutional diagrams would appear in his notes for the constitutional debates in both 1795 and 1799.⁸⁷

Just as Rousseau’s “General Will” was more than simply the aggregation of the wills of citizens,⁸⁸ so too would Sieyès’s Nation be greater than each of the individual units which composed it, whether they were citizens, factions, regional interests, or classes, and would overcome the relations of domination which might pervade the ordinary course of human life. The new pyramidic political hierarchy generated by this system would balance against the effects of the hierarchy of wealth established by a capitalist economy, and would perhaps even supersede it, allowing the virtues of citizenship and service to trump the desire to accumulate wealth by restructuring the incentives citizens faced rather than by the habituation of ancient virtue. In particular, this would be achieved by granting significant rewards – ranging from medals and awards to land and pensions – for political service.⁸⁹ Political equality, self-government, and universal participation in the political life of the nation could thus be achieved without the constant participation demanded by ancient democracy.

It was on this basis that Pierre-Jean-Georges Cabanis could argue, in 1799, that Sieyès’s representative system could rightly be regarded as nothing more than “good democracy”, even if it did not resemble their contemporaries’ understanding of that term.⁹⁰ Certainly, this was a less-demanding vision of democracy than that of the ancient world, and, by comparison, constituted a greatly reduced form of participation. What it did not represent, however, was simply the replacement of a democratic republican ideal with elite rule,⁹¹ and marked an attempt to devise a system in which the whole people could take part in the active life of the body politic without having to relegate a secondary class to a state of non-citizenship, either as slaves or “Passive Citizens”. Because they did not have to dedicate the entirety of their time to the life of the agora or entirely alienate their political rights, the people could thus be workers in a complex commercial society and citizens able to live a more human existence through active participation in a common civic life. At the highest level, political activity would be delegated to a representative political class, but it would have its foundation in a genuine process of debate, deliberation, and civic participation; in democracy “as a mode of social existence” enjoyed by all citizens.

Conclusion

In May 1798, as Sieyès prepared to leave Paris for a diplomatic mission to Prussia, his friend, Charles-Maurice Talleyrand-Périgord, gave a remarkable summary of his political disposition. “Disillusioned with modern republicans, even more than he is with their republics”, Talleyrand declared, “he wishes to get away from his homeland, which no longer has any attraction for him”.⁹² This statement could simply be read as a description of a frustrated statesman, dissatisfied in a republic whose constitution he despised, which, he believed, was racing towards ruin under the leadership of inferior politicians. But we might also read Talleyrand’s remark as a more substantive statement of Sieyès’s dissatisfaction with modernity and what has come to be called “modern republicanism”. A similar suggestion can be found in Germaine de Staël’s 1818 history of the revolution. Staël, herself close to Sieyès, remarked that

the human race displeases him, and he does not know how to deal with it: one would say that he wanted to deal with something other than men, and would have renounced everything to be able to find on earth a species more according to his taste.⁹³

It might be tempting to take this remark as a suggestion that Sieyès was genuinely committed to the breeding of a new slave species to free French citizens from material dependence (and the economic relations of mastery which it necessitated). What seems more likely, however, is that Staël’s comments, like Talleyrand’s, were a facetious expression of Sieyès’s antipathy to modern man. Contrary to the conventional interpretation of Sieyès as an unalloyed modern, both comments paint a picture of a thinker discontented with the nature of human life in a modern, commercial society.

It has been the central endeavour of this article to propose how these two interpretations might be reconciled, through the recognition that Sieyès’s youthful lamentations at the state of the modern world did not give way to an uncritical acceptance of commercial society as is sometimes suggested. Instead, Sieyès’s pessimistic analysis of the nature of inequality in a commercial society came to form the basis of a theory of how a polity satisfying the human need for citizenship could be created in a large modern state. From this perspective, the bizarre and unsettling piece of writing with which we began can be read in a new light. When read against Sieyès’s broader corpus, it becomes clear that this text’s central concern was not its eugenic proposals, but the problem of how to reconcile the inequality generated by the division of labour with the demands of human moral equality. It is for this reason that it is appropriate to read Sieyès’s fantasy of creating a species whose labour could be exploited without exciting human compassion alongside Rousseau’s analysis of the suffering of labourers in Émile. As Rousseau had written, in a society founded upon inequality, one should not “be surprised if politicians speak of the people with so much disdain, or if most philosophers affect to make man so wicked”.⁹⁴ Sieyès has most often been read as one such philosopher, but a closer reading of his work suggests that the need to counteract the inequality which made universal citizenship impossible was a consistent theme in Sieyès’s private and public writings.

Yet Sieyès also recognised that this could not be achieved through an attempt to recreate the political and economic conditions of the ancient polity. Instead, he sought to resolve it through the system which he sometimes referred to as “Adunation”, which combined a civic education designed to prepare the population for citizenship with an institutional arrangement conducive to a common civic life in the Primary Assemblies, if one reduced from the ideal of the ancient world. By putting the day-to-day business of politics in the hands of representatives but by grounding this in a genuinely deliberative and localised political process, representative government could be combined with a (limited) recreation of the ideal of a vigorous and participatory republican politics. The power of the modern state, founded on the sure base of the people, would enable the citizens of this representative republic to live a life of freedom and equality without having to dedicate themselves ceaselessly to political activity.

If these conclusions depart in some critical ways from much of the existing scholarship on Sieyès’s thought, they also offer us some novel insights into the history of “republicanism” in the eighteenth century. As Keith Baker wrote, two decades ago, “Classical republicanism, now so well mapped by historians of political thought in its Anglophone manifestations, still remains largely terra incognita in its francophone forms”.⁹⁵ If there have been considerable advancements since, they do not change the fact that the transition from “Classical” to “Modern” republicanism in France remains understudied, despite some very significant contributions.⁹⁶ By taking Sieyès seriously, not just as an agent of a bourgeois republicanism opposed to “classical” republican ideals but as a thinker engaged with, and appreciative of those ideals, we can begin to unearth a better understanding of how the transition between “classical” and “modern” republicanism played out. In seeing Sieyès’s project as an attempt to make something resembling, if not identical to, the republic of antiquarian nostalgia possible, we might also better understand what it might mean to revive the republican tradition.⁹⁷ In particular, it points to the absence of serious consideration of the economic prerequisites for a universal active citizenship in the “neo-republican” programme, or of how it might be possible to achieve the ancient republican ideal of citizenship without liberating citizens from the burden of labour, a liberation which had depended upon slavery in the ancient world.⁹⁸ If this essay is correct that it was precisely this problem with which Sieyès was concerned when he proposed the shocking scheme with which we began, we may nevertheless note that, in his mature works, he began to gesture towards a different solution to this problem. This was not, as his critics have at times alleged, the closing of the sphere of political life, but its reduction to a more limited – and therefore more possible – scale.

In his famous Letters From the Mountain, Rousseau declared to his fellow Genevans that

Ancient Peoples are no longer a model for modern ones; they are too alien to them in every respect  …  You are neither Romans, nor Spartans; you are not even Athenians.  …  You are Merchants, Artisans, Bourgeois, always occupied with their private interests, with their work.⁹⁹

What this meant was not that republicanism was no longer possible in the modern world, but that it would have to be different to that of the ancients. It could not be presupposed that the life of the Athenian citizen, lived out in the Agora, or of the virtuous Spartan or Roman soldier-citizen could be recreated. What was instead needed was a form of republicanism, and a vision of the life of the citizen, which did not depend upon slavery, adapted to the rhythm of the modern world and its pattern of life organised around labour in a complex commercial system. It was in this tradition that thinkers like Sieyès worked, animated not by a desire to construct a bourgeois commercial republic, but by a serious attempt to guarantee our ability to live in a free community of equals in a world characterised by the corrosive impact of economic domination and inequality.

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This work was supported by Arts and Humanities Research Council.

Notes on contributors

Angus Harwood Brown

Angus Harwood Brown is a PhD candidate in History at Gonville and Caius College Cambridge, where he works on Benjamin Constant’s Pouvoir Neutre and debates on constitutional guardianship in the history of political thought. His research is funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council’s Open-Oxford-Cambridge Doctoral Studentship and the Gonville and Caius College Bauer Studentship.

Notes

1 Sieyès, Qu'est-ce que le Tiers-État?, 2–9.

2 Ibid.: “Puisque une grande nation est nécessairement composée de deux peuples les producteurs et les instruments humains de la production, les gens intelligents et les ouvriers qui n'ont que la force passive; les citoyens éduqués et les auxiliaires à qui n'ont ne laisse ni le temps ni les moyens de recevoir l'éducation; ne serait-il pas à désirer, surtout dans les pays trop chaud et trop froids, qu'il y eût une espèce moyenne entre les hommes et les animaux, espèce capable de servir l'homme pour la consommation et la production?”.

3 Sewell, A Rhetoric of Bourgeois Revolution, 154–5.

4 Sieyès, “Esclaves”, 75: “D'une autre espèce qui ait moins de besoins et moins propre à exciter la compassion humaine”. In the French Archives Nationales, the document can be found in AN284 AP/3 Dossier 1/2.

5 Ibid.: “Le croisement de ces races vous fournirait: 1. une race forte (six à huit pieds de hauteur) pour les ouvrages de fatigue tant à la campagne qu'à la ville, les pongos; 2. une race moyenne (trois à quatre pieds de hauteur) pour les détails domestiques, les jockos; enfin 3. une petite espèce (douze à quinze puces) pour le petit service domestique et l'amusement. 4. Les nègres les commanderaient, les dresseraient et en répondraient … ”.

6 Sieyès, “Esclaves”, 75: “Le croisement de ces races vous fournirait: 1. une race forte (six à huit pieds de hauteur) pour les ouvrages de fatigue tant à la campagne qu'à la ville, les pongos; 2. une race moyenne (trois à quatre pieds de hauteur) pour les détails domestiques, les jockos; enfin 3. une petite espèce (douze à quinze puces) pour le petit service domestique et l'amusement. 4. Les nègres les commanderaient, les dresseraient et en répondraient … ”.

7 Ibid.: “Dès lors les citoyens, les chefs de production sérient des blancs, les instruments de labeur auxiliaires seraient les nègres, et les nouvelles races de singes anthropomorphes seraient vos esclaves … ”.

8 Ibid.: “Quelque extraordinaire, quelque immorale que cette idée puisse paraître au premier coup d'œil, je l'ai méditée longtemps, et vous ne trouverez pas d'autre moyen, dans une grande nation surtout dans les pays très chauds et très froids, de concilier les directeurs des travaux avec les simples instruments de labeur”.

9 Bastid, Sieyès et sa pensée, 114–15.

10 Pacini, “Colonial Predicaments, Eugenic Experiments, and the Evacuation of Compassion”, 177–81.

11 Ibid., 182.

12 Sewell, A Rhetoric of Bourgeois Revolution, 145–65. See also Negri, Insurgencies: Constituent Power and the Modern State, 216–19; Pereira, “Machines de Travail: Constituent Power and the Order of Labor in Sieyès’ Thought”, 673.

13 Losurdo, Liberalism: A Counter-History, 81–2, 92–3, 113–15.

14 See, particularly, Sieyès, “Esclavage”, 76; Sieyès, “La Nation”, 89.

15 Rousseau, “Émile ou de l’Éducation”, 556: “La pitié qu'on a du mal d'autrui ne se mesure pas sur la quantité de ce mal, mais sur le sentiment qu’un prête à ceux qui le souffrent”.

16 Ibid.: “Par extension l'on s'endurcit ainsi sur le sort des hommes; et les riches se consolent du mal qu'ils font aux pauvres, en les supposant assez stupides pour n'en rien sentir”.

17 Rousseau, “Discourse on the Origin and the Foundations of Inequality Among Men”, 162.

18 Forsyth, Reason and Revolution, 127; Pasquino, Sieyès et l’invention de la constitution en France, 9–10.

19 Baker, Inventing the French Revolution, 249–51. See also Jainchill, Reimagining Politics after the Terror, 201; Rubinelli, Constituent Power: A History, 50–5.

20 Sieyès, “Simplification morale et politique”, 439–40. The note is undated, but references a work by Dominique Joseph Garat, suggesting it was written after the publication of Garat’s celebrated 1778 Eloge de Michel de L’Hôpitale, and it follows quite closely to its argument about the differences between the ancients and moderns, suggesting it may indeed have been Sieyès’s source. See Garat, Eloge de Michel de l’Hôpital, Chancelier de France, 5–11.

21 Sieyès, “Simplification morale et politique”, 439 : “Dans nos systèmes de société fondée sur les propriétés particulières, Garat observe que ‘l'homme faible devient avare et l'âme énergique devient avide’, parce que la jouissance est toujours en perspective, au bout d'un désir, et non dans la possession de l’objet. Il est certain qu’une propriété commune, cultivée non par des ilotes, mais par les citoyens eux-mêmes dans quelques heures de la journée, donnerait outre l’exercice d’un travail modéré, l’obligation de se contenir dans une consommation et une jouissance physique simple, deux choses si essentielles pour une bonne constitution, d’autre part que les hommes que ceux chez qui nul privilège dispensent et découragent, chez qui une concurrence, une émulation générale, portent la masse entière vers les jouissances morales feraient qu’autant de héros, de génies, de dieux que de citoyens”.

22 Ibid., 440 : “Changez de spectacle, considérez nos nations européennes, le grand corps du people ravalé à la condition de brutes, les riches forcés de mourir d’ennui sur des jouissances destructrices de la santé, l’ignorance ou même l’égarement sur les jouissances morales, et l’âme exaltée seulement dans un petit nombre, par l’appât de vanités exclusives gothiques et féodales”.

23 Rousseau, “Discourse on the Origin and the Foundations of Inequality Among Men”, 161.

24 Pasquino, “Emmanuel Sieyès, Benjamin Constant, et le ‘Gouvernement des Modernes’”, 219.

25 Emmanuel-Joseph Sieyès, “Grece. Citoyen – Homme”, AN, 284AP/5, Dossier 4. Printed in Sieyès, Écrits Politiques, 81. I will refer to this edition hereafter, except where it deviates from the original text.

26 Sewell, A Rhetoric of Bourgeois Revolution, 73–4.

27 Sieyès, “Grece. Citoyen – Homme”, 81 : “Je crois que personne ne me contredira, si je dis qu’il n’y a plus de citoyens, puisqu’il n’y a plus de société se gouvernant elle-même dans toute la pureté de la liberté originelle; mais si je gémis de ne pas voir des hommes, on se récriera”.

28 Ibid.: “il n'y a véritablement qu'un petit nombre, bien petit, de têtes libres et pensantes qui perpétuent la dignité réduite de l'espèce humaine. Sortez de quelques capitales de l'Europe et cherchez partout. Voyez si dans les classes aisées il y a un seul individu qui ne soit l’esclave d’un grand, l’ennemi de ses semblables, un animal méprisable, quoique dressé à quelques singeries sociales vides de sensibilité”.

29 Ibid.: “Parmi les malheureux voués aux travaux pénibles, producteurs des jouissances d'autrui et revenait à peine de quoi sustenter leurs corps souffrants et pleins de besoins, dans cette foule immense d'instruments bipèdes, sans liberté, sans moralité, sans intellectualité, ne possédant que des mains peu gagnantes, et une âme absorbée, ne leur servant qu'à souffrir”.

30 Ibid.: “Les qualités de l'homme sont d'être sociable et non servile, d’être capable de devenir partie intégrante d’une société, ou citoyen; de conserver dans son âme l'esprit de l'égalité”.

31 Sieyès, “Grèce. Citoyen – Homme”, AN, 284AP/5, Dossier 4.

32 Sieyès, “Démocratie”: “La démocratie est un vaste sol de fermentation et de plus politique. C'est la que l'homme vaut tout ce qu'il peut valoir, et que l'état recueille tout ce qu'il pet recueillir”.

33 Sieyès, “Considérations sur l’espèce humaine”: “[U]n temps ou les plus grandes moitiés du genre humaine, semble avoir abandonné sans retour ses droits au despotisme”.

34 Sewell, A Rhetoric of Bourgeois Revolution, 73–4.

35 Sieyès, “Dire de l’Abbé Sieyès, Sur La Question Du Veto Royal”, 13–14: “Les peuples européens modernes ressemblent bien peu aux peuples anciens. Il ne s’agit parmi nous que de commerce, d’agriculture, de fabriques, etc.  …  on y songe bien plus à la consommation et à la production qu’au bonheur  …  les facultés productives de l’homme sont tout; à peine sait-on mettre à profit les facultés morales, qui pourraient cependant devenir la source plus féconde des plus véritables jouissances”.

36 See Pasquino, Sieyès et l’invention de la constitution en France, 36–8; Tuck, The Sleeping Sovereign, 169–72; Rubinelli, Constituent Power, 53.

37 Sieyès, “Dire de l’Abbé Sieyès, Sur La Question Du Veto Royal”, 14: “Nous sommes donc forces de ne voir, dans la plus grande partie des hommes, que des machines de travail”.

38 Sieyès, “Esclaves”, 75: “une grande nation est nécessairement composée de deux peuples, les producteurs, et les instruments humains de la production”.

39 For defences of the distinction, see Bastid, Sieyès et sa pensée, 347–8; Deusen, Sieyes: His Life and His Nationalism, 83–4. For criticisms, see Lefebvre, “Sieyes”, 102–3; Sewell, “Le citoyen/ la citoyenne: Activity, Passivity, and the Revolutionary Concept of Citizenship”, 106–12.

40 Sieyès, “Préliminaire de la Constitution Française et Reconnaissance et Exposition Raisonnée Des Droits de l’Homme et du Citoyen”, 37–8: “La différence entre ces deux sortes de droits consiste en ce que les droits naturels & civils sont ceux pour le maintien & le développement desquels la société est formée & les droits politiques, ceux par lesquels la société se forme & se maintient. Il vaut mieux, pour la clarté du langage appeler les premiers droits passifs & les seconds, droits actifs”.

41 Sieyès, “Observations sur le Rapport du Comité de constitution”, 20: “ceux enfin qu'une dépendance servile tient attachés, non à un travail quelconque, mais aux volontés arbitraires d'un maître. Chez les anciens, l’état de servitude épurait en quelque fort les Classes libres. Les Citoyens étaient tous capables d’exercer leurs droits politiques. Tout homme libre était Citoyen actif”.

42 Sieyès, Qu'est-ce que le Tiers-État?, 25–31. Translated by Michael Sonenscher in Sieyès, “What is the Third Estate?”, 107–9.

43 Rousseau, “The Social Contract”, 53; Pettit, “Two Republican Traditions”, 178–9.

44 Sewell, “Le citoyen/ la citoyenne: Activity, Passivity, and the Revolutionary Concept of Citizenship”, 110–11.

45 Boulay and Sieyès, “Observations Constitutionnelles”, 526: “l'association politique ne se compose véritablement que des citoyens actifs, ou actionnaires de l’Enterprise sociale”.

46 Sieyès, “Bases de l’ordre social”, 507: “il faut que l'homme soit libre ou qu'il soit esclave”.

47 Sieyès, “La Nation”, 89–90: “Je ne veux pas diviser les hommes en Spartiates et Ilotes, mais en citoyens et en compagnons de travail. J'ai déjà admis la vente à terme de l'emploi de toutes ses forces, ou l'engageante serve, l'esclavage de la loi”.

48 Sieyès, “Simplification morale et politique”, 440: “Tout cela est fort bien, mais comme il n’y a pas moyen de faire rétrograder les nations actuelles toutes fondées sur la propriété exclusive et s’efforçant de marcher vers le leur d’une plus grande prospérité, d’une plus grande richesses, permettent aux moralistes leurs plaintes et leurs regrets, mais faisons ici de la politique”.

49 Sieyès, “Préliminaire de la Constitution Française”, 16: “Si nous avions à faire une déclaration des Droits pour un Peuple neuf, quatre mots suffiraient; Égalité des droits civils, c'est-à-dire, protection égale pour chaque Citoyen, dans sa propriété et sa liberté; et égalité des droits politiques, c'est-a-dire, même influence dans la formation de la loi. Mais, lorsque les hommes à qui on veut présenter leurs droits ont été éprouvés par des siècles de malheur, il est permis d'entrer dans les détails et il peut n'être pas inutile de choisir, parmi les conséquences d'un principe”.

50 Rousseau, “Considerations on the Government of Poland”, 181. Rousseau made a similar argument in The Social Contract, 102–7.

51 Sieyès, “Observations sur le Rapport du Comité de constitution”, 21: “Sans doute c’est à la constitution, c’est à de bonne lois à réduire de plus en plus cette dernière classe au moindre nombre possible”.

52 Sieyès, Qu'est-ce que le Tiers-État?, 112–13. Translated by Michael Sonenscher in Sieyès, “What is the Third Estate?”, 154.

53 Sonenscher, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, 50–1; Hont, Politics in Commercial Society, 122.

54 F.P.B.[***], De l’équilibre des trois pouvoirs politiques, 96–7: “ce système épouvantable de Rousseau, concernant les difficultés de faire exercer la volonté générale sans l’esclavage, les confédérations et la destruction des villes”.

55 Roland de la Platière, Mémoires de madame Roland, 111–13. This is discussed in Bevilacqua, “Conceiving the Republic of Mankind”, 558–9; Sonenscher, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, 5–6.

56 Sieyès, “Gouvernement par procureur”, 424: “Dans les républiques anciennes, le gouvernement pouvait n’être pas représentatif d’abord 1e parce qu’elles étaient d’une petite étendue 2e (et c’est la meilleure raison) parce qu’il n’y avait de citoyens que les habitants disponibles, en totalité, ou en grande partie, le reste étant esclave ou étranger à l’action sociale”.

57 Sieyès, “Dire de l’Abbé Sieyès, Sur La Question Du Veto Royal”, 10: “Ils ne vont à rien moins qu’à couper, qu’à morceler, qu’à déchirer la France en une infinité de petites Démocraties, qui ne s’uniraient ensuite que par les liens d’une confédération générale”.

58 Ibid. 10–11. See Hont, Jealousy of Trade, 134.

59 Sieyès, “Dire de l'Abbé Sieyès, Sur La Question Du Veto Royal”, 10-11.

60 Sieyès, “Contre la Ré-totale”, 455–6.

61 Sieyès, “‘Gouvernement par procureur”, 425.

62 Rousseau, “The Social Contract”, 118.

63 Sonenscher, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, 67.

64 Sieyès, Politische Schriften, i, vii–viii: “Ich finde den unsterblichen Verfasser Emils, den wahs ren Bernuftmann weit mehr in seinem Werte über die polnische Verfassung als in dem gesellschaftlichen Betrage”. On Oelsner’s interpretation of Sieyès, see Nakhimovsky, The Closed Commercial State, 24–8.

65 Letter from Johann Rudolf Steck to Johannes Samuel Ith, 1796, 228: “Er ist sehr aufmerksam geworden auf die Arbeiten von Sieyes und glaubt wie es den wirklich unverkennbar ist, wenn beide von einem Punkt ausagieren ist so haben beide auch ein Ziel u mit einer Ansicht gearbeitet”.

66 Rousseau, “Considerations on the Government of Poland”, 197–8, 201.

67 This interpretation is particularly indebted to Hont, Politics in Commercial Society, 119–21, but also Kendall, “Introduction”, x–xxxix; Menthéour, “Restaurer l’Âme Antique: Rousseau, Mably et le mirage Polonais”, 449–69; Shklar, “Rousseau’s Images of Authority”, 922–4.

68 Koekkoek, The Citizenship Experiment, 154–5; Nippel, Ancient and Modern Democracy: Two Concepts of Liberty?, 179.

69 Sieyès, Qu'est-ce que le Tiers-État?, 29. Translated by Michael Sonenscher in Sieyès, “What is the Third Estate?”, 109.

70 Sieyès, “Observations sur le Rapport du Comité de constitution”, 2: “cette adunation politique si nécessaire pour ne faire qu’un grand Peuple régi par les mêmes lois”. For this view, see Forsyth, Reason and Revolution, 152; Sewell, A Rhetoric of Bourgeois Revolution, 131; Rosanvallon, The Demands of Liberty, 20.

71 Sewell, A Rhetoric of Bourgeois Revolution, 131.

72 Sieyès, “Du nouvel Etablissement public de l’Instruction en France”, 82–3: “Il fallait en agrandir la sphère, et lui faire embrasser la partie physique et morale de l'éducation, comme les facultés purement intellectuelles, les talents industriels et manuels, comme les talents agréables; car la véritable instruction s'occupe de tout l'homme, et même après avoir cherché à perfectionner l'individu, elle essaie d'améliorer l'espèce”.

73 Oelsner, “Exposé Historique des Écrits de Sieyès”.

74 Sieyès, “Du nouvel Etablissement public de l’Instruction en France”, 99–102.

75 Adams, Writings of John Quincy Adams, 333.

76 Sieyès, “Du nouvel Etablissement public de l’Instruction en France”, 85–6.

77 Théremin, De la condition des femmes dans les républiques, 77–8.

78 Sieyès, “Ethocratie”, 544: “[L]es hommes démoralisés ont plus besoin d’éthocratie”.

79 Sieyès, “Observations sur le Rapport du Comité de constitution”, 17–18: “[P]our la non-influence du crédit, de la richesse, &c., en un mot, pour toutes les idées qui sont comprises dans l’expression d’adunation politique”.

80 Sieyès, “Du nouvel Etablissement public de l’Instruction en France”, 146–7: “L’art d’assimiler des individus avait besoin de la conception des assemblées primaires”.

81 Sieyès, “Dire de l’Abbé Sieyès, Sur La Question Du Veto Royal”, 17: “Ce n 'est pas la veille, et chacun chez soi, que les démocrates les plus jaloux de la liberté forment et fixent leur avis particulier, pour être ensuite porté sur la place publique”.

82 Sieyès, “Démocratie”: “qu'on a tort de confondre avec la démocratie qui est 'existence sociale, et l'action politique de tous sur l'intérêt commun, cette machine politique qui recueille, digère et reverse sur tous les moyens du besoin commun. La démocratie est dans les citoyens et dans leur masse; dans l'établissement public au contraire, il ne peut y avoir que unité et organisation”.

83 Sonenscher, The Nation’s Debt and the Birth of the Modern Republic, 315–22.

84 See, particularly, Sieyès, “Observations sur le Rapport du Comité de constitution”; Sieyès, “Bases de l’ordre social”, 512; Boulay de la Meurthe and Sieyès, “Observations Constitutionnelles”, 520–1.

85 Rousseau, “Considerations on the Government of Poland”, 244–6. On Sieyès and Graduated Promotion, see Sonenscher, Before the Deluge, 77–92.

86 Sieyès, “The Explanatory Note of M. Syeyes”, 169–71. By far the best elaboration of this system remains that presented in Sonenscher, Before the Deluge, 77–81.

87 See AN284/AP/5 Dossier 1/8 and Dossier 2/6.

88 Rousseau, “The Social Contract”, 59–60.

89 See Sieyès’s proposal to grant landed estates to the highest officers of state in Boulay and Sieyès, “Observations Constitutionelles”, as well as an earlier proposal with the same aim entitled “Citoyens, Eigibles, Electeurs”. In the secondary literature, see Sonenscher, Before the Deluge, 77–92.

90 Cabanis, Quelques considérations, 26: “Et voilà encore la bonne démocratie”.

91 Negri, Insurgencies: Constituent Power and the Modern State, 216–19.

92 Sandoz-Rollin, “Conversation with Talleyrand. Sieyès appointed as ambassador to Berlin”, 191: “Désabusé sur les républicains modernes, bien plus encore que sur les républiques, il vaudrait s’éloigner de sa patrie n’a plus aucun attrait pour lui”.

93 Staël, Considérations sur les principaux événements de la Révolution Françoise, ii, 248: “La supériorité de l'esprit de Sieyes ne saurait l'emporter sur la misanthropie de son caractère, la race humaine lui déplaît, et il ne sait pas traiter avec elle: on dirait qu'il voudrait avoir affaire à autre chose qu'à des hommes, et qu'il renonce à tout faite de pouvoir trouver sur la terre une espèce plus selon son gout”.

94 Rousseau, “Émile”, 556: “Ne vous étonnez donc plus si les politiques parlent du peuple avec tant de dédain, ni si la plupart des philosophes affectent de faire l'homme si méchant”.

95 Baker, “Transformations of Classical Republicanism in Eighteenth Century France”, 33–4.

96 See, for example, Dunn, “The Identity of the Bourgeois Liberal Republic”; Hont, Politics in Commercial Society; Jainchill, Reimagining Politics after the Terror; Pasquino, Sieyès; Sonenscher, Before the Deluge.

97 See, in particular, Lovett, A General Theory of Domination and Justice; Pettit, Republicanism: A Theory of Freedom and Government; Skinner, Liberty Before Liberalism.

98 Andrew, “The Absence of Macpherson and Strauss in Pocock’s Machiavellian Moment”, 154–5.

99 Rousseau, “Letters Written from the Mountain”, 292–3.