The Issues and the Adversaries 399
Gironde, Mountain, Brissotins, Robespierrists, and Dantonists were really all
Jacobins.^15
At the extreme Left was the popular revolutionism so brilliantly described in a
recent book by Albert Soboul.^16 It was most especially voiced by the sans- culottes of
Paris between 1792 and 1794. The sans- culottes, who took this name in derision
for the knee- breeches or culottes of the middle and upper classes, which they nei-
ther wore nor owned, were the activists and militants among the really plain peo-
ple of Paris. More will be said of them shortly. They were small people unavoidably
engrossed in immediate matters. They, and their wives and children, were the ones
that went hungry if bread was unobtainable or too highly priced. No Jacobin, in
the strict sense, was ever really uncertain about his next meal. The sans- culottes
lived with this elemental problem. They rioted for bread. For them, the Revolution
would miscarry if it did not alleviate the economic and social condition of the
common man. Constitutions and legislative debates seemed to them remote and
unrealistic. They believed in direct action, and in direct democracy. They met lo-
cally, face to face, in neighborhood clubs, with like- minded acquaintances who
lived in the same streets. By the sovereignty of the people they meant what they
could do themselves. They distrusted representative and parliamentary institutions.
No mere delegate could long retain their confidence. To them it seemed that all
persons in the upper classes had to be closely watched, and among the “upper”
classes they included the gentlemen who paid dues to the Jacobin Club.
It was the self- assertion of these sans- culottes that made the “second” revolution
of 1792.
Meanwhile the Prussians continued their march toward the French frontiers.
The letters of Malouet to Mallet du Pan in June and July of 1792 had a prophetic
ring. It will be remembered that they were both conservatively liberal émigrés. Of
course, remarked Malouet, the Powers have no plan or intention of counter-
revolution. But when the Count of Artois and his retinue return, “they will make
the king do what suits them.” There is talk of a threatening manifesto to the city of
Paris. What madness! And Malouet gave a kind of answer to Noah Webster’s
question: “Do these people suppose that they can easily wipe out, like an idle fable,
that Declaration of Rights by which the French are so intoxicated?”^17
15 See Crane Brinton, The Jacobins: an Essay in the New History (New York, 1930), which stresses
their middle- class and radically ideological qualities.
16 See below, pp. 548–53.
17 Mémoires, II, 341–42, 354–55.