Crise de l'Ancien Régime, crise des idéologies : une année dans la vie de Sieyès

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Crisis of the Ancien Régime, Crisis of Ideologies: a Year in the Life of Sieyès This study concerns a limited field: Sieyes' publications dating from the end of the summer of 1788, the moment of the commencement of the "Etats generaux" from his Essai sur les privilèges to the third edition of Qu'est-ce que le Tiers Etat? More generally, my aim is to understand, in the ideological realm, a form of what Tocqueville calls the radicalism of moderates. I will show how Sieyès was led, by necessity, to rethink fundamental concepts, rather than simply inheriting them ready madefrom the Enlightenment philosophers: e.g. "philosopher" versus "administrator", "nation"/ "contract", etc. In redefining the philosopher as a man of both the future and the whole, whose horizon is the nation—reconceptualized on the basis of representation— Sieyès lays down an unheralded image of political man which is both a vision of the future and a circumstancial response to the crisis. The goal of this study is also to try to perfect, alongside the notion of revolution, an approach to the difficult notion of crisis in the history of ideology.