Schoeck_2010_EnvyATheoryOfSocialBehaviour.pdf

ENVY IN THE FRENCH REVOLUTION 407
1787-89. In August 1788, a Parisian building worker would have had to
spend 50 per cent of his income to get enough bread, and in the period
from February to July 1789, more than 80 per cent. In contemporary
documents on the insurrections of 1778 and the first years of the
Revolution, Rude found that a constant cause for complaint was the
shortage or the high price of bread. He gives details which show how,
often month by month, or week by week, certain social uprisings in
Paris, and the intervals between them, coincided with the rise and fall in
the price ofbread. ll
It was only gradually that unrest arising from these shortages led to a
more purposive motivation, of which the term 'envy' might be used.
With the help of the radical Hebertistes, and even more with that of the
enrages, the Parisian sans-culottes evolved a programme of social demands.
Their rage now turned against the grocers, whereas previously its
object had been the bakers and millers. The revolutionary mob tried, for
instance, to compel the grocers to sell their wares at pre-Revolution
prices. Rude sums up the results of his research in the following passage:
The inescapable conclusion remains that the primary and most constant
motive impelling revolutionary crowds during this period was the concern
for the provision of cheap and plentiful food. This, more than any other
factor, was the raw material out of which the popular Revolution was forged.
It alone accounts for the continuity of the social ferment that was such a
marked feature of the capital in these years and out of which the great
political journees themselves developed. Even more it accounts for the
occasional outbreaks of independent activity by the menu peuple, going
beyond, or running counter to, the interests of their bourgeois allies .... Yet
without the impact of political ideas, mainly derived from their bourgeois
leaders, such movements would have remained strangely purposeless and
barren of result. 12
Unlike some other writers, Rude also believes that the sans-culottes
could have absorbed the more abstract theories. Only thus can the depth
and extent of the Revolution be explained.
11 G. Rude, The Crowd in the French Revolution, Oxford and New York, 1959,
pp. 201 f., 202 ff.
12 Op. cit., pp. 208 f.