Christopher Hibbert - The Days of the French Revolution

journée: an important day, particularly one upon which some violent action of revolutionary significance occurred.

lanterne: a lamp-post which served as a gibbet in the early part of the Revolution, such as that upon which Foullon was hanged in the Place de Grève. ‘ À la lanterne! ’ was consequently an earlier version of the threatening cry ‘À la guillotine! ’

lettre de cachet: a royal decree, in the form of a sealed letter, by which the King could have a person imprisoned without explanation or trial.

levée en masse: the mobilization of the country’s total human and material resources. It was approved reluctantly by the Convention on 23 August 1793.

lit de justice: a special session of the Paris parlement in which the King could force its members to register his decree.

livre: unit of weight and monetary value. 4 liards = 1 denier , 12 deniers = 1 sou , 20 sous = 1 livre , 3 livres = 1 ecu , 8 ecus = 1 louis . The journalist, Linguet (1736–1794) said that a man needed 300 livres a year to live in reasonable comfort.

loi agraire: a policy favoured by some Enragés by which wealth would be more equally distributed by the enforced division of property.

Marais: the group in the Convention, also known as the Plain, that occupied the middle ground between Girondins and Jacobins.

Marseillaise, La: first called the Chant de guerre pour l’armée du Rhin when published at Strasbourg, became known by its present title when popularized by the Marseilles fédéré’s in Paris. It was banned for a time by Napoleon and after the Restoration.

maximum: declaration of maximum prices. The maximum des denrées fixed the maximum for foodstuffs, the maximum des salaries for wages. The maximum of May 1793 imposed a limit on the price of grain only, that of September 1793 on most essential articles. The maximum was abolished in December 1794. Many shopkeepers had flagrantly disregarded it. ‘So much for fixed prices,’ butchers were heard to say as they flung bits of heads and hooves into the meat on the scales, ‘and if you don’t like it you can bloody well lump it’

menus plaisirs: now pocket-money or pin-money, but in the context of Versailles those ‘small pleasures’ of the Court unconnected with hunting.

Messidor: the tenth month of the Revolutionary Calendar which corresponded with the days from 20 June to 18 July, from the Latin messis , harvest, and Greek doron , gift.

Montagnards: Jacobin deputies, collectively known as the Mountain, who occupied the higher seats in the Convention. Originally led by Danton and Robespierre, they helped to form the government after the overthrow of the Girondins.

muscadins: name given to bourgeois youth, particularly the jeunesse dorée , by the Jacobins.

Nivôse: the fourth month of the Revolutionary Calendar which corresponded with the days from 21 December to 19 January, from the Latin nivosus , snowy.

noblesse de robe: magistrates of the ancien régime who had acquired the status of nobility either by buying or inheriting their office.

ouvriers: urban citizens who worked with their hands, small manufacturers as well as workers.

péquin (pékiri): epithet used by soldiers for a civilian.

Père Duchesne, Le: Hébert’s notorious journal which appeared three times a week between 1790 and 1794 took its name from a stock character of the Théâtre de la Foire. He was depicted as a stove merchant in a vignette at the head of the front page with a pipe in his mouth and tobacco in his hand. Beneath the vignette were the words, ‘ Je suis le véritable père Duchesne, foutre .’

philosophes: the writers and philosophers of the middle of the eighteenth century who substituted for traditional beliefs an ideal of social well being based on a trust in the progress of humanity and science. Their ideas influenced many of the revolutionary leaders, as Robespierre was, for instance, influenced by Rousseau and his Contrat social .

physiocrates: writers on economics who believed that the source of national wealth was agriculture and advocated free trade.

Plain: See Marais .

Pluviôse: the fifth month of the Revolutionary Calendar which corresponded with the days from 20 January to 18 February, from the Latin, pluvial , rain.

Poissarde: fishwife, but also applied to other market-women.

Prairial: The ninth month of the Revolutionary Calendar which corresponded with the days from 20 May to 19 June, from pré, meadow.

rentier: person whose income comes from investments, man or woman of property.

répresentants en mission: delegates sent out by the Convention to the army and the provinces to explain and enforce its policies.

sans-culottes: literally meaning without breeches, a form of dress associated with aristocrats and the well-to-do; workers wore trousers. The term had political as well as economic significance. Santerre, the brewer, who was rich, liked to consider himself a sans-culotte ; so did numerous shopkeepers and master craftsmen who read revolutionary newspapers and pamphlets and influenced their illiterate workmen. But sans-culottes were generally poor, if not so poor that they were more concerned with getting enough to eat than with politics. Pétion defined them, cierks as well as artisans, petty traders and craftsmen as well as labourers, as the ‘have-nots as distinct from the haves’. ‘A great many sans-culottes did not work with their hands,’ Professor Richard Cobb has written, ‘could not tile a roof, did not know how to make a pair of shoes, were not useful. The trouble was that there was a vast range of disagreement about what constituted a sans-culotte , and as in the Year II it was a good thing to be, if one could not get in under one count – social origin, economic status, category of employment – one could go round to the back and get in under quite another – moral worth, revolutionary enthusiasm, simplicity of dress or of manner, services rendered to the Revolution…past sufferings at the hands of various oppressors…The sans-culotte is not an individual with an independent life of his own. It could not be said of him “once a sans-culotte , always a sans-culotte ”; for, apart from the difficulties of an exact definition of the status…he exists at all only as a unit within a collectivity, which itself exists only in virtue of certain specific, unusual, and temporary institutions: once the sectionary institutions have been destroyed, or tamed, the sans-culotte too disappears; in his place, there is what there had been before – a shoemaker, a hatter, a tailor, a tanner, a wine merchant, a clerk, a carpenter, a cabinet-maker, an engraver, a miniaturist, a fan-maker, a fencing-master, a teacher. There is nothing left save perhaps the memory of militancy and a hankering after Brave Times, that appear all the braver when remembered under very hard ones. The sans-culotte then is not a social or economic being, he is a political accident.’

sans-culottides: the five days of the Revolutionary Calendar left over after the year had been divided into twelve months of thirty days each. The Convention agreed that they would be feast days celebrating respectively Virtue, Intelligence, Labour, Opinion, Rewards. The sixth extra day in leap year was to be the sans-culottide on which Frenchmen were to come ‘from all parts of the Republic to celebrate liberty and equality, to cement by their embraces national fraternity, and to swear, in the name of all on the altar of the country, to live and die as brave sans-culottes ’.