Sans Culottes Quotes

The Bowery b'hoys were delighted ... to observe a pair of their favorites in league against their natural enemy, for Clancey detests our democracy, finds even the Whigs radical, the Adams family vulgar, Daniel Webster a sans-culotte. He fills the pages of his magazine America with libellous comments on all things American. Despite a rich wife and five children, he is a compulsive sodomite, forever preying on country boys new to the city.

Les Français ont inventé, en 1793, une souveraineté populaire qui s'est terminée par un empereur absolu. Voilà pour votre histoire nationale. Quant aux moeurs : madame Tallien et madame de Beauharnais ont tenu la même conduite, Napoléon épouse l'une, en fait votre impératrice, et n'a jamais voulu recevoir l'autre, quoiqu'elle fût princesse. Sans-culotte en 1793, Napoléon chausse la couronne de fer en 1804. Les féroces amants de l'Egalité ou la Mort de 1792, deviennent, dès 1806, complices d'une aristocratie légitimée par Louis XVIII. A

The Constituent Assembly enjoyed a prestige accorded none of its successors, but the populace observed only such decrees as suited it. What did the people want above all else? Tax reform, abolition of indirect levies, institution of controls over the grain trade. Tax collection was suspended; the salt tax, excises, and municipal tolls were suppressed; exchange of grains was either forbidden or continually thwarted. Proclamations and decrees against this had no effect. [...] In their eyes national sovereignty entailed direct democracy, an idea that would remain dear to the sans-culottes.

This new notion of freedom, resting upon liberation from poverty, changed both the course and goal of revolution. Liberty now had come to mean first of all “dress and food and the reproduction of the species,” as the sans-culottes consciously distinguished their own rights from the lofty and, to them, meaningless language of the proclamation of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen. Compared to the urgency of their demands, all deliberations about the best form of government suddenly appeared irrelevant and futile. “La République? La Monarchie? Je ne connais que la question sociale,” said Robespierre.

In the words of Jaurès, ‘there was in the history of the red flag an ambiguous period in which its meaning oscillated between the past and the future.’ It seems that it takes its current significance from a sort of semiotic reversal: deployed by the royal authorities during the executions of sans-culottes, the latter appropriated it and began to make of it their emblem (this occurred with the insurrection of 10 August 1792, when the revolutionary crowds stormed the Tuileries Palace, put an end to the monarchy and established the National Convention, which proclaimed the Republic in September). It reappeared in 1830 and, like the barricade, became the symbol of the insurgents in all the revolutions of 1848. After the violent repression of June 1848 and the ‘bloody week’ that crushed the Paris Commune in May 1871, counterrevolution made the red colour an object of fetishistic demonization; nothing red could be tolerated, and burning red fabrics became a ritual of purification and a practice of public safety. In 1849, Léon Faucher, the state secretary of the first conservative republican government, issued a circular letter directed to the prefects that contained very precise instructions: ‘The red flag is a plea for insurrection; the red cap recalls blood and mourning; bearing these sad marks means provoking disobedience.’ Therefore the government ordered the immediate banishment of those ‘seditious emblems’. After the Paris Commune, a witness wrote in his memoirs that the city was seized by ‘a crazy rage against all that was red: clothes, flags, ideas, and language itself …’ The colour red, he explained, had become ‘a mortal disease’ whose return should be avoided absolutely, as we do ‘the plague and the cholera’.

También yo creía que estaba por surgir una sociedad igualitaria, pero me decía que en esa sociedad también tendrían que funcionar (y mejor que antes) los trenes, por ejemplo, y que los sans-culottes que me rodeaban no estaban aprendiendo en absoluto a cargar la caldera de carbón, a accionar las agujas, a elaborar una planilla de horarios.

Yo soy lo que el clero llama un hereje, un impío, un sans-culotte, pero yo aquí digo a usted, en presencia de Dios, que respeto las verdaderas virtudes cristianas, como jamás la ha respetado fanático o sayón reaccionario alguno.

The most famous answer to the question, “What is a sans-culotte?” defined him as “a being who always goes on foot, who has no millions… and who lives simply on the fourth or fifth story with his wife and children, if he has any. He is useful, because he knows how to plow a field, to work a forge, a saw, a file, to cover a roof, make shoes and give the last drop of his blood for the Republic.

Chinaco: traducción inmediata del sans-culotte francés, “sin pantalones”. La palabra chinaco se usó México durante la guerra de Independencia pero no se hará popular hasta 1862. Fernando Escalante Gonzalbo: “hicieron del insulto un emblema”, en Ciudadanos imaginarios.

We then learn further that in the winter of 1807 the Immediate Commission was set up and carried out its great work. We did not learn, however, that the cannonade of Valmy and the surrender of the fortresses in 1806 were a complete act of treason on the part of the Prussian army at the time Freemasons, the sans-culottes and the Illuminati in France, that it was a complete conspiracy.

fighting the British in 1601 in Kinsale with the help of the Spanish; then Wolfe Tone and the French at Bantry Bay in 1798, trying to follow in the footsteps of the sans-culottes who cut the head off their king; then poor Robert Emmet, who led the United Irishmen in 1803. Throughout the centuries the Irish had fought and died for their