Sans-Culottes: An Eighteenth-Century Emblem in the French Revolution

Sonenscher, Michael

ISBN 10: 0691180806 / ISBN 13: 9780691180809

Published by Princeton University Press, 2018

About this Item

Fine in softcover. White spine with red titles. Seller Inventory # 221104

Bibliographic Details

Title: Sans-Culottes: An Eighteenth-Century Emblem ...

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Publication Date: 2018

Binding: Soft cover

Condition: Fine

Edition: 1st Edition

About this title

Synopsis:

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.

About the Author:

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.