Political Emergence of Babouvism
The Proletarian Revolution: Babeuf to Marx
Introduction
The French Revolution was not merely a classical bourgeois revolution that abolished the feudal order and marked the beginning of capitalist society and bourgeois democracy because it had not “done away with class antagonisms;”1 it was also a revolution that aimed to transcend the “bourgeois horizons” that became a “closed book to the ideologists of the bourgeois class.”2 Throughout the revolution, communist ideas carved a path for themselves3 because “the Great Revolution has bequeathed to tar some other principles of an infinitely higher import,” thereby elevating the fundamental goals of the French Revolution beyond bourgeois confines “like some great beacon to point the way, flame the words: [liberty], [equality], [fraternity].”4 Although its untraversed boundary was, after Thermidor, Napoleon, and the Restoration, the solidification of the bourgeois cosmopolitan, it brought to light ideas that extended beyond the entirety of the old world order—viz., communism, which, when thoroughly elaborated, is the idea of a new world condition that abolishes bourgeois private property.5
This idea emerges from the plebeian wing of French society and, through its principles, moral action, and revolutionary endeavor, stands in opposition to the economic and political shaping of the kingdom of the bourgeois class, advocating for a permanent revolution until the desideratum of the revolution is achieved, viz., the abolition of bourgeois private property and the realization of the emancipation of humanity: a communist society.6 The idea of a revolution that has been interrupted, which must be re-initiated—made permanent—until ultimate victory, emerges in the French Revolution after Thermidor. The revolution was interrupted by the bourgeoisie, who, according to Marx, have historically “played a most revolutionary part;”7 rather, it is the task of the plebeian wing, the impoverished masses, to restore the insurrectionary revolution, to achieve what the bourgeois revolution only promised through democracy: viz., “the legal and formal concept of ‘democracy,’ which serves the bourgeoisie as a screen to conceal their domination and as a means of deceiving the people, and by forgetting that in practice ‘democracy’ sometimes stands for the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie,”8 thereby transcending the oppressive dictatorship of the bourgeoisie.
This notion is embodied in the actions and thoughts of the People's Tribune, Gracchus Babeuf,9 and his comrade, Philippe Buonarroti,10 as well as in the revolutionary movement that, at the midpoint of its trajectory, had as its main representatives Leclerc and Roux, a movement that advocated for the cause of the proletariat in all great revolutions.11 Furthermore, historical materialism is rooted in this direction of French communism.
§1
Babeuf was the first to establish the communist idea as a political force during the French Revolution.12 The first appearance of an active communist party occurred in the bourgeois revolution, at the moment when the constitutional monarchy was abolished.13 Just as the most radical republicans in England, viz., the Levellers, advocated for the interests of the poorest and were concerned not only with political freedom but also with social equality, so too, and even more ardently, did the egalitarians and communists in the French Revolution defend and fight for these principles, standing firm in the belief that there can be no democracy without equality. Babeuf's conspiracy, as penned by his friend and party comrade Buonarroti, demonstrates that these republicans, drawing from the historical movement, understood that merely addressing the political question of monarchy versus republic did not resolve a single social issue in terms of the proletariat.14 Hence, their resistance to the consequences of the bourgeois revolution. Thus, the communist wing in bourgeois revolutions opposed the completion of a revolution that merely altered the political structure while leaving the social structure—the breeding ground of inequality and unfreedom—untouched, heralding a permanent revolution whose ultimate goal was communism.15 As Ernst Bloch expressed, “the radical, already socialist, accent of the French Revolution was placed more on equality than freedom, and Babeuf, the socialist of 1794 who took up the incipient proletarian tendencies in the midst the bourgeois denouement of the revolution, set himself up as the tribune of égalité.”16 The bourgeois interest in the French Revolution trembled before the ideal of equality, for equality meant equality of wealth and hence complete equality in consumption.
"The freedom spoken of in this revolution fit quite well with private property (which was still a human right for the French Revolution), and the idea of private property openly contradicted this freedom when it spoke of the freedom of those who did not have any private property and who had to sell themselves; but so long as it was not accompanied by a restriction, equality always implied the equality of assets. Thus it never remained a formal expression of capitalistic interests (as the equality of all owners in the eyes of the law), that is, it never expressed the capitalist need for the most homogeneous calculability possible; rather through itself equality denounced the real inequality of the classes. It was only a matter of practical consequence whether or not the bourgeois demand for equality as the abolition of class privileges is latched onto by the proletarian demand for the abolition of classes. While freedom, as simply individual freedom, sanctioned the entrepreneur, equality, as a reflex of the law of value, disputed his economic necessity…[Babeuf] recognized freedom as being dependent upon economic equality, that is, upon the abolition of the distinctions between the poor and the rich…So long and so far as freedom is not intimately bound up with equality it remains a chimera; freedom is liberation from oppression, and oppression is brought about by economic inequality and its effects.”17
For this permanent revolutionizing, a political organization is essential—an organization that will abandon the forms and methods of the previous popular movement. Hence, the Conspiracy for Equality emerged, marking the beginning of modern thought and action.18 From the ideas and practices of Babeuf's and Buonarroti's secret societies arose the secret societies of the materialist communists, through which Blanqui and Barbès would forge their conspiracies. Later, the International would emerge from these movements.19
The ideas and principles of the communist movement, which emerged during the French Revolution, persisted in the class struggle of the European proletariat throughout the past century, and following the October Revolution in Russia, they have been present in the proletarian struggle across nearly the entire world.20
The communist wing of the French Revolution—the Babouvists—thus aspired to the reign of reason in the world, to surpass bourgeois horizons, and to achieve total human liberation. However, they did not overlook that the achievements of the bourgeois revolution, including the so-called subjective political rights, form the foundation of historical continuity in the struggle for universal human liberation, for communism. These rights serve as the starting point for resisting exploitation and oppression. Were it not so, "[the] Marseillaise would not be the song of freedom, and revolution in general would become problematic.”21
By accentuating the aporias and the significant streak of red in the old tricolor,22 I sought to highlight the essential historical and theoretical foundations of Babouvism, within which its understanding of revolution emerges and from which the concept of the community of labor and goods originates.
§2
Scholars of Babeuf's doctrine, as well as of Babouvism as an ideology and movement, generally agree that Babouvism is deeply rooted in the French Enlightenment and materialism, as well as in the ideas of Rousseau, Mably, and Morelly.23 “Through Babouvism, communism, till then only utopian reverie, was formulated in an ideological system; through the Conspiracy of Equals, it entered political history.”24 Babouvism marked the significant departure25 from the prehistory of the socialism movement — viz., utopianism — by providing a communist theory grounded in the class demands of the oppressed and reflecting “the concrete development of a new society from germs present in existing society.”26
After the fall of the petty-bourgeois revolutionary leader Robespierre — who, true to his petty-bourgeois contradictions, vacillated between democratic equality and the bourgeois notion that equality is an illusion, condemning both revolutionaries and counterrevolutionaries to the guillotine27 — Babeuf recognized that both the bourgeoisie and the poor desired a republic.28 However, the bourgeoisie obviously sought a bourgeois and aristocratic republic, a republic of a privileged million — a republic of patricians and plebeians — where the republic of the million had always been the enemy, the scoundrel, the oppressor, and the bloodsucker of the twenty-four million; whereas, the people wanted a popular and democratic republic, a republic for twenty-four million, a republic of equality.29
Babouvism thus aligns with the radical Jacobin factions of the Enragés, understanding democracy in the Aristotelian sense — as the rule of the poor.30 In Babeuf’s program, the proletariat appears in its ancient sense, representing all the poor indiscriminately as the people. This concept of the people as inherently tied to poverty resonates even among 18th-century thinkers, who viewed them as a class of the poorest and most wretched.31 However, until Babeuf, workers and peasants were considered as those who work in slavery — wretched people, but not recognized as members of a class with their own interests and rights. Hence follows Babeuf's understanding of class struggle as the driving force of history — a subterranean force in the historical process that drives the revolution to its ultimate, permanent realization.
The interests and rights of the proletariat, like those of the sans-culottes and Jacobins, stem from the first article of the Montagnard Constitution of 1793, embodying a natural-law principle: "The aim of society is the common welfare,"32 that is, from the postulate of natural law regarding the freedom and equality of all people and citizens. However, equality here is not limited to legal equality but extends to equality in material conditions.33 “Not only equality of rights, equality enshrined in legal texts, but also honest comfort, the legally guaranteed sufficiency to meet all physical needs, and access to all social benefits, as a fair and necessary recompense for the part of labor that each individual contributes to the common task.”34 Thus, for Babeuf and his followers, the conclusion is clear: there can be no brotherhood without equality, and people cannot be called brothers if discrimination exists among them.
The realization of human equality and unity is impeded by private property, which ensures freedom and security for a minority, relegating the rest of society to the position of helots.35 Therefore, property must be structured to guarantee the freedom of all members of the community, meaning it must become social — that is, belonging to no one individually.36
Just as he advocated for the abolition of property rights, Babeuf believed that knowledge and education constituted a form of property that should also be made communal, rather than a privilege of the few.37 Building upon the Enlightenment thought of Condorcet, who argued that the spread of education and knowledge is essential to human liberation,38 Babeuf contended that education enables property owners to rise above the poor, who, lacking education, are shackled by prejudice and superstition. For Babeuf, ensuring equal access to education is a safeguard against the domination of the majority by a minority. Education empowers individuals to form and articulate their views independently within the community.
Thus, the Babouvist idea of a new world order brings to light the first conception of a community that is humanity's own creation, into which individuals are integrated as its free and equal members.
Although the aim of society — and of the French Revolution — is collective happiness,39 what the Revolution has actually produced, as Babeuf reveals, is the happiness of only a select few.40 The Revolution brought liberty and security to the commercial classes, the Directory, the legislators, and the millionaires; these gains have been realized for them, but not for the people. The Revolution was intended to bring happiness to all, yet this has not been achieved; therefore, the Revolution is incomplete — what has, in fact, been completed is the counter-revolution. Hence, the Revolution must continue until it becomes the Revolution of the people.
Constantly challenging the existing order is the gradual dismantling of injustices and replacing it with something better. And so long as these injustices persist, and the new world order has not been established, the revolutionary process must continue.41 It will persist until there are no longer rich and poor, great and small, masters and servants, rulers and ruled — that is, until equality is fully realized.
Continuing the relentless struggle for the plebeian Vendée, Babeuf advanced the first concept of a permanent revolution, aimed at achieving communism — that is, the abolition of all classes and class rule.
Centered around these ideas of the existing bourgeois society and the new society that must be fought for, the bourgeoisie—the wealthy—gather on one side, and the people—the poor—on the other, with diametrically opposed interests. Thus, the resulting class struggle is relentless and brutal. Achieving the people’s revolution requires the violent seizure of power and the dismantling of the bourgeois state. According to the Babouvists, this objective can only be realized through armed rebellion, for which revolutionary organization is both the prerequisite and driving force. The political organization of the Conspiracy of Equals illustrates that the Babouvists had moved beyond the traditional methods previously employed by the people's movement.
“The political organization of the Conspiracy marked a break with the methods used till that time by the popular movement. At the centre of the organization stood the leading group, backed by a small number of hardened militants; then there came the fringe of sympathizers, comprising patriots and democrats (in the Year II sense of the word), who were not involved in the secrecy, and who seem not to have shared the new revolutionary ideal; finally, there were the masses themselves, who were to be coaxed into participation. In sum, Babeuf’s was an organizational conspiracy par excellence, but one in which the problem of the necessary links with the masses seems to have been largely unresolved.”42
The longstanding tradition of a messianic role assigned to an organized minority, along with an underestimation of the revolutionary role of the masses, underpins not only the Conspiracy’s political organization—namely, the Secret Directory—but also its vision of society after seizing power.43 Following the seizure of power, the Babouvists propose the establishment of a revolutionary government to protect the people from the influence of equality's natural enemies. This would be accomplished through the dictatorship of a revolutionary elite, consisting of a select group of proven democrats. The historical mission of this government is to establish genuine equality, embodying the dictatorship of the poor, or the people.44 Thus, it has two defining aspects: the dictatorship over the wealthy and the foundation of a new society within the revolutionary framework. At the core of this vision lies the organized revolutionary elite.
This conspiratorial elite’s dictatorship, positioned between the victorious rebellion and the formation of an egalitarian society, is understood as a revolutionary authority. It aligns with the concept of legislative omnipotence and, particularly, with Robespierre’s model of dictatorship as the sole means of preserving revolutionary power and ensuring the revolution’s momentum and continuation. This conception, through which communism first entered political history, reemerges in the proletarian class struggles of the Revolution of 1848 and the Paris Commune, and it resonates within the proletariat's ongoing steps toward the realm of freedom.45
Interpretations of Babouvist ideas on revolution and the revolutionary organization of society have frequently missed a crucial dimension, resulting in a skewed view.46 Such interpretations often lead to the critique that revolutionary democracy, as envisioned by Babouvism, neglected freedom. However, this criticism is unfounded. The Babouvists pursued freedom and equality not as mere slogans or ideals confined to written declarations but as principles to be realized within the concrete realities of socio-economic and political life. According to Babouvism, if freedom and equality do not rest on the abolition of socio-economic inequality and constraints—on eradicating the disparities between wealth and poverty, between palaces and hovels—then these concepts remain chimeras rather than foundations of a new community.47 In his advocacy for political freedoms, Babeuf criticized the division of citizens into “actifs et passifs”48 groups and the excessive centralization of power within the national assembly, particularly within its committees and commissions, where he contended that freedom was more often undermined by intrigue than it was defended.
Moreover, Babouvism, in its foundational principles, upheld a key tradition of French revolutionary political thought: the idea of radical political mistrust as an essential democratic tenet. This principle manifested in the concept of the imperative mandate, by which representatives of the people are firmly restricted and held accountable through the inalienable sovereignty of the people.49
If the imperative mandate served as both a guarantee and an inalienable safeguard for the respect of popular sovereignty, then principles such as universal suffrage, freedom of thought and public expression, freedom of assembly, and the declaration of public service in the National Guard as accessible to all—including the election of officers—were also fundamental to Babouvism. For the Babouvists, revolutionary democracy necessitated the unwavering support of freedom of the press, regarded as a crucial postulate that must be upheld in both wartime and peacetime.50
With these political ideas, the Babouvists not only expanded the postulates of the Montagnard Constitution, particularly the people's right to revolution, but also laid the groundwork for the ideas of a new world order, whose arrival they could only sense, even as they sacrificed themselves for that intuition.
§3
In the French Revolution, two fundamental orientations emerged: one aimed at political revolution — political freedom as a mere semblance of freedom — and the other aimed at genuine freedom and equality. The former was realized by Napoleon, while the latter was both founded and personified by Babeuf.51 Babeuf's thought unveiled a historical understanding that the true battleground for democracy extends beyond the limits of political democracy; democracy had evolved into a proletarian principle, that is, democracy was fundamentally communism.52 This nascent concept of a new world order, rooted in the natural rights of man — that nature has endowed all people with equal rights to enjoy all its resources, and that the aim of human society is to protect this equality53 — leads to the demand for the abolition of inequality, specifically the abolition of private property, as it is both the expression and foundation of inequality. Transforming property into a social entity, or communal property — entrusted solely with the right to determine its use and distribution — replaces the right of ownership with the right of each individual to a fulfilling life, a right that belongs to every member of the social body.54 In this way, the right of ownership is supplanted by the right of each person to a contented life, a right inherent to all members of the social body.
The first and basic prerequisite of human association is the recognition of an implicit right to improve the social and political system in order to promote the happiness of its members. This right is usually unwritten, but it is absolutely inalienable. The people are never to bind themselves against their own true interests; they are never to place shackles upon themselves; nor are they to devise laws to shackle future generations. In agreeing to abandon the state of nature and on becoming a member of society, each man has in effect relinquished his primordial independence solely in order to improve his lot. Society, in other words, is committed to an unending quest for human welfare, and every man, woman, and child is to reap his or her fair share of the social reward that is the fruit of social cooperation.55
However, establishing equality — the natural right of man — requires yet another critical condition: the abolition of a societal structure in which a minority solely consumes and wastes while the majority produces and labors. This abolition necessitates asserting both the duty and right of all people to work, whereby each community member contributes a share of the labor needed to sustain and advance society as a whole.56 Furthermore, the Babouvist doctrine includes a third essential principle: all producers, all workers, labor for the collective association, with each contributor performing their share of work and receiving an equal portion of the association’s total product in return. In this community, devoid of private ownership, where all individuals are both producers and consumers, where trade and merchants are eliminated, and where no foundation exists for elevating any individual above the collective, the Babouvists envisioned the realization of communism as a society founded on shared goods and labor — equality without limitations, security, and the highest achievable happiness.57
“By the law of nature, which makes production depend on labour, this labour is evidently for each citizen an essential condition of the social compact; and as each, in entering into society carries with him an equal stake and contribution (the totality of his strength and means), it follows that the burdens, the productions, and the advantages, ought to be equally divided. They made it, moreover, he remarked that the end of society is to effectually prevent natural inequalities; that were it even true that inequality of enjoyments had hastened the profess of the really useful arts, it ought to cease now, seeing that any new progress can add nothing to the real happiness of all; and that the equality suggested by their own simple good sense to the first founders of societies, is still more strongly recommended to us by the increase of knowledge and by our everyday experience of the evils that follow in the train of inequality. Those who reasoned thus, saw in the community of goods and of labour — that is to say, in the equal distribution of burdens and enjoyments — the veritable object and perfection of the social state—the only public order adequate to banish oppression for ever, by rendering the ravages of ambition and avarice impossible, and to guarantee to each and every citizen the greatest possible happiness.”58
Although the Babouvist vision of community transcends Robespierre's contradiction between the right to life and the desire to uphold private property, encompassing the dimension of labor and freedom as foundations of the new community, it still reveals an idea of communism wrapped in both universal asceticism and crude egalitarianism on one hand,59 and political reason on the other. For Babouvists, a society of equality is thus a community founded on equality as mere leveling — through raw and ascetic equalization — structured by political will, power, and reason; in other words, revolutionary authority, or revolution as a political act and process.60 Yet, this does not preclude us from revisiting the origin and, once again paraphrasing Karl Marx, concluding that Babouvism, arising within the French Revolution, introduced the first conception of a new world order, represented the first revolutionary attempt at communism, and, at the same time, marked the division between liberalism and communism. Nevertheless, it remains the progenitor not only of the communist idea and inspiration but also of other ideological and theoretical orientations, thus serving as a precursor to the aporias of proletarian revolution.
Marx, Karl, et al. The Communist Manifesto. Get Political. London: Pluto Press, 2008, p. 51.
Lukács, György, and Enzo Traverso. The Destruction of Reason. London: Verso, 2021.
In a letter (September 10, 1791) to his friend, the deputy Coupe of Oise, Babeuf wrote, “Analyze Robespierre and you will find him too, in the last resort, an agrarian, and these great men are obliged to maneuver, because they feel that the time is not yet ripe.” (Espinas, Alfred Victor. La Philosophie Sociale Du Xviiie Siècle Et La Révolution. Paris: F. Alean, 1898, p. 410). “So Babeuf had ‘analysed’ Robespierre, and found that the lines on which his social ideas ran were the same as his own. He was grateful to the barrister from Arras for having always undertaken the defence of the people and the disinherited from the tribune of the Constituent Assembly, for having opposed the distinction between active and passive citizens, for having protested against martial law, denounced the abuses of the allotment of the communal lands, demanded a just division of inherited property, and upheld on all occasions the claims of humanity against those of bourgeois law.” (Mathiez, Albert. The Fall of Robespierre: and Other Essays. London: Williams and Norgate, 1927, p 233).
Peter Kropotkin, The Great French Revolution 1789–1793, 1909, p. 328.
Marx, Karl, et al. The Communist Manifesto. Get Political. London: Pluto Press, 2008, p. 71. “All property relations in the past have continually been subject to historical change consequent upon the change in historical conditions. The French Revolution, for example, abolished feudal property in favour of bourgeois property. The distinguishing feature of communism is not the abolition of property generally, but the abolition of bourgeois property. But modern bourgeois private property is the final and most complete expression of the system of producing and appropriating products, that is based on class antagonisms, on the exploitation of the many by the few.”
Babeuf, Gracchus, and Claude Mazauric. Textes Choisis. Paris: Editions sociales, 1965, p. 182.
Marx, Karl, et al. The Communist Manifesto. Get Political. London: Pluto Press, 2008, p. 53.
Lenin, The Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky, Complete Works, Vol. 28, 1974, p. 311.
Babeuf replaced his name François Noël with Gracchus to symbolically evoke the memory of the famous tribune of ancient Rome. About himself, Babeuf wrote: “When I chose as my protectors, in my opinion, the most honest men of the Roman Republic, I had a moral purpose, for they were the most resolute in wanting common happiness” (Babeuf, Gracchus, and Claude Mazauric, Textes Choisis. Paris: Editions sociales, 1965, p. 168). The People's Tribune—Gracchus Babeuf—was born in 1760 in Saint-Quentin into a family of civil servants; he grew up and lived in poverty and destitution. As a child from the Picardy region, he encountered early the struggle of peasants against feudal dues. Working as a surveyor and digging through the archives of the feudal lords, Babeuf discovered “the mystery of the usurpation of the noble caste” and the fundamental ideas of “agrarian communism.” After the fall of the Bastille, he moved to Paris, where he became a leader and thinker of the Equals movement. Babeuf's stay in Paris directed his focus toward the problems of the proletarian poor, and he formulated his “idea of a new world order,” for which the Directory condemned him to death, along with his associates and as the author of the Song of Equals—Darthé—and sent him to the guillotine on May 28, 1797. In a farewell letter to his wife and children, Babeuf wrote these lines: “Believe me, I do not regret sacrificing myself for the most beautiful cause. It is enough if all my efforts were to remain in vain; I have fulfilled my task. I have seen your happiness only in the happiness of all. Evil men were stronger and defeated me. It is sweet to die with a conscience as pure as mine.” Besides the Eternal Cadastre and the System of Depopulation, Babeuf's texts are scattered across the papers he mostly published and wrote himself.
Babeuf's understanding and that of the Babouvists were expressed in a series of newspaper articles, pamphlets, and proclamations that they published. The most well-known of these writings are Manifesto of Equals, Act (program) of the uprising, and the Analysis of Babeuf's Doctrine. The most comprehensive exposition of Babeuf's doctrine was provided by Philippe Buonarroti (1761–1837), a surviving participant of the Conspiracy of Equals and a comrade of Babeuf, who published in Brussels in 1828 the Conspiracy for Equality, known as Babeuf's. This fulfilled Babeuf's wish (expressed on July 14, 1796, in a letter to Lepelletier) to gather his drafts, notes, and sketches of revolutionary writings and to present to “all participants in equality... what the corrupt today call my dreams” (Babeuf, Gracchus, and Claude Mazauric, Textes Choisis. Paris: Editions sociales, 1965, p. 224). This work is not only a history of the Equals and their role in the French Revolution, but it also contains drafts of documents and acts that speak to the ideas of future social organization. It is a kind of document and program that significantly contributed to the propagation of Babouvism and its presence in communist thought and the class struggle of the proletariat. Philippe Buonarroti arrived in France during the Great French Revolution and aligned himself with the Montagnards. After the fall of Robespierre, he worked closely with Babeuf in preparing the Conspiracy of Equals, serving as a thinker and legislator for the Equals. After the discovery of the Conspiracy of Equals, he was expelled from France. In Switzerland and Belgium, he created secret revolutionary associations and spread Babouvism across Europe.
Marx, Karl, et al. The Communist Manifesto. Get Political. London: Pluto Press, 2008, p. 96
Mason, Laura. The Last Revolutionaries: the Conspiracy Trial of Gracchus Babeuf and the Equals. New Haven: London , 2022, p. 4.
Marx, Karl. Moralizing Criticism and Critical Morality. A Contribution to German Cultural History. Contra Karl Heinzen. Complete Works, Vol. 6, p. 312.
Ibid.
Louis, Paul. Histoire Du Socialisme En France, 1789-1945. Bibliothèque D'histoire Politique Et Sociale. 4. éd. Paris: M. Rivière, 1946, p. 51. “Standing before a high court in a remote provincial town, prosecutors and defendants looked beyond questions of guilt or innocence to interrogate the state of the nation. Was democracy possible without social equality?” (Mason, Laura. The Last Revolutionaries: the Conspiracy Trial of Gracchus Babeuf and the Equals. New Haven: London , 2022, p. 3).
Bloch, Ernst. Natural Law and Human Dignity. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1986, p. 165.
Ibid. p. 164.
Soboul, Albert. La Révolution Française. Terrains. Nouv. éd. rev. et augm. du Précis d'histoire de la Révolution française / Paris: Editions sociales, 1982, p. 10.
P. Kropotkin, The Great French Revolution 1789–1793, 1909, pp. 453—454.
The followers of Babeuf march in step with the revolutionaries of 1848 and the Communards of 1871. Babeuf's conception of communism and revolution is personified and developed, all the way to the Paris Commune, by the martyr L. A. Blanqui and his adherents. The ideas of Babouvism were present, in the past century, in the French social democracy, German true socialism, and the Chartists in England, and in the October, Chinese, and Cuban revolutions, as well as various social and liberation movements in the contemporary world. All of this speaks not so much to the vitality and grandeur of these ideas, but to the revolutionary reality of the epoch itself.
Bloch, Ernst. Natural Law and Human Dignity. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1986, p. 169.
Stéphanie Roza, Social rights and duties in Babeuf and the neo-Babouvists (1786–1848), French History, Volume 33, Issue 4, December 2019, Pages 537–553, https://doi.org/10.1093/fh/crz091, p. 538.
Soboul, Albert. La Révolution Française. Terrains. Nouv. éd. rev. et augm. du Précis d'histoire de la Révolution française / Paris: Editions sociales, 1982, p. 487. See also Mason, Laura. The Last Revolutionaries: the Conspiracy Trial of Gracchus Babeuf and the Equals. New Haven: London , 2022, pp. 20, 29.
Soboul, Albert. La Révolution Française. Terrains. Nouv. éd. rev. et augm. du Précis d'histoire de la Révolution française / Paris: Editions sociales, 1982, pp. 487—488. A similar position is held by Maurice Dommanget, who emphasizes that it is no coincidence that Picardy, the land of the Jacquerie and medieval Sparlac, gave the revolution and socialism not only Babeuf but also Saint-Just and Saint-Simon. (Dommanget, Maurice. Blanqui. Histoire Des Doctrines Socialistes Les Idées Et Les Faits. Paris: Librairie de l'Humanité, 1924). However, there are also authors like Paul Louis who consider that the peculiarities and originality of this doctrine amount to the fact that it seeks to "realize the ideas of a few thinkers." (Louis, Paul. Histoire Du Socialisme En France, 1789-1945. Bibliothèque D'histoire Politique Et Sociale. 4. éd. Paris: M. Rivière, 1946, p. 39), but there were, as always, bourgeois slanders that, like those of Edouard Fleury, proclaimed Babeuf to be a "leader of bandits.”
Mason, Laura. The Last Revolutionaries: the Conspiracy Trial of Gracchus Babeuf and the Equals. New Haven: London , 2022, p. 13. “A permanent solution was necessary, Babeuf argued. He did not, however, imitate ancient advocates of agrarian law by proposing that large estates be seized and redistributed. Such radical change would excite war, and, in any case, farming large parcels of land was more efficient. But the alternative he imagined showed him moving away from the notions of private property and paid labor he would ultimately reject.”
Bax, Ernest Belfort. The Last Episode of the French Revolution: Being a History of Gracchus Babeuf and the Conspiracy of the Equals. London: Grant Richards Ltd., 1911, p. 15.
Ibid., p. 26. “In October 1793 the revolutionary government was proclaimed, the dictatorship of the Committee of Public Safety came into full force, and with it the power of its now strongest member, Robespierre. The Committee of Public Safety being installed as, de jure, the supreme authority in France, it found that it had to make up its account with the de facto authority of the day, to wit, the Paris Commune.”
“A proletariat in the modern, sense, which implies the existence of the great machine-industry, did not exist. But a population, not as yet relatively very numerous except in a few large towns, of journey-men and labourers, which was destined to become the groundwork of the modern proletariat, did undoubtedly obtain, but obtained only as an economic appendix of the small middle-class [in modern Marxist terms: petty bourgeoisie] to which reference has been made. The old feudal landowning class, which had come down from medieval times, had now in the main become an absentee landowning class, dancing attendance at courts and growing financially poorer. While still retaining many of its feudal privileges, it functioned for the most part through its members holding positions in the bureaucratic hierarchy which centred in the Crown. As a consequence of the foregoing conditions, the leading political category of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was that of Ruler and Subject. Similarly, the leading economic category was that of Rich and Poor. It may be said, of course, that these categories obtain also to-day. But they are no longer dominant as categories in their bare abstractness, as they were in the eighteenth century” (Bax, Ernest Belfort. The Last Episode of the French Revolution: Being a History of Gracchus Babeuf and the Conspiracy of the Equals. London: Grant Richards Ltd., 1911, p. 11).
Babeuf, Gracchus, and Claude Mazauric. Textes Choisis. Paris: Editions sociales, 1965, pp. 179-180.
Miller, Fred, "Aristotle’s Political Theory", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2022 Edition), Edward N. Zalta & Uri Nodelman (eds.), URL = <https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2022/entries/aristotle-politics/>.
Leroy, Maxime. Histoire Des Idées Sociales En France. Paris: Gallimard, 1946-1954, volume II, p. 224.
Hunt, Lynn. The French Revolution and Human Rights: a Brief History with Documents. Bedford Series In History and Culture. Second edition. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin's, 2016.
"Babouvism is a philosophy of misery; it is for the poor to eat their fill each day that Babeuf took up his pen and sought to launch a call to arms. Reading the philosophers and the history of the Revolution, one sees that the most general concern, in the fields and in the cities, is indeed the issues of subsistence; and it is to seek a solution, finally definitive, to this acute problem, the problem of scarcity, that so much effort has been fiercely devoted, both from an economic and a penal perspective, by those who write and those who govern. It is in the form of a ‘hospice’ that Babeuf and his friends envisioned the future regime: it is when men will have been able to shelter themselves in such a refuge that finally happiness, the goal of society, will be known by unfortunate humanity. This sheds a broad light on the misery of the time. Misery, and only misery, has taken possession of the popular imagination. It is the hope of having a bed and a meager sustenance in a wretched refuge that drives Babeuf's hope, poor, like the impoverished vision of the dream that fills him. This general misery is the particular misery of Babeuf himself, his life, the life of the people as summarized, made up of privations, debts, mourning, sad tribulations, incarcerations—a life of a man hunted by poverty, of unstable, anxious, and demanding spirit. The image of the bailiff of Roye haunted his dreams. It is a true poor man who speaks, and that is what gives such an original tone to his revolutionary words." (Ibid., p. 89)
Babeuf, Gracchus, and Claude Mazauric. Textes Choisis. Paris: Editions sociales, 1965, p. 180.
Mason, Laura. The Last Revolutionaries: the Conspiracy Trial of Gracchus Babeuf and the Equals. New Haven: London , 2022, p. 50. ‘Now, Babeuf reached far beyond an agrarian law that would redistribute land and sans-culottes’ proposals to regulate commercial trade. They must abolish private property entirely. Leave each person “to the trade he exercises honestly, by which he lives happily,” and require them to deliver what they produce to a common storehouse. There, agents, “[who] work not for themselves but for the great family [of man], will return . . . to each . . . his equal share of goods in exchange for what he contributes.” Only then could commerce “invigorat[e] everything . . . nourish all associates equally.”’
Babeuf, Gracchus, and Claude Mazauric. Textes Choisis. Paris: Editions sociales, 1965, p. 170, 182—185. “At birth, every person should receive a portion sufficient [for survival], like air and water, which he does not bequeath to his heirs at death but returns to society.”
Babeuf, Gracchus, and Claude Mazauric. Textes Choisis. Paris: Editions sociales, 1965, p. 101. Since the people do not possess education and have not been freed from the spiritual influence of their exploiters, they cannot immediately establish their own rule after a rebellion. Universal education, for Babeuf, is a prerequisite for the governance of the people thought elected bodies.
Stanley E. Ballinger, The Idea of Social Progress through Education in the French Enlightenment Period: Helvetius and Condorcet, History of Education Journal, #1-4, 10, pages 88-99, 1959.
Babeuf, Gracchus, and Claude Mazauric. Textes Choisis. Paris: Editions sociales, 1965, p. 146.
Ibid. p. 159.
Babeuf, Gracchus, and Claude Mazauric. Textes Choisis. Paris: Editions sociales, 1965, p. 38: ". . . those who will complain about people who wish to continually revolutionize should rightly be regarded as enemies of the people" (Ibid). And in the Manifesto of the Equals, it is concluded: "The French Revolution is only the precursor of another revolution, much greater, much more luminous, which will be the last one."
Soboul, Albert. La Révolution Française. Terrains. Nouv. éd. rev. et augm. du Précis d'histoire de la Révolution française / Paris: Editions sociales, 1982, pp. 490-491.
Buonarroti, Philippe. Histoire De La Conspiration Pour L'égalité Dite De Babeuf: Suive Du Procès Auquel Elle Donna Lieu. Nouvelle éd. Paris: Charavay jeune, 1850, p.89.
Ibid., p.113.
Through Blanquism, the revolutionary tendency of Babouvism was transmitted to Marxism: “The revolutionary form to which Blanqui attached his name, Blanquism—that is, the theory of the creative insurrection—directly stems from Babeuf...(Leroy, Maxime. Histoire Des Idées Sociales En France. Paris: Gallimard, 1946-1954, volume II, p. 89). Dommanget similarly believes that there is continuity between the Manifesto of the Equals and the Communist Manifesto in the conception of political revolution.
Such an assessment essentially applies to the interpretation of Babuvism’s political ideas provided by P. Louis in the cited work (Histoire Du Socialisme En France, 1789-1945. Bibliothèque D'histoire Politique Et Sociale. 4. éd. Paris: M. Rivière, 1946). This one-sidedness, asserting that the Babouvists believed the revolution could be achieved through the arrest of the Directory, descends to the level of bourgeois spite.
Bloch, Ernst. Natural Law and Human Dignity. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1986, p. 164.
Babeuf, Gracchus, and Claude Mazauric. Textes Choisis. Paris: Editions sociales, 1965, p. 97.
Ibid. p. 203. Babeuf envisioned the election of the so-called “quinquevirate,” that is, competent representatives of the people who would meet every three months to deliberate on how well the people's deputies were fulfilling their mandate.
It is not against the Republic, but rather a principle of the Republic: freedom of the press, particularly its critique of the government and its legislation, and the vanity of those who impose their will as the general will.
Marx, Karl, and Friedrich Engels. Marx & Engels Collected Works. London [England]: Lawrence & Wishart, 1975, Vol. 3, p. 393. “The French Revolution was the rise of democracy in Europe. Democracy is, as I take all forms of government to be, a contradiction in itself, an untruth, nothing but hypocrisy (theology, as we Germans call it), at the bottom. Political liberty is sham-liberty, the worst possible slavery; the appearance of liberty, and therefore the reality of servitude. Political equality is the same; therefore democracy, as well as every other form of government, must ultimately break to pieces: hypocrisy cannot subsist, the contradiction hidden in it must come out; we must have either a regular slavery — that is, an undisguised despotism, or real liberty, and real equality — that is, Communism. Both these consequences were brought out in the French Revolution; Napoleon established the first, and Babeuf the second” (Ibid.)
Marx, Karl, and Friedrich Engels. Festival of Nations in London in Marx & Engels Collected Works. London [England]: Lawrence & Wishart, 1976, Vol. 6, p. 3.
Babeuf, Gracchus, et al. The Defense of Gracchus Babeuf Before the High Court of Vendome. [Amherst]: University of Massachusetts Press, 1967, p. 44.
Babeuf, Gracchus, and Claude Mazauric. Textes Choisis. Paris: Editions sociales, 1965, p. 80.
Babeuf, Gracchus, et al. The Defense of Gracchus Babeuf Before the High Court of Vendome. [Amherst]: University of Massachusetts Press, 1967, p. 35-36.
Ibid. 213. See also Babeuf, Gracchus, et al. The Defense of Gracchus Babeuf Before the High Court of Vendome. [Amherst]: University of Massachusetts Press, 1967, p. 44. “The only way to do this is to organize a communal regime which will suppress private property, set each to work at the skill or job he understands, require each to deposit the fruits of his labor in kind at the common store, and establish an agency for the distribution of basic necessities. This agency will maintain a complete list of people and of supplies, will distribute the latter with scrupulous fairness, and will deliver them to the home of each worker” (Ibid., p. 57)
Buonarroti, Philippe. Histoire De La Conspiration Pour L'égalité Dite De Babeuf: Suive Du Procès Auquel Elle Donna Lieu. Nouvelle éd. Paris: Charavay jeune, 1850, pp. 26, 66, 70.
Ibid., pp. 69-70.
Marx, Karl, and Friedrich Engels. Marx & Engels Collected Works. London [England]: Lawrence & Wishart, 1975, Vol. 6, p. 514.
See Marx's critique of primitive communism: e.g., “The first positive annulment of private property – crude communism – is thus merely a manifestation of the vileness of private property, which wants to set itself up as the positive community system.” (Marx, Karl, Friedrich Engels, and Dirk Jan Struik. Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844. New York: International Publishers, 1964).