Sans-Culottes: An Eighteenth-Century Emblem in the French Revolution

by Michael Sonenscher

This is a bold new history of the sans-culottes and the part they played in the French Revolution. It tells for the first time the real story of the name now usually associated with urban violence and popular politics during the revolutionary period. By doing so, it also shows how the politics and economics of the revolution can be combined to form a genuinely historical narrative of its content and course. To explain how an early eighteenth-century salon society joke about breeches and urbanity was transformed into a republican emblem, Sans-Culottes examines contemporary debates about Ciceronian, Cynic, and Cartesian moral philosophy, as well as subjects ranging from music and the origins of government to property and the nature of the human soul. By piecing together this now forgotten story, Michael Sonenscher opens up new perspectives on the Enlightenment, eighteenth-century moral and political philosophy, the thought of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and the political history of the French Revolution itself.

Genres: History, French Revolution, France, 18th Century

512 pages, Hardcover

First published September 4, 2008

About the author

Michael Sonenscher is a fellow of King's College, University of Cambridge. His books include Before the Deluge: Public Debt, and the Intellectual Origins of the French Revolution; Works and Wages: Nature Law, Politics and the Eighteen-Century French Trades; and The Hatters of Eighteenth-Century France.

Reviews

[JR Roach · Rating 5 out of 5]

At the start of the French Revolution, no one intended to turn the French monarchy into a republic. Almost everyone agreed that it would be impossible to do so in so large a state under conditions of such severe inequality. But then where did the republic, and the republicanism, come from that defined the course of the Revolution? In "Before the Deluge," Michael Sonenscher answered one half of this question by focusing on Sieyes's political thought, but Sieyes' constitutional plans gained little purchase in the National Assembly. Instead, in "Sans-Culottes," Sonenscher explores the origins and texture of the "patriot consensus" that dominated the course of the Revolution and eventually fractured into the Jacobin Terror.

Thanks to Benjamin Constant, it is a commonplace that the Jacobins sought to restore the "liberty of the ancients," and brought disaster on France by trying to create a Greco-Roman republic in modern times. Sonenscher reveals that the intellectual currents that eventually became Jacobinism were indeed heavily shaped by ancient philosophy and virtue, but hardly in the straight-forward sense we normally assume. His story starts with neo-Cynic critiques of the commercial society of Ancien Regime France, dominated by cultural artifice, inequality, self-dealing, luxury, artistic and scientific development, and the aristocratic patronage of the salons, alongside the constant specter of violent and destructive international competition. Writers bereft of aristocratic patronage and membership of a salon were "sans culottes" according to a contemporary joke, and they embraced ancient models of independence, virtue, and cultural simplicity (although crucially not political participation) embodied by figures like Diogenes as alternatives and denounced modern France as corrupt, inauthentic, and destined for disaster (a bit more culturally inflected version of the visions of disaster Sonenscher documented in "Before the Deluge").

Rousseau (in Kant's words "that subtle Diogenes") was a central figure for these Ancien Regime sans culottes. Rousseau provided the most sophisticated critique of modern society built on amour-propre, interdependence, and inequality (and itself influenced and made more resonant by Francois Fenelon's own moral critique of modern France), but also the bleakest prognosis: there was no going back to the state of nature and pre-commercial society and the monarchies of Europe were destined to collapse. The only institutional alternative, that of the small, self-sufficient agricultural republics he sketched out for Corsica and Poland, was not viable for France. Sonenscher's interpretation of Rousseau emphasizes that politically he did not provide any straightforward template for France's revolutionaries: only criticisms and dilemmas that underlined the nigh impossibility of reform.

Much of "Sans-Culottes" is spent documenting the strange intellectual resources that gave these "sans culotte" writers a viable path out of Rousseau's dead end for France. In short, speculations that theorized a thicker account of human sociability than Rousseau's pointed the way to a recovery of a more natural kind of human association founded on honest emotions, passions, and organic unity that could displace the artifice of court society. And positive evaluations of public debt provided an economic means of tackling inequality by levelling prosperity up, rather than necessitating the harsh imposition of equal austerity Fenelon proposed. The result would be a more equal society founded on the principles of talent, merit, and natural human association, and the means to reform would be a patriot king unilaterally striking against the aristocracy and financiers that stood in the way (a la Fenelon's vision of royal reform). What is important to emphasize is that contra Montesquieu and Rousseau, this "republicanism" was not dependent on a sharp analytical/institutional contrast between monarchies and republics. Rather, like Fenelon, the patriot consensus hoped to achieve a kind of republican equality and morality within the confines of a reformed monarchy.

Louis XVI's refusal or inability to play this role shattered these hopes and put the revolution on its path toward a republic. Sonenscher traces the political dilemmas - over the king and over the regime's fiscal policies that shattered this patriot consensus. As France's fiscal resources dwindled with rebellion in Haiti and aristocratic emigration, the Girondins were the first to turn to popular politics as the last remaining pillar of the regime: championing the moral integrity of Paris's poor "sans-culottes" against the Feuillants who had turned themselves into aristocratic clients by cooperating with the monarchy. As all recognized, this was a deeply dangerous and desperate move that was no one's first choice. The new regime no longer had the fiscal means or the time to use public debt to create the necessary economically equal basis for a free government. All knew from their classical history that establishing a republic in conditions of economic crisis, deep inequality, and foreign conflict was likely to end in disaster. But without the cooperation of a patriot king, a republic was the only means left of implementing the original patriotic agenda that had first animated the revolution. By accident, a program of anti-democratic reform had launched a democratic republic.

In these conditions, the republic had no good options, and Sonenscher argues that this recognition that France was on the verge of collapse (again informed by Rousseau's own pessimism) motivated the desperation of the Jacobin Terror. In these conditions, Abbe Mably's politics of necessity provided one violent and risky path to break the hold of luxury and restore the kind of need-based society capable of republican virtue and governance. The debate on the origins of the Terror, whether it was a necessary conclusion of the revolutionaries' radical ideology or a contingent product of desperate circumstances, misses the point that the Jacobins perception of and response to the desperate circumstances of the First Republic were a product of their own republicanism, which in itself demanded different kinds of political action depending on the circumstances. Which is why Robespierre could be a conventional advocate of royal patriotic reform in 1789 and a grim advocate of political violence in the name of the people in 1793. The hour had grown much later for republican reform, and the same kind of republican vision prescribed a very different medicine for very different circumstances.

When we finish this book, it's impossible to go back to conventional accounts of the revolution as the emergence of modern democratic political culture or as the rise of capitalist bourgeois society. Once we recover the complexity of 18th century thought, the 19th, 20th, and 21st century concepts that define contemporary scholarship simply have no descriptive or analytical purchase on the ideas, arguments, and possibilities that defined the origins, context, and course of the Revolution. The Revolutionaries did not set out to create anything recognizably modern, and to what extent their political project points anywhere it's to Napoleon's First Empire, with its combination of patriotic monarchy and legal equality, as Sonenscher alludes to at the end of his book, not to the liberal democracies of today. Understanding then how our own recognizably modern concepts and politics emerged in the wake of the Revolution is a far stranger and more complicated story - one that demands we trace the mixture of continuity and discontinuity as the intellectual world of the 18th century gives way to that of the 19th. This is exactly the story Sonenscher has started telling in his own "After Kant," and if that book is any guide we have so much more work to do to understand where we came from.

[Kin · Rating 4 out of 5]

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