Notice sur la vie de Sieyès, Membre de la première Assemblée Nationale et de la Convention, écrite à Paris, en messidor, deuxième année de l'ère républicaine (vieux style, juin 1794)
Contributions
- Emmanuel-Joseph Sieyès
- author
- Konrad Engelbert Oelsner
- author
- Claude-François Maradan
- publisher
Related resources
- has translation
- An account of the life of Sieyès, member of the first National Assembly, and of the Convention. Written at Paris, in Messidor, the second year of the Republican Æra, June and July, 1794. Translated from the French. Published in Switzerland, 1795 translation has paratext
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Notes
Unclear if the Notice was originally written by Oelsner and revised by Sieyes or the other way round. Either way, as the preface makes clear this (auto)biography was a concerted effort to clear Sieyes' name from various false accusations ("calomnie"), concluding with a vindication of all the charges that had been brought against him by the "opposition parties". Its timing (written in June and July 1794, in the months leading up to Robespierre's execution on 27 July 1794) may provide another clue. Oelsner, who lived in Paris from July 1790 to September 1794 and from April 1795 onwards, was also the author of 'Historical letters on the most recent occurrences in France', published in Wilhelm von Archenholz's journal Minerva under the pseudonym 'O'. This influential monthly provided German readers with a series of first-hand reports, alongside translations of key documents relating to the French Revolution. The philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel was a subscriber, and friend of Oelsner, and first encountered Volney's Ruines and Rabaut Saint-Etienne's 'Precis de l'histoire de la Revolution francaise pour 1792' in Minerva. Hegel referred to Sieyes and his ideas quite often in his own work and Oelsner also published a defence of Sieyes in the journal Klio (1796). For more on this, see James Schmidt, 'Cabbage Heads and Gulps of Water: Hegel on the Terror' (Political Theory 26:1, 1998)