Background
François Babeuf was born in Saint-Quentin on November 23, 1760.
journalist revolutionist agitator
François Babeuf was born in Saint-Quentin on November 23, 1760.
The basic education was given to him by father.
Before the French Revolution he was employed as a commissaire à terrien at Roye, a position in which he was supposed to help the landed aristocracy assert their feudal rights over the peasants. His occupation made him unpopular among the lower classes, and he himself did not like the nobility. In 1789, on the eve of the Revolution, he wrote the section of the petition from the village of Roye which requested the king to abolish all feudal rights.
In the early years of the Revolution, Babeuf held minor government posts in Somme, in Montdidier, and finally in Paris, where he settled in 1794. He is credited with having applied the word "terrorists" to the Jacobins of 1793-1794. After the Jacobins fell on 9 Thermidor (July 27, 1794) Babeuf supported the men who had defeated them. In 1794 he began to publish the Journal de la liberté de la presse, later known as Le Tribun du peuple. In an article written shortly after the Thermidorian coup, Babeuf expressed radical democratic ideas. At this time he began to call himself Caius Gracchus Babeuf, after the Roman social reformer.
In October 1794 Babeuf was arrested for attacking the government's economic policies. After his release the following year, he became one of the Directory's most violent critics. In Le Tribun du peuple he put forth his socioeconomic ideas and called for the establishment of a republic of equals. His theories, which formed the basis for 19th-century socialism and communism, were offensive to the Thermidorians. But he soon attracted a following of former Jacobins, and they opened a club at the Panthéon. In February 1796 the government closed the club and planned to take actions against the group, which was becoming a political menace.
Meanwhile, Babeuf and his supporters were plotting an attack upon the government. They wanted to implement the Constitution of 1793, because they believed that it would place governmental power in the hands of the people. However, their plan was betrayed by the spy Georges Grisel, and on May 10 Babeuf and the other leaders of the movement were arrested. On April 26, 1797, Babeuf was condemned to death, and he was executed the next day.
His newspaper Le tribun du peuple ("the tribune of the people") was best known for his advocacy for the poor and calling for a popular revolt against the Directory, the government of France. He was a leading advocate for democracy, the abolition of private property and the equality of results.
He has been called "The First Revolutionary Communist. "
Quotations:
"Society must be made to operate in such a way that it eradicates once and for all the desire of a man to become richer, or wiser, or more powerful than others. "
"Let the revolting distinction of rich and poor disappear once and for all, the distinction of great and small, of masters and valets, of governors and governed. Let there be no other differences between human beings than those of age and sex. Since all have the same needs and the same faculties, let there be one education for all, one food for all. "
"The French Revolution was nothing but a precursor of another revolution, one that will be bigger, more solemn, and which will be the last. "
Quotes from others about the person
"François-Noël Babeuf, the self-educated son of a gabellou and himself a man whose business it was before 1789 to show the rich how they might become richer by squeezing the peasants for feudal dues, did somehow produce the first modern and coherent communist political strategy. "
Higonnet, Patrice L. -R. (December 1979). "Babeuf: Communist or Proto-Communist?". The Journal of Modern History 51 (4): 773–781.
"The ultimate ideal of Babeuf and his Conspiracy was absolute equality. Nature, they claimed, calls for perfect equality; all inequality is injustice: therefore community of property was to be established. . .. In the ideal communist society sought by the Conspiracy, private property would be abolished, and all property would be communal and stored in communal storehouses. From these storehouses, the goods would be distributed “equitably” by the superiors — apparently, there was to be a cadre of “superiors” in this oh so “equal” world!"
Murray Rothbard (31 May 2016). The Conspiracy of the Equals — Mises Canada. excerpted from An Austrian Perspective on the History of Economic Thought (1995), volume 2, chapter 9: “Roots of Marxism: Messianic Communism, ” section 3, “The Conspiracy of the Equals. ”
