Sans-Culottes and the Part That They Played in Tthe French Revolution.1 It Is Also a Book About Rousseau, And, No Less Centrally, a Book About Salons
�1� INTRODUCTION: “ONE OF THE MOST INTERESTING PAIRS OF BREECHES RECORDED IN MODERN HISTORY” HIS is a book about the sans-culottes and the part that they played in Tthe French Revolution.1 It is also a book about Rousseau, and, no less centrally, a book about salons. Its aim is to try to show how the three subjects were connected, and by doing so, to begin to piece together the historical and intellectual setting in which the republican politics of the French Revolution first acquired their content and shape. This, in the first instance, entails going back quite a long way into the eighteenth century. It also involves trying to get behind many of the events and images now associated with what the sans-culottes became. These centre mainly on the crowds who stormed the Bastille in Paris in July 1789 and, more specifically, on the mixture of direct democracy and physical force that, according to an established range of historical interpretations, either was orchestrated deliberately or erupted spontaneously among the artisans and small shop keepers of urban France during the violent period of political conflict that occurred after the Parisian insurrection of 10 August 1792, and the trial and execution of Louis XVI in January 1793. By then, France had become a republic and, again according to the same range of established historical interpretations, the sans-culottes are usually described either as its social and political vanguard, or as the largely unwitting instruments of its Jacobin dominated politics.2 In one guise or another, however, the sans-culottes 1 It is also an attempt to correct some of the gaps or mistakes in Michael Sonenscher, “The Sans-Culottes of the Year II: Rethinking the Language of Labour in Revolutionary France,” Social History 9 (1984): 301–28; Work and Wages: Politics, Natural Law and the Eighteenth- Century French Trades (Cambridge, CUP, 1989), ch.
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