Background
Born on November 23, 1760, at St. Quentin, France, he was apprenticed in youth to a land surveyor, during which time he experienced for himself the oppressive nature of society under the eighteenth-century French monarchy. In 1789, when the French localities drew up lists of grievances to be presented to the newly summoned Estates-General, Babeuf prepared the list from Roye, in Picardy, where he had practiced his profession since 1783. He also took part in local attacks on nobles' houses after the fall of the Bastille on July 14, 1789. For his activities as a political journalist, especially in his own journal Le Correspondent Picard, he was imprisoned in 1790.
Throughout the French Revolution he championed the working classes, even against the Jacobin tyranny of Maximilien Robespierre, and published a clandestine paper Tribun du Peuple. In prison again for seven months in 1795, he met kindred spirits who were to join with him, the following year, in the plot which made him famous. This was a conspiracy to overthrow the ruling government, the Directory, by a carefully prepared popular insurrection. He planned to proclaim a "Republic of Equals," based on social and economic equality, with common ownership of goods.
