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This chapter discusses the phrase, sans culottes, and its key role within the larger context of the French Revolution. The phrase has a bearing on the sequence of events that led from the fall of the Bastille to the beginning of the Terror. This is because the name sans-culottes was actually a neologism with a rather curious history. Although it can be taken initially to refer to someone simply wearing ordinary trousers, rather than the breeches usually worn in eighteenth-century public or professional life, the words themselves also had a more figurative sense. In this latter usage, the condition of not having breeches, or being sans culottes, had to do with the arrangements and values of eighteenth-century French salons. In this setting, the condition of not having breeches, or being sans culottes, was associated with a late seventeenth- or early eighteenth-century salon society joke.

This chapter discusses how the very particular setting in which the emergence of the sans-culottes in their now familiar guise occurred goes some way towards explaining why the mixture of descriptive and causal claims built into the old master concepts of class or sovereignty of French Revolutionary historiography have never been able to provide much of an explanation of either its content or course, at least without the more complicated assumptions supplied by an assortment of nineteenth-century philosophies of history. Reconstructing that setting, on the other hand, does go some way towards explaining what led to the fusion between high politics and popular politics that occurred in France in the winter of 1791–2.

Chapter 4 details the most dramatic year of the Revolution, during which Rosalie witnessed three major events: the June 20 mass demonstration, the "Second Revolution" of August 10, and the vigilante violence of the September Massacres. It is during this year that Rosalie became a firm Jacobin, just as the political parties within the Legislative Assembly were becoming more distinct and combative. It argues that circumstances helped her crystallize this ideology, which departed significantly from her Old Regime values. It also demonstrates the subtle ways in which her presence as a witness at these and other events affected her relationships within the family and her sense of femininity in political terms.

The plebeian political practices of the sans-culottes ended in the third year of the French Revolution, with the repression of the Prairial insurrection and the political fallout of that defeat. This chapter focuses on the human bond that was forged in this plebeian experience. The relationships maintained by the Parisian sans-culottes appear to have been determined by the revolutionary and republican principle of “fraternity.” This constituted a “political” bond because the cohesion of the sans-culottes' movement was achieved in and through the political action that set it in motion. This “political bond of fraternity,” however, was made complex and fragile by the revolutionary political context in which the plebs' action was deployed.

Following a survey of how educated Russians analogized the 1905 Revolution to aspects of the French Revolution, Chapter 5 describes the debates within the Bolshevik faction of the RSDLP, and between the Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks about the temporal relationship between a bourgeois revolution in Russia and a proletarian one. Also, because the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks, in European exile, had time on their hands, they engaged in interminable debates on how the Jacobins and their supporters among the sans-culottes should be considered in terms of their class. The former were thought to originate in one or another subclass of the bourgeoisie; the latter were variously considered proletarian, proto-proletarian, or ‘plebeian’. Complicating matters—and making the emergence of a consensus more difficult—was that the classes that made the French Revolution were sometimes defined on the basis of what they did, and of whom they supported, rather than in terms of their social origin per se.

The Prologue sets the scene by describing the book’s protagonist on his deathbed in the late spring of 1797 and the thoughts that may well have come into his mind concerning his life before and, especially, during the French Revolution. It describes the principal source on which the study is based, the extensive correspondence from Colson to his friend, almost miraculously preserved in the archives of a small town in Central France. It also introduces some of the major themes to be examined. It argues that the life of Colson is important, first, as it throws light on the beliefs and behavior of the whole community of his neighbors on a small street in central Paris, many of whom would come to describe themselves as “sans-culottes”; second, as it illuminates his relations with the noble family for whom he worked as lawyer and financial accountant; and third, as it provides the example of a relatively elderly citizen in the Revolution—who was sixty-two years old in 1789. It concludes with a rapid overview of the chapters in the book.

The Conclusion brings together many of the most important themes of the book. It underlines the extent to which the great majority of Parisians—and no doubt the French population more generally—in no way anticipated the Revolution. It notes the near absence of any direct influence before the Revolution of the canonical “Enlightenment” on an intelligent and well-read member of the elite like Colson—except in the most general sense of an openness to very practical reforms. It documents the complete absence of a putative “desacralization” of the monarchy before 1789—sometimes argued by historians to link the Old Regime with the Revolution. It describes Colson’s long, patient, and forgiving support for the king, at least until his attempted flight in 1791. It also underscores the incessant circulation and power of rumors of impending disasters in Paris, not just in the summer of 1789 (during “the Great Fear”), but also as they continued from the autumn of 1789 throughout the Revolution, and how such rumors affected popular psychology and behavior. Finally, it stresses the strong popular resistance in Paris, even among the great majority of the “sans-culottes” radicals, to “dechristianization”—and the possible role of the attack on religion in the failure of many such radicals to support Robespierre on the 9th of Thermidor (July 27,1794).