INTRODUCTION: "ONE OF THE MOST INTERESTING PAIRS OF BREECHES RECORDED IN MODERN HISTORY"

THIS is a book about the sans-culottes and the part that they played in the French Revolution. It is also a book about Rousseau, and, no less centrally, a book about salons. Its aim is to try to show how the three subjects were connected, and by doing so, to begin to piece together the historical and intellectual setting in which the republican politics of the French Revolution first acquired their content and shape. This, in the first instance, entails going back quite a long way into the eighteenth century. It also involves trying to get behind many of the events and images now associated with what the sans-culottes became. These centre mainly on the crowds who stormed the Bastille in Paris in July 1789 and, more specifically, on the mixture of direct democracy and physical force that, according to an established range of historical interpretations, either was orchestrated deliberately or erupted spontaneously among the artisans and small shopkeepers of urban France during the violent period of political conflict that occurred after the Parisian insurrection of 10 August 1792, and the trial and execution of Louis XVI in January 1793. By then, France had become a republic and, again according to the same range of established historical interpretations, the sans-culottes are usually described either as its social and political vanguard, or as the largely unwitting instruments of its Jacobin-dominated politics. In one guise or another, however, the sans-culottes continue to be remembered (figure 1) as the hardworking, plain-speaking, moustache-wearing members of the popular societies, local militias, and revolutionary committees that proliferated in France between the spring and autumn of 1793, when the republic lurched from war into civil war, and as the institutions responsible for the Terror of 1793–4 — from the French Convention's two great committees of public safety and general security, to the revolutionary tribunal, the maximum on prices, and the law of suspects — were put cumulatively into place. Evaluations may differ, but the sans-culottes are still normally identified with the Jacobin phase of the French Revolution.

This book tells a different story, both about the sans-culottes and about the French Revolution. It is a story about how to make property generally available, and what can happen if things go wrong. It starts with the subject of culture, or what, beyond property, may be required for people to have better lives. It ends with the subject of necessity, or what, also beyond property, may be required politically just for people to survive. By describing the original, eighteenth-century setting to which the phrase sans culottes first belonged, and by piecing together the steps involved in giving the phrase its more familiar connotations, the aim of this book is to open up a way towards the real political history of the French Revolution itself. It is still, of course, a history with the same protagonists and the same sequence of events. But, in the one set out here, both the goals and values of the protagonists, and the historical significance of the events themselves will all look rather different. So, too, will the weight given both to economic and social, and to political and ideological explanations of their content and course. Part of the point of this book is, therefore, to start a long overdue process of historiographical realignment by integrating both the politics and the economics of the French Revolution into a single, but still causally differentiated, historical narrative. Its focus is on a mixture of modern debt-based economics and ancient republican politics and, more specifically, on how the first came to be seen in the eighteenth century as the means to revive the second. In this vision of the future, public credit appeared to supply a way to reinstate merit, talent, and individual ability as the only legitimate criteria of social distinction, relegating property, privilege, and inherited advantage to positions commensurate with their status as what, in eighteenth-century language, were usually called goods of fortune. Using the modern funding system in this way appeared to offer the prospect of reviving the ancient virtues, but without the violence of ancient politics, and, at least to some, to hold out the further prospect of a post-Machiavellian world, based firmly on purely natural, pre-Machiavellian, moral and political principles. From this perspective, modern public finance could look like the key to establishing a world made up of nations, not states, where the old phrase "the law of nature and nations" had been stripped, both theoretically and practically, of the state-centred set of connotations and arrangements that it had been given in the modern natural jurisprudence of the Dutch humanist Hugo Grotius and his seventeenth- and eighteenth-century followers ("sorry comforters," as the German philosopher Immanuel Kant called them in 1795).

In this sense, the narrative that follows is a story about a number of different eighteenth-century assessments of public debt, and about the way they came to be connected to an older and broader array of eighteenth-century evaluations of human nature, human history, and the part played by human feelings, or the passions, in both. Explaining how and why these connections occurred entails describing a number of subjects that now look quite specialised, but which were, in fact, considerably more central to eighteenth-century thought than they may now seem. Some have to do with early modern assessments of Ciceronian and Cynic moral philosophy, and, more generally, with the part played by ancient thought in eighteenth-century intellectual life. Some deal with what, in the eighteenth century, was usually called enthusiasm, and, more specifically, with the idea that music, dance, and poetry, rather than scarcity, need, and utility, were once the original bonds of human association. Some are concerned with eighteenth-century investigations of the very first forms of government, long before Rome set its seal on Europe's history, and with the possibility that the Scythians, Germans, Celts, or Saxons were once subject to forms of rule unknown in either republican or imperial Rome. Some involve heterodox early eighteenth-century Protestant and Catholic discussions of the origins and nature of property, and their bearing on the subject of love. Some centre on late eighteenth-century scientific speculations about the nature of life, and the part played by the soul in giving the body its complex internal organisation. Some, finally, involve the eighteenth-century afterlife of the ideas of the early eighteenth-century Scots financier John Law. Together, they add up to a story about the origins and nature of late eighteenth-century French republicanism and, more broadly, about how and why eighteenth-century evaluations of the ancient Greek idea of democracy turned from negative to positive, to become part of the political vocabulary and, more elusively, the political practice of modernity. Quite a large number of the features of this story about democracy's second life have disappeared from modern historiography, perhaps because they do not seem to have had much to do with the Enlightenment, or with the history of political thought, or with the emergence of political economy, or even with the history of the French Revolution itself. Much of the content of this book is designed to show that they did. Rousseau's part in the whole story is, however, quite complicated, because, as will be shown, many of its components came from Rousseau's critics, and not from Rousseau himself. But, without Rousseau, it is not clear that there would have been anything like this story at all.

The key initial ingredient in the story is, however, the original meaning of the phrase sans culottes and, with this in place, its 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 (since this, literally, is all that the French words mean), the words themselves also had a more figurative sense. In this latter usage, the condition of not having breeches, or being sans culottes, had very little to do with either everyday clothing or ordinary artisans, because it had, instead, much more 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. As with all jokes, the context matters. But, stripped of the details that, for a surprisingly long period of time, made the joke worth repeating, and of the initial story that made it amusing, as well as the now rather inaccessible moral point that both the story and the details were intended to make (these can all come later), the joke relied on the fact that in the eighteenth century a writer who had a patron — in this case a woman who kept a salon — might be given a pair of breeches, while one who did not, would not, and would, therefore, be sans culottes.

The word salon is also a neologism. Before the nineteenth century, salons were usually called sociétés, sociétés particulières, académies bourgeoises, or assemblées, with no metaphorical significance attached to the name of the room in which they often met, as can be seen in the engraving (figure 2) entitled L'assemblée au salon published in 1783 by a Parisian engraver named François-Jacques-Barthélemy Dequevauviller, and based on an earlier gouache by a Swedish, but also Parisian, court painter named Niclas Lafrensen. But whatever they were called, salons are now mainly remembered as one of the more distinctive informal institutions of eighteenth-century France, and the often rather ornate setting in which women played a major part in establishing and maintaining the mixture of culture, civility, intrigue, and patronage that made up much of the unofficial life of the old French monarchy. It is not usual to think that there was much of a connection between eighteenth-century salons and the sans-culottes of the period of the French Revolution (beyond, perhaps, mutual disdain). This is why the first objective of this book is to try to show that there really was, and that it was historically significant, and, in the light of this, that it is worth trying to explain how and why it occurred. The details of how, when, and by whom the connection came to be made are set out, first in chapter 2, and then in chapter 5. A large number of further details are involved both in trying to explain why the connection was made and, more importantly, in trying to describe what the point of making it might have been. These form the subject matter of chapters 3 and 4.

These details are, however, parts of a broader argument, whose first step is partly chronological and partly prosopographical. It is still usual to associate the sans-culottes with the year 1793 and the period of the French Revolution that began with the final phase of the conflict between the former lawyer and republican political journalist Jacques-Pierre Brissot, and his political allies on the one side (a loose alliance still sometimes called the Girondins), and the better-known figure of Maximilien Robespierre, and his Jacobin political allies on the other (a conflict that Robespierre and his allies won). But it is not difficult to find quite a large amount of historical evidence to show that the term sans-culottes was one of a number of now less well-known figures of speech that were used somewhat earlier in the French Revolution, specifically during the autumn and winter of 1791–2, to try to attract the kind of popular support that, by 1793, came to be associated more or less exclusively with the name sans-culottes (hommes à piques, or pikemen, was one, while bonnets de laine, or what, in English, might be called flat-cap wearers, was another). Further historical evidence also indicates that one reason why the words sans-culottes caught on, to become the name of a political force, while the other names fell gradually out of use, was because the words themselves had a resonance that was readily available to anyone who knew anything about eighteenth-century French salons (the evidence is set out inchapters 2 and 5). It may not be possible to count up the number of people who actually did know much about eighteenth-century French salons, but it is still possible to show that some of those who did were the political actors who were largely responsible for turning the words sans culottes into the name of a political force (with a hyphen to connect the two parts of the name). They were, in fact, Jacques-Pierre Brissot and his political allies, and they did so during the winter of 1791–2. A now forgotten early nineteenth-century tradition once had it that the ministry made up of Brissot's political allies that Louis XVI appointed in March 1792 was known as the sans-culotte ministry.

This chronological and prosopographical point has two implications. First, it pushes back the starting point of any historical explanation of the part played by the sans-culottes during the French Revolution to the period that preceded the fall of the French monarchy and the beginning of the Terror. Second, it shifts the initial focus of attention away from Robespierre and his political allies towards Brissot and his political allies. Together, they raise an obvious question about the type of connection that could have existed between Brissot, his political allies, and whatever the sans-culottes were supposed to be and do. The initial incongruity of the name itself makes the question more intriguing. Before 1789, Phrygian bonnets, pikes, or liberty trees all had a recognisable republican pedigree. They could be associated either with the ancient Roman republic and the liberty cap, or pileus, that was used to mark the emancipation of a slave, or with the popular militias, patriotic spirit, and egalitarian political arrangements commemorated in histories of the sixteenth-century Dutch and Swiss republics and the seventeenth-century English commonwealth. In this guise, they could all, for example, be found in the elaborate array of engraved emblems carefully chosen by the "strenuous Whig" Thomas Hollis to decorate the bindings of the many books that he sent all over Britain, Europe, and the United States in the middle of the eighteenth century to promote the republican moral and political values that he himself admired. The phrase sans culottes, however, had no such past political resonance. It belonged fully and firmly to the world of the salon, where, well before the French Revolution, it was simply part of a joke.

Explaining how and why a joke about breeches could have become a republican emblem calls, initially, for piecing together a number of early eighteenth-century arguments about culture, civility, fashion, and trade, because these were the arguments that first supplied a connection between the various purposes that salons were taken to serve, and someone who was said to be not wearing breeches and was therefore sans culottes. The arguments in question (described in detail in chapter 2) amounted to a strong endorsement of the part played by the arts, in the broad eighteenth-century sense of the term, not only in making commerce, not conquest, one of the keys to the difference between the ancients and the moderns, but also in supplying reasons for thinking that the continuous traffic in goods and services that was one of the more conspicuous features of the modern world could still be compatible with political or even moral virtue. In this context, it was not so much the interests that served to neutralise the passions, as the arts. Here, the analytical focus fell less immediately on property and the productive uses to which it might be put, than on the way that fashion, and the mixture of public display and social conformism that it served to promote, worked to offset many of the more potentially pernicious effects of private property. From this point of view, what, in the early eighteenth century, came to be called "fashion's empire" could be said to have produced a rather benign form of subjection, where slavery to fashion (or being a fashion slave, as the modern phrase goes) was more metaphorical than real.