The
news of the King's flight destroyed
the last of the King's popularity with the people of Paris.
The popular press portrayed the royal family as pigs and public
opinion plummeted. Increasingly there were demands for an end
to the monarchy and the creation of a new kind of government,
a republic.
At
the beginning of the revolution, the working men of Paris
allowed the revolutionary bourgeoisie to lead them. But by
1790 the sans-culottes were beginning to be politically active
in their own right. They were called sans-culottes (literally,
without trousers) because the working men wore loose trousers
instead of the tight knee breeches of the nobility. Eventually
sans culottes came to refer to any revolutionary citizen.
Though
their activity had been growing, after the King's flight to
Varennes the sans culottes were spurred to greater political
activity. They were uninterested in the complexities of politics,
and looked for simple solutions.
