Revolutionizing of the Revolution 411
Unprogressive in economic ideas, they were opposed to the actual course of
economic development, whether it be called bourgeois capitalism, industrialism, or
modernization. An American is bound to feel that these French popular demo-
crats had something in common with their contemporaries the Jeffersonian demo-
crats, and with the later Jacksonians, except that the French popular democrats
were typically not agrarians, and were prepared to see power in the hands of the
state. Their ideal was “a community of independent producers among whom the
State, by its laws, should assure an approximate equality.”^8
Such were the attitudes and ideals, and the popular democrats were highly po-
litical, as shown notably on August 10,1792. More often, however, it was hunger
and the fear of hunger that aroused them to take part in demonstrations and make
demands on the public authorities. The price of bread, even in normal times, in the
amount needed for a man with a wife and three children, was half as much as the
daily wage of common labor. A rise in its price brought disaster. At times, from
1793 to 1795, there was positive scarcity, to the point where bread and other food-
stuffs became unobtainable at any price. The effects became grimmer as one de-
scended the income scale. The fear of hunger colored all sans- culotte politics. It
motivated their demands on the Convention to obtain price controls, or repression
of hoarding and profiteering; it made the popular democrats favor the bourgeois
leaders who were willing at least temporarily to agree with them, and force the
expulsion of those who did not; it made them hate the “rich” and the “aristocrats”
because they ate better, or abhor and fear them, in the belief that the rich might
use popular starvation for their own political advantage. The economic class issue
was not at all between labor and capital, but between those who in times of scar-
city either did or did not face the possibility of actual hunger for themselves and
their children.
Violence, which has seemed to some an essential characteristic of the Paris pop-
ulace during the Revolution, seems to Soboul a natural byproduct of real events.
Violence, exaltation terroriste, buveurs de sang there were. The Septembriseurs were
drawn from sans- culotte ranks. But overwhelmingly the sans- culottes were not
violent men—or women. They were “often rough men, without education, their
souls inflamed by pov erty.”^9 Their violence was rarely wanton. It had an under-
standable aim. It was directed against the use of force by the counter- revolution.
There was fear, but it was well- grounded fear. The idea of an aristocratic conspiracy
was not baseless. There was the crisis of war and civil war, betrayal and secret con-
spiracy and the fear of the unknown. The guillotine in 1793 was welcomed and
idealized; it was the “popular ax,” the “scythe of equality,” and it was believed to
promote the supply of bread.
In the face of this uncouth manifestation of true popular revolution the Jacobins
divided. The Jacobins, in the strict sense of those who belonged to the Jacobin
Club, were, it must be repeated, almost all drawn from the middle class, and had at
least had enough education to make a speech in public, or even refer to the prog-
ress of humanity, the Greeks and Romans, and the famous authors of the Enlight-
8 Ibid., 473.
9 Ibid., 57 7.