Introduction: “One of the Most Interesting Pairs of Breeches Recorded in Modern History”

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.