Enragé priest who demanded controls on subsistence prices
A priest and radical activist in Paris’s Gravilliers section, Roux became a leading figure among the Enragés. He attacked food monopoly and speculation, demanded forceful price controls and economic equality, and presented the Enragés’ programme to the Convention in 1793. Arrested after attacks from Montagnard and Jacobin leaders, he died by suicide in prison.
Political position and stakes in the Revolution
Roux’s politics were tied to the subsistence questions raised in Paris’s Gravilliers section. He treated grain, prices, monopoly, and speculation not as mere moral failings but as political-economic threats to poor people’s survival. He therefore demanded strong price controls and action against the wealthy. Such demands brought abstract equality down to everyday questions of food, wages, and circulation.
The Enragés were neither a formal party nor simply a left wing of the Mountain. They were a loose current of radical demands shared by section activists and writers. Convention and Jacobin leaders could use their pressure while treating independent popular politics as a threat; Roux was arrested and died in prison. His case reveals the tension of a revolutionary government that introduced economic controls while repressing more democratic control from below.