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Updated: June 20, 2025
For it there is neither country, nor memories, nor property, nor religion. There is nothing and nobody but itself. Its dogma is equality, its prophet is Mably, and Baboeuf is its god. "Caius Gracchus" Babeuf, born 1764, and guillotined in 1797 for a conspiracy against the Directory, is sometimes called the first French socialist.
This old song of victory, and their firm demeanour, struck the public mind with astonishment, and seemed to render them still more formidable. Their wives accompanied them to the trial, Babeuf, at the close of his defence, turned to them, and said, "they should accompany them even to Calvary, because the cause of their punishment would not bring them to shame."
It is summed up in the phrase: the bourgeois is a bourgeois for the benefit of the working class. We do not here refer to that literature which, in every great modern revolution, has always given voice to the demands of the proletariat, such as the writings of Babeuf and others.
It allows Drouet to escape, and lets the trial of the Babouvists drag along, only two of them being guillotined, Babeuf and Darthe; most of the others are acquitted or escape. Nevertheless, for its own salvation, it is led to separate from the fiercest Jacobins and draw near to peaceable citizens.
Never have the fingers of night which contract beneath this stifling ceiling, turned the leaves of a book nor unfolded a newspaper. Babeuf is a speculator to Cartouche; Marat is an aristocrat to Schinderhannes. This cavern has for its object the destruction of everything. Of everything. Including the upper superior mines, which it execrates.
Below John Huss, there is Luther; below Luther, there is Descartes; below Descartes, there is Voltaire; below Voltaire, there is Condorcet; below Condorcet, there is Robespierre; below Robespierre, there is Marat; below Marat there is Babeuf. And so it goes on.
Babeuf, the falsifier of public contracts, is secretary for provisions to the Commune; Maillard, the Abbaye Septembriseur, receives eight thousand francs for his direction, in the forty-eight sections, of the ninety-six observers and leaders of public opinion; Chretien, whose smoking-shop serves as the rendezvous of rowdies, becomes a juryman at eighteen francs a day in the revolutionary Tribunal, and leads his section with uplifted saber; De Sade, professor of crimes, is now the oracle of his quarter, and, in the name of the Piques Section, he reads addresses to the Convention.
At the time of the installation of the Directory the hope was widely cherished that the Revolution was now entirely a thing of the past. But the unrest of the time was seen in the renewal of the royalist revolts in the west, and in the communistic plot of Babeuf for the overthrow of the whole existing system of private property.
The Convention worked hard at this scheme, and had nearly completed its work, when reaction took the upper hand. It was during this remarkable movement, which has never yet been properly studied, that modern Socialism was born Fourierism with L'Ange, at Lyons, and authoritarian Communism with Buonarroti, Babeuf, and their comrades.
According to the ruling clique, its adversaries are simply "anarchists," former Septembriseurs, Robespierre's confederates, the accomplices of Babeuf, eternal conspirators. Now, as in the year VI., the five regents still keep the saber-hilt firm in their grasp, and can therefore make the Legislative Corps to vote as they please.
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