Chapter 19. The Sections of Paris

The triumph of August 10, 1792, produced an exuberance that infected nearly every aspect of Parisian life. The more affluent abandoned their powdered wigs and adorned clothing for the simple garb of artisans; jewelry and fans that depicted revolutionary scenes became fashionable; newborn infants were given names that reflected the revolutionary era. In conversation, citoyen (citizen) replaced monsieur (sire) as a form of address. The “Scythian” red cap (bonnet rouge), the ancient headgear of freed slaves, had already been a popular way of proclaiming fidelity to the Revolution; now, after August 10, various sections adopted it—“the red cap of freedom”—as the required headgear for their officials to wear. Indeed, it became a symbol of the sections’ political power. Many sections once again changed their names, giving themselves more revolutionary appellations: the section Theater-Fran^ais now became the section Marseilles, while the section Place-Royale became the section des Fédérés, and the section Roi-de-Sicile became the section Droits-de-l’Homme. Nor was the republican fervor any less intense in the provinces. Upon hearing the news that the king was dethroned, army volunteers in the Vosges cried, “Long live the nation with no king!” while the Jacobins of Strasbourg demanded, “Long live equality! Down with the king!”[281]

Although many fidiris had participated in the invasion of the Tuileries Palace, “the dethronement of Louis XVI was, in fact, a victory above all else for the direct democracy of the Parisian sections,” observes Albert Goodwin.[282] Up to this point, the sections had looked to the National Assembly for leadership and supported it during earlier journies with their armed strength. But the newly elected Legislative Assembly had not carried out the journie of August 10; indeed, its role had been hesitant and dilatory, and its passivity and ambivalence toward the uprising morally discredited it. The Insurrectionary Commune, a municipal body, coordinated the sans-cuiottes of the sections in overthrowing the monarchy.

As the vanquishers of royal treachery, the sections were acutely conscious that they had performed the culminating service to the Revolution and to the nation. They had gone well beyond neighborhood, even municipal concerns, and viewed themselves, says Mathiez,“as the incarnation of the public interest and as having acted in the name of revolutionary France as a whole,”[283] or, in Doyle’s words, “as the guardians and watchdogs of the new republic, and the arbiters of what it should stand for.”[284]

By the same token, the new Insurrectionary Commune had gone far beyond the scope of the previous Paris Commune, which in the past had continually attempted to encroach upon the sovereignty of the sections by trying to “regularize” them, appoint their officials when it could, and limit the size of their committees and the range of their activities. The Insurrectionary Commune was the visible center of the sectional democracy. It contained twice as many members as the old Commune: where the sections had sent three delegates each to the old Commune, they now sent six, expanding the Insurrectionary Commune to a total of 288 members. All were elected on the basis of near-universal manhood suffrage. Moreover, the new members were politically more radical and less wealthy than their predecessors: although some were lawyers and professionals, most were small shopkeepers and artisans—that is to say, sans-culottes.

The new Commune was also more active than the old Commune had been; where the old Commune had met irregularly, the new one met daily. “The result,” observes Goodwin, “was that the sectional representatives were now consulted at every turn on the smallest matters of administration, as well as on large questions of national policy.”[285] Accordingly, the sections enjoyed an intense feeling of moral superiority over the Legislative Assembly. Not only did they play the leading role on August 10, but, while the Assembly delegates were regarded as less representative of the people—having been chosen through an indirect voting system with property restrictions on the franchise—the sections now voted for their officials directly without any limited franchise.

Nor was the sections’ superiority over the Assembly merely moral: they also possessed a major military force in the capital. The National Guard was answerable to the sections and the Commune, while the Assembly, meeting in Paris, possessed no reliable military force by which it could defend itself from popular pressure. In 1792 and 1793, every man who could have been spared for a separate force like the National Guard was sent to the front, leaving the Assembly vulnerable to demonstrations and future journies. Nor was the National Guard necessarily eager to carry out the Assembly’s will. No longer made up of the selected bourgeois soldiers of the kind who had fired on the petitioners at the Champs de Mars, it was now open to all citizens and consisted primarily of sans-culottes under Santerre’s command.

The Legislative Assembly, in turn, despite its reluctance, was increasingly obliged to carry out the measures favored by the sections. On August 10, it decreed that “the classification of Frenchmen in terms of active and non-active citizens was abolished,”[286] and it sent emissaries out to the provinces to justify the dethronement of the king to gain popular support for Louis’s removal. In many of the provinces, this was not a difficult task: the communes outside of Paris were losing their largely bourgeois membership and becoming ever more radicalized. In Lyon and Marseilles, among others, Commune members had been discredited by their failure to solve the problem of scarce bread and high prices, leading to the outbreak of food riots. There “the lower middle classes and even the artisans,” working through their local Jacobin clubs, “took the power into their hands.”[287] On August 26 and 28 the Assembly abolished all the feudal landed dues that had remained, except where the landlord could produce an original title deed to the lands that the peasants tilled. It declared that all common lands belonged solely to the village communities, and directed that the lands of the imigris be divided up into small lots. In a helpless position vis-ii-vis the Commune, the Assembly futilely tried to assert itself on August 30 by issuing a decree dissolving the Paris Commune and calling for new elections. This decree was completely ignored by the Commune and sections, and the Brissotins had to withdraw it in ignominious embarrassment. The Insurrectionary Commune of Paris now stood at the head of the revolution, even of the armies and the provinces. As one radical Assembly deputy, Chabot, sternly warned his colleagues in the Assembly, “Never forget that you were sent here by the sans-culottes.”[288]

THE SEPTEMBER MASSACRES

Hardly had the king’s dethronement been agreed upon when the military situation seriously deteriorated; during the month of August, the French war effort at the eastern frontier took a severe turn for the worse. The now-despised Lafayette finally defected to the enemy in mid-August, as republicans had long expected; nor was he alone. Other army officers joined the royalists in exile and threw their support to the Austrians and Prussians. The older generals who remained in the French army could no longer be trusted, which left the revolutionaries without enough reliable commanders. Under the hated Duke of Brunswick, the Prussians captured the fortress at Longwy on August 23, after a resistance so brief that it was obvious that French treachery had assisted the invaders in their victory. A Prussian invasion of France now seemed imminent, stoking deep fears among the Parisian masses of royalist conspirators, Church spies, and the danger of a counterrevolution in the undefended capital.

A week later, on September 1, news reached the capital that Verdun was about to fall, together with reports that a counterrevolutionary uprising had taken place in the western department of the Vendee. Paris went into a frenzy. The Commune decreed two days of house-to-house searches in which suspects were to be disarmed and their weapons given over to volunteers for the army. At its call, the newly armed volunteers assembled in the Champs de Mars before their departure for the front, where Danton gave a rousing speech—perhaps his most famous—summoning the country to fight heroically and audaciously— “L’audacer” —for its Revolution.

At the same time, two of the more popular newspaper publishers were demanding not only the defeat of the Revolution’s enemies abroad but the extermination of those within Paris as well. Jean-Paul Marat had been engaged in populist politics through his own journal, L’Atni du Peuple (The friend of the people), since 1789, followed by Jacques-Erné Hubert, in his Le Pire Duchesne, which demanded the most extreme measures against the Revolution’s enemies. “Nous sommes trains” (“We are betrayed”) was Marat’s constant cry, actually with greater accuracy than demagogery about the realities of the situation at times. The betrayers that both Marat and Hubert singled out were variously the royal family, the Assembly, the Brissotins, and even moderates in the Commune. “In order to ensure public tranquility,” Marat warned, “two hundred thousand heads must be cut off.”[289] By late August 1792, he flatly demanded: “Let the blood of the traitors flow. That is the only way to save the country”[290] —a demand that was not lost on the increasingly furious sans-culottes.

In particular, the enemies that Marat and others singled out were the prisoners in the city’s jails, many of whom were detained political suspects, and it seemed only too obvious to Parisians that when the Prussian-Austrian invasion approached Paris, royalist plotters would throw open the prison doors to gain supporters for a counterrevolution. Not unreasonably, alarmed sansculottes felt that this danger from within was all the greater because increasing numbers of volunteers were departing for the front, leaving the city itself defenseless. Indeed, in the first week of September, the fear of internal counterrevolution in the capital reached such frenzied proportions that it led— with or without planning—to what was to go down in the history of the Revolution as one of its most desperate acts. Large crowds began literally to butcher the city’s prison population. The first to be killed were recalcitrant priests who were imprisoned in convents and seminaries, followed by hundreds of inmates in the city’s jails.

The September massacres, as these rulings came to be called, continued for seven days, during which twelve hundred people—about half the entire prison population in Paris—were killed, either outright or after extremely summary trials. Perhaps no more than one-third of the dead were political suspects, priests, nobles, or speculators; most of those killed were common criminals, thieves, debtors, and prostitutes. Although the Commune tried to establish tribunals to try the prisoners, its efforts were largely ineffectual; indeed, Marat, who had helped to incite the massacres, was himself a member of the Commune’s vigilance committee, while one of the Commune’s deputy commissioners, Billaud-Varenne, went to the prisons while the massacres were under way and encouraged them, exclaiming, “You are slaying your enemies! You are doing your duty!”[291]

The massacres ceased only after the popular hysteria ran its course. Yet terrible and deplorable as they were, they served to strike terror into the hearts of counterrevolutionary forces within Paris, upon whom Brunswick seems to have counted to capture and destroy the capital, and their very savagery inadvertently served to undermine any potential resistance to the creation of a republic.

THE CONVENTION

The idea of establishing a National Convention that would give France a republican constitution originated in the Parisian sections and the Jacobin Club. Although the Paris Commune tried to persuade the Assembly to agree to universal manhood suffrage in electing the Convention’s delegates, the Brissotins, with the support of moderate elements, took pains to restrict the franchise. Accordingly, when the Convention finally assembled on September 20, the moderate and Brissotin members held the majority. Owing to the fact that many Brissotin leaders were elected from the Gironde department, the group now acquired the name of Girondins, who shifted from the Left in the Legislative Assembly toward the Right in the new Convention in reaction to the radicalization of the Revolution.

On at least one issue, the new Convention was virtually unanimous: the official abolition of the monarchy. This new social dispensation—the declaration of a republic—was heralded by establishing a revolutionary calendar in which September 22, when the Convention began to take up its historic tasks, was designated as the first day of Year One of the French Republic. Thereafter, very few were the tasks that the body carried out with general agreement among the members. A breach almost immediately opened up between two major factions: the provincial Girondins and the Jacobin Montagnards, who specifically represented Paris. Both favored the end of the monarchy and the establishment of the republic, but agreed on little else. The Montagnards, who now constituted the Left in the Convention, acquired their name because they occupied the upper benches of the Convention—hence the widespread use of the term “Mountain” to designate their deputies and the view they expressed.

That they had major differences became especially clear during the Convention’s debate over the future of the king. The Girondins wanted to avoid trying Louis for his treacheries, while the Montagnards sought, and gained, a trial for him, charging him with treason against the Constitution and the nation. After heated debate, on December 11 the Convention found Louis guilty, but having once condemned him, its members could not agree on his punishment: the Montagnards strongly favored a death penalty while the Girondins vehemently opposed it. Following a close vote favoring execution, Citizen Louis Capet—as the former king was now designated—was guillotined on January 21, 1793, an act of popular self-assertion against royalty that stunned Europe’s upper classes.

Thereafter the two factions in the Convention began to attack each other bitterly, often over trivial as well as important issues. Underpinning the acrimony that separated them was the Girondins’ fear that Paris was playing a decisive role in the Revolution—notably, the Parisian sans-culottes, the sections, and the Commune, whom the Girondins detested with unrestrained fury but upon whom the Montagnards, for their part, depended for support, together with the Jacobin Club, whose policies they seemed to echo. Indeed, nearly all the twenty-four delegates to the Convention from Paris were either Montagnards or Montagnard supporters, as well as Jacobins, most notably Robespierre, Danton, Marat, and Desmoulins. Presumably following Rousseau’s notion of the “general will,” they professed to constitute the will of the nation, which they patently identified with insurrectionary Paris. Thus, when rebellions against Paris later broke out in the provinces, the Montagnards were quick to designate the rebels as opponents of the national will, which, in the language of the day, they derogated as “federalism.”

The Girondins, for their part, derived most of their support from the provincial cities—although they were not without supporters from Paris as well. Consumed with an intense hatred of the Insurrectionary Commune and Montagnard dominance, they often quite provocatively tried to undermine the prestige of the capital in the country at large, reducing its hegemonic role in the Convention, and later fomenting anti-Parisian and essentially anti-Jacobin revolts. Increasingly, the Girondins portrayed the capital as the victim of bloodthirsty, pike-wielding radicals who had either carried out or connived in the September massacres, now a cause cilibre for opponents of the Revolution. The Paris Commune, in turn, was depicted by the Girondins as a nest filled with “anarchistes,” who, with the support of bloody lower-class ruffians, threatened to impose a tyranny on the nation as a whole.

The Girondins themselves were open to grave charges which the Montagnards eagerly exploited. In contrast to the Montagnard leaders, particularly Robespierre, they were primarily identified as the war party, having led the call for France to take up arms to maintain and spread the revolution. Such a charge would have carried no weight in the fall of 1792, when French revolutionary armies won their famously important victory over the Prussians at Valmy and occupied Savoy and Nice soon thereafter; indeed, on November 6, under General Dumouriez, the French defeated Austria at Jemappes, and on the nineteenth, the Convention decreed that France would offer “fraternity and assistance to ail peoples who wish to recover their liberty.” A month later, the Girondins decreed that whenever French troops occupied a country, they would confiscate the property of the nobles and the Church and destroy feudal dues and obligations, a decree which was applied to Belgium the following month, in the wake of advancing French troops. In this respect, it should be noted, the Girondins were no less revolutionary than the Montagnards and the two differed very little in their basic principles—including a shared fear of the “ anarchistes” in the poorest sans-culotte quarters of Paris.

But when the Girondin-controlled Convention declared war on Great Britain, then on the Netherlands, and Spain, France by March 1793 found itself at war with almost every major European power. The military tables that had favored the French armies now began to turn. With a British blockade that choked off France’s economic life and with serious reverses on the northern front, the unfavorable military situation in Paris, at least, evoked growing hostility toward the Girondin deputies, who seemed to occupy most of their time pouring venomous scorn on the Mountain and its lower-class supporters in the capital. While the sans-culottes in the sections worked ardently to save the Revolution from foreign invasion—manufacturing and distributing pikes, constructing a camp for soldiers outside the city, enlisting more troops, and seizing weapons from suspects—the Girondins exhibited less concern about the war and more in bolstering their political advantage over the Montagnards. With extraordinary ineptness, they steadily infuriated the radical and powerful Parisian sections, which they targeted for unrelenting attacks.

It is arguable whether the differences in social principles between the loosely formed Girondin faction and the Montagnards, who were to be ecumenically called the Jacobins, were quite as basic as they seemed from the harsh Convention debates between the two. Brissot and Robespierre, who typified the membership of the two factions, belonged to the same Jacobin club in the early years of the Revolution. Both, too, were provincial lawyers, essentially of similar social backgrounds, with shared political values. Despite their populist rhetoric, the Montagnard deputies in the Convention were no less uneasy about the Paris Commune than were the Girondins; indeed, for a time, Robespierre and his associates were essentially its captives who simply required its support to preserve their parliamentary dominance. Differences in personalities may have played as much a role in the conflict between the two factions as secondary issues, such as the various power bases on which the two factions rested: on one hand the Girondins, in relatively moderate or conservative provinces; on the other the Mountain, in Paris with its extremely democratic sections, whose powers Robespierre was to eviscerate after the Girondins were defeated.

THE SECTIONAL DEMOCRACY

What, then, were these little-known forty-eight sections of Paris, where the more radical of the sans-culottes exercised so much influence on public affairs? How were they organized? And how did they function?

Ideologically, the sectionnaires (as their members were called) believed primarily in sovereignty of the people. This concept of popular sovereignty, as Albert Soboul observes, was for them “not an abstraction, but the concrete reality of the people united in sectional assemblies and exercising all of their rights.”[292] It was in their eyes an inalienable right, or, as the section de la Cite declared in November 1792, “every man who assumes to have sovereignty [over others] will be regarded as a tyrant, usurper of public liberty and worthy of death.”[293]

Sovereignty, in effect, was to be enjoyed by all citizens, not preempted by “representatives,” as was the case in earlier national bodies and even the Convention. In this respect, the sectional movement that emerged in Paris in that year was perhaps the most self-conscious and explicitly democratic phenomenon to appear in history since ancient Athenian times, and certainly the most popular in its composition. The radical democrats of 1793 thus assumed that every adult was, to one degree or another, competent to participate in management of public affairs. Thus, each section, whether its members were politically radical or not, was structured around a face-to-face democracy: basically, a general assembly of the people that formed the most important deliberative body of a section, and served as the incarnation of popular power in a given part of the city. At the height of the radical sectional democracy, the general assembly comprised all male residents within a section’s jurisdiction, which, meeting in expropriated chapels and churches, each elected six deputies to the Commune, presumably for the purpose merely of coordinating all the sections in the city of Paris.

Each section also had its own various administrative committees, whose members were also recruited from the general assembly. These committees performed the functions of police, supply, finance, and neighborhood surveillance. Broadly, they may be grouped into three categories.

The civil committees, dating from the days of the districts, were responsible for administrative problems such as food supply and finance, as well as recordkeeping, and were normally overburdened with work in these practical areas. Initially, under the mayorship of Bailly in 1789–90, the civil committees’ members were directly appointed by the Commune and had a dual accountability to the Commune and the assembly, which they seem to have shrewdly negotiated by staying out of politics as much as possible. Their meetings were normally businesslike, and their outlook was fairly conservative. After the sans-culotte Potion replaced Bailly as mayor, however, civil committee members were elected by the sections’ general assemblies, to whom they were directly accountable.

Shortly after the August 10 joumie, the Legislative Assembly, as evidence of its populist credentials, shifted the task of prosecuting political crimes to the Paris Commune, which for its part, delegated much of this responsibility to the sections. The sections thereupon set up vigilance committees to handle suspected counterrevolutionaries. Elected directly by the assemblies, these vigilance committees proliferated enormously after the August journie. Since they were empowered to levy accusations and arrest suspects, the political views of the committee members became a source of increasing contention between radical and conservative sections—indeed, between the sectional democracy as a whole and the Commune, and, generally, between members of the Commune and the Convention—escalating from the base to the summits of society as the Revolution itself became more radical.

A large number of ad hoc committees were organized for special tasks such as providing the unemployed with work, collecting gunpowder or seeing to its production, mobilizing recruits for the war, establishing contact with other sympathetic sections, and even planning joumies. During festive periods, openair suppers for the poor and for neighborhood people generally were common and were regarded as ways of fostering fraternity within a community.

Of paramount importance, each section had its own battalion of National Guard, over which it had complete control and whose movements it alone could authorize. Usually the battalion was entirely subordinate to the orders of the section’s general assembly, many of whose members were part of the Guard itself. Assembly meetings in which National Guard officers were elected drew high attendance, higher even than those in which civilian officials were elected. Clearly, Parisians fully recognized the importance of the armed force their section commanded and held strong views on the kind of commander it should have.

During the height of the Parisian radical democracy, sectional life was vibrant, disputatious and earthy, as Albert Soboul tells us in one of the livelier accounts in his study on the sans-culottes:

A section was headed by a president, whose work was aided by an executive committee. A recording secretary chronicled the section’s proceedings—indeed, the activities of many of its committee meetings as well as the debates and decisions of its general assembly. Ushers maintained order during assembly proceedings, while tellers counted the votes, which were expressed by standing up or recorded in roll calls. Democratic practice, so important in a section’s life, required that the assembly elect or reelect the executive committee each month, often by acclamation if there were no complaints about its activities. The president usually occupied his position for a year, although he resigned when he differed from the decisions of assembly, as occurred during the bitter fights in early 1793 over plans to engage in an insurrection against the Convention. What kept the sections going, in reality, was a core of committed militants who remained at their posts and were fervently devoted to an ideal of direct democracy even when the general assembly dwindled to a small number of participants.

Meetings of the general assembly opened with a reading of the minutes, followed by a reading of the Paris Commune’s decrees and laws, and the proposed agenda which was drawn up by the president and his committee. This was commonly followed by protracted debates.[294]

Periods of crisis and episodes that evoked popular anger might draw as many as a thousand citizens or more to an assembly meeting, in which case various factions contended vigorously with one another, debates were heated, and every seat in the assembly hall was occupied. Meetings were commonly quite raucous, even indecorous, and extremely fervent, leading to threats, shouts, mutual recrimination, and even fistfights. During the heated Year II of the revolutionary calendar (1793), when one crisis followed soon upon another, Soboul tells us,

many citizens talked at random or screamed deafeningly, making all discussion impossible; this was in the Rfyublique section. In the Chalier section on 1 Ventdse [February 19], the president of the assembly drank a glass of wine in a chair, and some wanted to dismiss him; “This place is a wineshop now; it will soon be a tobacco shop as well.” Others remarked that several citizens had done the same; after an hour’s confusion, they merely returned to the order of business.[295]

Indeed, the sections were real political battlegrounds, and few of the fortyeight were politically unified. Within a particular quartier or neighborhood, citizens’ interests might differ enormously according to their economic status, ideologies, and overall social background. Royalists and moderates did not disappear from sectional assemblies during even the most militant periods of the Revolution. But a relative uniformity of views existed primarily in the poorest sections of Paris and in the wealthiest ones; in between, radical and conservative views often competed with each other furiously and were often resolved with highly intimidating tactics.

Nor was each section drawn entirely into its own life and problems. Radicals, moderates, and conservatives often communicated directly with their own kind across sections and formed joint committees that bypassed the Commune and the Convention altogether. During intense internal disagreements, sectionnaires did not hesitate to “call” upon their ideological allies in other sections for aid, which at times led to the outright invasion of one section by members of another. More often than not, it was the radicals who would invade the general assemblies of nearby sections on the pretext of fraternizing with their colleagues but in fact to combine forces to shift a vacillating assembly to their side.

POVERTY AND REVOLUTION

The poor and ragged sans-culottes, whom Jules Michelet in his famous history of the French Revolution was to call the bras mis , or “bare arms,” and in whose name the Montagnards often professed to speak, were especially unruly; the middle classes consistently labeled them “le canaille” and, in 1792–93, “les anarchistes.” Grinding poverty starved and debilitated thousands of Parisians, leading to food riots and even more brutal behavior in times of social unrest and fear, such as the September massacres. Poverty may have elevated riots to a nearinsurrectionary level, but in itself could not sustain a revolution. Poor sansculottes who were little more than wage-earners remained active adherents of the Revolution and direct democracy until their movement was crushed, but it was an economically more privileged stratum that actually shaped the overall radical tendencies of the Revolution. As we have seen, artisans, tradesmen, and small entrepreneurs could also be called sans-culottes because they were not nobles or men of great wealth. The famous enragi, Jean Varlet, in fact, was wellto-do. Yet he was willing to risk his life for the downtrodden and, like Marat, chose to live among the poor and share their living conditions.

Nevertheless, moral factors alone cannot sustain a revolution, given the material conditions in which the poorer Parisian population lived. Even with the distinction between active and passive citizens, the percentage of more affluent people who took part in the political process during the French Revolution was strikingly low. Of the fifty thousand citizens in Paris who had the right to vote in 1789, less than a quarter took part in the elections for the Estates General, and fewer than one in ten participated in electing deputies to the Legislative Assembly in 1791. Even at sectional assembly meetings, attendance rarely exceeded 10 percent of the citizenry and was often substantially less, to judge from the limited available data.[296] Normally, in fact, as few as thirty citizens attended—especially in affluent areas, since many conservative bourgeois considered nonparticipation in political affairs to be a more honorable course than participation together with the despised sans-culottes.

Nor could the full participation of laborers and artisans have been possible, considering the working hours that the poorest sans-culottes had to endure. “In many trades a sixteen-hour day seems to have been normal,” observes R.B. Rose,

beginning at first light (in the summer as early as 4 a.m.) and finishing at 8 p.m. In the building trades the working day was normally about twelve hours, but during the summer the workers, women and children included, were often on the site from 5 a.m. to 9 p.m. The workers at the Saint-Gobain royal mirror works were slighdy better off: their day stretched from 5 a.m. to 7 p.m., with half an hour for breakfast, an hour for lunch and a half-hour for tea. Wage rates varied from eight livres a day for some goldsmiths and jewelers down to two or three livres for building workers and joiners and one or two livres for laborers.[297]

Those in the lower wage rates—and they numbered in the tens of thousands—led lives of desperate poverty. Cost-of-living calculations indicate that a day’s food cost one livre and four sous on the average, while “the most basic lodging,” to use R.B. Rose’s expression, cost one to three livres a week. “Basic lodging” might mean that a family of four lived—and sometimes worked—in a single room on the sixth or seventh floor. Living conditions in the Faubourg Saint-Marcel, whose thirty thousand craftsmen and workers provided crowds for journees comparable in numbers only to the Faubourg SaintAntoine, were described as miserable by Sebastian Mercier, a contemporary observer. “An entire family occupies a single room,” Mercier related,

in which the four walls are bare, the wretched beds lie without covers, and the kitchen utensils are piled up with chamber-pots. All the furniture together is not worth twenty crowns. Every three months the inhabitants, thrown out for owing back rent, must find another hole to live in. Thus they wander, taking their miserable possessions from refuge to refuge. No shoes are to be seen in their lodgings; the stairs echo only with the sound of wooden clogs. The children are naked and sleep helter-skelter.[298]

People who lived under such conditions were necessarily preoccupied with obtaining food, shelter, clothing, and the simplest amenities of life. They could hardly have participated actively in running revolutionary institutions or attending assembly meetings regularly, especially when so many of those meetings overlapped with their working hours. A journeyman or laborer could hardly report to work in fit condition at six in the morning or even earlier after attending a general assembly meeting until eleven or later the evening before. What is admirable is the extent to which laborers like the bras nus and artisans did participate in their sectional assemblies; indeed, the bras nus and lowly artisans were often present in politically precarious situations in sufficient numbers to tip the balance in favor of radical policies. But their ability to mold events and decide policies was patently limited. Only a few of their names appear on lists of members of sectional committees, which commonly met in the afternoon and consumed full days of tedious work. Thus, members of the civil committees of the sections usually had independent incomes, and only fairly well-off or highly dedicated citizens could afford to staff the sectional institutions, still less participate in their demanding activities.

That is not to say that there were no paid officials in the sections. The police commissioner was normally paid a living salary by the Commune, as were the justices of the peace, who handled minor legal disputes, such as defaults of debts, petty fraud, broken contracts, and damage suits. In September 1792 these jobs brought in annual salaries of 3,000 and 2,400 livres respectively, roughly the wage of a highly skilled artisan. Recording secretaries received more modest salaries, approximately 800 livres a year. Other sectionnaires who did public business, whether as part of a civil or revolutionary committee, were given stipends for the hours or days they lost in doing their regular work. But on the whole, most section officials were not regularly paid and received only minimal incomes.

THE ENRAGÉS

In February and March 1793, the worsening military situation reduced the already straitened condition of the Parisian sans-culottes to crisis proportions. British warships successfully blockaded France to a point where the capital was experiencing severe shortages of basic goods and high prices; grain was once again scarce, and the price of bread rose steeply in Paris as elsewhere in France. The assignats were losing value so precipitously that a laborer in Reveillon’s wallpaper factory, for example, spent 80 percent of his income on bread.[299] On February 24, when the cost of soap rose sharply, laundresses simply seized whatever soap they could lay their hands on and sold it at pre-1789 prices. Riots were becoming commonplace as crowds in large numbers looted shops and warehouses.

This growing crisis provided fertile ground for populist orators and writers, particularly the enragis, who tried to articulate the ideas and suspicions of the sans-culottes. By no means did the enrages form a united political group with a coherent social program; what they did share were naive, often formless commitments to what Anglo-American radicals would generically call “leveling.” That is to say, they believed in a broad redistribution of goods favoring the poor at the expense of the wealthy. Owing to the Le Chapelier law of 1791, the laboring sans-culottes were not permitted to organize themselves to strike for higher wages; accordingly, the enrages demanded that the Convention impose heavy taxes on the wealthy, fix the price of foodstuffs with a maximum, requisition food from the countryside, and stringently enforce the laws against speculation in wheat (a practice that was very widespread). Basically, they placed blame for the worsening economic conditions on those who intrigued against the Revolution, especially speculators and war profiteers, whom they often associated politically with the Girondins.

Not that better-known propagandists such as Marat and Hubert failed to attack speculators and profiteers; in fact, this theme was central to their speeches and writings. But their propaganda was marked more by moral outrage than by demands for social measures to relieve economic distress. By contrast, a few enrages flirted with quasi-socialistic beliefs, in some cases hinting that the property of the wealthy should be shared among the poor according to material need. In any case, vague as their social views may have been, they carried on an intense and effective agitation in the poorer sections of Paris and generated deep-seated fears in the Commune as well as the Convention.

Perhaps the most clear-sighted of this inchoate group of enrages was JeanFran^ois Varlet, an active sectionnaire and the secretary of the radical section Droits de l’Homme (Rights of Man). Varlet worked in the post office, despite the fact that he had an independent income. A young man in his early twenties, he was a prolific pamphleteer, as well as a revolutionary songwriter and orator; his works were immensely popular among the sans-culottes, of whom he wrote, “The poor devils of the garret... reason more surely, more boldly than the best gentlemen, the great speech-makers, the groping savants; if they wish to attain true knowledge, let them go as I among the people.”[300] Early on, Varlet came to loathe the Jacobins, as well as the Convention and the Paris Commune, for their political opportunism and centralistic policies.

In fact, Varlet had no faith in representative forms of government. He was fascinated by theories of direct democracy, which he drew in part from his readings of Rousseau. As Morris Slavin puts it, “Varlet consistently advocated direct democracy as a practical alternative to the newly established parliamentary system, which he found corrupt and neglectful of the needs of the sans-culottes for whom he spoke. He dreamed of a universal democracy.”[301] This view dominated his political thinking. At the time of his election as secretary to the section Droits-de-l’Homme, he is reported to have said, “We [the sections] have... unlimited powers; we are the sovereign [bodies]. We shall break the (established] authority; we shall reconstruct it and give it sovereignty. It will smash the Convention. What is more legal?”[302]

Varlet’s maximum program aimed at nothing less than the abolition of the Convention and establishment of a revolutionary committee, structured provisionally around ten bureaus, whose strictly defined functions would be dictated by the Paris sections. The sectional assemblies were to meet en permanence, that is, either daily, or whenever the people cared to convoke them without having to gain permission from higher authorities. The delegates that the assembly elected to his proposed revolutionary committee had to be clearly mandated and subject to recall, a doctrine embodied in the term mandat impératif. Thus, the committee would be directly accountable to the general assemblies of the sections. Essentially, Varlet and his supporters sought to replace the Convention and its ministers with a direct communal democracy, a “Commune of communes” (to use the revolutionary vocabulary of a later era) of a kind that was to find considerable favor with nineteenth-century anarchists.

These democratic views gained Varlet little if any support from the Commune or the influential factions in the Convention, be they Montagnards or Girondins. The Commune’s General Council openly denounced him as “an intriguer,” while Marat expressly dissociated himself from the young enragi. The Jacobins expelled him from their club for “an excess of civisme .”

Another leading enragi was Jacques Roux, a constitutional priest whose profession brought him into daily contact with the poor. Vigorously castigating hoarders, speculators, and the ttouveaux riches who were immorally profiting from the Revolution, he openly advocated a policy of terror against the wealthy and the counterrevolutionaries. His rhetoric, marked by bloody threats against the rich and resplendent, was filled with appeals to liberty and equality, which easily assured him a warm reception from the poor.

Speculators, show me your pocket-books; your sudden wealth will attest without retort to your larcenies, your betrayals, your crimes. Before the capture of the Bastille, you were covered with nothing but rags; today you inhabit palaces; you owned but a plow and now you are rich landlords.[303]

The more radical sectional assemblies, in fact, voted to read aloud his speeches, normally delivered at the Gravilliers section, twice weekly, while his writings sold widely in Paris.

Roux’s zealotry in behalf of the people’s real concerns disquieted not only the authorities but other ostensible popular spokesmen, particularly Marat, whom Roux, in fact, adored and to whom he gave refuge when the “friend of the people” was pursued by the police. Marat was by no means flattered by the attention of his overly enthusiastic acolyte, who often acted politically as well as personally from impulse and failed tragically to provide his supporters with the far-seeing leadership they so desperately needed. His social concepts were naive: they consisted largely of a moral commitment to alleviate hunger and furious, often tactless, attacks upon the rich, whom he blamed for the afflictions of the poor. Curiously, he found no inconsistency in the fact that he was a constitutional priest who continued to retain his parish and state-subsidized income, while advancing eminently un-Christian and bloody methods for purging the Revolution of profiteers and careerists. In every sense a man of blood, Roux was a radical inquisitor who frightened his Montagnard enemies as much as he frightened the hoarders and speculators against whom he railed.

Nor is it surprising to learn that the eminently egalitarian etiragis included fiery Parisian women, such as Pauline Léon and Claire Lacombe, who cofounded the Society of Revolutionary Republican Women and energetically guided it through its brief but stormy existence from May to October of 1793. Léon, married to Théophile Leclerc, an enragd journalist in his early twenties, managed her own family’s chocolate-making business, and had been radicalized during the fall of the Bastille. With the characteristic boldness of a Parisienne, she did not hesitate to stand before the bar of the all-male National Assembly and declare that the Rights of Man applied to women, who should also be able to bear arms so that they too could defend themselves and the Revolution. Her associate, Claire Lacombe, had been an actress of some distinction in Toulon, where her avowal of militant republican views displeased her director, and she came to Paris in 1792 in time to participate in the August journde. The Society of Revolutionary Republican Women self-consciously advanced the rights of women as equals of men in every respect, and one of its orators who appeared before the Jacobin Club bluntly asserted that she and her fellow members had ceased to be “servile women, domestic animals.”

But France was still a patriarchal society during the Revolution, and neither the Society of Revolutionary Republican Women nor its leading figures were permitted to play any important role in the sans-culottes movement. Indeed, the Society often evoked the anger of the market women in Les Halles—especially peasant women who came from the countryside to sell their produce—by demanding that they wear tricolor cockades and trying to gain their support for the republic. Not that the market women were counterrevolutionary or necessarily lacking in revolutionary zeal: they had, after all, been among the crowds who marched to Versailles in October 1789 and incited many of the food riots that rocked Paris over the years. But a deep disenchantment with the Revolution was setting in among the poorer people of the capital, men and women alike. They deeply mistrusted the Convention, the Commune, and even the more demonstrative republicans who fed them rhetoric instead of bread.

This distrust was partly justified. For the sans-culottes generally, the most profound institutional problems of the Revolution lay in the conflict between their own popular democracy and those who attempted to centralize authority, be they the leaders of the Convention or the Commune. Nor were the heroic figures in the early days of the Revolution immune to the lure of power. Danton, one of the founders of the sectional democracy, had long abandoned the Cordeliers district and entered the ruling ministry. Robespierre and Hubert, at least in the eyes of Jacques Roux, were little more than careerists who masked their appetite for power in radical verbiage. As “the men at the bottom rose in the political hierarchy,” observes Norman Hampson,“they became impressed by the virtues of centralization, only to find a new generation of aspiring grassroots politicians turning their old weapons against them.”[304] The growing conservatism of major revolutionary leaders did not escape the attention of the lower classes, for which the Revolution had yet to supply even modest rations or plots of land.