Permanent Guillotine, The: Writings of the Sans-Culottes

  INTRODUCTION

When the Bastille was stormed and taken on July 14, 1789, it wasn’t a crowd of breeches-wearing professionals that marched through the streets, attacked the prison, freed the internees, and killed its superintendent, carrying off his head on a pike. It was the working people of Paris, men who didn’t wear breeches, the sans-culottes, who carried this out.

Two years later, on July 17, 1791, when the king was captured attempting to flee France and join his kindred in neighboring countries to make war on the revolutionary state, when the moderates of the Revolution were quite content to allow the king to maintain a defanged role in French life, it was these same sans-culottes who gathered on the Champ de Mars to demand the founding of a republic and who were brutally shot down.

A year later, with their revolutionary Fatherland in danger, again the sans-culottes went into action, emptying the prisons of Paris of enemies of their new republic, massacring imprisoned priests who had refused to swear loyalty to the republic, and setting up popular tribunals that resulted in a spontaneous Terror that led to the deaths of 1,100 foes. As a participant in these acts later wrote, While we shuddered with horror at what was being done, we nevertheless realized that the massacres were inspired by the dictates of justice.

When just weeks later the time had come to carry revolutionary war to the enemy and the government called for volunteers, within a single week fifteen thousand men, almost all sans-culottes, answered the call, and at the Battle of Valmy they defeated the leagued forces of the émigrés, Prussia, Austria, and Hesse. As Albert Soboul wrote in his majestic history of the Revolution: Against a professional army composed of highly disciplined men who passively obeyed the orders they received, the new army, national and popular in spirit, had fought and emerged victorious. And as Goethe, who was at the battle, said in one of his conversations with Eckermann: This day and place open a new era in world history. And indeed, on September 21, 1792, the day the news of the victory reached the National Convention, royalty was abolished and the French Republic was proclaimed.

And then a year later, in 1793, when the campaign of dechristianization was launched, it was again the sansculottes who pushed it hardest. The campaign, which began with the establishing of the republican calendar, replacing the existing one with a more rational division of time, including a ten-day week, and replacing the former names of months with names related to nature, had started out cautiously when it was directed from above. Cemeteries were secularized and carrying out any religious functions outside churches was banned. And then the sans-culottes, particularly the outspoken and profane Jacques Hébert, through the voice of his paper Le Père Duchesne, joined the campaign, and it took off in earnest. The cult of revolutionary martyrs replaced that of Christian martyrs; the bishop of Paris was forced to resign; and on November 10, 1793, a Festival of Liberty and Reason was held at Notre Dame Cathedral, complete with a mountain constructed in the church (symbolizing the Jacobins and the left), and the church itself was reconsecrated to the Cult of Reason. How far to the left the sans-culottes were became clear when they demanded that the state cease paying the salaries of priests: Robespierre and the Jacobins opposed the measure, fearing it would alienate neutral nations. The Jacobin government’s success in slowing the pace of dechristianization was a pyrrhic one: it was the first clear sign of the Jacobin’s fear of the sans-culottes, and halting dechristianization was the opening salvo in crushing the sans-culottes as an independent revolutionary force. The disappearance of this revolutionary wing ultimately left the Jacobins with no allies when they in turn were crushed on 9 Thermidor—July 27, 1794.

As Albert Soboul said of them in his study, The Sans-Culottes: The Revolution was to a large extent their making. From the spring of 1789 to the spring of 1795, from the fourteenth of July to Prairial, Year III, they consecrated their energy to it. They placed all their hopes in it. They lived and suffered for it.

Who, then, were these sans-culottes, and what did they want of the Revolution they so loved?

It would be a serious mistake to view them as the working class. Though they were the precursors of the working class, in the conditions of late eighteenth-century France no such class truly existed. They were not factory workers, for there were no factories. They were a disparate group of small merchants, independent artisans, and hired laborers who had many desires in common, but not all, and so their demands, when they made them, reflected this multiplicity of points of view. However idealist and imprecise it might sound, the name given them by Jules Michelet, the greatest of French historians, might be the one that best characterizes them: the people.

Standing against them was the aristocracy, and just as the people can mean many things, so can the aristocracy. For the sans-culottes anyone respectable was an aristocrat. They hated the aristocrats even for their attire: the clothing you wore expressed your political attitude (thus the king’s popularity the day he donned the bonnet phrygien, the Liberty Bonnet that symbolized the Revolution) and to be decked out in finery was to be suspect. To wear fine clothing, to wear breeches, meant you were one of those who charged extortionate rents; who hoarded goods, thus raising their prices; who looked down of the people and their needs; who supported the king. So strong was this hatred of the respectable that in Year III, at the meeting of a revolutionary section, a woman called for the guillotining of every single respectable person.

The positive sans-culotte demands did not include a socialist France, and when later historians like Daniel Guérin criticize their spokesmen for failing to establish a revolutionary vanguard party that would have led them to a socialist paradise, their criticism is revelatory of their lack of historical perspective and of an exacerbated case of anachronism. The sans-culottes were the most revolutionary section of the populace, insisting on the total dismantling and physical destruction of much of the old ruling class—the permanent guillotine was their ideal of justice—and though some of their demands do indeed have a socialist tinge, that is really the most that can be said for them. They wanted price controls put in place and maximum prices set for subsistence goods. They didn’t want to abolish private property, but rather wanted restrictions on the amount that could be owned: they were merchants themselves and had no interest in seeing their livelihoods nationalized. In fact, as we see below in The Sans-Culotte Alphabet, they don’t want to take property for the simple reason that I wouldn’t want anyone to take mine. What they wanted was for there to be equality, absolute equality, believing that anything owned beyond the necessary was a superfluity. Their enemies were profiteers and hoarders, those who had any ties to the ancien régime, and those who provided goods of different quality to the wealthy and to the people. But it must be said again: the sans-culottes were not a class. Most of them were either artisans who made their living by the sweat of their brows or merchants of varying degrees of wealth and success. Expecting people with these varied interests to advance down the road to socialism is thus foolhardy, and to condemn them for failing to attain it unjust.

As The Sans-Culotte Alphabet demonstrates, they often considered themselves not an independent force, but rather the most militant supporters of the Jacobins, striving to keep that group on the revolutionary straight and narrow, though they were also strong in the Cordeliers Club. Robespierre and the Jacobins, skillful politicians that they were, made use of elements of the sans-culotte program to keep them within the fold, most importantly in the imposition of the maximum, and as we have seen allowed them a certain amount of freedom, but not total freedom, in the dechristianization campaign. When any of their demands became too radical, or they posed a threat to the Jacobins and thus, in the eyes of the latter, to the Revolution itself, they were brutally brought back into line. More particularly, it was their leaders who were brought back into line and eventually guillotined.

Whatever the strength of the spontaneous outbursts of the masses, and however important the revolutionary sections were in giving vent to the ideas and sentiments of the sans-culottes, there nevertheless arose among them, or, more precisely, there went among them men who served as the primary voices of this diffuse mass.

Most important was Jacques Hébert, best known for his newspaper, written in the persona of the furnace maker Père Duchesne, who spoke the invective-filled French of the sans-culottes (though Hébert himself was the son of a bourgeois and called for the most extreme measures against the enemies of the Revolution: guillotining of the aristocracy, revolutionary war until victory, and insistence that the only way to ensure that profiteers weren’t hoarding goods after the imposition of the maximum was executions and the use of the army for requisitioning).

These ideas ultimately led him to become a ferocious enemy of the Jacobins, whom he considered tepid and unwilling to see to it that profiteers were punished, and in March 1794, Hébert and his followers planned an uprising. Robespierre and his allies on the Committee of Public Safety, learning of the Hébertist plans, struck first, arrested him and his followers, placed him on trial on March 24, and that very evening Hébert and his followers were executed. Even the Jacobins realized the importance of this trial and execution in the revolutionary process: Saint-Just would say, The Revolution is frozen.

Executed with Hébert was Anacharsis (né Jean-Baptiste) Cloots, the son of a wealthy Dutch family established in Germany, a man so Francophile that even before the Revolution he advocated the annexation of the left bank of the Rhine to France. With Cloots is born revolutionary internationalism, and he had two main focuses: spreading the French Revolution to the rest of Europe and a militant atheism far beyond the deism of Robespierre and his colleagues. So strong was his belief in himself and the universality of the ideals of the French Revolution that he assumed the title of Orator of Humanity and published newspaper called The Universal Orator. He would pay dearly for both his internationalism and his atheism: arrested by the Jacobins the same day as Thomas Paine, though not an intimate of Hébert, he was joined to the Hébertists at their trial and guillotined.

More controversial and a man more difficult to grasp, in the words of the historian Albert Mathiez, was Jacques Roux, author of the key programmatic statement, Manifesto of the Enragés. Roux was condemned during his lifetime by almost all who one would have supposed would be his allies, most particularly by Marat, whose assassination Roux was suspected of being involved in, and Jacques Hébert. Despite having been suspected of a role in Marat’s death, so strong was his identification with the murdered Friend of the People that his newspaper (several selections from which are included in this collection) was entitled The Publicist of the French Republic by the Shade of