END OF THE 1500-YEAR-OLD MONARCHY

AT A TIME OF LOOMING INVASION AND PROVINCIAL REVOLT, THE "SANS-CULOTTES" END MONARCHY 

They are the striking force that defeats the nobles.  

Lafayette and Washington in 1784 by Remy Mignot & Thomas P. Rossiter, 1851 / zoom ;  Sans-culottes en armes par J.B. Lesueur, 1793-1794  zoom 

 

Sans culottes meant "without breeches" —  workers' trousers instead of elites' knee breeches and silk stockings. They took up the name in opposition to the privileged.

    Le Peuple armé, full water color of the work above, 1793/1794 / zoom 

Though close to the most determined revolutionaries, the Jacobins, they had their own goals as shown by their greatest energy when the price of bread, the staple, was high.

     --The classic study is that of George Rudé, The Crowd in the French Revolution, 1959

          Le Procès et mort du Roi, 2020

They wore the red bonnet of freed Roman slaves, symbol of liberty. Leftist demonstrators may still wear them in their memory.  

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June 20, 1792 : Thousands of sans-culottes storm the Tuileries palace. Marie-Antoinette faces them from behind a table and Louis XVI drinks to the health of the people while wearing the red cap.  

• Royalist images show the royals as self-controlled and courageous, which they were. 

         Nineteenth-century painting, probably by Thomas Falcon Marshall  / Internet, no source named

     The Manifestation of June 20 juin 1792 at the Tuileries by Jean-Baptiste Vérité after an unknown artist, 1796 / zoom

Louis, right, holds a soldier's hand over his heart to show that he is unafraid. Then he drinks to the Revolution, wearing the red cap (as seen below).

The sans-culotte, on the left, wears a patched coat. 

• Sans-culottes' view:

Gone from the web.

Zoom (please scroll down)

• Opposed images

An actor poses as a sans-culotte in a well-known painting by Louis Bouilly, 1792 / zoom; The Radicals' Arms by George Cruikshank, 1819 / zoom

Girondins: conservative opponents of the Jacobins. The painting shows sans-culottes greeting them before they arrest them. They are associated with Romans and carry a banner of fraternity.   

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On July 25 1792, the commander of the invading Prussian army threatens "ever-memorable vengeance" if the Tuileries are attacked. 

The sans-culottes find this proof that the king and queen are traitors: On August 10, they seize the Tuileries palace. The royals are given refuge in the Assembly but the king forgets to tell his forces not to fight, and the confrontation ends in the massacre of most of the Swiss guards and in many other deaths.

Zoom: at musée Carnavalet, not exhibited

 

Memories and records:

• Madame Campan sees a royal guard sitting on a bed. She cries to him to run away and he says he cannot move from fear. "As he said those words, I heard a troop of men quickly running up the stairs: they threw themselves on him, I saw him assassinated. ils se jettent sur lui, je le vois assassiné. Je cours vers l'escalier, suivi de nos femmes. The women throw themselves at their feet and seized their sabres. The stairs' narrowness hindered the assassins; but I felt a terrible hand push my back to seize me by my clothes, when someone cried from the bottom of the stairs: What are you doing up there? The horrible Marseillais* who was going to kill me answered heim [?], the sound will never leave my memory. The other voice answered just these words: "We don't kill women."

-- Memoirs, p. 328 

* Marseillais: Four hundred volunteers from the Marseilles region in southern France had just arrived, and stopped in Paris on their way to the frontier. Tanned, with black hair and moustaches and a heavy accent, they stood out. Their song, the Marseillaise, is the national anthem.

• "Those figures [of dead or wounded attackers] do not express the heroism or individual sacrifice, or the days passed in terror and privation." 

"The victory of August 10, if they returned wounded or mutilated, did not spare them or their families from the hardships of material privation; if they died, there would be long months of waiting until the authorities agreed, eventually, to grant a pension to the widows and orphans. So Pierre Dumont, age 50, gas worker, domiciled at 254 rue du Faubourg-Saint-Antoine, mutilated [...] died from his wounds two years later; a pension for his wife was refused. [A page and a half of example follow.]" 

-- Rudé, French edition, 1982, pp.128-129 (my trans.)

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The Musée Carnavalet gives the sans-culotte a few small pictures at the back of the last of five rooms. About the events shown here it says nothing.

# # #

The royals are imprisoned as crowds jeer.

Nineteenth-century engraving / zoom

 

The 15-hundred-year-old monarchy is dead.

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Next,

The "Temple," a prison that could have been worse