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the humiliating control of this estate by the aristocracy, even as he works on the primary theme of the Estates General voting methods.⁴¹ Instead of voting by head, so that a critical mass of commoner and commoner-sympathetic votes could be secured, the voting was to be done by orders. The First Estate with its aristocratic bishops dominating, and the Second Estate made up completely of aristocrats, would always outvote, two to one, the Third Estate. Consequently, “First claim of the Third Estate: that the representatives of the Third Estate be chosen solely from among citizens who really belong to the Third Estate.”⁴² It has been too easy for aristocrats, new and old, to be chosen by their districts, where they dominate the local people, as representatives in the Third Estate. And even if they do not go themselves, they can make sure that their Third Estate representatives do their dirty work. The “second claim” that Sieyès lays down is that the deputies to the Third Estate “be equal in number to those of the two privileged orders.”⁴³ Apparently tolerant of the disproportions in representation that occurred in much earlier centuries, he is indignant that two hundred thousand clergy and nobles of his own day should be allowed to dominate twenty-five or twenty-six million citizens. Voting by head, then, is, of course, the third claim of the Third Estate: “It is quite certain that unless votes are counted by head the true majority may be set aside, which would be the supreme difficulty, since it would render legislation null and void.”⁴⁴

      Naturally, a government dominated by aristocrats could not fairly and successfully go about reform, even though they have at times seemed more eager for reform than have been the torpid members of the Third Estate itself. In his fourth chapter, Sieyès finds once again that the members of the other Estates can do no right. If they want to help, it is in their own interest. If they make a move to pay taxes, it will be so that the Estates General will not have to meet at all: “More likely, one suspects, the nobility is trying to hoodwink the Third Estate at the price of a kind of anticipation of justice, in order to divert it from its current demands and so distract it from its need to be something in the Estates General.”⁴⁵ Other major examples of the unequal treatment meted out by the government are the use of taxes (to help poor nobility) and the tracking down and sentencing of criminals: “Who are the citizens the most vulnerable to personal harassment by the regular agents [agents de file] and by their subordinates in all parts of the administration? The members of the Third Estate.”⁴⁶

      Basic principles of operation and a statement of future agenda constitute the last two chapters. The nation is not part of some other entity; it is the whole. Consequently, the orders who stand apart from the citizenry are not part of the nation, and means for getting to and tabulating the population are essential. Another shot at the nobles, then: “There was once a time when the Third Estate was in bondage and the nobility was everything. Now the Third Estate is everything and the nobility is only a word.”⁴⁷ He is chagrined that, even so, the aristocracy can pretend to a new authority, more repressive than the previous authority. The Third Estate has to be true to itself. It should not see itself as an order, one of three Estates. It is the nation, and “its representatives constitute the whole National Assembly.”⁴⁸ More immediately, Sieyès’s expressed intransigence in discussion of the role of the Third Estate, equating it with the legislature, energized the Tennis Court scenario. Others, such as the comte de Mirabeau, feared going all the way, but on 17 June 1789 the Third Estate affirmed its identity as the National Assembly.

      Henri Grégoire

      Grégoire was born in the commune of Vého, which was once a province of the Holy Roman Empire known as Les Trois Évêchés, a region distinct from Lorraine proper. He complained that historical errors had led to misunderstandings about the entire western region of France, about Alsace-Lorraine in general and Les Trois Évêchés in particular. Yet he called Lorraine “our Lorraine” when he reviewed some of the hurts visited upon it from the Middle Ages onward.⁴⁹ His earliest religious experience would have been colored by the Jansenism of his mother, who herself was simply following the local curé.⁵⁰ Receiving his early education from the Jesuits, he clearly distinguished, in his Mémoires, the role of good Jesuits in his own formation from the role played by the whole order in church life. “I will carry with me to my grave a respectful attachment to my teachers, even though I do not at all like the spirit of the defunct society,” he wrote, in the belief that a revival of the society might well bring new problems to Europe.⁵¹ Youthful intellectual impressions stayed with him across the years. Antimonarchical texts such as De justa Henrici tertii abdicatione and Vincidiae contra tyrannos were the foundation of his antipathy to the monarchy of Louis XVI. And he never forgot how one elderly librarian responded to his search for books to “to amuse” himself with: “We only give out books here to learn from.”⁵²

      From Humanist to Pastor

      Both Pierre-Joseph de Solignac, secretary of the Polish king, Stanislaus, and author of a five-volume history of Poland, and Canon Gautier, who had published studies in science and history, helped Grégoire in his early attempts at poetry. He said that he loved “the joyful allure [aspect riant] of the Vosges, made to stir up the imagination.”⁵³ At Nancy, he studied one year of philosophy, and was then introduced by De Solignac to the “Jewish question” of the day. On to Metz for a second year of philosophy, a year of fundamental theology, and the lively influence of Adrien Lamourette, who believed that a return to the ways of the primitive Jerusalem church would bring about a golden age of Christianity. Antoine Sutter says of Lamourette’s early influence on Grégoire, “He not only hoped for regeneration and the primitive purity [of the church], he sang its praises, and his student was not deaf to the song.”⁵⁴ Grégoire ended his studies with two years of dogmatic theology at Pont-à-Mousson under the abbé Sanguiné, who won him over to Richerism, with its exaltation of the priest’s role in the church.

      In 1773, Grégoire entered a major essay contest sponsored by the Academy of Nancy with his Éloge de la poésie, recently cited by Alyssa Sepinwall as a capital text in distinguishing the early from the later Grégoire.⁵⁵ Here, too, there was little religious reference, certainly no specific Christian religious reference, but in its engaged, perhaps overheated, aestheticism it parallels Sieyès’s philosophically engaged, perhaps overblown, discussion of religion. Poetry is his “faithful lover,” the embodiment of perfection because it conjoins usefulness and pleasure.⁵⁶ Philosophical treatises, in contrast, have produced much less: “Philosophy persuades the mind and makes little progress; the poet leads the heart and wins over the person.”⁵⁷ There is praise of Virgil, Homer, Corneille, and the muses, and condemnation of those he considered promoters of vice: Catullus, Tibullus, and Ovid. Biblical poetry is praised subsequently: “The most sublime poetry, the most majestic, and all the riches of the secular Muses will never equal it.”⁵⁸ This was followed by virtually the only extended reference to God in the text: “Sometimes I see a merciful God who opens his hand, and the earth swims in abundance. Sometimes it is a terrible God who arms himself with wrath and makes the universe tremble from the sound of his lightning.”⁵⁹ Grégoire invokes the great and ringing sounds of praise in the Temple and the laments of the Jews in exile: “I open David’s Psalms. What energy, what nobility, what images.”⁶⁰ Nevertheless, as Sepinwall puts it, in this essay “Grégoire sounded like any classically trained young man using romantic metaphors.”⁶¹

      In the Éloge, there is a non-moralizing appreciation of the tenderness of women: “To hold back the destructiveness of your charms, must we add oriental cruelty to our own ways.”⁶² There is also great discretion in talking of the depths of his soul. One assumes he is speaking of Christ in the following lines, but is he necessarily? “For a long time my wavering heart searched for repose in the bosom of a friend.” There were other bonds of love that he broke when, as he said, “I learned to discern a true friend from those muddied souls that have only the tawdry jewelry of friendship; after such effort, I found my dear J....[sic].”⁶³ Grégoire exalts the role of poetry as a moral guide, but also shows its didactic importance in such diverse areas of life as astronomy, painting, and agriculture. Beauty is understood to be found in every area of life. He interpolates words of praise for Stanislas, father-in-law of the French king and ruler of the Les Trois Évêchés: “O

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