'without breeches') were the common people of the lower classes in late 18th-century France, a great many of whom became radical and militant partisans of the French Revolution in response to their poor quality of life under the Ancien Régime.

They supported the abolition of all the authority and privileges of the monarchy, nobility, and Roman Catholic clergy, the establishment of fixed wages, the implementation of price controls to ensure affordable food and other essentials, and vigilance against counter-revolutionaries.

[4] The sans-culottes ... campaigned for a more democratic constitution, price controls, harsh laws against political enemies, and economic legislation to assist the needy.

[7]The sans-culottes also populated the ranks of paramilitary forces charged with physically enforcing the policies and legislation of the revolutionary government, a task that commonly included violence and the carrying out of executions against perceived enemies of the revolution.

During the height of revolutionary fervor, such as during the Reign of Terror when it was dangerous to be associated with anything counter-revolutionary, even public functionaries and officials actually from middle or upper-class backgrounds adopted the clothing and label of the sans-culottes as a demonstration of solidarity with the working class and patriotism for the new French Republic.

[1] It was not long before Maximilien de Robespierre and the now dominant Jacobin Club turned against the radical factions of the National Convention, including the sans-culottes, despite their having previously been the strongest supporters of the revolution and its government.

[1] The execution of radical leader Jacques Hébert spelled the decline of the sans-culottes,[1][page needed] and with the successive rise of even more conservative governments, the Thermidorian Convention and the French Directory, they were definitively silenced as a political force.

The distinctive costume of typical sans-culottes featured:[1] On 27 April 1791, Robespierre opposed plans to reorganize the National Guard and restrict its membership to active citizens, largely property owners.

[9] Along with other Jacobins, he urged in his magazine the creation of a revolutionary army in Paris, consisting of 20,000 men,[10][clarification needed] with the goal to defend "liberty" (the revolution), maintain order in the sections, and educate the members in democratic principles; an idea he borrowed from Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Machiavelli.

[12] Following the king's veto of the Assembly's efforts to raise a militia of volunteers, the reinstatement of Brissotin ministers and suppression of non-juring priests, the monarchy faced an abortive Demonstration of 20 June 1792.

[13] Sergent-Marceau and Panis [fr], the administrators of police, urged the sans-culottes to lay down their weapons, telling them it was illegal to present a petition in arms, although their march to the Tuileries was not banned.

[14] Early in the morning (10 August 1792) 30,000 Fédérés, and sans-culottes militants from the sections led a successful assault upon the Tuileries;[15][clarification needed] according to Robespierre a triumph for the "passive" (non-voting) citizens.

[17] On 8 and 12 May Robespierre repeated in the Jacobin club the necessity of founding a revolutionary army consisting of sans-culottes, paid by a tax on the rich, to beat the aristocrats inside France and the convention.

[20][21][22] As rioting persisted, a commission of inquiry of twelve members, with a very strong Girondin majority, was set up to investigate the anarchy in the communes and the activities of the sans-culottes.

They demanded that a domestic revolutionary army should be raised and that the price of bread should be fixed at three sous a pound, that nobles holding senior rank in the army should be dismissed, that armouries should be created for arming the sans-culottes, the departments of State purged, suspects arrested, the right to vote provisionally reserved to sans-culottes only, and a fund set apart for the relatives of those defending their country and for the relief of aged and infirm.

[32] Barère voiced the Committee of Public Safety's support for the measures desired by the assembly: he presented a decree that was passed immediately, establishing a paid armed force of 6,000 men and 1,000 gunners "designed to crush the counter-revolutionaries, to execute wherever the need arises the revolutionary laws and the measures of public safety that are decreed by the National Convention, and to protect provisions (A force of citizen-soldiers which could go into the countryside to supervise the requisition of grain, to prevent the manoeuvres of rich égoistes and deliver them up to the vengeance of the laws)".

Jacques Hébert, Ronsin, Vincent, Momoro, Clootz, De Kock were arrested on charges of complicity with foreign powers (William Pitt the Younger) and guillotined on 24 March.

[43] When the National Convention met to discuss the fate of the former king Louis XVI in 1792, the sans-culottes vehemently opposed a proper trial, instead opting for an immediate execution.

The sans-culottes believed in a complete upheaval of the government, pushing for the execution of any that were considered corrupt by the leaders, even going as far as wanting "the enemies of the republic [to] hang-main and the guillotine to stand like the first patriots, the finisher of the law.

The popular image of the sans-culotte has gained currency as an enduring symbol for the passion, idealism and patriotism of the common man of the French Revolution.

[52] Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm observes that the sans-culottes were a "shapeless, mostly urban movement of the labouring poor, small craftsmen, shopkeepers, artisans, tiny entrepreneurs and the like".

[53] The Marxist historian Albert Soboul emphasized the importance of the sans-culottes as a social class, a sort of proto-proletariat that played a central role in the French Revolution.