The Permanent Guillotine: Writings of the Sans-Culottes

When the Bastille was stormed on July 14, 1789, it wasn't a crowd of breeches-wearing professionals that attacked the prison, freed the internees, and killed its superintendent, carrying off his head on a pike. It was the working people of Paris, men who didn't wear breeches, the sans-culottes, who carried this out.