This pamphlet from 1789 depicts how Enlightenment era ideas and tropes connected with the nation found their way into French political culture and were later articulated in the highly charged atmosphere of the Revolution. As tracts such as the above indicate, the ideas and meanings circulating in contemporary scholarly and lexicographical works were well represented in the intense constitutional debates of the day, the nation being rendered at some points as a linguistic entity and ‘moral’ being, capable of both debasement and regeneration, and at others in its less esoteric guise as a body of people governed by the same laws. Some extended this later point to further assert, following ideas present again in writings of earlier vintage, that the nation was not only a body of people subject to the same laws – it was the very source of the power to make laws and the arbiter of their rectitude. By declaring therefore in his famous manifesto that the ‘third estate’ or commoners were ‘the nation,’ Abbé Sieyès was making a still larger statement on the nature of sovereignty.