le muscadin

• Posted by mgr on July 12th, 2007 filed in Dandy-Typen, KULTURELLES, Zeitdokumente
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definition: French dudes or exquisites, who aped the London mashers in the first French Revolution. Their dress was top-boots with thick soles, knee-breeches, a dress-coat with long tails, and a high stiff collar, and a thick cudgel called a constitution. It was thought to be John Bullish to assume a huskiness of voice, a discourtesy of manners, and a swaggering vulgarity of speech and behaviour. Probably so called from being ‘perfumed like a popinjay.’

source: E. Cobham Brewer. Dictionary of Phrase and Fable (1898)

definition: the middle class youth (or muscadins), whose arrogance excited the particular fury and hostility of the sans-culottes
term applied by the sans-culottes to bourgeois citizens and middle-class youth in the period after Thermidor. It suggests foppishness and fine clothes.

source: George Rudé: The Crowd in the French Revolution. London: Oxford University Press (1967).

Encouraged by Pétion from the Convention, young Muscadins (as well-pomaded rejectors of the shaggy sansculotte political style were coming to be known) seized control of several sectional assemblies and denounced the ‘popular despotism’ of the commune. They also paraded in the Champs-Élysées, calling for Marat to be guillotined. Steps taken against them were noisily denounced by the Girondin speakers in the Convention.

source: William Doyle: The Oxford History of the French Revolution. Oxford: Oxford University Press (1990).

The Girondins did have support in Paris from the muscadins, young clerks and shop assistants who were the social predecessors of the reactionary jeunesse dorée of Year III. The muscadins presented a threat sufficient for the Commune to bring out the National Guard against them in May.

source: Barry Rothaus/Samuel F. Scott: Historical Dictionary of the French Revolution 1789-1799. Vol. 1. Westport: Greenwood Press (1985).

…Thus rowdiness, interruptions and the bullying of actors by individuals in the audience continued as before, though the ruffianly ‘patriots’, the tapedurs and the tricoteuses who used to make a nuisance of themselves in the theatres, were now replaced by the muscadins, rich young fops, with their womenfolk wearing the so-called Grecian robes and sandals which the neoclassical craze had made fashionable. The flimsiness of this costume was notorious…
The muscadins or ‘gilded youth’, as they were also called, came mainly from families that had suffered under the Terror; now they had the opportunity of an easy revenge. The extent of their power was demonstrated by their success in preventing performances of an operetta, Le Concert de la rue Feydeau, in which some mild fun was poked at their pretentions. On the first night they interrupted the play, vociferously insisting on its withdrawal.

source: F. W. J. Hemmings: Culture and Society in France, 1789-1848. New York: Peter Lang (1987).

Jean Starobinski noted that the muscadins’ caricature of Ancien Régime clothes indicated that the Revolution had been brought to a halt (The Invention of Liberty. Skira/Rizzoli: Geneva, 1987, p. 102).
the muscadins’ female counterparts, the merveilleuses, whose simply pseudo-antique dresses signified a new freedom, indeed license, at once politically and vestimentary, when set against the memory of the oppressive rigours of the Jacobin republic.

source: Richard Wrigley: The Politics of Appearances: Representations of Dress in Revolutionary France. New York: Berg (2002).

MUSCADINS, young dandies of the Thermidorian Reaction, otherwise known as incroyables, collets noirs, the jeunesse dorée, and Fréronistes (followers of the conventionnel L.-M.-S. Fréron). The muscadins probably derived their name from their liberal use of musk perfume, but they were more obviously distinguished by their taste in dress. They favored a long jacket with wide lapels and a black velvet collar, signifying a state of mourning for the beheaded king. They often wore seventeen buttons, a sartorial reference to Louis XVII. They wore tight breeches and boots, and they carried a stick weighted with lead, euphemistically known as the pouvoir exécutif, which they put to aggressive use during innumerable street brawls in the Year III. They sometimes carried a monocle, which came to symbolize their insolent and disdainful attitude toward the lower classes. They wore their hair in ringlets. They had their own affectations of speech, and their own hymn ( ” Le réveil du peuple “). The Parisian set dined regularly at the café de Chartres and the restaurants of the Palais Royal, even during the famine and starvation of 1795.

The muscadins were most frequently students, merchants’ and lawyers’ clerks, and sons of bourgeois placed in the public administration to escape conscription. The politically active muscadins of Paris have been numbered at between 2,000 and 3,000, and their strength lay chiefly in the northwestern sections of Le Pelletier, Butte-des-Moulins, Tuileries, Piques, Guillaume-Tell, Halle-au-Blé, Brutus, and Muséum. This was the area around the Palais Royal and the Stock Exchange, where the muscadins were associated with currency speculation. It was also an area deeply implicated in the royalist rising of Vendémiaire Year IV.

The muscadins were responsible for the harassment of ex-terrorists on the streets and in the theaters of the larger cities, as well as from the public gallery of the Convention. Egged on first by Fréron but then principally by J. Rovère, they forced the pace of the Thermidorian Reaction, influencing the closure of the Jacobin club of Paris and the removal of J.-P. Marat’s remains from the Panthéon.

Their extravagant tastes, however, their refusal to join the army, and their patronage of expensive restaurants at a time when people were dying from starvation made the muscadins the object of popular detestation. They may, therefore, have helped to provoke the popular Parisian rising of Germinal and Prairial Year III. The Convention employed the muscadins as its praetorian guard, but in Prairial, they were no match for the serried ranks of the workers of the faubourg Saint-Antoine.

Once the Convention had crushed the last sans-culotte rising in Prairial Year III, it could dispense with its embarrassing alliance with the muscadins, who were beginning to express openly royalist sentiments. From then on, the muscadins were doomed as a political force. The café de Chartres was closed in Messidor Year III, and J.-M. Souriguères de Saint-Marc, author of ” Le réveil du peuple,” was arrested. In Vendémiaire Year IV the northwestern sections of Paris attempted to resist the Two-thirds Law, which perpetuated two-thirds of the conventionnels in power under the new constitution. Troops led by General N. Bonaparte helped to defeat this rising, in which many muscadins were involved.

The muscadins were a group distinguished by their youth, mainly bourgeois social origin, provocative manners, and emblematic dress. They played a political role in the Year III as the militant wing of the antiterrorist reaction, but Vendémiaire Year IV was their day of reckoning with the Thermidorian Convention.

F.-A. Aulard, Paris pendant la réaction thermidorienne et sous le Directoire, 5 vols. ( Paris, 1898- 1902); G. Duval, Souvenirs thermidoriens, 2 vols. ( Paris, 1844); F. Gendron, La jeunesse dorée: épisodes de la Révolution française ( Québec, 1979).

Quelle: Barry Rothaus/Samuel F. Scott: Historical Dictionary of the French Revolution 1789-1799 Vol. 2. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1985: 693f.

Ancien mot désignant un fat outré, muscadin va se répandre dès l’automne 1793, à Paris, après avoir servi à critiquer, à Lyon, des jeunes gens élégants, parfumés au musc et qui s’étaient opposés aux soldats de la Convention. Le Dictionnaire universel du XIXe siècle cite une phrase prononcée par Barère, dans un discours, en l’an II: »ce nom qu’une jeunesse orgueilleuse s’est fait donner et qui attestera à la postérité qu’il a existé en France, au milieu de sa révolution, des jeunes gens sans courage et sans patrie.« Les muscadins font beaucoup parler d’eux et s’attirent de nombreux et violents sarcasmes. Si leurs perruques blondes, leurs bas blancs et leurs collets noirs les distinguent de la jeunesse républicaine, ils sont aussi les symboles de leurs opinions politiques, affichées ostensiblement et défendues par un bâton qu’ils nommaient leur pouvoir exécutif.

On nous les présente dans des vêtements serrés et unis, imbus d’eux-mêmes, impertinents, affichant une fatuité qui les conduit à marcher à petits pas; parfois, ils affectent un air ennuyé en grasseyant quelques mots et ils se retrouvent au boulevard des Italiens - futur boulevard de Gand - qu’ils rebaptisent boulevard de Coblentz. Leur fatuité, leur impertinence, leur air ennuyé, leur sens de la distinction, enfin le décor où ils évoluent sont autant d’éléments que nous retrouverons chez les premiers dandys.

source: Jean-Pierre Saidah: “Le dandysme: continuité et rupture” In: Montandon, Alain (Hg.): L’honnête homme et le dandy. Tübingen: Narr, 1993:130f.

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