In the French Revolution, the sans-culottes (French pronunciation: [sɑ̃ kylɔt], without silk knee-breeches) were the radical militants of the lower classes; typically urban laborers. Though ill-clad and ill-equipped, they made up the bulk of the Revolutionary army during the early years of the French Revolutionary Wars.[1] The appellation refers to the fashionable culottes (silk knee-breeches) of the moderate bourgeois revolutionaries as distinguished from the working class sans-culottes, who traditionally wore pantalons (long trousers).[2][3]
Among the political ideals held by the sans-culottes were popular democracy, social and economic equality, affordable food, rejection of the Free market and free-market economy, and zealous pursuit of perceived counter-revolutionaries and political enemies.[4] During the peak of their influence, roughly 1792 to 1795, the sans-culottes provided the principal support behind the two far-left factions of the Paris Commune, the Enragés and the Hébertists.[2][5][6] Led by revolutionaries such as Jacques Roux and Jacques Hébert, the sans-culottes were rallied to provide critical support for the most radical left-wing factions in the successive governments of the revolution. Radicalized and militarized, the sans-culottes likely provided the material strength for the more violent and visceral events of the revolution, such as September massacres of 1792. During the Reign of Terror, they provided important support for the violent policies of Maximilien Robespierre and the Committee of Public Safety.
By early 1794, however, radicalism was rapidly losing influence and political legitimacy in the Paris Commune.[1] The far-left factions that enjoyed the support of the sans-culottes began feeling the wrath of Robespierre and the Committee of Public Safety, and the important leaders of the Enragés and Hébertists were imprisoned and executed by the very Revolutionary Tribunals they had supported.[1] With the absence of effective leadership and having lost their favor with the Jacobins, the sans-culottes withered.[1] Within a year of the execution of Robespierre and the Thermidorian Reaction the militants were forcibly - and permanently - suppressed by the more conservative new government, the French Directory.[7]
Contents |
The distinctive costume of typical sans-culottes featured:[1]
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.[8] The term sans-culottism (French: sans-culottisme) refers to this idealized image and the themes associated with it.[8] Many public figures and revolutionaries who were not strictly working class styled themselves citoyens sans-culottes in solidarity and recognition.[1] However, in the period immediately following the Thermidorian Reaction the sans-culottes and other far-left political factions were heavily persecuted and repressed.[1]
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 (1795) and substituted the name jours complémentaires.[1]
Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm claims that the sans-culottes were a 'shapeless, mostly urban movement of the labouring poor, small craftsmen, shopkeepers, artisans, tiny entrepreneurs and the like'.[9] He observes they were organised notably in the local political clubs of Paris and "provided the main striking-force of the revolution".[9] These were the actual demonstrators, rioters and the constructors of barricades. However, Hobsbawm argues that sans-culottism provided no real alternative to the bourgeois radicalism of the Jacobins.[9] From Hobsbawm's 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 unrealisable.[9]
"The sans-culottes (...) campaigned for a more democratic constitution, price controls, harsh laws against political enemies, and economic legislation to assist the needy."
In the summer of 1793 the sans-culottes, the Parisian enragés especially, accused even the most radical Jacobins of being too tolerant of greed and insufficiently universalist. From this far-left point of view, all Jacobins were at fault because all of them tolerated existing civil life and social structures.
They were also allied with the Enragés, the most extreme spokesmen on the left for the interests of the Parisian sans-culottes.