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Since the publication of François Furet's Interpreting the French Revolution, historians have generally agreed that the instigators of the revolution did not represent a cohesive "bourgeois" consciousness. Rather, reading the mass of books, pamphlets and journals of the revolutionary period reveals a cacophony of competing interests and ideologies. The struggle of these varied interests to achieve political legitimacy and primacy took the revolution on its peculiarly ambiguous and often violent course. William H. Sewell's latest book, A Rhetoric of Bourgeois Revolution, continues the expansive, ongoing project of explicating the competition and conflict within revolutionary political discourse, but also reverses its direction. Through a close reading of a single seminal pamphlet, the Abbe Sieyes' What Is the Third Estate?, Sewell argues that the contradictions of the French Revolution are inherent not only in the general competition for discursive legitimacy, but also in the rhetorical structure of individual texts.
Inspired by the rigorous textual readings of deconstructionist literary criticism, but supported by copious references to extratextual influences, Sewell "portray[s] What Is the Third Estate? as a complex and unstable product of diverse and overlapping social, intellectual, linguistic, and political processes" (38). There is no doubt that Sieyes' pamphlet had a direct and profound influence on the events of 1789. Sewell accounts for this success by outlining Sieyes' rhetorical strategy: Sieyes wins support for his political program by rooting it in both the current events of the time - the debate over the relative constitutional sovereignty of the three estates - and by embracing popular metaphysical abstractions about the nature of sovereignty. Borrowing Rousseau's concept of the nation as the embodiment of the general will, Sieyes argues quite simply that since the Third Estate represents 98% of the people of France, it is the entire nation. Since the government is, by definition, the legislating assembly of the nation, the first and second estates, representing the clergy and the nobility, have no place in government. Sieyes then criticizes the débats-du-jour regarding the structure of the Estates-General through a blistering indictment of the first and second estates, and their sole quest for the continuance of their own privileges. In attacking the nobility "with uncommon bitterness and acerbity" (5), Sieyes appeals to the anti-aristocratic sentiments of the merchants and bureaucrats of the third estate. He also chastises the members of the third estate for their own compromising solutions; thus encouraging them to believe that the fundamental division of government was the reason for its failure. The only solution was to exclude the aristocracy not only from government but from social life... "By identifying the aristocracy as the essential cause of France's political woes, and by demonstrating that the aristocracy is a social nullity, absolutely without metaphysical standing, Sieyes prepares his readers to accept his radical political conclusion that the Third Estate can rightfully arrogate itself sovereign power to determine the nation's constitution" (62). Sieyes' rhetorical genius lay in his ability to recast his audience as the fulfilment of his political narrative and thus of France's political destiny.
To an extent, Sieyes' program was fulfilled. On June 17, 1789 the Third Estate declared itself the sovereign National Assembly and on August 4 outlawed aristocratic privilege, making themselves, as Sieyes had encouraged them, the representatives of a nation. On the question of representation, however, the contradictions in Sieyes' thought become apparent. Contrary to the popular Rousseauist distrust of representative government, visible in Sieyes' own gloss on the general will, he proposed that the National Assembly should be comprised of "extraordinary representatives... charged with the plenitude of the national will" (cited on p. 50). As Sewell explains at length in chapter 3, Sieyes advocates a representative government. He believes that a division of "representative labour," modelled loosely on Smith's political economy of intentionality and rational contract-making by the entire nation, will increase liberty to all. Yet, for Sieyes, representing the nation means being both available and able to leave business or the land and participate in the government. Thus, Sieyes' ostensible qualification for government was citizenship, but his definition of the citizen is somewhat more limited than might be supposed in What Is the Third Estate? Sieyes distinguishes active citizens as those with the wealth, independence, education and availability to represent the nation, and passive citizens as those who are tied to the land and restricted to manual labour. In a remarkable note, Sieyes outlines a utopian fantasy of creating a race of ape-men who could work the land, freeing more people for active citizenship (155-62). These are random speculations. But clearly, Sieyes was in favour of a society of "two peoples"; a labouring class and a management class (153). In this sense the democratic energy of What Is the Third Estate? is definitely compromised.
Sewell's research into Sieyes' often haphazard notes elucidates a challenging, though sometimes disturbing, dimension to Sieyes' political thought. One of the difficulties of Sewell's work lies in his use of the concept of rhetoric. Borrowed from deconstructionist methods of De Man, Hillis Miller, Jameson and Spivak, Sewell erroneously assumes that rhetoric and its inherent contradictions are structural properties of texts. But any explanation of a rhetorical strategy within its social context demands a comprehensive assessment of audience reception. This Sewell does not supply, choosing instead to account for the pamphlet's initial success through its textual structure, and the intellectual sources Sieyes derived from his personal experiences and reading. Sewell explains the ultimate failure of Sieyes' policies by arguing that his move from an emotionally charged rhetoric of exclusion and nationhood, to a complicated system of representative associations of contracted power, did not sit well with the Rousseauist pseudo-philosophes of the Revolutionary assembly. Yet this is a stark generalization of Sieyes' audience and of the process of persuasion and conviction involved not only in rhetoric, but in publication and reception. Sewell rightly demonstrates the importance of rhetorical ethos in political policy. But by focusing and simplifying the audience of Sieyes' work, Sewell overlooks the multiplicity of discourses and ideologies which he acknowledges in his introduction as a seminal aspect of French revolutionary history. In making Sieyes the spokesperson for those contradictions that undermine any system of representation, Sewell engages his own work in the problematic of representation itself.
Alex Dick
University of Western Ontario