The sans-culottes were the common people of the lower classes in late 18th
century France, a great many of whom became radical and militant partisans of
the French Revolution in response to their poor quality of life under the
Ancien Régime. The appellation sans-culottes refers to their lower
class status; culottes were the fashionable silk knee-breeches of the
nobility and bourgeoisie, as distinguished from the working class
sans-culottes, who traditionally wore pantalons, or trousers, instead. The
sans-culottes, most of them peasants and urban labourers, served as the driving
popular force behind the revolution. Though ill-clad and ill-equipped, they
also made up the bulk of the Revolutionary army during the early
years of the French Revolutionary Wars. The most fundamental political ideals of
the sans-culottes were social equality, economic equality, and popular
democracy. They supported the abolition of all the authority and privileges of
the monarchy, nobility, and Roman Catholic clergy, the establishment of
fixed wages, the implementation of price controls to ensure affordable food and
other essentials, and vigilance against counter-revolutionaries. The height of
their influence spanned from the original overthrow of the monarchy in
roughly 1789 to the Thermidorian Reaction in 1794. Throughout the
revolution, the sans-culottes provided the principal support behind the more
radical and anti-bourgeoisie factions of the Paris Commune, such as the Enragés
and the Hébertists, and were led by populist revolutionaries such as Jacques
Roux and Jacques Hébert. The sans-culottes also populated the ranks
of paramilitary forces charged with physically enforcing the policies and
legislation of the revolutionary government, a task that not uncommonly
included violence and the carrying out of executions against perceived enemies
of the revolution. During the peak of their influence, the
sans-culottes were seen as the truest and most authentic sons and daughters of
the French Revolution, held up as living representations of the revolutionary
spirit. During the height of revolutionary fervor, such as during the
Reign of Terror when it was dangerous to be associated with anything
counter-revolutionary, even public functionaries and officials actually
from middle or upper-class backgrounds adopted the clothing and label of the
sans-culottes as a demonstration of solidarity with the working class and
patriotism for the new French Republic. But by early 1794, as the bourgeois and
middle class elements of the revolution started gaining increasingly more
political influence, the fervent working class radicalism of the sans-culottes
rapidly began falling out of favor within the National Convention. It
wasn't long before Maximilien de Robespierre and his now dominant Jacobin
Club turned against the radical factions of the National Convention, including
the sans-culottes, despite them having previously been the strongest supporters
of the revolution and its government. Several important leaders of the Enragés
and Hébertists were imprisoned and executed by the very revolutionary
tribunals they had supported. The execution of radical leader Jacques
Hébert spelled the decline of the sans-culottes, and with the successive
rise of even more conservative governments, the Thermidorian Convention
and the French Directory, they were definitively silenced as a political
force. After the defeat of the 1795 popular revolt in Paris, the
sans-culottes ceased to play any effective political role in France until
the July Revolution of 1830. Appearance
The distinctive costume of typical sans-culottes featured:
the pantalon – in place of the culottes worn by the upper classes
the carmagnole the red cap of liberty
sabots Legacy
The popular image of the sans-culotte has gained currency as an enduring
symbol for the passion, idealism and patriotism of the common man of the
French Revolution. The term sans-culottism, sans-culottisme in
French, refers to this idealized image and the themes associated with it. Many
public figures and revolutionaries who were not strictly working class styled
themselves citoyens sans-culottes in solidarity and recognition. However, in
the period immediately following the Thermidorian Reaction the sans-culottes
and other far-left political factions were heavily persecuted and repressed.
The Republican Calendar at first termed the complementary days at the end of the
year Sans-culottides; however, the National Convention suppressed the name
when adopting the Constitution of the Year III and substituted the name jours
complémentaires. Analysis
According to Sally Waller, part of the sans-culottes mantra was "permanent
anticipation of betrayal and treachery". The members of the sans-culottes were
constantly on edge and fearing betrayal, which can be attributed to their violent
and radical rebellion tactics. Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm observes that
the sans-culottes were a 'shapeless, mostly urban movement of the labouring
poor, small craftsmen, shopkeepers, artisans, tiny entrepreneurs and the
like'. He further notes they were organised notably in the local political
clubs of Paris and "provided the main striking-force of the revolution".
Hobsbawm writes that these were the actual demonstrators, rioters and the
constructors of barricades. However, he also argues that sans-culottism provided
no real alternative to the bourgeois radicalism of the Jacobins. From
Hobsbawm's Marxist perspective, the ideal of the sans-culottes, which sought
to express the interests of the 'little men' who existed between the poles of
the bourgeois and the proletarian, was contradictory and ultimately
unrealizable. The Marxist historian Albert Soboul
emphasized the importance of the sans-culottes as a social class, a sort
of proto-proletariat that played a central role in the French Revolution.
That view has been sharply attacked by scholars who say the sans-culottes were
not a class at all. Indeed, as one historian points out, Soboul's concept
has not been used by scholars in any other period of French history.
Modern colloquial usage The women's fashion industry commonly
takes words that have historically been used to describe men's garments and uses
them to describe an entirely different garment, often creating confusion among
historians and history students and readers. For example, currently, the
term "culottes" in French is now used to describe women's underpants, an article
of clothing that has little or no relation to the historic culottes. The
term "sans-culottes" has been used to refer colloquially to mean not wearing
underpants. See also
French Revolution Enragés
Hébertists Descamisado
References Further reading
Andrews, Richard Mowery. "Social Structures, Political Elites and
Ideology in Revolutionary Paris, 1792–94: A Critical Evaluation of Albert
Soboul's' Les sans-culottes parisiens en l'an II'," Journal of Social History
19#1 pp 71–112. in JSTOR Furet, François and Mona Ozouf, eds. A
Critical Dictionary of the French Revolution, pp 393–99
Sonenscher, Michael. Sans-Culottes: An Eighteenth-Century Emblem in the French
Revolution. Pp. 493. Woloch, Isser, and Peter McPhee. "A
Revolution in Political Culture" in McPhee, ed., A Companion to the French
Revolution 435–453.