364 Chapter XV
last days of 1788 he penned his Qu’est ce que le Tiers Etat? which soon went through
several editions, and of which the drift was that the nobility was utterly useless,
and that the Third Estate could better form a complete nation without it. Sieyès,
made famous by his pamphlets, became one of only three clerics elected by the
Third Estate to the Estates General. His very rigidity made him a leader of the
Third at Versailles in the face of the noble resistance. Where Mounier hoped for
voluntary integration of the three orders, Sieyès preferred that the upper two be
peremptorily summoned. It was Sieyès, against Mounier’s more cautious judg-
ment, who persuaded the Third to adopt the term National Assembly, on the
ground that the nation was assembled whether the privileged orders were present
or not. Sieyès, like Mounier, was elected by the Assembly to its constitutional
committee in July.
Mounier and Sieyès, though they came to stand for opposite views, actually
agreed on a good deal. Both detested the society of orders and estates. “Aristocracy
is the worst form of government,” said Mounier; “it degrades the public character.”^15
Sieyès could have said no more in so few words. Both were alarmed by popular
disturbances; both went along with the August decrees because they felt obliged
to; both were concerned for property, law, and order; both wanted a fixed and firm
constitution which would be durable, and under which no organ of government
would exceed the limits assigned to it. Both saw the need of obtaining in govern-
ment a true and authoritative representation of the people, one that should not
only truly reflect the national will, but have power to commit its constituents and
have its policies properly enforced. Both, as men of the eighteenth century, like
Adams or Jefferson, saw as one of the dangers in government a tendency for
elected personages to become self- perpetuating or even hereditary, to serve their
own interests, to cease to be truly representative, and yet become very difficult to
control or to remove. It was in means and procedures, more than in ends, that
Sieyès and Mounier differed. To explain why Sieyès prevailed in every case is to
explain a good deal of the Revolution.
To begin with, there was an important question of principle. Did the National
Assembly have to negotiate a constitution with the King? Were the Assembly and
the King independent legal authorities whose agreement was necessary for every
clause? Could the Assembly put into the constitution only what the King would
willingly approve? No American constitutional convention had ever faced these
questions.
Mounier was inclined to avoid such questions as a little too theoretical, to take
a common sense view, arguing that the King already existed as a reality, that the
country deeply respected the royal authority, that the Assembly enjoyed prestige
because the King had convoked it, and that the King in any case would be respon-
sible for enforcing the new constitution, so that it was only reasonable to seek his
genuine agreement on its terms. France, said Mounier, was not a tabula rasa, nor in
a state of nature, nor just “emerged from the forest”; nor in his opinion was the
Assembly a true convention nationale. It is significant that this term, which was to
15 Considérations sur les gouvernements et principalement sur celui qui convient à la France (August,
1789), 14.