William H. Sewell Jr.,Steven Laurence Kaplan,Keith Michael Baker
What Is the Third Estate?, was the most influential pamphlet of 1789. It did much to set the French Revolution on a radically democratic course. It also launched its author, the AbbÃ© Sieyes, on a remarkable political career that spanned the entire revolutionary decade. Sieyes both opened the revolution by authoring the National Assemblyâ€™s declaration of sovereignty in June of 1789 and closed it in 1799 by engineering Napoleon Bonaparteâ€™s coup dâ€™Ã©tat.,This book studies the powerful rhetoric of the great pamphlet and the brilliant but enigmatic thought of its author. William H. Sewellâ€™s insightful analysis reveals the fundamental role played by the new discourse of political economy in Sieyesâ€™s thought and uncovers the strategies by which this gifted rhetorician gained the assent of his intended readersâ€”educated and prosperous bourgeois who felt excluded by the nobility in the hierarchical social order of the old regime. He also probes the contradictions and incoherencies of the pamphletâ€™s highly polished text to reveal fissures that reach to the core of Sieyesâ€™s thoughtâ€”and to the core of the revolutionary project itself. ,Combining techniques of intellectual history and literary analysis with a deep understanding of French social and political history, Sewell not only fashions an illuminating portrait of a crucial political document, but outlines a fresh perspective on the history of revolutionary political culture. 
Academic
A Rhetoric of Bourgeois Revolution: The AbbÃ© Sieyes and What is the Third Estate?