Emmanuel Sieyès: Bourgeois Disdain For the Special Privileges Of The Aristocracy

The plan of this book is fairly simple. We most ask ourselves three questions.

1. What is the Third State? Everything.
2. What has it been until now in the political order? Nothing.
3. What does it want to be? Something

... Only the well-paid and honorific posts are filled by members of' the privileged order [nobles]. Are we to give them credit for this? We could do so only it the Third Estate was unable or unwilling to fill these posts. We know the answer. Nevertheless, the privileged have dared to preclude the Third Estate. "No matter how useful you are," they said, "no matter how able you are, you can go so far and no further. Honors are not for the like of you….

... Has nobody observed that as soon as the government becomes the property of a separate class, it starts to grow out of all proportion and that posts are created not to meet the needs of the governed but of those who govern them? ...

It suffices to have made the point that the so-called usefulness of a privileged order to the public service is a fallacy;; that, without help from this order, all the arduous tasks in the service are performed by the Third Estate; that without this order the higher posts could be infinitely better filled; that they ought to be the natural prize and reward of recognised ability and service; and that if the privileged have succeeded in usurping all well-paid and honorific posts, this is both a hateful iniquity towards the generality of citizens and in act of treason to the commonwealth.

Who is hold enough to maintain that the Third Estate does not contain within itself everything needful to constitute a complete nation? It is like a strong and robust man with one arm still in chains. If the privileged order were removed, the nation would not be something less but something more. What then is the Third Estate? All; but an "all" that is fettered and oppressed. What would it be without the privileged order? It would be all; but free and flourishing. Nothing will go well without the Third Estate; everything would go considerably better without the others....

... The privileged, far from being useful the notion; can only weaken and injure it; the nobility may be a burden for the nation.

The nobility, however, is ... a foreigner in our midst because of its civil and political prerogatives.

What is a nation? A body of Associates living under common laws and represented by the same legislative assembly, etc.

Is it not obvious that the nobility posses privileges and exemptions which it brazenly calls its rights and which stand distinct from the rights of the great body of citizens? Because of these special rights, the nobility does not long to the common order; nor is it subject to the common laws. Thus, its private rig make it a people apart in the great nation.

Source: from What is the Third Estate? by Emmanuel Joseph Sieyes, translated by M, Blondel; pp. 51-52 & 54-58; Praeger Publishers, Westport, CT 1964.