Through the revolutionary storms and the murderous epochs which had successively seen all the great actors in the political struggles disappear from the scene, the Abbé Sieyès emerged as a veteran associated with the first free impulses of the nation. In 1789, his pamphlet, "What is the Third Estate?" had arrested the attention of all serious minds. He had several times, and in decisive circumstances, played an important part in the Constituent Assembly. Since his vote of the 20th January, and until the 9th Thermidor, he remained in voluntary obscurity; mingling since then in all great theoretical discussions, he had exercised a preponderating influence in recent events. From revolution to revolution, popular or military, he came out in the part of legislator, his spirit escaping from the influence of pure democracy. He had formerly proposed the banishment _en masse_ of all the nobility, and he still nursed in the depths of his soul a horror for all traditional superiority. He had said, "Whoever is not of my species is not my fellow-creature; the nobles are not of my species; they are wolves, and I fire upon them." He had, however, been brought, by his reflections and the course of events, to construct eccentric theories, of a factitious aristocracy, the wielders of power to the exclusion of the nation, recruited from a limited circle--a disfigured survival of the Italian republics of the middle ages, without the free and salutary action of representative government. "Confidence ought to proceed from below, and power to act from above," declared the appointed legislator of the 18th Brumaire. He himself compared his political system to a pyramid, resting on the entire mass of the nation, terminating at the top in a single man, whom he called the Great Elector. He had not the courage to pronounce the word king.