Conclusion: Democracy and Terror

This chapter discusses how the very particular setting in which the emergence of the sans-culottes in their now familiar guise occurred goes some way towards explaining why the mixture of descriptive and causal claims built into the old master concepts of class or sovereignty of French Revolutionary historiography have never been able to provide much of an explanation of either its content or course, at least without the more complicated assumptions supplied by an assortment of nineteenth-century philosophies of history. Reconstructing that setting, on the other hand, does go some way towards explaining what led to the fusion between high politics and popular politics that occurred in France in the winter of 1791–2.

The Entitlements of Merit

This chapter shows how the moral and social dimensions of the subject of army reform grew out of the range of questions that it generated about property and inheritance, as against merit and distinction, in determining both the composition of the French nobility and its relationship to the French royal government. Getting the peacocks to pay raised a number of political dilemmas, however. These, in turn, helped to rule out the old vision of a powerful reforming monarch as the solution to absolute government's financial problems. The political history of the French Revolution thus began with the unavailability of this alternative. Irrespective of the damage done by the argument over military reform to any plausible prospect of relying on Louis XVI to be a patriot king, the model itself pulled strongly against both the realities of modern war finance and the more urgent political need to consolidate the royal debt.

Introduction: “One of the Most Interesting Pairs of Breeches Recorded in Modern History”

This chapter discusses the phrase, sans culottes, and its key role within the larger context of the French Revolution. The phrase has a bearing on the sequence of events that led from the fall of the Bastille to the beginning of the Terror. This is because the name sans-culottes was actually a neologism with a rather curious history. Although it can be taken initially to refer to someone simply wearing ordinary trousers, rather than the breeches usually worn in eighteenth-century public or professional life, the words themselves also had a more figurative sense. In this latter usage, the condition of not having breeches, or being sans culottes, had to do with the arrangements and values of eighteenth-century French salons. In this setting, the condition of not having breeches, or being sans culottes, was associated with a late seventeenth- or early eighteenth-century salon society joke.

Property, Equality, and the Passions in Eighteenth-Century French Thought

This chapter explores the problems of reform in eighteenth-century French thought, beginning with an examination of the origins of a new, theologically heterodox, interest in the human body, and its bearing on the moral and political thought of François de Salignac de la Mothe Fénelon and his followers. Its aim is to present some idea of the intellectual context that made it possible to align Rousseau's moral and political thought either with Thomas Hobbes or with Fénelon, and, ultimately, with both. With this established, it may then be easier to see why the advocates of the ambitious programme of economic and social reform that came to be known as Physiocracy were able to associate Rousseau, Hobbes, and Fénelon with something like the same, rather sober, set of moral and political arrangements.

Diogenes and Rousseau: Music, Morality, and Society

This chapter considers how the joke about breeches fitted into a way of thinking about human association that set decorum alongside justice, reciprocity alongside property, distinction alongside equality, fashion alongside price competition, equity alongside legality, honnêteté alongside charity, and “sublime” self-love alongside ordinary human selfishness. More fundamentally, it also fitted into the type of claim about the relationship between the passions and the arts that could be found in the works of Jean-Baptiste Dubos or Voltaire, and of how, in conjunction, they could keep morality alive. For Rousseau, the alternative to “the masterpiece of politics of our century” involved a rather limited array of individual interests and relied heavily on the part played by public opinion in shaping social behaviour. With these in place, self-interest and the common interest would coincide, without requiring any further motivation to be supplied by benevolence or altruism.

An Ingenious Emblem

This chapter delves deeper into the history of the phrase, sans culottes. It shows that the point of the joke about breeches was that someone without culottes had the wrong kind of status, emotion, and decorum on which salon society was based. One further reason for the joke's late eighteenth-century resonance was that it fitted a real writer remarkably well. The chapter reveals that the writer in question was the satirical poet Nicolas-Joseph-Laurent Gilbert. Gilbert seems to have led a life that was something like a literal version of the tale of literary ambition, abject poverty, and unscrupulous exploitation told by Voltaire in his satirical poem Le pauvre diable (The Poor Devil, 1760). Finally, the chapter discusses some debates between Louis-Sébastien Mercier and Jean-Jacques Rousseau on vitalist and contractual conceptions of political society.