Comparison Between the Bishop of Rodez, S. Colbert de Castlehill, a Figure Ignored by Historians, and Abbé Sieyès, Icon of the Revolution

Two ecclesiastics, members of the High Clergy or initiated into its administration, became involved in the Revolution in 1789: Seignelay Colbert de Castlehill, former Grand Vicar of the Archbishop of Toulouse, Loménie de Brienne, then Bishop of Rodez; Abbé Sieyès (1748–1836), Grand Vicar of Lubersac, Bishop of Chartres, author in 1788–1789 of the famous Qu'est-ce que le Tiers État? They took part in the provincial states of their regions, respectively Haute-Guyenne and Orléanais. They met in Versailles on 22 June 1789 shortly before the transformation of the General Estates into the National Assembly. On the same day, Bishop Colbert of Castlehill joined the Third Estate. Sieyès, although belonging to the Clergy, was elected in extremis deputy of the Tiers of Paris, a rare case for a religious. Both became deputies to the Constituent Assembly and, although their arguments differed, they both defended the tithe, that hated tax paid to the clergy, and with what arguments. They had in common an abstract and geometrical conception of the administrative division of the kingdom: they wanted to rationalise the administration of the country for the sake of better communication between administrators and citizens, without taking into account the singularity of the land and the landscape. This Enlightenment conception was not shared by all the Constituents, far from it. They each developed and adhered to a philosophy of natural law that sometimes intertwined with the idea of the happiness of civil and political societies. The thirteen years separating Colbert from Sieyès his junior, the fact that Colbert did not prolong his stay in France and his participation in the revolution, explain their difference in the implementation of natural law. Colbert chose religion and Sieyès the art of governing to which he was enjoined by events. Colbert was a man of the Enlightenment, like Sieyès, whose actions constitute a link between the ideas of emancipation and their revolutionary application.