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 | Sans-Culottes: |
This is a bold new history of the sans-culottes and the part they played in the French Revolution. It tells for the first time the real story of the name now usually associated with urban violence and popular politics during the revolutionary period. By doing so, it also shows how the politics and economics of the revolution can be combined to form a genuinely historical narrative of its content and course. To explain how an early eighteenth-century salon society joke about breeches and urbanity was transformed into a republican emblem, Sans-Culottes examines contemporary debates about Ciceronian, Cynic, and Cartesian moral philosophy, as well as subjects ranging from music and the origins of government to property and the nature of the human soul. By piecing together this now forgotten story, Michael Sonenscher opens up new perspectives on the Enlightenment, eighteenth-century moral and political philosophy, the thought of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and the political history of the French Revolution itself. Michael Sonenscher is a fellow of King's College, University of Cambridge. His books include Before the Deluge: Public Debt, Inequality, and the Intellectual Origins of the French Revolution (Princeton); Work and Wages: Natural Law, Politics and the Eighteenth-Century French Trades; and The Hatters of Eighteenth-Century France. "This is intellectual history as free jazz. Sonenscher rips and riffs through the links to be made between all manner of ideas across several generations of salon conversation and erudite writing. . . . This work's contribution . . . to illuminating the complexity of eighteenth-century French intellectual history cannot be gainsaid."--David Andress, Times Literary Supplement "Close attention to his text will be repaid with a deepened awareness of the variety and power of the political writing in circulation in the late monarchy. He succeeds completely in establishing that political life was in most respects richer and more full of nuance than we might imagine."--James Livesey, American Historical Review Endorsements: "With deftness, wit, and great erudition, Michael Sonenscher traces the complex and unexpected pre-Jacobin history of the phrase 'sans culottes' to its origins in the rivalries and concerns of the Parisian salons. This probing history brings to life the patronesses, philosophers, wits, and hacks of the ancien régime and illuminates the contending uses of ancient philosophy and visions of society and personal virtue that circulated among them. The analyses of competing Ciceronian and Cynical views of fashion, and of the gulfs between Rousseau and his self-designated acolytes, are particularly powerful. This book will be sure to transform irrevocably our understanding of the notorious emblem of Jacobinism."--Jennifer Pitts, author of A Turn to Empire Another Princeton book by Michael Sonenscher: Subject Areas: | |||||
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