Revolutionizing of the Revolution 409
most important of these writers is Albert Soboul of Paris, from whom the fol-
lowing description is mainly drawn.^6
In the years from 1792 to 1795 the more aggressive and class- conscious of these
small people proudly called themselves sans- culottes, spurning the knee- breeches
of their social superiors; and the term sans- culottisme can be understood to mean
the aroused and politically active state of these people during the two or three
years that it lasted.
These sans- culottes were in effect popular democrats. In the crisis and break-
down of 1792 they represented an enormous wave of citizen self- help. They ap-
plied the great concepts of liberty, equality, and the sovereignty of the people to
themselves and to the concrete circumstances with which they were personally fa-
miliar. They believed that they themselves were sovereign, in face- to- face contact
in their section meetings; and that distant elected persons were only their dele-
gates, often not to be trusted. They favored what a later generation in America
would know as the referendum and recall. “Consent of the people” meant their
consent in their own assemblies. The right to bear arms meant that they should
carry pikes in their own streets. The judgment of the people meant that they should
denounce their own neighbors for suspicious behavior or unsuitable sentiments,
and that their own committees should put them under arrest. They resisted at-
tempts at control of their activities by the Convention and its Committee of Pub-
lic Safety in 1793.
If they thus presumed to exercise sovereignty, they accepted the corresponding
responsibilities; they were ready to give their time, to act and to fight. The younger
ones were gradually absorbed into the army. They spent long hours at meetings,
and in the work of committees, or on the exposure of suspects, or on errands and
missions and patrols about the city, or in exchange of delegations with sister
groups, or in semi- military formations in which men from the city went into rural
areas to procure food from the peasants, or bring patriotic pressure to bear in other
communities.
Shopkeepers, retail merchants, traders, artisans, small manufacturers, hired la-
borers, porters, water- carriers, waiters in cafés, janitors in buildings, barbers, wig-
makers, stonemasons, and makers of ladies’ hats, they were the people of Paris
without the frosting—and generally without the dregs, since the vagrant, the
shiftless, and the delinquent did not become true sans- culottes. Some lived by a
daily wage, some by the sale of articles of their own production, some by the
proceeds of retail shopkeeping, and a few indeed by the income of their capital.
Among men arrested in 1795 as dangerous sans- culottes were a dyer with a for-
tune of 21,600 livres, and others owning workshops that employed sixty men. No
less than 1,311 individual sectionnaires of the height of the Terror have been
6 A. Soboul, Les sans- culottes parisiens en l ’an II (Paris, 1958). See also R. C. Cobb, “Quelques
aspects de la mentalité révolutionnaire, avril 1793- Thermidor an II,” in Revue d ’ histoire moderne et
contemporaine, VI (1959), 81–120. Both these works refer to a period slightly later than the one dis-
cussed here, but apply in general to late 1792. See my article discussing these and other writings,
“Popular Democracy in the French Revolution,” in French Historical Studies, I (1960), 445–69. Cobb’s
full work has also now appeared: Les armées révolutionnaires: instrument de la Terreur dans les départe-
ments, avril 1793- floréal an II, 2 vols. (Paris, 1963).