XI - THE SANS-CULOTTES

Summary

So far I have been considering the interpretation of the revolution as—what indeed it largely was—a revolution of the urban middle classes and the better-off peasantry. The agitation for the partition of the common lands has reminded us that there was also a poorer element in the countryside, and that within the ranks of the peasantry something like a class conflict existed. Cleavages also appeared, though they are perhaps less clearly defined, in urban society. They are revealed in the signs of a proletarian or socialist movement which have been detected behind the bourgeois and capitalist one by socialist historians.

Jaurès was the first to write a ‘socialist history’ of the revolution, but though he appreciated more of the conflicts in agrarian society than most of his successors, he did not uncover the documentation of the popular movement in the towns. Mathiez went farther, with his discovery of the enragés, who combined democratic political ideas with vaguely socialistic economic ones. Though these were easily defeated, he saw the Robespierrist faction of the Jacobins as taking up their policy. Still, however, he hardly penetrated below the middle-class leadership.

A step farther was taken by M. Guérin, who borrowed his description of ‘bras nus’ from Michelet, but with a different ideological and social content. He says that his aim was to persuade the workers not to be duped by ideas of class collaboration or of the finality of the French Revolution. Girondins and Montagnards, he insisted, belonged to the same class; they were all bourgeois and fanatical defenders of the rights of private property. Jacobins such as Cambon and Robert Lindet were the protectors of the capitalists.