Sans Culotte Public
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Sans Culotte Public
Robert Wilde is a historian who writes about European history. He is the author of the History in an Afternoon textbook series.
Wilde, Robert. "Overview of the Sans-culottes." ThoughtCo, Aug. 25, 2020, thoughtco.com/who-were-the-sans-culottes-1221898.
Wilde, Robert. (2020, August 25). Overview of the Sans-culottes. Retrieved from https://www.thoughtco.com/who-were-the-sans-culottes-1221898
Wilde, Robert. "Overview of the Sans-culottes." ThoughtCo. https://www.thoughtco.com/who-were-the-sans-culottes-1221898 (accessed September 7, 2022).
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The Sans-culottes were urban workers, artisans, minor landholders, and associated Parisians who took part in mass public displays during the French Revolution . They were frequently more radical than the deputies who formed the National Assembly, and their often violent demonstrations and attacks threatened and cajoled revolutionary leaders down new paths at key moments. They were named after an article of clothing and the fact that they didn’t wear it.
In 1789, a financial crisis caused the king to call a gathering of the ‘three estates’ which led to a revolution, the declaration of a new government, and a sweeping away of the old order. But the French Revolution wasn’t simply the rich and the noble versus a unified body of middle and lower class citizens. The revolution was driven by factions across all levels and classes.
One group that formed and played a massive role in the revolution, at times directing it, were the Sans-culottes. These were lower-middle-class people, craftsmen and apprentices, shopkeepers, clerks, and associated workers, who were often led by the true middle class. They were the strongest and most important group in Paris, but they appeared in provincial cities too. The French Revolution saw a remarkable amount of political education and street agitation, and this group was aware, active and willing to commit violence. In short, they were a powerful and often overwhelming street army.
So why ‘Sans-culottes?’ The name literally means ‘without culottes’, a culotte being a form of knee-high clothing that only the wealthier members of French society wore. By identifying themselves as ‘without culottes’ they were stressing their differences from the upper classes of French society. Together with the Bonnet Rouge and the triple colored cockade, the power of the Sans-culottes was such that this became a quasi-uniform of revolution. Wearing culottes could get you into trouble if you ran into the wrong people during the revolution; as a result, even upper-class French people sported the sans-culottes clothing to avoid potential confrontations.
Over the early years the Sans-culottes program, loose as it was, demanded price-fixing, jobs, and crucially provided support for the implementation of the Terror (the revolutionary tribunal that condemned thousands of aristocrats to death). While the Sans-culottes' agenda was originally focused on justice and equality, they quickly became pawns in the hands of experienced politicians. In the long run, the Sans-culottes became a force for violence and terror; the people at the top were only ever loosely in charge.
Robespierre, one of the leaders of the revolution, attempted to guide and control the Parisian Sans-culottes. Leaders, however, found that it was impossible to unify and direct the Parisian masses. In the long run, Robespierre being arrested and guillotined, and the Terror stopped. What they had instituted began to destroy them, and from them on the National Guard were able to defeat the Sans-culottes in contests of will and force. By the end of 1795 , the Sans-culottes were broken and gone, and it is perhaps no accident France was able to bring in a form of government that managed change with far less brutality.
Nicolas Biggs | French Revolution | January 12, 2021 February 24, 2020
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The sans-culottes, the name for the commoners that fought against the monarchy during the rebellion, were arguably the heart and soul of the French Revolution .
With their name derived from their choice in apparel — loose fitting pantaloons, wooden shoes, and red liberty caps — the sans-culottes were workers, artisans, and shopkeepers; patriotic, uncompromising, egalitarian, and, at times, viciously violent. Ironically, given its origin as a term to describe men’s breeches, the term “culottes” in French was used to describe women’s underpants, an article of clothing that has little or no relation to the historic culottes, but now refers to apparent skirts that are actually split with two legs. The term “sans-culottes” has been used colloquially to mean not wearing underpants.
Sans-culottes were quick to take to the streets and deal out Revolutionary justice through extralegal means, and images of severed heads falling into baskets from the guillotine, others stuck on pikes, and general mob violence are closely associated with them.
But, despite their reputation, this is a caricature — it does not fully capture the breadth of the sans-culottes’ impact on the course of the French Revolution.
They were not only a disorganized violent mob, but were also important political influencers who had ideas and visions of a republican France that hoped to do away, once and for all, with aristocratic privilege and corruption.
The sans-culottes were the shock troops that stormed the Bastille , the insurrectionaries that overthrew the monarchy, and the people who — on a weekly and sometimes even daily basis — gathered in the political clubs in Paris that gave representation to the masses. Here, they deliberated the most pressing political issues of the day.
They had a distinct identity, exclaiming it for all to hear on September 8, 1793 :
“We are the sans-culottes… the poor and virtuous… we know who our friends are. Those who freed us from the clergy and from the nobility, from feudalism, from tithes, from royalty and from all the plagues that follow in its wake.”
The sans-culottes expressed their new freedoms through their clothing, transforming dress which had been a mark of poverty into a badge of honour.
Sans-Culottes translates to “without breeches” and it was meant to help distinguish them from members of the French upper-classes who often wore three-piece suits with breeches — tight-fitting pants that hit just below the knee.
The restrictiveness of this clothing signified a status of leisure, a status of being unfamiliar with the dirt and drudgery of hard work. French workers and craftsmen wore loose-fitting clothing which was much more practical for manual labor.
Loose-fitting pantaloons contrasted so sharply with the restrictive breeches of the upper-classes that it would become the rebels’ namesake.
During the most radical days of the French Revolution, loose fitting pants became such a symbol of egalitarian principles and Revolutionary virtue, that — at the peak of their influence — even the sans-culottes’ educated, wealthy bourgeois allies adopted the fashion of the lower classes [1]. The red ‘cap of liberty’ also became the normal headgear of the sans-culottes.
The dress of the sans-culottes was not new or different, it was the same style of dress which had been worn by the working-class for years, but the context had changed. The celebration of lower-class dress by the sans-culottes was a celebration of the new freedoms of expression, socially, politically, and economically, that the French Revolution promised.
Sans-culotte politics were influenced by a mix of Roman Republican iconography and Enlightenment philosophy. Their allies in the National Assembly were the Jacobins, the radical republicans who wanted to get rid of the monarchy and revolutionize French society and culture, though — classically educated and sometimes wealthy — they were often frightened of the sans-culottes’ attacks on privilege and wealth.
For the most part, the aims and objectives of the sans-culottes were democratic, egalitarian and wanted price controls on food and essential commodities. Beyond that, their aims are unclear and open to debate.
Sans-culottes believed in a type of direct democratic politics which they practiced through the Paris Commune, the city’s governing body, and the Sections of Paris, which were administrative districts that arose after 1790 and dealt with issues in particular areas of the city; representing the people in the Paris Commune. Sans-culottes often commanded an armed force, which they used to make their voice heard in greater Parisian politics.
Although the Parisian sans-culottes are the most well known, they were active in municipal politics in towns and cities throughout all of France. Through these local institutions, shopkeepers and craftsmen could influence Revolutionary politics by petitions, demonstrations, and debates.
But sans-culottes also practiced “politics of force” — to put it lightly — and tended to see people’s beliefs regarding the subject as a clear us versus them . Those who were traitors to the Revolution were to be dealt with swiftly and violently [2]. The sans-culottes were associated by their enemies with the street-mob excesses of the French Revolution.
Pamphlet writing was an important part of Parisian politics. The sans-culottes read radical journalists and discussed politics in their homes, public spaces, and at their workplaces.
A man, and a prominent member of sans-culottes, by the name of Jacques Hébert, was a member of the “Society of the Friends of the Rights of Man and the Citizen,” also known as the Cordeliers Club — a popular organization for the group.
However, unlike other radical political clubs which had high membership fees that kept membership exclusive to the privileged, the Cordeliers Club had low membership fees and included uneducated and illiterate working people.
To give an idea, Hébert’s pen name was Père Duchesne, which drew on a popular image of a Parisian common worker — haggard, a liberty cap on his head, wearing pantaloons, and smoking a pipe. He used the sometimes-vulgar language of the Parisian masses to criticize the privileged elites and agitate for revolutionary change.
In an article criticizing those who denigrated women’s participation in Revolutionary politics, Hébert wrote, “ F*&k! If I had my hands on one of these buggers who speak ill of beautiful national acts it would be my pleasure to give them a f^%king hard time.” [3]
Like Hébert, Jacques Roux was a popular sans-culottes figure. Roux was a priest from the lower-classes who seethed against the inequalities in French society, earning himself and his allies the name “Enragés.”
In 1793, Roux delivered one of the more radical statements of sans-culottes politics; he attacked the institutions of private property, condemned rich merchants and those who profited from hoarding goods like food and clothes — calling for these staples of basic survival and welfare to be made affordable and readily-available for the lower classes who made up a large part of the sans-culottes.
And Roux didn’t only make enemies of aristocrats and royalists — he went so far as to attack the bourgeois Jacobins, challenging those who professed to be for liberty, equality, and fraternity to turn their lofty rhetoric into concrete political and social change; making enemies amongst the wealthy and educated but self-declared “radical” leaders [4].
Marat was an ardent Revolutionary, political writer, doctor, and scientist whose paper, The Friend of the People , called for the overthrow of the monarchy and the establishment of a republic.
He viciously criticized the Legislative Assembly for its corruption and betrayal of Revolutionary ideals, attacked unpatriotic military officers, bourgeois speculators exploiting the French Revolution for profit, and praised the patriotism and honesty of craftsmen [5].
The Friend of the People was popular; it combined social grievances and fears of betrayal by liberal nobles in fiery polemics that inspired the sans-culottes to take the French Revolution into their own hands.
In general, Marat tried to play the role of an outcast. He lived in the Cordellier — a neighborhood that would become synonymous with sans-culottes ideals. He was also rude and used combative and violent rhetoric that was displeasing to many Parisian elites, thus confirming his own virtuous nature.
The first hint of the potential power coming from sans-culotte street politics came in 1789.
As the Third Estate — representing the commoners of France — was snubbed by the Crown, clergy, and nobility in Versailles, a rumor spread through the workers’ quarters of Paris that Jean-Baptiste Réveillon, a prominent wallpaper factory owner, was calling for cutting Parisians’ wages.
In response, a crowd of hundreds of workers gathered, all armed with sticks, marching, shouting “Death to aristocrats!” and threatening to burn Réveillon’s factory to the ground.
On the first day, they were stopped by armed guards; but on the second, brewers, tanners, and unemployed stevedores, among other workers along the Seine — the main river in Paris — formed a larger crowd. And this time, guards would fire into the mass of people.
This would be the bloodiest riot in Paris until the insurrections of 1792 [6].
As political events during the hot summer days of 1789 radicalized the commoners of France, the sans-culottes in Paris continued to organize and develop their own brand of influence.
J. Humbert was a Parisian who, like thousands of others, took up arms in July of 1789 after hearing that the king had dismissed a popular and capable minister — Jacques Necker.
Necker was seen by the Parisian sans-culottes as a friend of the people who solved the problems of aristocratic privilege, corruption, speculation, high bread prices, and poor government finances. Without him, vitriol spread through the public.
Humbert had spent his day patrolling the streets when he caught word that arms were being distributed to the sans-culottes; something big was happening.
Managing to get his hands on a musket, no ammunition was left available to him. But as he learned that the Bastille was being sieged — the imposing fortress and prison that was a symbol of the power of the French monarchy and aristocracy — he packed his rifle with nails and set off to join the attack.
Half a dozen musket shots and the threat of firing a cannon later, the drawbridge was lowered, the garrison surrendering to the mob that stood at hundreds of people strong. Humbert was within the first group of ten to rush through the gates [7].
There were few prisoners at the Bastille, but it represented the repressive power of the absolutist monarchy that possessed and starved the country. If it could be destroyed by the common people of Paris, there stood very few limits to the sans-culottes’ power.
The Storming of the Bastille was a demonstration of the extralegal power that the people of Paris commanded — something which went against the political sensibilities of the lawyers and reformist nobles that filled the Constituent Assembly.
In October 1789, a crowd of Parisian women marched to Versailles — the home of the French monarchy and a symbol of the Crown’s distance from the people — demanding the royal family accompany them to Paris.
Physically moving them was another important gesture, and one that came with political consequences.
Like the Bastille, Versailles was a symbol of royal authority. Its extravagance, court intrigue, and physical distance from the commoners of Paris — being located outside the city proper and hard for anyone to get to — were markers of a sovereign royal authority that was not contingent on the support of the people.
The assertion of power made by the women of Paris was too much for the legally minded property owners that composed the leading bloc in the Constituent Assembly — the first legislative body created after the outbreak of the French Revolution, which was busying itself with crafting the new constitution and considered itself as France’s source of political authority.
In response to this march on Versailles, it was forced to pass a law banning “unofficial demonstrations” with the intentions of limiting the influence of the sans-culottes [8].
The reform-minded Constituent Assembly saw the sans-culottes as a threat to the constitutional system they were trying to craft. This would have replaced the absolute, god-given authority of the pre-Revolutionary monarchy with a monarchy that was instead deriving authority from the constitution.
The wrench in their plans was the sans-culottes and the power of the crowd, which had no interest in a monarch of any kind; a crowd that had shown itself to be capable of overturning royal power outside of the rules and norms of the Constituent Assembly, or any governmental body at all for that matter.
In order to understand the role of the sans-culottes in Revolutionary politics, a quick sketch of the political map of Revolutionary France is in order.
Revolutionary politics can be broken down into factions, but those factions did not correspond to one of today’s modern, organized political parties, and their ideological differences were not always very clear.
This is when the idea of a left to right political spectrum — with those favoring social equality and political change on the left, and conservatives favoring tradition and order on the right — emerged into society’s collective consciousness.
It came from the fact that those favoring change and a new order literally sat on the left side of the chamber in which constituents met, and those favoring order and maintaining traditional practices sat on the right side.
The first elected legislative body was the Constituent Assembly, formed in 1789 at the start of the French Revolution. This was followed by the Legislative Assembly in 1791, which was then supplanted by the National Convention in 1792.
Circumstances changed frequently and relatively quickly with the tumultuous political climate. The Constituent Assembly had tasked itself with crafting a constitution to replace the monarchy and the antiquated legal system of parliaments and estates — which divided French society into classes and determined representation, giving more to the wealthy elite who were much fewer in number but who controlled most of France’s property.
The Constituent Assembly created a constitution and passed the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen, which established universal, natural rights for individuals and protected everyone equally under the law; a document that remains a milestone in the history of liberal democracy today.
However, the Constituent Assembly essentially dissolved itself under heavy political pressure, and, in 1791, elections were held for what was to be the new governing body — the Legislative Assembly.
But under the direction of Maximilien Robespierre — who would eventually become one of the most notorious and powerful people in French Revolutionary politics — anyone who sat in the Constituent
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