enragés, term applied to a small group of Parisian radical extremists in the French Revolution. Rising prices and food shortages provoked them in Feb.-Mar., 1793, to pillage the city's food stores. Led by Jacques Roux, they demanded strict economic controls and successfully agitated for the overthrow of the Girondists. To maintain popular support in a time of crisis, the government granted many of their demands in the early months of the Reign of Terror, but arrested them. After Roux's arrest (Aug., 1793) Jacques René Hébert supported them.

Les Enragés (literally "the Enraged Ones") were a radical group active during the French Revolution of 1789 opposed to the Jacobins. Initiated by Jacques Roux, Théophile Leclerc, Jean Varlet and others, they believed that liberty for all meant more than mere constitutional rights. Roux once said that "liberty is no more than an empty shell when one class is allowed to condemn another to starvation and no measures taken against them".

The demands of the enragés included:

• Price controls on grain
• The assignat as the only legal tender
• Repression of counterrevolutionary activity
• A progressive income tax

They were supported by the sans-culottes. To the left of the Montagnards, the enragés were fought against by Maximilien de Robespierre and reëmerged as the group of Hébertistes. Their ideas were taken up and developed by Babeuf and his associates.

Another group styling itself les enragés emerged in France in 1968 among students at Nanterre University. They were heavily influenced by the Situationists and would go on to be one of the leading groups in the May 1968 French insurrection.

References

• Daniel Guérin: Class struggle in the first French republic : bourgeois and bras nus 1793-1795, London: Pluto Press, 1977
• René Viénet: "Enragés and Situationists in the Occupation Movement, France, May'68" , New York: Automedia 1992 ISBN 0-936756-79-9, London: Rebel Press 1992, ISBN 0-946061-05-4

This material is taken with permission from http://www.enrager.net