It was against a background of growing discontent on all sides that a royalist uprising – on 13 Vendémaire (5 October 1795) – came near to overthrowing the Thermidorean Convention. The primary assemblies – in Paris they were the general assemblies of the sections themselves – had been convened in June 1795. These meetings were to approve or reject the constitution and to appoint ‘electors’ who would in turn appoint deputies to the new revolutionary assembly due to meet in the Autumn of 1795. Exploiting the discontent with the Convention, royalist agitation was having a big effect, not just in the countryside, but in Paris and the provincial towns. An enormous majority of 1,057,390 to 49,788 voted for the new draft constitution.
However, the proposal for ‘two-thirds’ of the new deputies to be automatically elected from the previous Convention met with an entirely different reception. The Parisian Sections to whom the proposals were submitted had undergone vast changes under Thermidor. All Jacobins had been driven off the committees and even from the general meetings. The workers and the sans-culottes had been pushed aside in the Sections by the bourgeoisie and the upper petit bourgeoisie. One observer commented: ‘There is only a small number of workers present at the assembly’. Thus the Sections accurately personified the ‘Republic of the proprietors’. Flushed with confidence, its philosophy was summed up in the French Gazette: ‘In all civilised communities, the proprietors alone comprise society. The others are only proletarians who, assigned to the class of supernumerary [superfluous] citizens, await the moment that will permit them to acquire property’.
The royalists controlled only one Section – Lepeletier, in the financial sector. But it was not difficult to persuade the bourgeoisie who dominated the assemblies that the Thermidoreans were violating the rights of the electors. The Thermidoreans had been given due warning of what was coming when a premature royalist insurrection broke out on 17 September 1795. The Convention replied by confirming the degree against emigrés and the refractory clergy. It voted for a law to control religion – forcing priests to recognise the sovereignty of the people – and established penalties against all those who attacked the scale of national property or who advocated the re-establishment of the monarchy. Worse from the big bourgeoisie’s point of view was that it lifted the laws against ‘terrorists’, allowed them to arm and to attend the assemblies. Troops were also drafted into the capital.
These measures sparked off an explosion which led to the royalist insurrection. The royalists were in the leadership, but the majority who were involved would have rejected the ultimate aim of the restoration of the monarchy had this openly been proclaimed. The bourgeoisie was driven into the hands of the royalists by outrage at the dictatorial methods of the Thermidoreans, combined with the fear of a return of ‘revolutionary government’. Throughout September, using their base in Lepeletier, the royalists began to organise throughout the Parisian Sections. By the middle of the month, they had managed to win 30 of the Sections for an address to the citizens of Paris.
On 23 September, the results of the voting in the primary assemblies were announced. This showed a vote of 205,498 in favour of the ‘two-thirds’, with 108-754 against. The Convention then proposed that the primary assemblies disband, the electoral assemblies be convened and the new Legislative Assembly meet in early November. But a number of the Parisian assemblies cried ‘Foul’. There was a widespread belief that the vote had been rigged on a big scale. They therefore ignored the instruction to disband. At the same time, the ‘gilded youth’ rallied to the royalists, coming to blows with the army and ordinary citizens. They stormed through Paris declaring, ‘Down with the two-thirds! Long live the king! Down with the Convention! Down with the bayonets!’.
Physical clashed developed in the Sections in late September, with the Jacobins denouncing the ‘brigands’ who had taken them over. Led by Lepeletier, 15 sections declared on 2 October that they were in a ‘state of rebellion’ against the Convention. This was the beginning of the reactionary Vendémiaire insurrection. The government countered by assembling an army of 1500 volunteers, which included some sans-culottes who had been disarmed after the Prairial uprising. Despite intense royalist agitation, raging inflation and food shortages, the sans-culottes and workers instinctively opposed the uprising and drew closer to the Convention. The big majority were not prepared to see the liquidation of the revolution, which would have quickly followed the victory of the Vendémiarie uprising. In the Champs Elysées, workers manning the local fire pumps locked the royalist sectionnaires out of their meeting place and threatened the bourgeois electors that if they joined the rebels, ‘They (the workers) would set them straight’.
On 2 October, government troops under General Menou, who commanded the military forces in Paris but who had royalist leanings, were ordered to surround the headquarters of the Lepeletier Section. This they did, but Menou then negotiated with the rebels and allowed them to return to their homes. Encouraged, they prepared to mobilise 25,000 sectionnaires under arms to march on the Convention. In the event, 7-8000 took part in the attack on the Convention. The government, however, had prepared 5000 troops under the overall command of Barras but with the young General Bonaparte, only recently on the inactive list, put in charge of artillery. Bonaparte was just one of half a dozen generals who served under Barras in this affair, and only ex post facto, on Barras’s recommendation, was Bonaparte officially recognised as his second in command. The Tuileries was converted into an armed fortress, with 40 cannon installed and all the approaches manned. When the rebels advanced, they were met with Bonaparte’s famous ‘whiff of grapeshot’: in fact, it was withering gunfire. With heavy casualties on both sides, the royalist rebels were eventually driven back at six o’clock in the evening. There was a minor skirmish the next day, but the Royalists had effectively been broken. The government proceeded to close down the primary assemblies, and set up military courts to try the principal authors of the rebellion. This repression was much milder than that which followed the putting down of the sans-culottes’ Prairial uprising. The Thermidoreans were anxious not to drive too great a wedge between themselves and the bourgeois Sections which had supported the uprising. Therefore, the mass of the participants in Vendémiaire were considered to be mere dupes of a handful of royalists. The repression was concentrated against a small number of instigators, journalists, known royalists, presidents and secretaries of sectional assemblies. Yet, the great majority of these were allowed to escape. A mere 30 out of 200 of those originally arrested were tried by military courts. Only two were executed, eight more were acquitted and the rest were sentenced to fines or imprisonment.
However, the suppression of Vendémiaire did nothing to lighten the burden of the sans-culottes. High prices and scarcity continued with even greater increases for bread and fuel as the winter of 1795 approached. Hopelessness and despair gripped the population. An observer commented: ‘Poverty is at its lowest depths; the streets of Paris present the grievous spectacle of women and children on the point of collapse from lack of nourishment; the hospitals and alms houses will soon be insufficient to house the army of sick and wretched. Poverty and hunger have almost completely silenced their voices; but when on occasion their voices are raised, it is in muttered Imprecations against the government’. The remnants of the Jacobins were silent, the sans-culottes militants were dispirited, scattered or imprisoned. The population was cowed by the army, brought in by the Convention but now remaining as a permanent occupying force in the capital.
The unstable equilibrium between different class forces compelled the Thermidoreans to zigzag from left to right. But the army, and particularly the generals, were to become the ultimate arbiters of political disputes, the real power behind the façade of a ‘liberal’ constitution. This deadlock between different class forces was to lay the basis for the eventual coming to power on 18 Brumaire of Napoleon Bonaparte.
The Conspiracy of Equals
In the aftermath of Vendémaire, the Thermidorean regime swung to the left, accompanied by attempts to invoke the ‘republican spirit’. Concessions were made to the remnants of Jacobinism and the sans culottes. Jacobin activity began to revive and the clubs reopened; Gracchus – he took his name from the Gracchi of ancient Rome – Babeuf restarted Tribune du Peuple.
Babeuf had evolved from a keeper of the manorial rolls, an agent of the feudal system and a comparatively well paid job, to become the leader of the communist ‘Conspiracy of Equals’. This movement appeared in the downswing of the revolution, in the last act so to speak, and when the proletariat had been exhausted by the preceding struggles. Doomed to inevitable defeat, it is nevertheless a vital episode in the revolution, a bridge from the plebeian sans-culottes to the modern socialist and Marxist movement. Babeuf, Darthé, Buonarotti and their comrades stood for a communist organisation of society. Given the undeveloped character of the productive forces and the proletariat at that stage, it was not, nor could it have been, the communism of Marx and Engels, that is, scientific socialism. Yet it was an important and heroic first attempt to formulate, in an inevitably rather idealistic fashion, the idea of a future communistic society.
No sooner had the bourgeoisie carried through its revolution, than it was faced, in embryo, with its future ‘grave diggers’. Babeuf articulated both the masses’ disappointment at the results of the revolution, and the yearning of the dispossessed for a society which could solve their problems. His solution was for equality, the sharing of goods in common, and later the idea of common ownership. Babeuf began as a champion of the peasantry. He later wrote that his job as keeper of the manorial rolls allowed him to discover ‘amid the dusty archives, the repulsive secrets of the nobility and the story of its usurpation of the land of France’. During the revolution he became a firm advocate of ‘agrarian law’, which for him meant the abolition of private property and of the division of society into exploited and exploiters.
As early as 1791, he advocated land division as a step towards a classless society. His efforts to defend the poor, both in the rural and the urban areas, his opposition to limits on free expression of thought, speech and writing led to inevitable imprisonment. Robespierre’s attempts to limit the press and free speech together with the attacks on the rights and conditions of the sans-culottes earned the opposition of Babeuf. Indeed, initially he welcomed 9 Thermidor, believing that the overthrow of Robespierre would lead to the re-introduction of the still-born constitution of 1793. His hopes disappointed, he soon came to oppose the Thermidoreans and this led to a further period of imprisonment. While he was incarcerated, news of the Prairial uprising reached him. He took this as evidence of the readiness of the proletariat to continue the revolutionary struggle, and he produced a special manifesto in September 1795 denouncing the new tyranny of the rich.
In Prison, he met and discussed with other revolutionaries, ex-Jacobins and sans-culottes. It was at this time, in late 1795, that he was to meet Filippo Buonarotti. Intense discussion and debate amongst the revolutionaries resulted in the formulation of the ideas of ‘communism’, which were later to be summarised in the manifesto of the ‘Conspiracy of Equals’. As has happened many times in history, the prisons became the ‘universities of the revolution’.
Babeuf was released in October 1795, full of hope and determined to rally the Parisian masses. But, as he emerged from the Abbaye prison, he could not fail to notice the passivity and inertia which gripped the masses. He wondered what had become of the heroic people of the Parisian suburbs. But as Trotsky wrote:
A revolution is a great devourer of human energy both in the individual and collective sense. The nerves give way. Consciousness is shaken and characters are worn out. Events unfold too swiftly for the flow of fresh forces to replace the loss. Hunger, unemployment, the death of the revolutionary cadres, the removal of the masses from administration, all this led to such a physical and moral impoverishment of the Parisian suburbs that they required three decades before they were ready for a new insurrection.
Nevertheless, in the most difficult circumstances, in November 1795 Babeuf resumed the publication of the Tribune du Peuple. Together with sans-culottes friends and members of the National Convention, such as Jean Baptiste Drouet, the post master of the Ste Menehould and a member of the Mountain, and ex-Jacobins like Felix Lepeletier, he set up the Club du Panthéon. Its purpose was to openly agitate for the overthrow of the Thermidorean dictatorship and a return to the constitution of 1793. They attracted thousands to their meetings, and the growth in their support alarmed the government. Therefore, on 27 February 1796, the Club was raided by a force commanded by Napoleon Bonaparte, who drove out the membership and barred the doors.
During the spring of 1796, the government, maintaining itself in power by the use of a vast network of spies, summary arrests, laws illegalising political opposition, and other repressive measures, drove the Panthéonists underground. In this situation was born the Conapiration pour lÉgalité – the Conspiracy of Equals. A directorate was set up in March 1796, amongst whom were included, apart from Babeuf himself, Buonarotti, Sylvain Maréchal, Felix Lepeletier and AA Darthé. The Equals set about mobilising the sans-culottes, the body of Paris militants who still remained faithful to the original ideals of the revolution, estimated by Babeuf at something like 17,000 men. By means of placards, handbills, leaflets and pamphlets, an appeal was made to the masses of Paris and the major cities to organise the people of France to overthrow the Thermidorean tyranny.
The manifesto of the Equals, written by Sylvain Maréchal, revolutionary writer and orator, took as its motto a phrase of the philosopher, Condorcet – ‘Equality of fact, the final aim of social art’. It began with the words:
People of France! Buring fifteen centuries you have lived as slaves, and in consequence unhappily. It is scarcely six years that you have begun to breathe, in the expectation of independence, happiness and equality!… Always and everywhere the poor human race, delivered over to more or less adroit cannibals, has served as a plaything for all ambitions, as a pasture for tyrannies. Always and everywhere men have been lulled by fine words; never and nowhere have they obtained the thing with the word. From time immemorial it has been repeated, with hypocrisy, that men are equal and from time immemorial the most degrading and the most monstrous inequality ceaselessly weighs on the human race… Equality has never been anything but a beautiful and sterile fiction of the law. Today when it is demanded with a stronger voice, they reply to us: ‘Be silent, wretches! Equality of fact is nought but a chimera: be contented with conditional equality, you are all equal before the law. Canaille, what do you want more?’ What do we want more? Legislators, governors, rich proprietors, listen, in your turn! We are all equal, are we not? This principle remains uncontested. For, unless attacked by madness, no-one could seriously say that it was night when it was day.
Well! We demand henceforth to live and to die equal, as we have been born equal. We demand real equality or death; that is what we want.
And we shall have it, this real equality, it matters not at what price! Woe betide those who place themselves between us and it! Woe betide him who offers resistance to a vow thus pronounced!
The French revolution is but the precursor of another, and a greater and more solemn revolution, and which will be the last! The people has marched over the bodies of kings and priests who coalesced against it: it will be the same with the new tyrants, with the new political hypocrites, seated in the place of the old ones! What do we want more than equality of rights? We want not only the equality transcribed in the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen; we will have it in the midst of us, under the roof of our houses. We consent to everything for its sake; to make a clear board, that we may hold to it alone… Legislators and governors, who have neither genius nor good faith; rich proprietors without bowels of compassion, you will try in vain to neutralise our holy enterprise by saying that it does no more than reproduce that agrarian law already demanded more than once before! Calumniators! Be silent in your turn and, in the silence of confusion, listen to our demands dictated by nature and based on justice!
The agrarian law, or the partition of lands, was the immediate aim of certain soldiers without principles, of certain peoples moved by their instinct rather than by reason. We aim at something more sublime and more equitable – the common good, or the community of goods. No more individual property in lands; the land belongs to no-one. We demand, we would have the communal enjoyments of the fruits of the earth, fruits which are for everyone!
We declare that we can no longer suffer with the enormous majority of men, labour and sweat in the service and for the good pleasure of a small minority! Enough and too long have less than a million of individuals disposed of that which belongs to more than twenty millions of their kind!
Let this great scandal that our grandchildren will hardly be willing to believe in, cease! Let disappear once and for all the revolting distinction of rich and poor, of great and small, of masters and valets, of governors and governed! Let there be no other differences between the human beings than those of age and sex… The moment had arrived for founding the Republic of the Equals, that grand refuge open for all men. The days of general restitution have come. Families groaning in misery, come and seat yourselves at the common table prepared by nature for all her children! People of France! The purest form of all glory had been reserved for thee! Yes, it is you who may first offer to the world this touching spectacle…
The day after this veritable revolution they will say, with astonishment, What? The common well-being was to be had for so little? We had only to will it. Ah! Why do we not will it sooner? Why had we to be told about it so many times? Yes, doubtless, with one man on earth richer, more powerful than his neighbours, than his equals, the equilibrium is broken, crime and misery are already in the world. People of France! By what sign ought you henceforward to recognise the excellence of a constitution? That which rests entirely on an equality of fact is the only one that can benefit you and satisfy all your wants.
Then the declaration clearly differentiated between the constitutions of 1791 and 1795 on the one side and 1793 on the other:
The aristocratic charters of 1791 to 1795 have only riveted your bonds instead of rending. That of 1793 was a great step indeed towards real equality, and never before had it been approached so closely; but yet, it did not achieve the aim and did not tough the common well being, of which, nevertheless, it solemnly consecrated the great principle.
People of France! Open your eyes and your heart to the fullness of happiness. Recognise and proclaim with us the ‘Republic of the Equals’.
This bold appeal found a ready audience amongst the thousands of sans-culottes in the slums and Faubourgs of Paris. One account pictures a crowd of 2000 gathered around a poster of the equals. A troop of soldiers arrives and the officer threatens to tear down the poster. The crowd, eagerly agreeing with the sentiments expressed, restrained the officer who, on departing, agreed that the poster correctly expressed the views of the people of Paris. However, passive acceptance of Babeuf’s ideas was one thing, proceeding to insurrection something entirely different. The masses cannot be turned on and off like a tap. The sans-culottes, since the failure of the Prairial uprising, were cowed and silent and refused to respond to the call of the equals. The ‘conspirators’ were eventually betrayed by Grisel, a police spy who had insinuated himself into the inner circle of the Equals. He was an agent of Carnot, who was now part of the directory, and was rapidly moving towards the right. Babeuf was to be avenged; Grisel was killed by Babeuf’s son Émile in a duel some years later.
In early May, the government struch; 131, including Babeuf and most of the leaders of the conspiracy, were arrested. The Babouvists wtill at large attempted an insurrection, but were crushed. Thirty were summarily executed. Babeuf himself and the other leaders were imprisoned in Paris but later transported, in specially constructed cages to make them appear like animals, to Vendôme for trial. Nine months after they were arrested 65 defendants, some of them in absentia, were put on trial. Some futile attempts were made by supporters of Babeuf who were still at large to free the prisoners but they failed. The high point of the trial was undoubtedly the magnificent speech of Babeuf himself before the court. At the outset he boldly declared:
To die a martyr does not cut short a man’s life; such a death, rather confers immortality, for the man who dies in such a cause lives on in the hearts of his people.
The revolution’s greatest days, when it triumphed over all its enemies, when it vindicated gloriously the rights of the people, are here portrayed as harbingers of dire calamity. The end of the bigoted rule of priests is bewailed because it has led to the spread of ‘atheism’. Those happy changes confidently expected as a result of the establishment of the republic are dubbed ‘anarchy’. Those measures that were dictated as a means of breaking the resistance of the country’s enemies are branded as chaos, murder and robbery. Laws for the relief of misery are seen as nothing more than red ruin. Those who rally to the defence of the republic are pilloried as murderers, anarchists, evildoers, monsters newly emerged from their hidden lairs.
Babeuf indicted the Thermidoreans a usurpers and betrayers of the revolution. He stated:
The accumulation of power and privilege in the hands of a tiny minority already rendered formidable by reason of its wealth alone, and the slavish subjection of practically the entire people to this handful of the mighty – this the prosecution calls order. But we call this disorder. Order is only thinkable to us when the entire people are free and happy.
Defending the right of insurrection against an unjust government which had been expunged from the 1795 constitution he stated:
The greatest error in all politics is doubtless the idea that the essence of conspiracy consists in the intent to overthrow established governments. If this were true, the peoples would be doomed to remain for all time under any government, no matter how base and vile, that had once succeeded in establishing itself. Such reasoning flouts the principle of the sovereignty of the people; it is nothing more than a new version of the divine rights of kings. From this viewpoint the revolution of 14 July, 1789, which overthrew an established government, was a criminal conspiracy.
I saw, in the existing government, the sovereignty of the people slighted, and the right to elect and to be elected granted exclusively to a small minority. I saw the revival, not merely of ancient privilege, but of new and odious distinctions between active and passive citizens. I saw all the guarantees of personal freedom swept away – the right of petition and of assembly, the right of the people to bear arms, the right to a free press. What was worse, I saw the people’s sacred inalienable right to make the laws taken away from them and vested in a second chamber; and this notwithstanding the fact that throughout the entire revolution the bicameral system had been so long and so bitterly opposed. At the same time I saw the executive vested with great power and removed from popular control – it was even giver the power to remove the popular representatives and to replace them at its discretion. I saw social services and public education completely ignored. How different was the state of affairs before? The previous constitution had been overthrown and the present one had been established against the wished of the people. The previous constitution had been sanctioned by 4,800,000 votes cast freely, decisively, and almost unanimously. The existing one was propped up by at most 900,000 votes, cast under the most dubious circumstances.
After 13 Vendémiaire, I became aware that the masses – weary of a revolution whose twists and turns had brought them only sorrow – had, it must be admitted, turned back to royalism. In Paris, I saw that the simple and unlettered people had been led by their enemies to feel a cordial detestation for the Republic. The masses whose judgement is guided by daily experience, had with little difficulty to ask themselves: How did we fare under the crown and how is it now under the republic? In the ensuing comparison the republic came off second best… I looked about me. I saw that many, many people were downhearted, yes even many patriots were downhearted who earlier had waged so valiant and victorious a struggle for freedom. Demoralisation had spread far and wide and an absolute paralysis of popular initiative had set in. The masses had been stripped of all basic guarantees against the excesses of their rulers, and so disarmed. Our brave revolutionaries still bore the marks of their ancient chains; not a few of them, who did not think the matter through clearly, had almost come to the conclusion that the republic could not be anything so marvellous after all.
Babeuf explained that he therefore launched the ‘Tribune of the People’ in which he declared that the republic was:
not just a word, a meaningless phrase. The slogan of liberty and equality, which was so long dinned into your ears, had a certain charm in the early days of the revolution, because you believed that it contained real meaning. Today this slogan means nothing to you anymore; it is only an empty oratorical flourish. But we must repeat again and again that this slogan, notwithstanding all our recent painful experiences, can and should connote something of a deep significance for the masses.
Anticipating elements of Trotsky’s future theory of the Permanent Revolution, Babeuf then declared:
The aim of the revolution, furthermore, is to realise the happiness of the majority. If, therefore, this aim is not fulfilled, if the people do not succeed in attaining the better life which was the object of their struggle, then the revolution is not over.
Inveighing against the rich, Babeif quoted from the Outline of Babeuf’s doctrine, which was the main prosecution evidence:
The purpose of the revolution is to abolish inequality and to restore the common welfare. The revolution is not yet at an end, since the wealthy have diverted its fruits, including political power, to their own exclusive use, while the poor in their toil and misery lead a life of actual slavery and count for nothing in the state.
There was no question of these ideas being put into effect if the people willed otherwise. As a matter of fact, I was very far from enjoying a measure of popular support.
His following words contrast with the miserable attempts of the present leaders of the labour movement to accommodate themselves to every twist and turn of so-called ‘public opinion’:
On the contrary it is only too easy to become discouraged by the difficulties and the dangers involved in taking a case to the public, and only too tempting to conclude that the enterprise is hopeless before even putting the matter to the test.
Drawing on all the great writers who inspired the French revolution, such as Mably, Rousseau, Diderot and others, Babeuf comes out with a bold defence of his communistic ideas. They were bound to be of a utopian character, not really going beyond the sharing of goods in common. Given the absence of large scale industry and of a modern proletariat, Babeuf was incapable of rising to the heights of scientific socialism, the communism of Marx and Engels. And yet the tradition that he laid down in the festering slums of Paris and amongst the emerging proletariat was to be carried through to the nineteenth century from one generation to another. The heritage of Gracchus Babeuf, as with the other great utopian socialists such as St Simon, Fourier and Robert Owen, laid the foundations on which the modern labour movement and scientific socialism itself were built.
Babeuf and Darthé were found guilty by the Thermidorean court and were executed on 27 May 1797. However, their ideas lived on through those like Buonarotti who, after years of imprisonment and old age, wrote his history of the ‘Conspiracy of the Equals’. This was eagerly seized upon by the proletariat in France and Europe in the first half of the nineteenth century. Engels comments:
[Communism] was first discussed in the dark lanes and crowded alleys of the Parisian suburb, Saint-Antoine, and soon after in the secret assemblies of conspirators… Communist ideas spread rapidly over Paris, Lyons, Toulouse and the other large and manufacturing towns of the realm; various secret associations followed each other, and among which the Travailleurs égalitaires (equalitarian workingmen), and the Humanitarians were the most considerable.
The Equalitarians were rather a ‘rough set’, like the Babouvists of the great revolution; they proposed making the world a workingman’s community, putting down every refinement of civilisation, science, the fine arts, etc as useless, dangerous, and aristocratic luxuries, a prejudice necessarily arising from the total ignorance of history and political economy.
In 1843 Engels estimated that the ‘French Icarian communists are estimated at about half a million in number, women and children not taken into account. A pretty respectable phalanx, isn’t it?’
Thus, in cutting off the head of Babeuf and his comrades, the French bourgeoisie did not eliminate his influence. Like the bourgeoisie of other countries later, they were to learn that no amount of guillotines, guns or torture chambers can eliminate the ideas of socialism which are rooted in the very development of the proletariat as a class.
Babeuf’s ideas were not at all restricted to France. They were a formative influence in the rise of Chartism in Britain, the first distinctly independent mass political movement of the working class in history. Buonarotti’s history of ‘Babouvism’ was translated into English by the Chartist leader Bronterre O’Brien. It had a profound influence on the British proletariat, as did the French revolution as a whole. This was reflected at a meeting in 1945 in London which was addressed, amongst others, by the Chartist leader George Julian Harney. In a speech which was commented on by Engels, he dissected the various stages and the characters in the French revolution. He said of the founder of French communism:
Babeuf was one of these, the originator of the famous conspiracy known by his name. That conspiracy had for its object the establishment of a veritable republic, in which the selfishness of individualism should be known no more – (cheers), in which private property and money, the foundation and the root of all wrong and evil, should cease to be – (cheers); and in which the happiness of all should be based upon the common labour and equal enjoyment of all (great cheering). These glorious men pursued their glorious object to the death. Babeuf and Darthé sealed their belief with their blood, and Buonarotti, through years of imprisonment, penury and old age, preserved to the last in his advocacy of the great principles of those heroic deputies Romme, Soubrany, Duroy, Duquesnoy and their compatriots, who condemned to death by the traitor aristocrats of the Convention, heroically slew themselves in front of, and in contempt of their assassins, performing this self-tragedy with a single blade which they passed from hand to hand.
