The educational and spiritual formations of Emmanuel-Joseph Sieyès and Henri Grégoire were similar, and both men possessed a worldly intellectual independence in their seminary days, Sieyès searching for meaning in philosophy and Grégoire in poetry. They were formed in an era when Catholic seminary education was a combination of the high ideals reset for priests at the Council of Trent and the practical worldliness of French social life at all levels. According to Trent, priests were to be mediators between God and the people in a ministry of preaching the gospel and presiding at worship, Mass, confession, and the other sacraments. The preaching and sacramental activity in the early careers of Sieyès and Grégoire has left few traces, especially for Sieyès, but even his silence about his priesthood could not hide the years of saying Mass. A major Sieyès biographer, Jean-Denis Bredin, writes, “One can doubt that he stayed away from [celebration of] the sacraments, for it was not that easy for an important vicaire to never ‘do’ priest. It is sure in any case that at Chartres he said Mass.”1 Though Grégoire was the totally dedicated priest and revolutionary, either one of two other major figures might have been considered as alternates to Sieyès: (1) Charles-Maurice de Talleyrand, one of those priests by default from the aristocracy, who in his last act as bishop of Autun assured the valid consecration of the first constitutional bishops, and thus apostolic continuity; (2) Joseph Fouché, member of the Catholic teaching congregation of the Oratorians, who emerged as a thoroughly secularized, even violent promoter of revolution, and who, under Napoleon, helped assure the incorporation of the constitutional bishops into the concordatory church. But of Talleyrand’s seminary days no documentation of intellectual and quasi-spiritual developments has survived, and Fouché was not an ordained priest. The theme here is formation, in any case.2
In major writings, published before the opening of the Estates General, Sieyès laid down a program for the rehabilitation of the state, and Grégoire, a program for the rehabilitation of religion in general by the regeneration of the Jews (of Europe) in particular. Sieyès and Grégoire were arguably the most influential priestly voices in French public life in the first three years of the revolution. They are impossible to miss in Jacques-Louis David’s unfinished yet famed canvas of the Tennis Court Oath of 12 June 1789: Sieyès seated at the central table faite podium for the reader of the oath (Jean-Sylvain Bailly, dean of the Third Estate) and Grégoire standing in the foreground slightly left, in a common embrace with the Carthusian monk, Dom Christophe Gerle, and the Protestant pastor Jean-Paul Rabaut Saint-Etienne. Dom Gerle, painted in as an appropriate actor by David, was absent that day, which leaves Sieyès and Grégoire as the featured priests. When they both arrived on the national scene, Sieyès had jettisoned the minimal God talk of his earlier years and Grégoire had jettisoned the worldly cultural discourse of his earliest essays. Whereas Sieyès was a political revolutionary for whom priesthood was little more than a job category, Grégoire was an engaged priest who was at the same time a political revolutionary. Sieyès and Grégoire represented the two polarities of revolutionary priesthood—total secularism and total commitment to ministry in the new political era—with Sieyès far above the religious “isms” in his own realm of philosophy and political theory, and with Grégoire firmly planted in mainline Gallicanism, leaning Jansenist in some ways, and much more Richerist when he was opposing Old Regime bishops than when he was presiding as a bishop of the Constitutional Church.3
Emmanuel-Joseph Sieyès
Neither before nor after ordination did the abbé Sieyès appear to have any of the formal religious commitment promoted in the Catholic theological and spiritual writings of the day. But he was the last in a long line of Old Regime priests who balanced their secularism and even, at times, total lack of religious faith with dedication to their intellectual and administrative tasks.4 As a young man, his drive for social advancement was uncomplicated by moral or professional vision. Short in stature, plain in looks, afflicted with poor skin, his physique and personality were perhaps no worse than average. His parents were dedicated churchgoers in Fréjus, the southern French city of Sieyès’s birth and upbringing, and his two older sisters, whom he said he loved more than all the other siblings, eventually joined the convent. The father, Honoré Sieyès, was the one who talked of God and morality in his correspondence with the future priest. Sieyès himself had only those practical, “get ahead” concerns, accepting the clerical state as a natural setting for the realization of social status and financial security, and any efforts he made on behalf of his brothers were geared toward the same goals.5 Neither as a youth nor as an adult of any age did Sieyès display any interest in female companionship or sexual pleasure. A misanthrope on the personal level, he eventually became, nevertheless, a passionate student of the human condition.6
Formation and Clerical Life
The Jesuits at Fréjus were Sieyès’s first teachers, but whether he left their school because his father wished it (as is said in the autobiographical Notice that has come down to us from the mature Sieyès) or because he simply was not invited to go on there, we do not know.7 He continued his studies at Draguignan with the Doctrinaires, a congregation that in southern France was on a par with the Jesuits, and he flirted briefly and fancifully with the idea of a military career. Inasmuch as priesthood was his family’s goal for him from the beginning, he prepared, in the totally unsystematic way of his day, for entrance into the clerical state. When he arrived at the seminary of Saint-Sulpice in Paris at the age of seventeen and a half, he had already been tonsured—officially, then, a cleric. The top seminary in France at that time, Saint-Sulpice had never fully realized the goals of the Council of Trent or the hopes of its founder, Jean-Jacques Olier. Instead, there was at best a conflict of disciplinary styles and at worst an apparent certification of spiritually directionless hangers-on.
Sieyès worked out his own range of studies and readings, primarily philosophical and social scientific. Music had real importance for him then; theology, none. In a manuscript labeled Projet de bibliothèque, he set about structuring his intellectual life. Otherwise he went about his serious study at the nearby Sorbonne (transferring from Saint-Sulpice to the nearby Vincentian seminary of Saint-Firmin) before taking on the full clerical obligations that came with ordination to the subdiaconate. The range of courses that were prerequisites to his licentiate forced him back into theology and church history, to the detriment of his social scientific studies. But, even so, by the time he was ordained in 1772, two years before finishing the licentiate, he had already laid the foundation of his future intellectual life.
Charles-Augustin Sainte-Beuve highlights, in his Causéries de lundi, Sieyès’s culture and originality: “Sieyès was a born master” in the sense that “he did not make use of any of the masters of his day: neither Encyclopedists nor Condillac nor Rousseau. Even politically, one cannot say that Sieyès had been a disciple of Rousseau; he had early passed judgment on, and refuted, him.”8 Probably he was preoccupied more with the observation of himself in the act of analyzing society, the economy, and the possibilities of revolution. Sainte-Beuve wrote that Sieyès’s sciences sociales consisted above all in the divisions of work, applied to the different functions and powers in society, and that an art social consisted in controlling popular energy: “Sieyès, the enemy of every privilege and of all aristocracy, had nonetheless distanced himself from pure democracy. And he believed that the art [social] consisted primarily in making popular energy reasonably applicable for modern nations, by means of a system of representation that he put together with infinite ingenuity.”9 His tabula rasa approach to politics and the economy extended to history also: “It seems to me that judging what is taking place by that which has already happened, is to judge the known by means of the unknown. It is better to judge the past on [the basis of] the present, and to acknowledge that so-called historical truths have no more reality than so-called religious truths.”10
Therefore, people as social, political, and economic actors were the objects of his