The Explosion of 1789 363
Mounier, with his balanced government, and Sieyès, with his constituent power,
each stood for ideas that had their parallel in America. A comparison of the two,
showing how Sieyès prevailed over Mounier, should not only explain much in
France but illuminate the relationship between the French and American revolu-
tions, which remains one of the principal problems of the period.
Mounier was the son of a cloth merchant of Grenoble, where he was befriended
in his younger days by the grandfather of Stendhal. He became a lawyer, and in
1782 had been able to purchase a minor judicial office, and so had acquired a “per-
sonal” or non- hereditary noble status which still kept him in the Third Estate. He
was a moving spirit in the revolution of 1788 in Dauphiny which led to the Vizille
assembly. More than anyone else, he had brought the nobles and bourgeois of
Dauphiny together, with double representation for the Third and vote by head in
the revived provincial estates, and so had taken the first step in what his fellow
Dauphinois, Barnave, called the “democratic revolution.” Elected to the Estates
General, Mounier hoped for the same voluntary merger of the orders that he had
seen happen in Dauphiny. This failing, he joined with the most aggressive spirits in
the Third, and became a main author of the Oath of the Tennis Court. After the
three orders were fused in the National Assembly, Mounier was elected to the first
committee on the constitution. Skeptical of abstract declarations of rights, con-
vinced that if there were to be such a declaration it should not be published until
the constitution was completed, Mounier nevertheless went along with the major-
ity and composed a draft of his own. In fact, the first three articles of the Declara-
tion officially adopted on August 26, the most famous affirmations in the whole
document, were in Mounier’s language and represented his conceptions.^14
Sieyès also originated in the lesser bourgeoisie, his father having held positions
in the financial and postal administrations of the royal government. He had been
trained for the church, because it offered careers to men like himself, and had in
fact had considerable experience in ecclesiastical administration. Spending several
years in Brittany, he had sat with the clergy in its Provincial Estates, where he had
formed a low opinion of the hordes of nobility in that body. Transferred to Char-
tres, he had been an aide to the bishop there, and in this capacity had sat in the
Orléanais provincial assembly of 1787. Here the Abbé Sieyès, his bishop (the lib-
eral Lubersac), the eminent scientist, Lavoisier, and the Count de Rochambeau
who had commanded in America, all vainly urged the nobility to give up some of
their privileges. Where Mounier in Dauphiny found a basis of agreement for no-
bles and bourgeois, Sieyès in Brittany and the Orléanais had had the opposite ex-
perience. It was from his own participation in real affairs that he acquired some of
the cold and contemptuous hatred of the nobility that made him famous. In the
14 On Mounier and the Declaration, see Egret, Mounier, 114–17, and Archives parlementaires (pre-
mière serie, 209 vols., Paris, 1867–1913), VIII, 289 and 463. Mounier submitted his draft to the As-
sembly on July 27. On August 20, late at night, after a fatiguing discussion on the phrasing of the first
three articles, Mounier proposed the language which the Assembly thereupon adopted, and which
closely echoed his own draft of July 27. It is rarely pointed out, especially by the more unfriendly and
conservative critics of the Declaration, that its opening articles were devised by a man of relatively
conservative disposition, who was well aware of the inadequacy, in Burke’s phrase, of something writ-
ten on a piece of paper about the rights of man.