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1A lower-class Parisian republican in the French Revolution.
‘The sans-culottes demanded that the revolutionary government immediately increase wages, fix prices, end food shortages, punish hoarders and most important, deal with the existence of counter-revolutionaries.’
‘These were the sans-culottes, men who defined themselves not only by their trade but also by the clothes they wore.’
‘While Rousseau is frequently cited with approval by numerous leaders of the sans-culottes, or by Robespierre or Gracchus Babeuf, Rousseau was more a prophet of radical individualism than he was of cooperation.’
‘For the urban poor and even respectable tradesmen, hunger was never far away and during the French Revolution the Parisian sans-culottes had a national maximum for prices as one of their principal political goals.’
‘Proposals were initially made to revise the Constitution of 1793 but, in the wake of abortive uprisings by the Parisian sans-culottes in the spring of 1795, a fresh document was devised instead.’
‘Not only that, numerous French Jacobins and sans-culottes were aware of this in the 1790s as were many of their democratic radical brethren across the English Channel.’
‘This influx of citizen-soldiers, many of them active sans-culottes, intensified radicalism within the army, and many officers were expelled or guillotined.’
‘The sans-culottes had played a role in revolutionary events since 1789, but they had, as a class, received few gains.’
‘While the French Revolution politicized the sans-culottes, the Industrial Revolution industrialized them.’
‘The author also found small similarities between the ‘forces of order’ of 1791 and the sans-culottes movement of 1793, more evidence that crowds of the era were not all cut from the same cloth.’
‘Deputies writing to their constituents describing the threat posed by Jacobins and sans-culottes may have been genuine in their fears.’
‘Tomes have been written on how, in late 18 th-century France, an effete and ineffectual monarchy was replaced by the tyranny of the sans-culottes and the bloodlust of the Committee for Public Safety.’
1.1An extreme republican or revolutionary.
‘Neither was it a Rousseauist abstraction, but a body of angry sans-culottes protesting against the recession and tax increases.’
‘If Rousseau had been alive today, the arch-sentimentalist would have been spilling his guts to Oprah and excusing the excesses of present-day sans-culottes like a Guardian leader.’
‘The statement's adoption was in line with the republican movement's calculated agenda to get into power on both sides of the border as an electoral avenue towards a united Ireland with a Sinn Féin sans-culotte hue.’
‘Are not these charitable people - these sans-culottes - very generous to you?’
‘Along with sans-culotte politics came revolutionary tactics.’