The National Razor

“The Permanent Guillotine – Writings of the Sans-Culottes,” edited by Mitchell Abidor, 2018

The image of the French Revolution in the U.S. and Britain has been colored by anti-revolutionary liberal novels like “Tale of Two Cities,” middle-class tales like Marat/Sade and execrable films like “Marie Antoinette” with Kirsten Dunst, which whitewashes Antoinette’s role in the repression and counter-revolution. Tourists and the French are still treated to a diorama of poor Antoinette imprisoned in the Concierge on the Ile de la Cite. The celebration of kings and queens doesn't stop there.  Netflix's "The Last Czar" ultimately paints a sympathetic portrait of the Romanovs, as does the "Marco Polo" series of Kublai Khan. The endless movies about queens starring Hollywood royalty like Helen Mirren and the idiotic coverage of the British royal family complete the picture.  Monarchs are cool!  No one talks about the sans-culottes (‘without shoes’) in a nice way.  So lets…

Slogan of the Sans-Culottes

The sans-culottes were the left-wing of the Jacobins of Marat, the Cordeliers Club and ‘The Mountain’ – a term for the whole French left.  They actually kept the Jacobins in line for a time.  The sans-culottes hated the monarchists, the clergy, the large businessmen and bankers, the judges and the ‘moderates’ – who were all in league together against the people and the French Revolution (1789-1795).  In other words, the sans-culottes were quite modern!  This is a collection of original writings by authors most will be unfamiliar with – Jacques Hébert, Jacques Roux, Jean Francois Varlet, Anacharsis Cloots, Sylvain Maréchel.  It includes revolutionary songs and hilarious dialogs, along with writings by organizations like the Brave Sans-Culottes, The Popular Society of Sans-Culottes of Nimes and The Enragés.  Writings of the Conspiracy of Equals, a group expressing the beginnings of communism, are not included.

The sans-culottes were more progressive than the American Revolution that came earlier.  Their role helped the French Revolution destroy the royal structure and inhibit the role of religion, while taking aim at large businessmen. Benjamin Franklin, a representative of the U.S. government, sided with the ‘moderate’ Girondin faction on the issue of executing royalty. The sans-culottes opposed this view, as the king and queen served as organizing forces and rallying points for counter-revolution. The sans-culottes also advocated terminal punishment of hoarders, capital strikers and price gougers, taking aim at the rich.  Instead they wanted to institute civil distribution and control of food and necessary goods.

Themes that run through their dialogs, speeches, articles and submissions to the revolutionary National Convention:  

1.          A hard-core anti-clericalism making fun of the priests, Jesus, the Catholic Church, a ‘virgin’ Mary and the ‘sacrament.’  This was because the clergy were one of the strongest legs of cruel support for the last monarch of France, King Louis XVI and his cohort.  Notre-Dame, the famous Parisian cathedral, was rededicated to the ‘Cult of Reason’ by the sans-culottes during the Revolution.  This was part of a de-Christianization program that sought to remove state funding for the Catholic Church and its priests. 

2.             A fierce hostility to large farmers and merchants, even bakers, who hoarded grain and goods, drove up prices, stopping production of food and tried to starve the people into submission.  They wanted price-controls and restrictions on how much the rich could own.

3.             An overwhelming anger against the so-called Girondin moderates – centrists who protected Antoinette, royalty, corrupt businessmen and the reactionary courts.  The Girondins engaged in civil war and encouraged a bloody military intervention by Austria to stop the French revolution.  As Lenin and Trotsky noted in their writings on France, ‘reasonable’ centrism blocks with right politics, not left. Watch the behavior of Democratic party ‘centrists’ like Biden, Harris, Buttigieg, O’Rourke, Booker or Klobuchar to see this in action in a modern U.S. context. 
      And of course, royalty.

  

The Queen Meets Her Deserved Fate

The editor, Mitchell Abador, says the sans-culottes were mostly artisans and small merchants – a radical petit-bourgeois. However the Enrages mention ‘workers’ repeatedly in their text and even Abador mentions ‘hired laborers.’  Abador seems to claim that the working-class as a class did not really exist or play a role in the revolution or the sans-culottes.  However any understanding of how artisans and merchants go about their business would show that cart drivers, hod-carriers, seamstresses, washer-women, clerks, stevedores, some peasants, soldiers, servants and simple laborers existed in 1789.  Perhaps not in the leadership, but certainly playing a large role as the real base of the sans-culottes themselves.  Comments about ‘hundreds of thousands’ of sans-culottes in the various rural departments and cities like Marseilles and Paris cannot just refer to artisans and merchants.  And I would imagine most small merchants and artisans actually could afford shoes!  For Abador to seem to disappear the working classes in the French Revolution is a political act.

Certain Jacobins like Jean-Marie Collot d’Herbois crossed the aisle as Bukharin did, and supported the Thermidorian counter-revolution led by Napoleon in July 1794, which overthrew the Jacobins and Robespierre. Much as Stalin destroyed the Bolshevik Party that led the Russian Revolution, along with a good proportion of the leadership of the Red Army in the purges of the 1930s.  But no sans-culottes crossed the aisle.  They stayed true to their politics and were either executed or escaped.

Other reviews on French politics below, use blog search box, upper left:  “The Coming Insurrection,” “Citizen Tom Paine,” “In the Crossfire,” “The Left and Islamic Literalism,” “Thomas Piketty,” “The Beach Beneath the Street,” “Deephan,” “Something in the Air,” “The Age of Uprising,” “The Conspiracy.”  

And I bought it at May Day Books!

Red Frog 
Commune di Cortona, Toscana, Italia

September 16, 2019