The French Revolution of 1789, the beginning of a social ferment which spread over half of Europe, started as a revolt of the wealthier section of the middle class against absolutism. Nothing was further from their thoughts than the overthrow of the monarchy. They intended only to establish a constitutional monarchy on the English model, with a sharing of power between king and Parliament. Their ultimate object, if only vaguely conceived, was the transformation of the existing aristocratic system into a middle-class capitalist society.
The absolute monarchy of Louis XVI was justified in terms of Divine Right, which was based in its turn on a transcendental, mystical interpretation of the Bible. According to this doctrine all authority is divine in origin and therefore eternal and irrevocable, unaffected either by human rights or human desires. The theory was revived in the Middle Ages in the course of the struggle between pope and emperor as to which Divine Right, the spiritual or the temporal, had precedence over the other. However, the idea of the Divine Right of kings was not, as such, brought into question during the course of the dispute. It was accepted as dogma by the great mass of people and was not questioned, even by scholars, until the middle of the seventeenth century.
The French bourgeoisie, in its struggle to curb the absolute power of the king, to challenge the theory of Divine Right and to divide power between king and people, required a legal doctrine. In the theory of the social contract they found a rational basis for opposing the absolutist doctrine of Divine Right.
Justification for this new view was found in the Old Testament, which said that King David made a treaty with his people and that his power had accordingly been based, as it were, on a social contract. The Middle Ages was a deeply religious period in which every word of both Old and New Testaments was taken to be divinely inspired. It was the task of the theologians to reconcile these two conflicting doctrines. This was undertaken by Thomas Aquinas (1225–74). In his treatise, De Regimine Principum, he distinguished three elements in secular power: its essential substance, bestowed by God; its constitutional form (which could be monarchical, aristocratic or democratic); and the form in which the ruling power was exercised—the two latter being bestowed on government by the people. It followed that if a government misused the power entrusted to it by the people and degenerated into a form of slavery, the people were entitled to revoke the power they had granted. This doctrine contained the nucleus of both the social contract and the sovereignty of the people. It was the prevailing view in the Middle Ages among both theologians and lawyers.[1]
Philosophers in seventeenth-century England and eighteenth-century France combined these theological teachings with the theories of natural law, also derived from the thinking of the ancient world. According to this view, people are free and equal in natural law and actually enjoyed freedom and equality while living in natural conditions. When, however, they began to establish a social order, they installed a government and made a treaty by which they assigned to it their sovereignty in return for an undertaking to protect their rights and freedom.
From this premiss, one school of thought concluded that the social contract was indissoluble and irrevocable, and therefore that sovereignty and royal power were absolute and indivisible. Another school came to the opposite conclusion that, since the sovereignty of the people was inalienable and irrevocable, the people retained the right to alter the contract with the king, or to revoke it and take back the power vested in him. Since the people were the source of all power, the sovereignty enjoyed by the king was delegated to him only by the people.
The execution of Charles I in 1649 and the deposition of James II in 1688 brought to an end in England the controversy about Divine Right and popular sovereignty. The people, represented by Parliament, took back power into their own hands and beheaded Charles I for resisting by force the sovereignty of the people. They dethroned James II for abusing the power with which he had been entrusted by the people and so, as the Convention of 1688 stated in its proclamation, of 'having endeavoured to subvert the constitution of the Kingdom by breaking the original contract between king and people'. The theoretical justification for this act of popular sovereignty was provided by John Locke in 1690. His work On Civil Government was epoch-making. Based on the theory of natural law, Locke's clear and logical demonstration that power in state and society resided in the people contributed powerfully to the American Revolution of 1776 and the French Revolution of 1789. In France, the theory of popular sovereignty found its classical expression in Rousseau's Du Contrat Social, which appeared in 1762.
Contemporary religious and metaphysical views of regal harmony as the embodiment of divine grace had already been destroyed, at a philosophical level, by such writers as Helvétius, Holbach, Diderot and Voltaire. But Rousseau's idea that, since the sovereignty of the people derived from men's 'natural rights', every individual in consequence participated in sovereignty through his own 'natural right' was circulated far and wide in thousands of vehement pamphlets, reaching far beyond a limited circle of intellectuals of the broad mass of the people.[2] It became a popular myth, a source of political enthusiasm, a symbol of salvation. When Louis XVI summoned the States General in May 1789 and instructed the electors of the Third Estate—the tax-paying male population—to submit a list of their grievances and demands, it was the spirit of Rousseau which permeated the cahiers. They demanded equality of rights, equal justice, free speech, the abolition of feudal dues and, above all, a responsible executive and an elected Assembly.[3]
Inspired by such ideas, the majority of the electorate called for a 'solemn declaration of the natural, inalienable and sacred Rights of Man', since, as was subsequently stated when the Constitution of 1791 drew up its preamble to the 'Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen', 'the ignorance, neglect or disregard of the Rights of Man is the sole source of public misfortune and the corruption of governments'.
But how were the 'natural, inalienable and sacred Rights of Man', proclaimed by the French National Assembly in August 1789, to be reconciled with the economic and social requirements of a middle-class, capitalist society? The Declaration opened boldly with the statement: 'Men are born and remain free and equal.' But the recognition of freedom and equality as the basic natural rights of men was not necessarily compatible with a society based on economic and social inequality, a society in which the propertied and propertyless classes were sharply divided.
The National Assembly at first tried to solve this conflict of principles and class interests by dividing the people into 'active' and 'passive' citizens—into tax-payers, the 'true shareholders in the great social enterprise', according to the constitution drafted by Sièyes, and those whose incomes were too low to be taxed.[4] The latter were deprived, on Sièyes's proposal, of 'the right to participate actively in public life'. They were denied the right to vote. Even the active citizens were divided into two electoral groups so as to guarantee the predominance of the larger 'shareholders'. Finally, the right to be elected was restricted to such a high income level that, as Camille Desmoulins pointed out in the debate on the electoral laws, Rousseau, Corneille and Mably among others would not have been eligible for election. In this way, the propertied middle class secured an electoral system which guaranteed it political power. It could now establish itself as a new privileged class. Eventually it secured for itself complete control over the state. As Aulard remarked, they 'acted on the not very fraternal view that the middle class alone constitutes the nation'.[5] The aristocracy of birth gave way to an aristocracy of money.
The middle class used its power chiefly to establish security for private property. The Declaration of the Rights of Man had already proclaimed this to be a 'natural and immutable right…inviolable and sacred'. When hunger provoked popular uprisings this right seemed to be threatened. Danton demanded in the Convention that 'all personal property in land and industry should be, for all time, protected by the nations'. The Convention accordingly, on 18 May 1793, passed a unanimous decree that made even propaganda against the existing property laws punishable by death. This was applied to 'anyone who proposes agrarian or other subversive legislation concerning landed, commercial or industrial property'.[6] Even earlier, the Convention had issued a decree on 14 June 1793, dissolving all trade unions and journeymen's associations as a 'threat to freedom' and incompatible with 'the Declaration of the Rights of Man', forbidding them to be reconstituted under threat of punishment, while at the same time instructing the authorities to suppress by force all associations of artisans, labourers and journeymen formed for the purpose of bargaining on wage questions.[7] Isaac Le Chapelier, supporting this in the Convention, did not deny that the low level of wages made for a condition of dependence 'little better than slavery'.[8] But property had to be protected against the threat of an organized proletariat. Indeed, it is fair to say that perhaps nowhere, at no time, and in no country, has the right of private property been more firmly claimed and more firmly guaranteed than by the French Revolution.
Workers employed in factories and small workshops looked to the Revolution for an improvement in their conditions. They hoped for better pay, the legal control of food prices and an easing in their constant struggle for economic independence. As artisans and journeymen who hoped one day to set up as masters on their own on a small scale, they had no intention of questioning the institution of private property. All they sought was security for the small property-owner. They were against the large estates. They wanted a maximum size of property to be laid down for private ownership, so that 'one and the same citizen may possess only one shop and one workshop' and that 'no one may hold more land in tenure than is required for a stipulated number of ploughs'.[9] But such strivings were irreconcilably opposed to the built-in drive of a capitalist economy towards the concentrated ownership of capital and industry.
In the period of the French Revolution, the workers did not yet constitute a class. Whereas the middle class had their own political organization in the Jacobin clubs, there was no independent party to represent the workers. Though they provided the vanguard in all the popular uprisings, they were content to follow the intellectual leadership of the middle class. The frequently occurring strike movements were only undercurrents in the social development of the Revolution. Indeed, the workers did not produce a single important figure in the course of the revolutionary struggles. Even at the height of the ferment, in 1793 and 1794, members of the petite bourgeoisie, journalists, lawyers, priests and tradesmen, functioned as spokesmen for the proletariat. Such men inevitably reflected the outlook and interests of the middle rather than the working class.[10]
Workers and other humble folk—the sansculottes—had defended the Revolution with their blood. It was they who stormed the Bastille and they who, at Marsfeld, engaged the royal forces whom the Court had ordered on 14 July 1789 to suppress the Revolution. They had fought for the Revolution on numerous battlefields. And all the time they saw the rich grow richer, their wealth swollen by the sale of the lands which the state had confiscated from the nobility and the church, their pockets lined with the proceeds of army contracts, financial speculation and juggling with food supplies. Meanwhile, the poor grew poorer. The peasants at least had been freed from their feudal overlords and become owners of the land they tilled. But the workers had gained nothing. The Rights of Man and the gospel of Liberty, Equality and Fraternity had left them destitute.
The disinherited were well aware of the marked contrast between the principles of the Revolution and those of a social order based on middle-class property. As Jacques Roux complained to the Convention, 'Liberty is only an empty illusion if one class of people can with impunity starve another. Equality is only an empty illusion while the rich retain their monopoly, which gives them power of life and death over their fellow creatures.'[11] This precisely expressed the feelings of the wage-earners, artisans and urban poor. Their revolt brought Marat and Robespierre to power.
Some decades earlier, Morelly and Mably, in their philosophical writings, had projected a utopian version of Socialism. But to Jacques Roux, on the extreme left of the Convention, and to the Jacobin leaders, Marat and Robespierre, this did not seem a realistic solution to the conflict. They were merely against the abuses of wealth. They believed in a maximum size for property holdings. They wanted to lessen the contrasts between rich and poor.[12] Their ideal was that portrayed by Rousseau in his Du Contrat Social, in which 'all have something and none too much'. They hoped to create a republic of small farmers and handicraftsmen. They did not consider the destruction of the existing basis of property, the replacement of private by common ownership, to be a matter for serious consideration.
The struggle to solve the insoluble conflict between the Rights of Man, based on a concept of 'natural' freedom and equality, and the interests of middle-class property-owners, determined the internal development of the Revolution from its inception. It was fought out in the Convention between the Gironde, the party of the propertied middle class and the substantial citizens, and the Jacobins, who represented the petite bourgeoisie, artisans, wage-earners and peasants. In May 1793 the Gironde was overthrown. The Jacobins became heirs to the Revolution, but it was an inheritance fraught with danger. France was at war, surrounded by powerful enemies who had invaded her from north and east. At the same time, in the west and south, in the Vendée, Lyon, Marseille, Bordeaux and Toulon, an armed counter-revolution had broken out against Paris. A rapid currency depreciation had forced food prices to fantastic heights. It seemed as though the Revolution would succumb to its enemies at home and abroad. To avert the danger, the Jacobins established a revolutionary dictatorship and a reign of terror. With their arrival in power there began a second revolution, a revolution of the broad urban masses.
But this revolution too was doomed to fail, since it could not aim at the destruction of capitalist order. What distinguished the second revolution from the first was only its more pronounced democratic tendency and more advanced social aims. It abolished the tax qualification for the right to vote. It proclaimed, in the Constitution of 1793, that the aim of society was the 'general welfare'. Apart from that, however, property was still listed in the Constitution as one of the natural and inalienable rights, with every citizen having the right to 'enjoy his property and his earnings…and to dispose of them at his own discretion'.
Such encroachments on private property as were made by the Committees of Public Safety—the organ of the revolutionary dictatorship—were war measures, taken to deal with a national emergency. The Committee issued decrees to prohibit speculation in foodstuffs and other vital necessities. It controlled the price of food, but at the same time put a ceiling on wages. While it confiscated the property of 'enemies of the Republic' and allocated the proceeds for the relief of destitution, it also made it clear that 'the property of patriots is sacred and inviolable'.[13]
To the cry of 'Down with the tyrant Robespierre! Freedom!', the wealthier section of the middle class brought about the downfall of the Jacobin dictatorship and its reign of terror on 9 Thermidor—27 July 1794. But in fact this marked the beginning of the 'period of the demolition of freedom', as F. A. Mignet, historian of the French Revolution, called it. The general franchise was abolished, and replaced by the two-tier electoral law. The Press was once more in shackles, and finally, by the end of the Consulate, its freedom was completely destroyed. One after another the clubs were closed down, and every movement of the lower middle class and of the workers was crushed by a régime of terror. The revolutionary wars of 1792, 1793 and 1794, which had been conducted as a struggle for liberating enslaved peoples, degenerated into imperialist wars of conquest. And a few weeks after 18 Brumaire—9 November 1799—the Constitution of 1799 placed the entire power of government in the hands of the First Consul, Napoleon Bonaparte. William Hazlitt had cause to complain that 'the sun of freedom was swallowed up by the night of despotism'. With the fall of the Jacobins, the Revolution was left drained of its power. Tired of the struggle, the workers subsided into apathy. Disillusioned by the Revolution, they surrendered in defeat.
But some embers were still glowing beneath the ashes of the Revolution. Before the 'night of despotism' fell over France, they broke just once again into towering flames. This outbreak, Babeuf's Conspiracy of the Equals in 1796, is an important event in the history of Socialism and the International.
François-Noël Babeuf (1760–97) was twenty-nine at the beginning of the Revolution. His father had served for a time as a major in the army of Maria Theresa. On returning to France he had fallen into deep poverty, supporting his family as a wage-earner, later as a junior official employed in collecting the salt tax. The young Babeuf began to work as a personal servant. After teaching himself law, he became surveyor and archivist in a land-records office in Picardy. There, he later wrote, 'in the dusty archives of the feudal aristocracy', he discovered 'the appalling secrets of illegal appropriation by the caste of noblemen'. When in 1789 the peasants of Picardy rose in revolt, Babeuf burned the documents and title deeds of the feudal aristocracy in the market-square of Rouen.
From then on he felt himself to be in the service of the Revolution. He steeped himself in the writings of Diderot, Rousseau, Brissot and, particularly, Mably and Morelly, the first exponents of utopian Socialism in French literature. He organized a movement of peasants in Picardy against the taxes on salt and drink, the poll tax and the tithe, and for the restoration and redistribution of the confiscated lands. In October 1790 he founded a paper, Le Correspondent Picard, in which he untiringly pointed out the discrepancy between the Declaration of the Rights of Man, with its promise of equality, and the actual inequality prevailing in economic, political and social life. In September 1792 he was elected district administrator in the Department of the Somme, but at the beginning of 1793, with a prosecution pending against him, he fled to Paris. There he found a position in the city supply department.
Babeuf played no part in the momentous and fateful struggles of the time, which culminated in the overthrow of the Gironde. The rule of the guillotine, inaugurated by the Jacobins, aroused his strong abhorrence. He had been an unhappy eye-witness of the terrible cruelties to which the turbulent masses of Paris had succumbed after the storming of the Bastille on 14 July 1789. He wrote at the time to his wife: 'How terribly have the practices of torture, the wheel, the stake and the gallows which the hangmen are operating all round us debased our standards! Instead of civilizing us, the masters are turning us into barbarians.'[14] With his hatred of cruelty, Babeuf detested the 'vile tyrant Robespierre', and welcomed his fall as the re-birth of freedom.
But he soon realized that 'tyranny has passed only from one hand to another'. Soon after 9 Thermidor, Babeuf had founded another paper, Tribune du peuple. In it he admitted that his earlier assessment of Robespierre and the Jacobin dictatorship had been a mistaken one; 9 Thermidor represented the peak of revolutionary achievement. Up to that date the Revolution had advanced over all obstacles. Since then it had been in steady retreat.
The victors of 9 Thermidor had sent the Jacobin leaders to the scaffold and closed down their clubs. After a time, however, a number of Jacobin members of the Convention and of the club sections tried to collect their scattered supporters together and to rebuild their organization. They called the new body the Club of the Panthéon. It had no special programme, but it kept alive the Jacobin tradition of democratic republicanism as the champion of the artisans and the lower middle classes.
The formation of the club in November 1795 coincided with a desperate economic crisis and widespread impoverishment. The government of the wealthy bourgeoisie had abandoned a number of Jacobin policies, including maximum food prices and the requisitioning of supplies, the distribution of food to the needy and the laws against speculation. At the same time, as inflation proceeded, the depreciation of the currency sent the price of food soaring. Wages failed to keep pace with prices and the workers grew desperate. Deaths from malnutrition were widespread.[15] While Babeuf was in prison at Arras he lost a seven-year-old daughter, who died from exhaustion. There were hunger riots in Paris.[16] The members of the Panthéon called for the relief of suffering, whereupon the government ordered Bonaparte, at that time in command of the army of the interior, to suppress the club at the end of February 1796.
Babeuf, who assumed the name Gracchus in honour of the popular tribune, Gaius Gracchus, in ancient Rome, was especially concerned with the interests of the impoverished working people. He had joined the Panthéon Club on its formation, and organized within it a small group of like-minded people, a secret society which called itself the Society of the Equals.
Babeuf's society was organized as a conspiracy. It aimed at the forcible overthrow of the Directorate—the government of the day—the seizure of the state, and the establishment of a dictatorship which would over a period construct a democratic society on a Socialist basis. Its story was told thirty years later by his faithful friend and spiritual heir, Philippe-Michel Buonarroti, in a documented history. In it, the author described the main ideas of Babeuf, his plan of conspiratorial organization, the technique of propaganda which he developed and, finally, the course of the trial following the arrest of the conspirators.[17]
Babeuf's consistent aim since 1789 had been to resolve the discrepancy between the natural right to equality, which the Revolution consistently upheld, and the intolerable social and economic inequality which actually existed. The Constitution of 1793 had proclaimed the principle of political equality. But it did nothing to abolish the glaring inequality, both social and economic, between rich and poor.
He saw, in Socialism, the logical outcome of man's struggle to realize his natural equality. 'Nature gave everyone an equal right to the enjoyment of all goods,' ran a sentence at the head of the manifesto which Babeuf pinned on the walls of Paris, containing a brief summary of his ideas. 'We must have this equality,' the Manifeste des Égaux announced, 'not merely transcribed in the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen: we must have it in our midst, under the roof of our houses. …' 'In a true society,' it went on, 'there is no room for either rich or poor.' But in order to achieve a true society, it would be necessary to make a further revolution. The French Revolution, as it had developed so far, must, he said, be 'only a prelude to another revolution which, with loftier aims and more far-reaching effects, would be the final revolution…doing away with private property in land…and with the terrible contrasts between rich and poor, masters and servants! The time has come to set up the republic of equals, whose welcoming doors will be open to all mankind.'
Babeuf's Socialism had all the characteristics of its day. A majority of the population consisted of peasants, tenant farmers and farm labourers working for private landowners. The Communism of Morelly and Mably, from which Babeuf drew his inspiration, had been for the most part agrarian, impelled rather by the unequal distribution of land than by the contrasts stemming from industrial development. Manufactures were still mainly the products of artisans in small workshops, of workers in small factories and, to a certain extent, even of farmers' households. The idea of socializing industry, an idea which presupposes its concentration in very large units, was still unknown.
His objective was the common ownership of property. Land was to be redistributed to the cultivators, farmers and farm workers, who lacked it. But the ownership of land would be transferred not to the farmers but to the nation as a whole, as its inalienable property. Working farmers would enjoy only the right of use, without being able to transmit land to their heirs. The produce would be delivered to public storehouses. To prevent the accumulation of wealth in private hands, there was to be no right of inheritance, and productive capital would on the death of its owner become public property. In this way individual wealth would gradually accrue to the nation, to be administered by elected officials under public control. Everyone would be liable to labour service, and the livelihood of all would be guaranteed by the state. The nation would ensure the just distribution of the wealth produced by society. Equality of education was a major item in Babeuf's programme, designed to secure to everyone an equal opportunity of rising in the world.
Through working in secret and under constant threat from the authorities, the Society of the Equals won a considerable following. By May 1796, according to Paul Louis, it had about 17,000 supporters in Paris alone, together with a number of branches in the provinces.[18] It was joined by a good many of the earlier Jacobins, democratic republicans and officers, released by the Directorate, when their own Panthéon Club was suppressed by the police. Aulard, though he gives no figures, confirms on the basis of contemporary documents, including police files, that Babeuf's propaganda reached the mass of the people in Paris, that they knew of his doctrines and 'took them seriously'.[19]
The society was organized on conspiratorial lines, with its full Socialist aims known only to a small circle of initiates. At the head was a central body calling itself the Secret Committee of Public Safety, with Babeuf, Antonelle, Sylvan Maréchal and Buonarroti as members. Subordinate to it were twelve deputies, one for each district of Paris, charged with preparing mass insurrections in the districts, through a network of underground propaganda cells. Neither the deputies, nor the agents through whom they kept contact with the central committee, were known to each other. Besides Babeuf's Tribune du peuple and L'Éclair du peuple, edited by Simon Duplay, propaganda was carried on by means of leaflets, posters, revolutionary songs in the coffee-houses, mass demonstrations in the streets and underground meetings. Members of the cells were also instructed to keep the central committee informed, through the deputies, about the state of public feeling.
A 'military commission' was attached to the central committee, with the task of recruiting support for the conspiracy inside the army and police force. It was also to keep the central committee informed about the morale of the forces and supply it with details about arsenals and ammunition depots.
The society's propaganda seems to have been particularly intensive in one particular police unit. The government grew suspicious and ordered its posting to the front. The unit mutinied and two days later, on 30 April 1796, it was disbanded.
In the view of the central committee, this incident showed that the time was ripe for an uprising. It set up an 'insurrection committee' consisting of Babeuf, Darthé, a former member of the Convention, Buonarroti and Félix Le Peletier. It established contact with a group of Jacobins who had been members of the Convention until they were deprived of their mandate after 9 Thermidor, and had then devoted themselves to overthrowing the government.
The two groups agreed on the measures to be taken after a successful uprising. Those citizens of Paris who had given armed support to the insurrection were to gather on the Square of the Revolution and install the insurrection committee as a provisional government, by acclamation. Next, the Convention would meet, consisting only of those members whose mandates had been withdrawn by the Directorate. The places of the excluded deputies were to be filled by eighty staunch democratic republicans, on a list compiled by Buonarotti. The Convention would then repeal all laws passed since 9 Thermidor and re-establish the Constitution of 1793.
The rising was prepared down to the smallest detail. Under cover of night, the armed conspirators would converge on the centre of the town and then occupy the headquarters of the Directorate and the Town Hall. Posters were printed, ready for sticking on the walls during the night. They carried the rallying-cry of the insurrection: 'The Constitution of 1793! Liberty! Equality!' The date and the exact hour of the rising were fixed.
But a few days before the rising was due to begin, a member of the military committee, Captain Georges Grisel, betrayed the plans to the government. On 10 May 1796 a large number of the leaders were arrested. They included Babeuf, Darthé, Buonarroti and Jean-Baptiste Drouet, the famous postmaster from Saint-Menehould, who had discovered Louis XVI on his flight to Varennes. Another 245 warrants for arrest were issued. In Babeuf's home the police found all the plans of the conspiracy. The government at once issued a proclamation to the people and called up 10,000 men. About three months later, on the night of 26 August, the accused were brought in cages to Vendôme, where the Supreme Court assembled. But another six months were to elapse before the trial opened.
Meanwhile, Babeuf's followers attempted a desperate coup. During the night of 9 September six or seven hundred armed conspirators made their way, with the help of supporters in the army, into the military camp at Grenelle. They called on the soldiers to join them in overthrowing the government. The commander of the garrison ordered his men to attack, and in the ensuing battle the conspirators were put to flight. Some lost their lives, a number were arrested. Thirty-one of the prisoners, including three former members of the Convention, were sentenced to death by a military tribunal. Of the remainder, thirty were deported and twenty-four imprisoned.
The trial of Babeuf and his associates began at the end of February 1797 and lasted about three months. Of the sixty-four conspirators, forty-six were in the dock; eighteen were tried in their absence, as was Drouet, who had escaped from prison.
The indictment made no mention of the Socialist aims of the conspiracy. It confined itself to the charge that the accused had tried to dissolve the legislature by force and restore the Constitution of 1793. A government decree of the previous year (passed on 16 April 1796) made propaganda for the restoration of this Constitution a capital offence. On the strength of this, the public prosecutor demanded the death sentence. The jury found Babeuf and Darthé guilty; and Buonarroti and a number of others guilty with mitigating circumstances. Fifty-five of the accused were acquitted.
In a dignified and moving speech, lasting over six court sessions, Babeuf defended himself. He described the outcome of the Revolution, contrasting the noble principles it had proclaimed with the bitter reality of its degeneration.
The Revolution [he declared] cannot be a deed without issue. It would be intolerable if the sacrifice of so much blood ended merely in a worsening of conditions for the people.…The Revolution aims at happiness for the majority. Until this aim is reached, the Revolution has not ended.…If this were really the end of the Revolution, it would be nothing but the terrible sequel of a crime.
Babeuf went on to explain the outcome of the Revolution for which he and his followers had been striving.
There are epochs in history [he explained] when the hard and inflexible laws of development have concentrated all the wealth of a people in the hands of a tiny minority.…The mass of the people is appropriated by others; they are confronted with a caste which has grabbed everything for itself and hangs on to it pitilessly. Such conditions determine the moment at which a mighty revolution breaks out. They precipitate one of those noble epochs, foreseen by the prophets of ancient times, in which a general upheaval in property relations becomes inevitable, and in which the revolutionary uprising of the poor against the rich becomes a historical necessity.
That moment, said Babeuf, had arrived.
Almost all the accused remained steadfast.
They none of them belied themselves [said Mignet], they spoke as men who feared neither to avow their object, nor to die for their cause. At the beginning and the end of each sitting, they sang the Marseillaise. This old song of victory, and their firm demeanour, struck the public mind with astonishment, and seemed to render them still more formidable.[20]
Babeuf and Darthé were condemned to the guillotine. When sentence was pronounced they tried to kill themselves with a dagger which Babeuf's son had smuggled into the prison cell. Covered in blood, they were taken back to their cell, and they were still covered in blood when the next day they were dragged to the guillotine. They died on 28 May 1797. The others who had been found guilty, including Buonarroti, were sentenced to terms of imprisonment and deportation. Embracing Babeuf for the last time, Bonarroti promised to write the story of his life, his ideas, the history of the conspiracy and of the trial.
Babeuf's execution was received by the Parisian workers and petite bourgeoisie with the same indifference that they had shown when the conspiracy was discovered. Only one paper, the democratic Journal des hommes libres, honoured Babeuf and Darthé as 'martyrs of liberty'. Though Babeuf's name was well known to the inhabitants of the Paris suburbs, he never enjoyed the popularity of Marat.[21] His Socialist message was unable to reawaken the revolutionary spirit of the masses, which had subsided since 9 Thermidor. Only a very few people shared his ideas.
And indeed, in the prevailing social and economic conditions, Babeuf's ideas were utopian. Even had the conspiracy succeeded, the policy of restricting property rights to the use of land, without the possibility of transmitting such property to their heirs, would have provoked a successful peasant uprising. And the attempt to abolish the inheritance of artisan property would have shared a similar fate. Even had they captured power, the Babeuvists would at the most have been able to continue the Jacobin tradition. And they would then have been overthrown by an alliance of the bourgeoisie, the peasants and the army, because of their threat to the security of private property.
Nevertheless, the Conspiracy of the Equals was a significant episode in the history of Socialism and the International. With this conspiracy, the idea of Socialism made its first appearance on the stage of world history. No previous social movement had aimed at the abolition of the social system based on private property. Such movements as the agrarian agitations led by Gaius Gracchus in the second century B.C., or the Levellers in the seventeenth century A.D., had striven merely for a fair distribution of the land, or—as in the German Peasant War of the sixteenth century—fir the ending of intolerable conditions of economic and social oppression. Babeuf's conspiracy, however, had as its object the complete overthrow of the system of property: the abolition of private ownership and the establishment of a social order based on common property.
The Socialist vision which inspired the Conspiracy of the Equals was not in itself new. It had been painted in vivid colours by Mably in mid-eighteenth-century France, by Campanella in Italy at the beginning of the seventeenth century, by Thomas More in England in the sixteenth century, and long before that, by Plato in Greece in the fourth century B.C. But the society described by these earlier thinkers was a fantasy, an expression of moral values and in no way seen as the achievable programme of a social movement.
What was new in Babeuf's conception was the idea of a socialism which would not be, as with Plato, the tool of a philosopher king nor, as with Mably, a product of 'the advancement of knowledge', but the outcome of a class struggle—in Babeuf's terms, 'the war of plebeian against patrician, of poor against rich', a struggle to win control of the state and use it as an instrument for the overthrow of private property. He saw clearly that the state served as a tool in the interests of the classes which controlled it: the grande bourgeoisie, the 'golden millions', as he called it, under the Girondins, and the 'plebs'—farmers, artisans and workers—when the Jacobins were in power. State power, he concluded, could be used as an instrument of social revolution. In this idea we find the origin of the theory, which Marx later developed, of state power as a lever in the process of Socialist revolution.
It was also Babeuf who introduced the concept of proletarian dictatorship into the body of Socialist theory. His ultimate aim was without doubt a democracy, finding its fulfilment in a universal, economic, social and political equality. But from the tragic outcome of the French Revolution he concluded that, since the mass of the people had formed their ideas and habits of thought under an aristocratic régime, based on class divisions, they had become in a sense 'corrupted'. In the first period of proletarian revolution, such a people would not be able to summon up the necessary sacrifice and self-denial. A transitional stage would be needed.
The idea of a minority dictatorship in the interests of the majority was by no means new. It had been one element in the French revolutionary tradition. It had originated in Rousseau's Du Contrat Social, which justified the 'despotism of freedom over tyranny'. Marat had called for the establishment of a people's dictatorship and Robespierre had, up to a point, achieved it. What was new in Babeuf's conception as the idea of a dictatorship as a transitional political stage in the process of social revolution. This contained the origin of the theory of proletarian dictatorship as it later evolved in the ideologies of Blanqui, Marx and Lenin.
Babeuf's Conspiracy of the Equals also originated the theory of an armed seizure of power by a disciplined vanguard through a coup d'état, later developed by Blanqui and employed with world-shaking consequences by Lenin. Babeuf's organization supplied a model of the structure, technique and propaganda methods of all the conspiratorial secret societies in the subsequent history of the Socialist movement—the Blanquists, the Russian Social Revolutionaries and the Bolsheviks.
It was Buonarroti's book, Babeuf and the Conspiracy for Equality,[22] which conveyed to posterity the ideas and methods of the Babeuvists. It appeared in Brussels in 1828 and two years later in Paris. In 1838 the Chartist leader, Bronterre O'Brian, published an English translation. Marx read the book in 1844 and, together with Engels, considered arranging for a German edition, to be translated by Moses Hess.[23]
The impact of this book on Socialist thought and activity has earned it a lasting place among the classics of Socialist literature. Babeuf's ideas as expounded in this book exercised until the middle of the nineteenth century a dominating influence on the Communist secret societies in France[24] and on the left wing of the Chartist movement, led by George Julian Harney and Ernest Jones. Through the League of the Just, which was founded in 1838, they were transmitted to the Communist League, a forerunner of the International. It was this organization which embodied the ideas of Babeuf and preserved them for posterity in the famous Communist Manifesto.
1. The theory of the Social Contract was actually developed by the Greek Sophists, discussed by Plato in the Republic, Book 2, and in the Gorgias.
2. An excellent appreciation of the importance of Rousseau's Du Contrat Social can be found in G. D. H. Cole's introduction to the English edition of 1913, published in Everyman's Library. See also the edition published in 1946 by Oxford University Press, containing in addition Locke's treatise, with an introduction by Ernest Barker, an essay on the place of these writings in the history of European political thought.
3. Thompson, op. cit., p. 25; Kingsley Martin, French Liberal Thought in the Eighteenth Century (London, 1929), p. 75.
4. The debates in the French National Assembly in 1791 on the right of the poor to vote had their precedents in the famous Putney debates of 1647. There the delegates of Cromwell's revolutionary army (both privates and officers) had met to discuss the Agreement of the People, which was to lay the foundation for popular rights. The representatives of the units demanded as an 'absolute natural right' an equal vote for all subjects. General Ireton denied the existence of any such 'absolute natural right'. People who had nothing to lose had no right to elect the law-makers. Mr Rich, another representative of the propertied classes, argued that those without property would naturally elect non-propertied people to represent them. 'It could then happen,' he went on, 'that the majority would abolish property and decree equal possessions for all.' For the Minutes of these discussions, see W. Clarke, The Clarke Papers, 1847–9, ed. C. H. Firth (London, 1891), vol. I, pp. 299–307, 315. In fact, more than two thousand years ago, the concept of demokratia (literally, 'rule of the people') was interpreted by the political theories of democracy's birthplace, Plato and Aristotle, as 'government by the poor'. See H. D. F. Kitto, The Greeks (Harmondsworth, 1951), p. 125.
5. Aulard, Politische Geschichte der Französischen Revolution, vol. I, p. 44. 'The Legislative Assembly …, master of the state …, was the French bourgeoisie'—Lefebvre, op. cit., vol. I, p. 153.
6. Aulard, op. cit., vol. I, p. 366.
7. For the text of these decrees, see Heinrich Cunow's documented study, Die Parteien der Grossen Französischen Revolution und ihre Presse (Berlin, 1912), p. 145.
8. Cunow, op. cit., p. 301
9. Albert Soboul, 'Klassen und Klassenkämpfe in der Französischen Revolution', in the symposium Jakobiner un Sansculotten, edited by Walter Markov (Berlin, 1956), p. 67.
10. cf. Cunow, op. cit., p. 355.
11. Cunow, op. cit., p. 357.
12. 'There was in the minds of the Jacobins no definitive resolution to impair individual property and to proceed to a reorganization of society along new lines. The expressed beliefs of all the Jacobins and the decrees of the National Convention are unanimous in their respect for property'—André Lichtenberger, Le Socialisme et la révolution française (Paris, 1899), p. 128.
13. As to the confiscation of property of the rich, Lichtenberger observes: 'The property of the rich is not attacked because it is unjust in itself, but because the owners are counter-revolutionary; and the poor are benefited, not only because they have a right to subsistence, but because they are patriots'—Lichtenberger, op. cit., p. 270.
14. Mathiez, op. cit., vol. I, p. 68.
15. Mathiez, op. cit., vol. III, pp. 37–8. Matiez's early death prevented him from completing the work. The third volume, cited here, was edited by G. Lefebvre.
16. The hunger riots in Paris in October 1795 were the last mass risings of the suburban poor during the French Revolution. For a detailed description, see E. V. Tarle, Germinal und Prairial (Berlin, 1953).
17. See also Victoire Advielle, Histoire de Gracchus Babeuf et du babouvism (Paris, 1884). For an examination of Babeuf's ideas, see G. D. H. Cole, A History of Socialist Thought, vol. I (London, 1953), pp. 11–22.
18. Paul Louis, Histoire du socialisme en France (Paris, 1936), p. 56.
19. Aulard, op. cit., vol. II, p. 524.
20. F. A. Mignet, History of the French Revolution (London, 1846), p. 325.
21. Aulard, op. cit., vol. II, p. 325.
22. The full title of the German edition, appearing in Stuttgart in 1909, was: Babeuf und die Verschwarung für die Gleichheit mit dem durch sie veranlassten Prozess und den Belegstücken.
23. See Arthur Lehning, 'Buonarroti's Ideas on Communism and Dictatorship', in International Review of Social History, vol. II (1957), p. 282.
24. For the survival of Babeuf's ideas in the Communist secret societies in France, see Georges Sengler, Babeuvisme après Babeuf. Sociétés secretes et conspirations communistes, 1830–48 (Paris, 1912).