The French Revolution and the Temporality of the Collective Subject between Sieyès and Marx

I shall examine the ‘stakes’of the French Revolution from two perspectives: that of Sieyès and that of Marx. The former, Sieyès, an influential theoretician of the Revolution, ‘ideologist’ of the Third Estate, played a crucial role in the initial years of the Revolution; the latter, in many ways, adopted the French Revolution – the Revolution par excellence, the mother of all revolutions – as a model for the communist revolution. But the comparison between the two thinkers focuses on the question of political temporality. This comparison aims to underline the clear difference, from a temporal perspective, between the collective subject of Sieyès and that of Marx, using the common reference to the French Revolution as a starting point.