by Alan Schom
Graduating fifty-fourth in a class of eighty, he emerged with his baccalaureat and licence secured.[285] But it was hardly a propitious beginning for an impecunious young man. His childhood heroes — Alexander, Hannibal, and Caesar — had gradually given way to more cerebral giants, who had occupied most of his thoughts and study ever since, including among them such political theoreticians and philosophers as Rousseau, Montesquieu, Descartes, Condillac, Helvétius, Grotius, and Hobbes. In particular he was inspired by the works of the seventeenth-century British physician-philosopher John Locke. As his daily life and reading reflected, the Abbé Sieyès was by no means a devout or religious gentleman, preferring administration to ontology, and he was soon appointed secretary to Jean-Baptiste Joseph de Lubersac, bishop of Tréguier. Not taking his clerical vows overly seriously, the otherwise grim priest enjoyed the favors of an occasional mistress and more frequently the repose of Monseigneur de Lubersac’s elegant estate of Bougainval. And yet such earthly pleasures were of no real, intrinsic value or interest to this compulsively serious young man with few friends or acquaintances. But with the bishop’s promotion from the wilds of Brittany to the more pastoral surroundings of Chartres — the nation’s wealthiest and most prestigious bishopric — came promotion for Sieyès as well, who on accompanying him was soon named grand vicaire — in charge of administering the thirty vicars attached to the cathedral.[286] This in turn was to lead unexpectedly to politics, as his new post permitted him to spend most of his time in Paris, where the nation was astir.
Of a reclusive nature, he was not a particularly warm or lovable human being and thereafter rarely corresponded with or saw his family. Nor was he even remotely handsome. Of average height, hollow chested, with a somewhat hooked nose, pale, bald with long stringy hair on the sides reaching down to his shoulders — this dry, humorless, awkward young man seemed devoid of any social graces or charms whatsoever. To make matters worse, he was troubled with a lifelong chronic hernia and often crippling eye problems. Food, clothes, fine furniture, elegant surroundings, beautiful women, and even money were of no lasting interest to the introverted Sieyès, as the one or two semibarren rooms he rented in Paris throughout his life attested, with their two or three chipped chairs and table buried beneath stacks of books and papers, and a coat hanging from a nail on the wall. Nor during his twenties and thirties, was he a familiar sight in an age of superb salons given by the capital’s grandes dames and their imitators. Later Madame de Stael, famous for her own fashionable if unconventional salon, which Sieyès did attend, admired the abbe’s intelligence but nevertheless acknowledged that “the human race displeased him and he did not quite know how to deal with it.”[287] And although she found his ideas interesting, not so his personality; she declared him to be “a very moody character...not the best sort of person for communicating with other men, so easily did he become irritated by their views, when not actually wounding them with his own.”[288] No doubt to the astonishment of just about everyone, including himself, by the eve of the Revolution of 1789 the forty-one-year-old grand vicaire had turned into an important personality, if ever the curmudgeon, preoccupied only with political philosophy and theory — how to better the plight of France, its ruling institutions, and even its people.
Unhappy with the absolute monarchy of the Bourbons, as well as the pervasive influence of his fellow churchmen (more than eighty thousand strong) and church institutions, Sieyès now turned his long-simmering rebellion and his philosophical quest into two slender, if most timely, revolutionary pamphlets that shocked Louis XVI and much of the nation — What Is the Third Estate? and Essay on Privileges. “What is the third estate [that is, the common people, as opposed to the clergy and the nobility, comprising the other two]?” he asked. “Everything,” he replied. Yet they had no voice in government, and this, he insisted, must now be changed. “If we do not have the right constitution,” he argued, “then we must draw one up” to enable the people to have a say in how their lives were governed. (What is interesting is the fact that Sieyès wrote these pamphlets only after he and his father had exhausted all attempts to prove that they themselves were aristocrats related to the ennobled de Sieyès family.)
Much to his surprise, Emmanuel Sieyès soon found himself out of his black cassock and in a frock coat, acclaimed as one of the founders of the French Revolution and one of the earliest members of what was to become known as the infamous Jacobin Club. Naturally, just as his fame quickly spread, so did his number of acquaintances, a small handful of whom he was to become relatively intimate with, including the rebellious Madame de Stael, daughter of King Louis’s one-time finance minister, Jacques Necker, the celebrated mathematician and philosopher, the Marquis de Condorcet, as well as the widow of Claude Adrien Helvétius (the wealthy tax-farmer-general, better known as a philosopher), though admittedly the theme of such friendships remained purely political in scope. Warmth and human companionship however, still remained quite beyond his ken, and in that sense the grim abbé had no real social life at all.
Despite the fire of his occasional speeches and printed rhetoric and of his private conversations, when critical moments actually arose, Sieyès was generally not found among those haranguing crowds or making masterful decisions. Indeed, throughout his life he attempted to recede into the background, a timid, undecided, almost cowardly soul, avoiding political leadership and in particular its responsibilities, which he generally excused on grounds of poor health. On the few occasions he did stand out, he had a firm majority behind him, as in January 1793, when he joined Talleyrand, Barras, Carnot, and most of the other leaders of the Revolution in voting for the execution of Louis XVI. Although he served on the Committee of Public Safety on more than one occasion, it was not in the limelight but in a less abrasive position, for example concerning himself with the nation’s educational system.
Subsequently, when on May 28, 1795, the assemblies ordered the arrest of all members of both the Committees of Public Safety and of the Sûreté Générale and their political appointees, culminating in some twelve hundred detentions, the name of the elusive Sieyès was not to be found on the list. In fact, the month before he had safely maneuvered himself into nothing less than the presidency of the Convention, the perfect haven.[289]
With the overthrow of the Convention in the summer of 1795 and its infamous committees, the Constitution of the Year III (as it was to be known hereafter) replaced the old government with a new executive power comprising five directors, supported by a Council of Five Hundred (it had 500 members) and a senior Council of Ancients (of 250 members). Sieyès, though not happy with this constitution (preferring another of his own making), did reluctantly accept it, but, unlike the opportunistic Barras, declined to serve on the first Directory that October.[290] Sieyès did accept membership in the newly created institute, however, when he was named to the section on Moral and Political Sciences,[291] and of course he was elected to the first Council of Five Hundred, from which he launched a scries of attacks against the repressive acts of the new Directory in a country already struggling after devastingly bad harvests and a severe winter.
One of the many fascinating aspects of the French Revolution was the bizarre array of human specimens it spewed forth, including two men so antithetical in character, values, outlook, and goals as Abbé Sieyès and Napoleon Bonaparte. The perspicacious Madame de Stael, after laying unsuccessful amorous siege to General Bonaparte, noted that she found “something disdainful about him when he is pleased with himself, and quite vulgar when he is fully relaxed.”[292] This same disdain, blended with a pervasive distrust, was shared by both Bonaparte and Sieyès, vis-à-vis not only each other but many of the same political leaders of the day. For his part, Abbé Sieyès’s hostility to this conquering hero increased sharply following his victorious return from Italy in December 1797, after Bonaparte’s negotiations at Leoben and the temporary occupation of Venice, not to mention drafts in hand of the preliminary treaties of Tolentino (with Pius VI) and of Campo F
ormio (with the Austrians, resulting in the ceding of Holland and Belgium to France, and northern Italy as well, in the guise of the Cisalpine Republic). Then, rubbing salt in the wound, Sieyès was obliged to attend three of the subsequent celebrations given in the general’s behalf, including a dinner given by the politician François de Neufchâteau, for a couple of dozen distinguished personages, including members of the Institute (to which Bonaparte was elected two weeks later), followed by a private dinner given by the lovely Madame de Stael, and finally an enormous banquet given by the combined parliamentary councils in honor of Bonaparte’s role in making the new peace treaties (and loot) possible. Never a subtle man, Napoleon in his abrupt manner warned the French people during his speech that night where he stood and what to expect, concluding, “When the happiness of the French people will one day finally be based on the best organic laws, Europe will then be freed.”[293] Only one man present apparently listened to his words with special concern: Emmanuel Sieyès.
In 1798, in order to avoid the political dilemma facing the Directory, Abbé Sieyès had — with Talleyrand’s full support — suddenly had himself appointed French minister to Berlin, although he had no diplomatic experience whatsoever and could not speak a word of German. To aggravate matters, the dispatching of Sieyès, regicide par excellence, to the very antirepublican Prussian court of King Friedrich Wilhelm III was hardly likely to heal wounds or bring about a rapprochement between the two antagonistic states.[294]
In the meantime all was not going well for France, despite the government’s momentary respite after overthrowing the attempted Jacobin electoral landslide. The country’s traditional archenemy, England, had formed a working agreement with Russia in December 1797, followed by General Jourdan’s defeat at Stokach on March 25, 1798, and Gen. Jean-Victor Moreau’s further defeat at the hands of the Russians and Austrians at Cas-sano on April 27, 1799, while General Bonaparte’s badly needed army was far across the sea, stranded in the sands of Egypt, where it was of no use to anyone. As if this were not bad enough, Czar Paul I had declared war on France in September 1798, while Franco-Prussian relations quickly plummeted, thanks in part to Minister Sicyes. But then in his absence, on May 16, 1799, Abbe Sieyès was elected to the Directory. He immediately abandoned Berlin for the French capital.
If Barras, who had been ruling the Directory with an iron hand since its inception, considered Sieyès politically as well as personally detestable, other “republicans,” including Madame de Stael’s most recent lover, Benjamin Constant, welcomed the abbe’s presence as “the last hope...of this poor republic which has been struggling so against immorality and stupidity for these past eighteen months.” Sieyès had left the country at a time of national crisis and had returned at an even worse time of constitutional jeopardy. While he was still en route to France, on June 5, the Council of Five Hundred, meeting in camera, had sent an ultimatum to the Directory demanding that it justify its actions and policies at home and abroad. No answer had been forthcoming three days later, when Abbé Sieyès was officially sworn in as the newest member of the Directory.
This then was the grave situation facing France — of which Bonaparte was still quite unaware when planning to return home. The constitutional crisis, the great open clash between the Ancients and the Five Hundred, on the one hand, and the Directory on the other, was coming to a head. On June 16, eleven days after issuing this ultimatum, the two councils still had received no response from the Directory; they declared themselves in permanent emergency session. Retaliating, the Directory did likewise and the next day succeeded in ejecting from their board Director Treilhard (on the grounds that his election had been technically invalid), replacing him with the more manageable former justice minister Gohier. The political temperature in the French capital was now at the sizzling point.
On June 18 the angered Five Hundred attacked, the eloquent Jacobin firebrand Bertrand launching into the Directory and accusing them of having “annihilated public spirit, muzzled our liberties, and of having persecuted the republicans,” while others denounced Directors Merlin and La Révellière, who were forced to resign. Sieyès, an old friend of Merlin, sat by silently without protesting or attempting to come to his aid. These two directors were now quickly replaced by ex-Jacobin and member of the Convention Roger-Ducos and General Moulin (a friend of Barras). At the same time the complete cabinet of ministers was swept away, including Foreign Minister Talleyrand, who was replaced by Reinhard, Cambacérès taking over the Justice Ministry, Fouché heading the Police Ministry, Quinette the Interior Ministry, and the occasionally energetic republican General Bernadotte, the War Ministry. Curiously enough it was Sieyès who now took the initiative in canceling the former decision to dispatch Admiral Bruix to Egypt to rescue General Bonaparte and his army and bring them back to France. But what could not be swept away so easily was the moral corruption of French society at the top, as whores and demi-mondaines replaced wives among public functionaries, reflecting the two new kings of a corrupt Paris, money and power. Meanwhile Director Barras remained “the very model of these [corrupt] new times: going from business to pleasure, from pleasure to politics, and from politics back to business.” For the less sybaritic Sieyès the decline in France reached a startling new low when he witnessed the old revolutionary salutation of “Citizen” being replaced again by “Monsieur” and “Madame.” “That is simply scandalous!” the shocked abbé muttered.
Meanwhile, at his new post War Minister Bernadotte did not find himself in any more enviable a position, with the French military in full retreat abroad, General Moreau’s defeats in Italy resulting in the French evacuation of that country, while in Germany, General Jourdan was likewise defeated, not to mention the parlous state of the French army in Switzerland, following Masséna’s defeat by Russian forces now threatening French frontiers.[295] In France itself Jacobins, despite the severe thinning of their leadership, continued to make themselves and their causes felt, by the end of June calling for a fresh revolutionary-style levée en masse (mass draft) of army conscripts and the abrogation of the right to buy a substitute for army service, while the “red” General Jourdan demanded that “the rich” provide forthwith a one-hundred-million-franc “loan” to the nation.[296] Perhaps even more frightening to those who had survived the horrors and atrocities of Robespierre’s Reign of Terror was the creation by the Councils of Ancients and Five Hundred of the “law of hostages.” This permitted the government of every department to arrest and take hostage relatives of émigrés or chouans (royalist rebels), who could be deported every time a public official was assassinated. For every such murder victim, four hostages (persons not personally responsible for or guilty of the crime) were to be deported from the country to penal colonies. What is more, this new law provided for the seizure of hostages in the event of acts of rebellion, stealing of crops, arson, pillage, and so on, all of which Abbé Sieyès quietly acknowledged without raising objections, thereby repeating his former role under Robespierre’s regime. “We need a great burst of republican action,” superpatriot Sieyès warned. “Do not forget, the enemy is at our very gates and simply must be repulsed.”[297] But all continued to go badly for France throughout the summer of 1799, accompanied by fresh royalist uprisings around Toulouse and in the West, while Sieyès’s good friend General Joubert, on whom he had been secretly counting for his own plans, was killed at the Battle of Novi (in Piedmont) on August 15, followed ten days later by the landing of English troops in Holland, even as uprisings took place in Lyons.
Meanwhile, belatedly, the more conservative Council of Ancients cracked down on the immediate Jacobin threat within, on July 26 expelling their club (now calling itself the Friends of Freedom and Equality) to move out of the Salle de Manege, or riding hall of the Louvre, Sieyès proclaiming that “those calamitous days [under Robespierre] will not take place again. We, like you, detest everything that is contrary to the law and order of the land and the tranquillity of our citizens...Our government exists to provide
justice.” Nevertheless, on August 5 the Jacobins arrogantly adopted a frightening new program, demanding the abrogation of all existing laws contrary to the constitution and calling for the “redistribution” of property from the wealthy and middle classes to all those without any.
The Directory had to act vigorously if it was not to be overthrown by the incorrigible Jacobins. Thus it was they had called in the tough ex-terrorist and Jacobin Joseph Fouché, “the Executioner of Lyons” and regicide, to head the nation’s Police Ministry. On August 13 Sieyès — fully supported by Barras and Roger Ducos (against the opposition of Gohier and Moulin) — demanded the official suppression of all Jacobin clubs, and because of the strong popular support for General Bernadotte (with his open ties to the Jacobins), Sieyès and Barras had to get rid of him as well. This was the same Bernadotte who was responsible for finally reinvigorating the army and bringing in badly needed reinforcements, money, and supplies that would soon result in fresh French victories abroad by Generals Brune and Masséna. But, as war minister, Bernadotte could also turn triumphant French troops against the Directory, therefore Sieyès wanted him out.