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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.