François Babeuf

François-Noël Babeuf, known as Gracchus Babeuf (November 23, 1760, Saint Quentin - May 27, 1797, Vendôme) was a politician, journalist, French theoretician and revolutionary. He died guillotined for trying to overthrow the government of the Directory with the "Conspiracy of the Equals." His political theory, known as Babouvism , is considered one of the forerunners of communism.

Biography

Before the Revolution (1760-1789)

Born in 1760 in Saint-Quentin. His father was a tax administrator and his mother an uneducated servant. In Picardy, where he worked as a seigneurial and feudist agent, he learned about the agrarian transformations that were causing the confrontation between the village communities, who defended their rights and community traditions, and the new large capitalist farmers. As he himself later confessed, "it was in the dust of the stately archives that I discovered the mysteries of the usurpations of the noble caste".

Following Rousseau, but also Mably and Morelly, Babeuf was already wondering if it would be possible to achieve "perfect equality" - an expression he took from Mably. He put it this way in a letter written in 1787:

What would be the state of a people whose institutions were such that the most perfect equality between each of its individual members would reign indistinctly; that the soil that dwelt was not of anyone, but that it belonged to all; in short, that everything was common, to the product of all types of industries? Would such institutions be authorized by natural law? Would it be possible for this society to subsist, and even if the means to achieve an absolutely equal distribution were practicable?

In 1789 Babeuf outlined his ideas in the Preliminary Discourse to the Perpetual Cadastre in which he critiqued the organization of society and property —“social laws have provided the means to the intrigue, cunning and the ability to shrewdly seize common property»—, and proposed the approval of an agrarian law that would prevent the owner from selling his assets and oblige him to return them to the community when he died, then producing a new distribution of the land at the rate of eleven bushels per inheritance. The work was subtitled: Demonstration of convenient methods, to guarantee the principles of fair and permanent base and distribution and easy perception of a single tax on both land possessions and personal income. There he said:

The earth, a common mother, can only be departed for all life, and every part made inexpensive, so that the individual patrimony of each citizen could always be assured and impermissible.

After the Revolution (1789-1795)

After the triumph of the Revolution, Babeuf defended, like the Jacobins and the sans-culottes, that the purpose of society was "common happiness" and that "equality of enjoyment" should be ensured. But his experience during those years—especially his participation in the Picardy agrarian movement from 1790 to 1792 against the payment of indemnities to the lords for the "suppression of the feudal regime," as well as calling for the distribution of the clergy's property among the "badly well-off" peasants in the form of long-term leases—led him to the conclusion that the means of "providing sustenance to that immense majority of the people who, with all their willingness to work, do not have it"—that is, to achieve “perfect equality”—was not to limit property, as sans-culottes, hebertists and enragés proposed, but to abolish it and establish “community of goods and works”. In this way, according to Albert Soboul, "communism, until then a simple utopian dream, was erected as a finally coherent ideological system".

Cover Le Tribun du peuple (1795)

Imprisoned on May 19, 1790 for agitator, he is released in July, thanks to Jean-Paul Marat. In October he starts editing Le Correspondant Picard . He settled in Paris in February 1793 where he was imprisoned from November 14, 1793 to July 18, 1794. From September 3, 1794, after the fall of Robespierre, Babeuf published the Journal de la Liberté, which became Le Tribun du peuple on October 5th, which achieved wide circulation. Imprisoned again on February 7, 1795 and released on October 18, 1795, he quickly relaunched the publication of Le Tribun du peuple . From this newspaper, where he signed with the pseudonym Gracchus Babeuf , he attacked both the Jacobins and the regime that arose from the Thermidorian reaction. In his articles, he postulated the organization of society on the basis of joint work and a social revolution that was to complete the revolution carried out since 1789, even defending the use of violence and the need for a period of dictatorship.

Away from all public office (he had been elected by the Montdidier district, September 1792), he carried out his political and revolutionary work in the Club del Panthéon (a political organization that brought together former Jacobins and victims of reaction).

The Conspiracy of Equals (1795-1797)

In 1796 Napoleon Bonaparte, who was the head of the Army of the Interior, closed the Panthéon Club and Babeuf, without further legal means, created a secret insurrection committee made up of seven members, including himself, Filippo Buonarroti and Agustin Darthe. The committee launched a propaganda campaign aimed at agitating the popular classes that was to end with an uprising, the "Conspiracy of the Equals" (spring 1796), whose purpose was to overthrow the Directory and put into effect the Constitution of 1793. This constitution had never been applied. But the Directory was informed of the conspiracy (possibly thanks to Fouché) and 21 Floreal (May 10, 1796), the conspirators were arrested by the police.

The trial against Babeuf and his companions began on February 20, 1797, and lasted three months. Babeuf and Darthé were sentenced to death and were taken to the scaffold bleeding because they had attempted suicide hours before the execution. In his last letter, which Babeuf wrote to his wife and his children, he told them:

Write to my mother and my brothers. Tell them how I have died and try to make them understand, those good people, that such a death is glorious, far from dishonoring. Goodbye forever; I turn into the bosom of a virtuous dream.

The Conspiracy of the Equals was not more than a simple episode in the history of the Thermidorian regime, but it was very important for the history of socialism and the popular and workers' struggles of the following century, since «for the first time, the The communist idea had become a political force. Babeuf himself was aware of this and that is why he wrote from prison to Félix Lepeletier asking him to gather "all his projects, notes and outlines of democratic and revolutionary writings, all of them oriented towards the broad objective" and so "one day, when he stop the persecution, when perhaps good men breathe freely enough to throw a few flowers on our graves, when again the means of procuring to mankind the happiness that we proposed can be "presented to all the disciples of equality... the temperate collection that today's various corrupt call my dreams ». It was not Lepelletier but Filippo Buonarroti who fulfilled the commission thirty years later. In 1828 he published in Brussels Conspiracy for Equality called Babeuf , a work that, according to Soboul, “exerted a profound influence on the revolutionary generation of the thirties. Thanks to her, Babouvism became a link in the development of communist thought."