ABSTRACT
In the excerpts below from William H. Sewell, Jr’s recent book, A Rhetoric of Bourgeois Revolution: The Abbé Sieyes and “What Is the Third Estate?”, the bold ideas of Furet and Baker are challenged through an analysis of the major theorist of the Revolution’s early years, the Abbé Sieyes. It was his 1789 pamphlet, What Is the Third Estate?, after all, that helped to transform the political crisis from a struggle between crown and aristocracy to one among the privileged orders and the leaders of the Third Estate, or in Sieyes terminology, between parasitic noblemen and the French nation.
