Volume 3, Number 1 · August 20, 1964
Bourgeois manifesto
By Peter Gay
What Is The Third Estate?
by Emmanuel Joseph Sieyès, translated by M. Blondel, edited by S.E. Finer, with an Introduction by Peter Campbell
Praeger, 215 pp., $5.00
Political pamphlets sometimes have surprising careers. Most of them are ephemeral production; they last their appointed time and vanish. But a few of them outlive ponderous treatises ostensibly written for the ages: the Communist Manifesto is treated as a classic in political theory, Luther's ringing Pagan Servitude of the Church, as a great document in religious history. Sieyès's What Is the Third Estate?, the Bourgeois Manifesto of the French Revolution, is not quite in the second category. Nor is it in the first: it deserves to survive, and so this version, the first complete edition in English, in a clear and accurate translation, is welcome. It has been supplied with considerable apparatus—a substantial, imaginative Introduction by Peter Campbell, and technical and historical notes by S. E. Finer, who provides essential information on the genesis of the pamphlet and on the issues to which it addresses itself—but this apparatus, weighty though it seems for such a relatively slight work, is by no means otiose. Neither Sieyès's pamphlet, which was a stunning success, nor Sieyès's career, which was (at least so far as France is concerned) a rather dreary failure, is well known outside a narrow circle of specialists.
Review, 663 words
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