What Is the Third Estate?

What Is the Third Estate? is a political pamphlet by the French writer and clergyman Abbé Emmanuel Joseph Sieyès, written between 6 November and 12 December 1788 and published in January 1789, shortly before the French Revolution. It answered finance minister Jacques Necker's invitation to say how the Estates-General should be organised. Sieyès argued that the third estate, the common people, formed a complete nation in itself, that the clergy and nobility were unnecessary, and that the nation was sovereign; he asked for representation equal to the other two orders together and votes by head. Some 300,000 copies were printed, and it made Sieyès one of the leaders of the Estates-General.