Political ideals
A
sans-culotte with a
halberd, by
Jean-Baptiste Lesueur
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.
[5]
The
sans-culottes (...) campaigned for a more democratic constitution, price controls, harsh laws against political enemies, and economic legislation to assist the needy.
[6]
They expressed their demands through petitions of the sections presented to the assemblies (the Legislative, and Convention) by the delegates. The sans-culottes had a third way of applying pressure to achieve their demands: the police and the courts received thousands of denunciations of traitors and supposed conspirators.
[7] The height of their influence spanned roughly from the original overthrow of the monarchy in 1792 to the
Thermidorian Reaction in 1794.
[4] 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.
[1]
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.
[8]
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 commonly 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 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.
[4]
But by early 1794, as the bourgeois and middle-class elements of the revolution began to gain more political influence, the fervent working-class
radicalism of the
sans-culottes rapidly began falling out of favour within the National Convention.
[4] It was not long before
Maximilien de Robespierre and the now dominant
Jacobin Club turned against the radical factions of the National Convention, including the
sans-culottes, despite their 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.
[4] The execution of radical leader Jacques Hébert spelled the decline of the
sans-culottes,
[4] 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.
[5]: 258–259 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.
