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Updated: May 14, 2025
In it were the twelve thirty-day months, with their names of vintage, fog, and frost; of snow, rain, and wind; of bud, flower, and meadow; of seed, heat, and harvest: the whole terminated most unpoetically by the five or six supplementary days named sansculot-tides, sansculottes meaning without knee-breeches, a garment confined to the upper classes; that is, with long trousers like the common people, and these days were so named because they were to be a holiday for the long-trousered populace which was to use the new reckoning.
It is a revolution!" Within a few hours the yelling maenads and bold satyrs of the sansculottes possessed the gorgeous Salon de la Paix, whilst the King and his family were on their way to Paris....
Alfieri, on an occasion of even greater difficulty, was stopped with his illustrious friend at the gates of Paris in 1792. They were flying in post-chaises, with their servants and their baggage, from the devoted city, when a troop of sansculottes rushed on them, surged around the carriage, called them aristocrats, and tried to drag them off to prison.
"Oh, ho!" exclaimed the joiner frowning, "but if they all came, the patriots would be in a minority.... Citoyen Gamelin, will you drink a glass of wine to the health of all good sansculottes?..."
He recognized that this curtailment of formalities was genuinely characteristic of the new justice, at once salutary and terrifying, the administrators of which were no longer ermined pedants leisurely weighing the pros and contras in their Gothic balances, but good sansculottes judging by inspiration and seeing the whole truth in a flash.
Judge and jury toiled, fevered and half asleep with overwork, distracted by the excitement outside and the orders of the sovereign people, menaced by the threats of the sansculottes and tricoteuses who crowded the galleries and the public enclosure, relying on insane evidence, acting on the denunciations of madmen, in a poisonous atmosphere that stupefied the brain, set ears hammering and temples beating and darkened the eyes with a veil of blood.
"A great injustice has been done," cried Danton, "to the innocent and helpless. I ask the lives of Henriette Girard and Citizen de Vaudrey!" The judges did not need to answer. A savage cry of "No! No!" swelled from the infuriated "Mountain." The sansculottes half rose from their benches, shaking minatory fists, yelling, gesticulating. Faces were contorted in fury.
It makes one realise, too, that with all their faults, the aristocrats of France, who, a hundred years ago, were condemned to the shameful death of the guillotine and went in their tumbrils through streets filled with cursing crowds of sansculottes, with scorn and contempt written on their features, were rather exceptional people.
In 1789 the Sansculottes were intending to destroy this mountainous Assumption, and some ill-starred idiot saved it by placing a cap of liberty on the Virgin's head! To think that some beautiful windows were knocked out in order to get a better light for this mass of lard! If only there were the slightest hope of ever getting rid of it; but alas! all such hopes are vain.
The wild and drunken madness of the triumphant people expended itself in many strange forms, of which none was stranger, more awesome, more ludicrous and yet more tragic than the Carmagnole. This was a dance that seized whole multitudes in its rhythmic, swaying clutch. The tune was "Ca Ira!" that mad measure of the sansculottes, meaning roughly "Here it goes "And there it goes!"
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