Chaumette began his political career as member of the Jacobin Club editing the progressive Revolutions de Paris journal from 1790.

[3] His oratory skills proved him a valuable spokesperson of the Cordelier Club, and more importantly, the sans-culotte movement in the Paris sections.

His conduct, oratorical talent, and the fact that his private life was considered beyond reproach, all made him influential, and he was elected president of the Commune, defending the municipality at the bar of the National Convention on 31 October 1792.

Re-elected in the municipal elections of 2 December 1792, he was soon given the functions of procureur of the Commune, and contributed with success to the enrollments of volunteers in the army by his appeals to the population of Paris.

He led a deputation from the Commune and argued before the National Convention that failing to punish Louis XVI for his crimes was causing high prices and the fall of the assignat.

Chaumette's thesis was that as long as Louis XVI went unpunished prices would remain high, and shortages and the profiteering that created them, which he assumed to be the work of the royalists, would go unchecked.

[8] Chaumette stood up on a table to declare that "we now have open war between the rich and the poor" and urged the immediate mobilisation of the revolutionary army to go into the countryside, seize food supplies from hoarders and exact punishments on them.

He demanded the formation of a Revolutionary Army which was to "force avarice and greed to yield up the riches of the earth" in order to redistribute wealth, and feed troops and the urban populations.

"[15] His views were heavily influenced by atheist and materialist writers Paul d'Holbach, Denis Diderot and Jean Meslier.

[20][page needed] Chaumette's ultra-radical ideas on the economy, society and religion set him at odds with Maximilien Robespierre, the powerful circle around him and other "moderate" Montagnards.

Hébert and his associates planned an armed uprising to overthrow Robespierre, but Chaumette, along with fellow sans-culotte leader François Hanriot, refused to take part.

[26] In 1790 Chaumette reviewed the work of Louis Claude de Saint-Martin, a French Catholic philosopher wishing for a theocratic society in which the most devout people would guide the rest of the population.

He criticizes Saint-Martin's ideal due to its similarity to France's feudal order before the Revolution in which the rule of the monarch was legitimized by the divine right of kings.