Jacobins of 9 Thermidor Year II (27 July 1794), they took on the remaining Jacobins and sans-culottes, and largely succeeded in suppressing them over the next year or two. In prints they are often seen carrying large wooden clubs, which they liked to call "constitutions". They were supposedly organized by the politician and journalist Louis-Marie Stanislas Fréron, and eventually numbered 2,000-3,000. They, in fact, seem to have mostly consisted of the lower middle classes, the sons of "minor officials and small shopkeepers",[1] and were quietly encouraged by the shaky new government, who had good reason to fear Jacobin mobs, and wider unrest as the hard winter of 1794-5 saw increasing hunger among the Parisian working class. The Muscadins are considered to be part of the First White Terror in response to the preceding Reign of Terror
of the Jacobins.
The "jeunesse dorée" came to have a considerable influence on the
Jacques Nicolas Billaud-Varenne, who were all threatened with transportation to French Guiana (though only the latter two were eventually sent there).[2] After they had succeeded in suppressing the sans-culottes, their usefulness to the government was over, and they began to pose a threat. After the "whiff of grapeshot" in the crisis of 13 Vendémiaire
, in October 1795, they ceased to be a significant factor in Parisian politics.
The term
The term "Muscadin" existed well before the post-Thermidor gangs, who are also referred to as the "jeunesse dorée" ("gilded youth") or simply les jeunes gens ("the young people"). The term had long been current in
Garde Nationale
, and when Lyon was besieged by Jacobin armies in 1793, the term became known in Paris.
In that year the term was used in the battle between the Jacobin publications Le Père Duchesne, written by Jacques Hébert, and Le Vieux Cordelier, written by Camille Desmoulins, with Hébert using it in criticising Desmoulins. The split among the Jacobins was to be resolved the next year by the execution of both men with many of their respective factions; in the meeting of the Committee of Public Safety that moved against the "Hébertistes" in March 1794, Barère complained that Muscadins, along with foreigners and deserters, were seen to "congregate at the theatre, dressed with ridiculous ostentation, and ... show themselves with dirty stockings, large moustaches, and long sabres, threatening the good citizens, and especially the people's representatives" – he saw them as supporting the ultra-radical "Hébertistes".[3]
Costume
The costumes of the Muscadins are less well-recorded than those of their successors, the
Jacobins; the Muscadins took to extremes elements of the shared fashions of the day. Their walking sticks, clubs or bludgeons
are often thick twisted pieces of wood, perhaps artificially grown in that style; they are supposed to have referred to these as "constitutions".
Coward, Barry, and Swann, Julian, Conspiracies and Conspiracy Theory in Early Modern Europe: From the Waldensians to the French Revolution, 2004, Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.,
