Gilded youth

Meaning

Phrase.

The phrase names fashionable young anti-Jacobins. Their elegance accompanies jeers at condemned prisoners and later the persecution of Jacobins and destruction of images. Dorée suggests glamour and social privilege, not an assertion that every member is literally rich or wears gold. The group’s appearance after Thermidor does not make it a simple moral opposite of the earlier punitive crowds, whose gestures and demands recur.