An Ingenious Emblem

This chapter delves deeper into the history of the phrase, sans culottes . It shows that the point of the joke about breeches was that someone without culottes had the wrong kind of status, emotion, and decorum on which salon society was based. One further reason for the joke's late eighteenth-century resonance was that it fitted a real writer remarkably well. The chapter reveals that the writer in question was the satirical poet Nicolas-Joseph-Laurent Gilbert. Gilbert seems to have led a life that was something like a literal version of the tale of literary ambition, abject poverty, and unscrupulous exploitation told by Voltaire in his satirical poem Le pauvre diable (The Poor Devil, 1760). Finally, the chapter discusses some debates between Louis-Sébastien Mercier and Jean-Jacques Rousseau on vitalist and contractual conceptions of political society.