Emmanuel Joseph Sieyès and Thomas Paine

Emmanuel Joseph Sieyès and Thomas Paine were the two great pamphleteers of the revolutionary age, Sieyès the abbé whose What Is the Third Estate? of January 1789 answered, everything, and who lived to help Napoleon to power, and Paine the English staymaker whose Common Sense made the American Revolution and whose Rights of Man answered Burke. In July 1791, after the king’s flight to Varennes, they debated in the Paris press whether France should become a republic, Paine arguing for one and Sieyès for a constitutional monarchy as the surer guard of liberty. The exchange is the clearest statement of the choice the Revolution faced.