ByDoug Enaa Greene
Dedicated to the Babouvists of today.
“We Communists, united in the Third International, consider ourselves the direct continuators of the heroic endeavors and martyrdom of a long line of revolutionary generations from Babeuf – to Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg.”
February 20, 2013 -- Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal -- The above words were spoken by Leon Trotsky during the opening session of the Third International in Moscow in March 1919. While Trotsky was speaking, the young Soviet Republic was fighting desperately for its life against counter-revolutionary White Armies and foreign intervention. The Soviet Republic was also struggling to maintain itself in the midst of economic breakdown and famine.
Despite this, the workers and peasants of Russia were showing great heroism in their defense of the Revolution, a matter of great importance beyond the Soviets themselves. The Russian Revolution had provided a light of hope to the oppressed masses of Europe and the world of a future that was free of capitalism.
Yet Trotsky acknowledged in his opening remarks to the Third International, that the Russian Revolution was building upon the efforts of many others, including those who had been killed without ever glimpsing the accomplishment of actual revolution. One of those who Trotsky named was Francois-Noel “Gracchus” Babeuf, a pioneer who opened the horizon to the possibility of communist revolution. For Babeuf, a communist operating in the midst of France's bourgeois revolution of 1789, saw a future beyond capitalism. For Babeuf, there were many roads that had been opened by the French Revolution, some of which led to a society dominated by competition, or social democracy while Babeuf wanted to push the revolution to its ultimate limit in order to realize 'the common happiness.'
Babeuf was a revolutionary thinker and actor who was communist without having had a concept of capitalism as such. Babeuf was someone who was opposed to class domination, private property, social inequality but in a different and underdeveloped way than we think of through the lens of Marxism. Now it could be argued that Babeuf's attempt to achieve his revolution in the context of late 18th century France was premature or insane since objectively capitalism and the proletariat were underdeveloped while subjectively the masses were exhausted from years of upheaval while Babeuf was overly optimistic about the chances of success. Furthermore, Babeuf's Conspiracy had no real program for the peasantry, the Conspiracy missed key moments to stage their revolution and was easily penetrated by a police agent that broke up the whole organization leading to the arrest of Babeuf and key leaders.
Yet Babeuf's efforts, however futile in their own limited moment, blazed a path for future attempts that would succeed. As Slavoj Zizek has written, “there is always space to be created for an act –precisely because, to paraphrase Rosa Luxemburg's critique of reformism, it is not enough to wait patiently for the 'right moment' of the revolution. If one merely waits for it, it will never come, for one has to start with 'premature' attempts which – herein resides the 'pedagogy of the revolution' – in their very failure to achieve their professed goal create the (subjective) conditions for the 'right' moment.”
There lies the significance of Babeuf;his effort to usher in communism, however premature and foolhardy helped set the stage for the future. In retrospect, we can say that Babeuf was not concerned with what was 'historically possible,' rather he sought to realize the utopian excess that was contained in the revolutionary event of 1789 and make its promises real. When Babeuf made communism his goal, as Jodi Dean has written on communism as horizon, “the field of possibilities for revolutionary theory and practice starts to change shape. Barriers to action fall away. New potentials and challenges come to the fore. Anything is possible.”It is to Babeuf that we can trace the origins of modern communism as a political movement against against private property and class society in general. Babeuf's importance lies in the fact that he took communism out of the realm of utopian speculation and made it a practical ideal worth struggling for. Babeuf accomplished this by uniting theory and practice in the shape of a revolutionary political organization that was linked to the masses, secretive only by necessity, and aiming at the seizure of state power to usher in the common happiness. Even if Babeuf's efforts were premature and doomed to failure, his efforts did create the subjective conditions for future victories.
I. Early years
Francois-Noel“Gracchus” Babeuf was born on November 23, 1760 in Saint-Quentin, in the province of Picardy in northeastern France. Babeuf was born during the twilight years of the Bourbon monarchy. As the “old regime was crumbling; new social and economic relations were growing up within it.”These new relations were those of the rising bourgeoisie which, according to Isaac Deutscher, “had achieved a relatively high level of maturity; the revolution merely broke the broke the shell and thereby broke the shell and speeded up the organic growth and the development of those elements.”The bourgeoisie was motivated by the ideas of the Enlightenment which led to the development of what Michel Beaud calls “an ideological arsenal ... weapons for contesting the monarchy (social contract, general will, and democracy), for questioning the privileges of the nobility (freedom, equality), for rallying the peasants and urban artisans (freedom, equality and property), and for responding to the aspirations of the manufacturers and traders (freedom, once more, but to produce and to trade).”A section of the bourgeoisie, inspired by Enlightenment ideals and allied to the popular classes (sans culottes and peasantry), would unite in 1789 to overthrow the old regime.
Yet the rise of capitalism also coexisted in Picardy with the traditional peasant economy“which had their own collective rights and community customs, and which were struggling obstinately against the concentration of farming units in the hands of the big capitalist farmers.”As Birchall pointed out, “while agriculture was still the basis of the economy of Picardy, a growing number of peasants were unable to survive by cultivation alone ... three quarters of the peasants in Picardy were obliged to supplement their income as day-laborers or artisans, especially in weaving.”This pre-proletariat lived in miserable conditions, living in barracks similar to slave sand engaged in strikes and other forms of resistance.
Francois-Noel was born to a Claude Babeuf, a former soldier and an excise officer who belonged to the lowest level of the tax administration. His father had a meager income and, according to Rose “there can be little doubt that Francois-Noel knew the bite of poverty as a child, as his parents struggled to rear thirteen children on a meager income.”Of the thirteen children of the Babeuf family, only four managed to live to adulthood. Babeuf later “blamed the deep poverty of his family for the fact that his mother could not supply the basic needs of her children.”
Claude Babeuf was responsible for collecting a number of indirect taxes in Picardy (one of the most heavily taxed regions in France in per head terms) such as “the gabelles (or taxes on salt), the traites (or customs duties), the aides (excises on drink but also on some foods and manufactured articles) and the tabac (the state tobacco monopoly).”Many of these taxes would later be bitterly resisted by the peasantry and shopkeepers in Picardy after 1789 with Babeuf playing a vital role in the agitation; here he cut his teeth as a revolutionary activist.
Francois-Noel had no formal education, rather his father took charge of his education. There are differing accounts of how educated Babeuf senior actually was. On the one hand, Ernest Belfort Bax says that Babeuf's father “taught his sonthe elements of Latin, mathematics, and of the German language.”Yet Babeuf himself describes his father as someone “who knew how to read and write very badly, he got it into his head to that he would be his children's only teacher.” While Babeuf was remarkably intelligent and curious, he managed to receive the rudiments of a basic education (including some knowledge of Latin) from his father, but by the age of twelve Babeuf rebelled against his father's strict punishments and instead “he earned his living by laboring.”
For the next four to five years, Babeuf worked on building the Picardy canal. The canal had originally been completed in 1732, which had allowed for grain to be sent directly to Paris from Picardy. An extension on which Babeuf labored, was begun in 1769. Building the canal was done without machines and thus “required a huge amount of labour – some skilled artisans, but mostly unskilled labour provided by beggars, members of peasant families seeking to supplement their incomes and such like.”As Birchall points out, building the canal “provided one of the biggest concentrations of wage labor in eighteenth century France.” This could not have failed to make an impact on Babeuf, who was naturally curious and had suffered poverty as child. Now he was experiencing firsthand the effects of labor discipline and worker exploitation.
In 1778, Babeuf left he would later call “the excessive harshness of manual labor [which] gave me cause to think; my conclusion in short was to find some way of earning my keep with less difficulty.” Babeuf's education allowed for him to be apprenticed and learn the trade of a feudist. As a feudist, as Rose summarizes it, it was Babeuf's job to work in
notary specialization of the legal aspects of the administration of feudal estates. In the second half of the eighteenth century pressures of rising costs and increasing expectations compelled the owners of feudal signeuries to rationalize the administration of their holdings and, wherever possible, to increase their incomes from feudal dues and incidents. The investigation of feudal archives and the revising of the terriers, as the formal surveys of obligation for each estate were called, provided work for an expanding army of experts. Such men worked chiefly for aristocratic landowners ...
This was a job that needed some education and allowed Babeuf to be relatively successful.
However, Babeuf's job posed a contradiction. On the one hand, it was a source of income for him and soon his family as well (in 1782 Babeuf married Marie-Anne-Victoire Langlet, a maid in a chateaux with little formal education). Yet Babeuf came from poverty and had worked as a laborer, experiencing the harshness of exploitation, now he was working for the ruling nobility in order to help them reintroduce feudal rights over the peasantry in order to extract more payments from the peasantry. Although Babeuf hated the exploitation of the ruling class, his livelihood depended upon making that same system work. While working in the archives of the manorial lords, Babeuf “discovered the horrible secrets of the usurpations of the nobility.” Babeuf could see that the land, titles and wealth that the nobility claimed for itself was hardly natural. Rather, he saw that the origins of feudal property was based on theft. In 1786, Babeuf remarked that “in my capacity as a feudist, I could not fail to know how the majority of large estates were formed and came into the hands of those who possess them. The most ancient titles are almost all nothing but the ratification of enormous iniquities and vicious robberies. It was law enforced with sword and torch in hand on peasants, those who tilled the fields, and who, to save their skins, abandoned to their robbers, along with the soil they had brought into cultivation, their own persons, which they no longer knew what to do with.”
It wasn't just in the manorial archives and through his own reading (we will elaborate more on this later) that Babeuf learned about the nature of the feudal lords. Babeuf also learned through his everyday relations with various noble employers. For instance, Babeuf worked with the Marquis de Soyecourt who expressed dissatisfaction with Babeuf's feudist work and then didn't pay him for it. For Babeuf, working with Soyecourt was one of his most important commissions. The Belleforieres de Soyecourt was one of the most important families in Roye, owning a great deal of land. However, the Soyecourt family had done no survey on their lands since 1732 and the collection of dues from the peasantry was disorganized, meaning revenues had sharply fallen. Babeuf approached the Marquis to do a survey of his lands in order to discover the dues. In October of 1787, the Marquis and Babeuf signed an agreement. Babeuf's workload was increased extensively and he had to hire assistants and call in his brother, a surveyor from Paris to help. After a few months, Soyecourt began to doubt Babeuf's abilities as a feudist and refused to pay for his services. Babeuf claimed he was owed more than 19,000 livres for his work which drained his savings, but the Marquis would only pay for 2370 livres. Babeuf took the marquis to court for a breach of contract in January 1789 but the President of the court was a member of the Soyecourt family and decided for the marquis. The result of this court case was “that other clients now also refused to pay.”Babeuf thus made many enemies among the noble elite in Roye and after 1789, he would be one of the foremost challengers to the nobility. At the time of the revolution, Babeuf's career as a feudist was in ruins.
Rose points out Babeuf's ambitions during his time as a feudist, writing that he “was ambitious and eager to make his way in the world, driven by the curious mixture of confidence and insecurity which belongs to the self-made and the self-taught. The way ahead lay clearly through success and renown in his profession.” Yet it was clear that Babeuf's aspirations were already being frustrated by 1789. He also didn't have only his own welfare to think of but that of his wife and children.
Babeuf and Marie-Anne had five children together during their marriage, of whom three lived to adulthood. Babeuf enjoyed few years of comfort during the 1780s and almost none during the Revolution facing a “constant battle against poverty and even starvation.”It was thanks to his wife's dedication and loyalty that the family was able to stay intact.
Babeuf was perhaps unique among the major male figures of the French Revolution in his condemnation of colonialism, slavery and support for women's equality. Babeuf attacked the French colonial slave system in Haiti by saying “it is we alone who have transmitted into another hemisphere the terrible vices which degraded our own, and it seems that we are not inclined to abjure any of them and banish them from our own society except on the condition that we go and tarnish with them a land which hitherto had preserved, in its extreme simplicity, all the innocence and purity of the first ages.” When slavery was abolished by the Convention throughout all the territories ruled by France in 1794, including Haiti, Babeuf hailed the “benevolent decree which had broken the odious chains of our brothers the blacks.”
Babeuf's views on women come out in can be seen in an 1786 letter to Dubois de Fosseux, where he says that “we sacrifice and transform women, enervate her in order to make her our slave ... In the two sexes faculties are equal in number, and if, taken one by one, they don't always correspond completely, overall they balance out.” Babeuf also linked the domination of man over women to similar origins as that of the nobility over the poor. As he says in the letter, “the claimed superiority of man over woman and the despotic authority he asserts over her have the same origin as the domination of nobility, in both cases there is a usurpation of rights and consecration of a prejudice which led our fathers to make physical strength a cult. - Lets abolish this profane cult, the most profane of all when it is exercised to the detriment of justice, lets eradicate the last traces, and reestablish woman in her rights and in the freedom which belongs to her as it does to us.”
Now Rose claims that Babeuf's advanced attitudes on women were not extended to his wife and that “he was clearly unconvinced of the intellectual equality of the one woman closest to him.”Yet as Birchall pointed out, “Babeuf knew well-enough that his wife could read and write for he corresponded regularly with her whenever they were separated ... [his] correspondence shows that he communicated his developing political ideas to his wife whenever they were separated; we can only presume they discussed them when they were together.” Marie-Anne also played an active role in his later revolutionary activity, helping with the distribution of newspapers and even spending time in jail as a result. She also supported her husband during his many imprisonments, sending him food and letters.Babeuf also took great care to be involved in his children's education (particularly his eldest son Emile). Although he had rebelled against his own father's strict upbringing, Babeuf appears to have himself been a strict (albeit a loving) parent, one inspired by the precepts of Rousseau.
That Babeuf was influenced by Rousseau should not be a surprise. Even though Babeuf had received little formal education, he had a great drive to develop himself intellectually. A self-taught thinker who devoured books throughout his life,he was very much the heir to the radical philosophy of the Enlightenment. Central to the Enlightenment worldview was that “philosopiz[ing] is to give reason all its dignity and to restore it to its rightful position, to take everything back to its basic principles and shake off the yoke of public opinion and authority.” Such Enlightenment ideas were put to use by the rising bourgeoisie in order to attack the divine rights, backwardness and privileges of the Crown, Church and the nobility. However, the bourgeoisie by in large, as Albert Soboul writes,“were far from being democratic. In particular they were bent on conserving a social hierarchy in order to maintain the distinction between themselves and the classes beneath them.”
Rousseau was much more egalitarian than other Enlightenment thinkers such as Voltaire, who was comfortable with monarchies and despite his attacks on religion, believed that it was essential for the poor to believe in order to maintain the existing social order.In the Discourse on the Origin of Inequality, Rousseau rejected inequality based on class and status:
I conceive that there are two kinds of inequality among the human species; one, which I call natural or physical, because it is established by nature, and consists in a difference of age, health, bodily strength, and the qualities of the mind or of the soul: and another, which may be called moral or political inequality, because it depends on a kind of convention, and is established, or at least authorised by the consent of men. This latter consists of the different privileges, which some men enjoy to the prejudice of others; such as that of being more rich, more honoured, more powerful or even in a position to exact obedience.
It is useless to ask what is the source of natural inequality, because that question is answered by the simple definition of the word. Again, it is still more useless to inquire whether there is any essential connection between the two inequalities; for this would be only asking, in other words, whether those who command are necessarily better than those who obey, and if strength of body or of mind, wisdom or virtue are always found in particular individuals, in proportion to their power or wealth: a question fit perhaps to be discussed by slaves in the hearing of their masters, but highly unbecoming to reasonable and free men in search of the truth.
Rousseau also recognized that social inequality made democracy impossible. For instance, Rousseau was aghast at the existence of
people who abound in wealth on the one hand, and the most abject and low on the other. Is it in these extremes, where the one doth his utmost to by, and the other to sell himself, that we are to expect the love of justice and the laws? They are the causes of the state's degeneracy. The rich have the law in their pockets, and the poor choose bread rather than liberty.
Rousseau looked upon the existing institutions of society as enslaving people when by right “The legislative power belongs to the people, and can belong to it alone.” It was in an original state of nature that people were actually free.
While other enlightenment thinkers were attacking the feudal property of the nobility as in conflict with reason, Rousseau was going further:
it is impossible to conceive how property can come from anything but manual labour: for what else can a man add to things which he does not originally create, so as to make them his own property? It is the husbandman's labour alone that, giving him a title to the produce of the ground he has tilled, gives him a claim also to the land itself, at least till harvest, and so, from year to year, a constant possession which is easily transformed into property.
Thus Rousseau called into question all property that was not based upon labor, opening the door wide to a general assault on private property. And Babeuf would eagerly go through that door.
But whereas Rousseau provided a foundation with which to question feudal (and bourgeois) property as not in line with reason, he provided no serious political thinking on how to challenge these illegitimate property relations in practice. Rousseau's solution was in fact based on a moralistic appeal to establish a just society by enacting the proper laws. For example, Rousseau says in the Social Contract, that “the whole social system should rest: i.e., that, instead of destroying natural inequality, the fundamental compact substitutes, for such physical inequality as nature may have set up between men, an equality that is moral and legitimate, and that men, who may be unequal in strength or intelligence, become every one equal by convention and legal right.” Since Rousseau is not suggesting is the proper social agent that could establish an equal society, he can only rely upon moral appeal and his thinking lurches into utopianism.
Babeuf was also likely influenced by other radical Enlightenment thinkers such as Mably and Morelly. Mably“vigorously deplored the inequalities that characterized modern France, and showed their roots in the forms of property that existed.” Morelly also attacked private property vigorously by stating
Now, would this universal plague, this slow fever, private interest, ever have been able to take hold if it had found no sustenance, nor even the slightest dangerous ferment?
I believe that no one will contest the justness of this proposition: that where no property exists, none of its pernicious consequences could exist ... .
The true medium of all political or moral demonstration, and the primary cause of all disorder.
Babeuf also seems to have been impressed by what he heard of Nicholas Collingan (although he did not read the work). At one point, he ranked Collingan higher than Rousseau by saying that “It seems to me that our Reformer does better than the citizen of Geneva [Rousseau], whom I have sometimes heard called a dreamer. In truth, he dreamed well, but our man dreams better. Like the citizen of Geneva, he maintains that, since men are absolutely equal, they must not have any private possessions, but must enjoy everything in common, so that no one can, by the mere fact of birth, be either more or less rich, or be considered less worthy, than any of those around him.”
Babeuf was critical of Malby and Rousseau's attack on luxury, however, for their very crude vision of an equal society. Although Babeuf would later be stigmatized for advocating an ascetic communism that declared “perish the arts need be so long as we have equality,” he profoundly disagreed with such statements. As Babeuf said in praise of Collingnon's work which did not advocate people retreating from the modern world for the sake of equality, “he has us eat four good meals a day, dresses us most elegantly, and also provides those of us who are fathers of families with charming houses worth a thousand louis each. he has succeeded in reconciling the pleasures of social life with those of natural and primitive life.”Babeuf did not want people to live in a Rousseauist state of nature where everyone received only the basic necessities and luxuries were eschewed for the sake of equality. Rather, he envisioned an equal society as one that would lessen the burden of labor while providing subsistence to the people. His vision would be one where arts and industry would flourish and people could develop themselves to their fullest potential. We will discuss more Babeuf's egalitarian vision in a later section.
In 1787, Babeuf asked how realistic communism was with these words: “from the general knowledge now available, what would be the condition of a people whose social institutions were such that there existed the most perfect equality among all the individuals, that the land was owned by no one but belonged to all and that everything was owned in common, even the products of all industry? Would such institutions be in harmony with natural law? Could this society exist and would the methods of equal distribution work?”
Babeuf answered his own question with an emphatic yes: “Well, so be it, as far as I am concerned; I have decided to be one of the first emigrants to this new republic. I would not have any difficulty in adjusting myself to the new way of life, just so long as I can be happy and satisfied, without any fears concerning the well-being of my children or of myself.”However, one criticism Babeuf had of utopian thinkers like Rousseau was that they did not show how to achieve the desired end of an equal society. For example, what Babeuf said as a critique of Collignon, could easily be applied to Rousseau as well, “it's a great pity that he has not explained what means will achieve this end.”
By 1789, Babeuf was showing himself to be concerned with developing the political and social agencies that could bring about a society of equals. Still this was all at the level of speculation; he had as of yet no practical experience with which to test his ideas. Babeuf’s main concern was providing for his family and finding work (becoming more difficult to do by the time the revolution broke out). It was only with the outbreak of the French Revolution that Babeuf would be thrown into the rapids, where he would quickly learn to swim, and to fashion the ideas of the world’s first modern communist practice.
II. The rapids of revolution
The French Revolution of 1789 was, in the words of Eric Hobsbawm, “ecumenical. Its armies set out to revolutionize the world. Its ideas actually did so.” By 1787, the regime of Louis XVI was in dire economic straits, burdened with an inefficient tax system, misery for the masses and obsolete noble privileges. The King called a meeting of the Estates General in order to shift the burden onto the Third Estate (which constituted everyone who was not an aristocrat or member of the clergy). The Third Estate “contained the popular classes in the countryside, and in the towns. It also included ... the lower and middling bourgeoisie, essentially artisans and traders. To these were added the members of the liberal professions: those magistrates who had not been ennobled, lawyers, notaries, teachers, doctors, and surgeons.” Despite this great social chasm, the third estate was united “in its opposition to the privileged orders and its claims for civil equality.” Once civil equality was granted though, in 1789, the unity of the third estate broke apart and class struggle erupted that propelled the revolutionary process forward.
However, that was in the future. In June 1789, when the Estates General refused disperse, Louis XVI prepared to move soldiers into Paris in order to disperse the delegates. When the King had summoned of the Estates General, his act had “aroused among the ordinary people of Paris a tremendous feeling of hope, hope that the evils of the old social order were about to be swept away and that a new era was about to begin. And now it seemed that this hope was about to be dashed by the aristocracy ... the people naturally decided to take action against the enemies of the nation.”And on July 14, a crowd of people in Paris stormed the Bastille, a hated symbol of absolutist despotism, in search of arms. Very quickly, Louis XVI decided to withdraw his soldiers from the city. The Estates General (now the National Assembly) was saved. Within a month, France would produce the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen and proclaim the end of feudalism. A new era of human history was dawning.
Babeuf was in Paris several days after the Bastille was stormed. He was there to publish a book of his called, Cadastre Perpetuel, which was “demanding the introduction of popular education, [in addition] he guardedly contented for the need of reform if society were to be spared a rising of the poor against the rich.” Babeuf applauded the storming of the Bastille by writing to his wife: "Oh, how this joy pained me. I was at once pleased and displeased. I said so much the better and so much the worse. I know the people are doing themselves justice and I approve of this justice when it is being gratified by the annihilation of the guilty. But may it not be cruel today?”While Babeuf did not deny the necessity of revolutionary violence by the people, he did not uncritically celebrate violence since he believed that the people were brutalized by the monarchy.
Babeuf's book ended up being read by very few and he stayed in Paris until August 1790. His motives for staying were not political, but according to Bax “was for the purpose of getting further work in connection with land-agency.”Despite his financial problems, Babeuf could see the people of Paris and France coming to political life and was determined to play a part. He “recognized the significance of Marat who provided him with a model.”Theory was now moving to action. Babeuf was briefly employed for the London-based journal, Courrier de l'Europe. Although none of Babeuf's articles were published, some drafts do survive, which clearly locate Babeuf on the revolution's left wing. Babeuf took clear positions on“the proposal to make the the right to vote dependent on paying a certain level of tax and recorded Robespierre's speech in favor of universal suffrage. He was conscious of the problem of food supplies ... [and] argued for price controls. He was impressed by the large number of women taking part in demonstrations ... and he advocated tolerance for Jews ... another theme was important to him was that of press freedom.” Always central to Babeuf's political orientation was equality and the desire to push the revolution as far as it would go. However, this journalistic venture was an abject failure and the end of feudalism threatened his very livelihood,but Babeuf did not defend the old order. Rather, he celebrated the destruction of the old regime and his profession by saying: “I am myself disposed, all the same, to put my shoulder to the wheel, to bring about that which would destroy my livelihood. Egoists would call me mad, but no matter!”For Babeuf, there was to be no turning back. He had crossed over from armchair theorist to revolutionary activist. Babeuf returned to Roye in October 1789, where he took part in a mass movement of resistance resistance against the injustices of feudal taxes. Babeuf's agitation was enough to make the nobility and the wealthy of Roye send him to the Conciergerie prison in Paris in May 1790. After two months, thanks to the support of Marat, Babeuf was released from prison and returned home amidst great enthusiasm among the population.
Babeuf's revolutionary activities in Roye (which we will continue below) show that the revolution was not made solely by the bourgeoisie. While sections of the bourgeoisie in 1789 put the emphasis on equality of rights, the revolution's “unfolding is shot through with the tensions and conflicts arising from different perceptions of what this equality might mean.”As mentioned earlier, when the bourgeoisie attacked feudal property, they opened the door to the general assault on private property.
The expanding popular movement in France no doubt terrified the bourgeoisie who did all that was possible to hold it back. For instance, the Great Fear that began at the end of July 1789 was a series of peasant revolts. These revolts were fueled by the misery, destitution, and insecurity of the peasantry which had grown more acute by the economic crisis coupled with fears of an aristocratic plot and brigandage. The growing peasant revolt was “aimed principally at the aristocracy for the peasantry had every intention of achieving the abolition of feudal dues and they believed that the surest way of obtaining this end was by burning the seigneurial castles and with them the archives which they contained.”The peasantry were taking charge of their own affairs and ensuring their right to life and the means of preserving it for everyone. The landlords bitterly resisted the peasantry, but the peasantry was able to gain support from the National Assembly which on August 4, 1789 abolished the feudal regime, but deprived that declaration of teeth by “retaining the redemption of feudal rights. To free themselves of rents weighing on the dues-payers, the peasants had to compensate the landlord.”As Soboul points out, “among the mass of the peasantry disillusion was widespread.” It would take six more peasant risings between 1789 and 1792 and the rise of the Jacobins to power for the old regime in the countryside to be irrevocably destroyed.
Yet the risings in the countryside had shown beyond any shadow of a doubt that the peasantry were taking their destiny into their own hands, even against the liberal bourgeoisie. This was also being repeated in the cities, particularly Paris, where the sans culottes were pushing the revolution forward. The sans culottes were not a single class though, but according to historian Albert Soboul was composed of “artisans, shopkeepers and merchants, journeymen and day-laborers -along with a bourgeois minority – formed a coalition against the aristocracy which represented an irresistible force. However, within this coalition there was a friction between those who, artisans and merchants enjoyed incomes from private property or industry, and those who, journeymen and day-laborers, had no other source of income save their wages.”Despite these contradictions, the popular movement of the sans culottes would find itself allied to the radical bourgeois Jacobins, who were prepared to take up the demands of the sans culottes and to push the revolution to its very limits (clashing with other sections of the bourgeoisie at times) in order to secure France from external invasion and internal counterrevolution.
The sans culotte movement and the Jacobins were vocal in their condemnation of the Constitution of 1789 which“proclaimed that all citizens had the right to contribute toward making the law; but ... restricted voting rights to those who owned property.”Thus French society was divided between active citizens, who had full rights and passive citizens who were excluded from the political life. Citizenship and rights were secured for the wealthy. In effect, an aristocracy of money replaced that of birth.
Jacobins such as Robespierre denounced this division of French society into active and passive citizens by declaring:
are men equal in their rights, when some enjoy exclusively the right to stand for election as members of the legislative body or other public institutions, others simply the right to appoint them, and the rest are deprived of all these rights? No. Such, however, are the monstrous differences established between them by decrees that render a citizen active or passive; or half active or half passive, depending on the various degrees of fortune enabling an individual to pay three working days, or ten days of direct taxation, or a silver mark. All these provisions are therefore essentially anticonstitutional and antisocial.
The sans culottes were fired by an“equality that fed their revolutionary ardor and arrayed it against the aristocracy and then against the bourgeoisie.”The sans culottes had stormed the Bastille in 1789 against absolutist oppression and for a better life, not to be denied political rights. While the National Assembly denied them rights, the sans culottes created “popular societies which increased in numbers, opening a public space for information, discussion of of contemporary problems and proposals in the form of petitions.”The foremost champions of the sans culottes for political rights were the Jacobins in general, and Robespierre in particular, who supported the popular societies and the expansion of the franchise.
The sans culottes were also suffering from a rise in the prices of essential goods such as bread. As bread prices rose, wages did not keep up thus making hunger an acute problem for the sans culottes. For the sans culottes, not only were they suffering from poverty and oppression by the old regime but the cost of “food absorbed most of their wages and pensions.” This central role of food for the sans culottes forced them, according to Soboul “to make certain demands; they wanted to have enough bread, reasonably priced and of good quality. Hence demands for the 'maximum' (a price ceiling), the demand for control and continuous complaint of fraudulent practices.”The Assembly did little to alleviate the high price of bread, rather they were motivated by economic liberalism to establish unlimited free trade in grain. The result was that “public markets were depleted, so the people went to the producers to get grain or stopped corn convoys traveling by road or canal in order to establish popular granaries.”In response to the outbreak of popular resistance, the Assembly did not dare intervene in the workings of the market, but on July 26, 1791 they passed a marital law that “criminalized as seditious assembly all the forms the popular movement had adopted since the start of the revolution: refusal to pay feudal rents, tithes or taxes, disturbances about food opposed to the so-called freedom of trade of grain, and strikes by rural or urban wage-earners.”
The popular societies and the rural and urban masses continued to hold their meetings and push for their right to live and participation in French society. By 1792, the widening democratic movement was taking “control of policy with regard to supplies, the fixing of prices of essential goods, supplies to markets and assistance to paupers ... [this] programme of popular political economy was defended by the Mountain [The Jacobins].” The lower classes were thus pushing the revolution farther than the leadership of the National Assembly was willing to go. This popular movement found its champions among the radical bourgeois Jacobins, who were determined to defend the gains of the revolution by destroying the monarchy and ensuring that old privileged classes should lose their power. By 1793, the Revolution was facing war with all of Europe, civil war in the Vendee and divisions in the Assembly. The situation grew so desperate that the popular movement thrust the Jacobins to power to defend the besieged republic with the extreme measures of economic centralization, terror and price controls that saved France and ensured the survival of the sans culottes.
Ultimately the Jacobins were defenders of private property, albeit with limits. As Robespierre said in 1793 when proposing property limits in a new Constitution, “property does not rest on any principle of morality. It excludes all notions of justice and injustice ... .you added more and more articles to ensure the greatest liberty for the exercise of property, but said not a single word to determine its legitimate character ... I suggest that you reform these faults by including the following truths. Article I. Property is the right every citizen has to enjoy and dispose of the portion of the portion of goods guaranteed to him by law ... III. It cannot prejudice either the security, or the liberty, or the life, or the property of our fellows.”Many of the sans culottes were small property owners, and they never questioned private property as such, but sought the ideal of a society of small property owners which “saw nothing contradictory in maintaining the private property they owned, or hoped to own, and its restrictions within the narrow limits familiar to their social position.”Yet the Jacobin ideal of a society of small property owners guaranteed the right to live was incompatible with the demands of unfettered capitalism.
The Jacobins and other radical bourgeoisie were not centrally involved in exploitation and the production process, and according to Neil Davidson, they did not have full class consciousness and thus “could potentially adopt more extreme revolutionary positions than the majority of actual capitalist members of their class.”The Jacobins and their supporters were victims of a heroic illusion, which revealed itself once their was complete and bourgeois property relations could fully develop. Marx sums up the illusions of the Jacobins and their aftermath by saying, “but unheroic though bourgeois society is, it nevertheless needed heroism, sacrifice, terror, civil war, and national wars to bring it into being. And in the austere classical traditions of the Roman Republic the bourgeois gladiators found the ideals and the art forms, the self-deceptions, that they needed to conceal from themselves the bourgeois-limited content of their struggles and to keep their passion on the high plane of great historic tragedy.”Furthermore, since the bourgeoisie, according to Davidson,
could not be the only or even necessarily the major social force involved in the revolutionary process, since it remained a minority class, if a larger one than that of the existing rulers. Its leaders, consciously or unconsciously, had to mobilize the masses under ultimately deceptive slogans of universal right, necessary for a minority class to lead the coalitions that overthrew the old regimes, but disguising or simply avoiding the fact that exploitation would continue, albeit in new forms.
However, the masses of people “who threw themselves into the Revolution were not simply fighting the bourgeoisie's battles unawares. They did not, as Daniel Guerin puts it, 'take the offensive with the intention of making a 'bourgeois revolution.' They were making their own revolution and their enemy was privilege and oppression, whether clerical, noble or bourgeois in form.”
Yet the end result, as Marx put it, was that while
the bourgeoisie was victorious in these revolutions, but the victory of the bourgeoisie was at that time the victory of a new social order, the victory of bourgeois ownership over feudal ownership, of nationality over provincialism, of competition over the guild, of partitioning (of the land] over primogeniture, of the rule of the landowner over the domination of the owner by the land, of enlightenment over superstition, of the family over the family name, of industry over heroic idleness, of bourgeois law over medieval privileges.
In the end, the way was opened in France to the expansion of capitalist property relations, despite the intentions of the popular masses who were deeply engaged in this struggle. Still if the ultimate results of the French Revolution was the unimpeded rule of capital and if the Jacobin ideal was unrealizable, what were the oppressed classes supposed to do with the “realisation that the disposal of the social question of rule by princes and republic did not mean that even a single “social question” has been solved in the interests of the proletariat.”Babeuf would step in here and attempt to overcome the contradictions opened by the French Revolution between the right to live and the needs of capitalist development by realizing that it would take the abolition of private property (the root cause of inequality) and developing the practice to achieve the common happiness. Babeuf was not a utopian, rather he saw communism as a practical ideal and developed the necessary political instruments to bring it forth. And it is here that we now need to show Babeuf navigating his way through the shifting currents of the French Revolution as he reached this conclusion.
III. Picardy
Babeuf stayed in Picardy until early 1793, becoming deeply involved in the growing tax rebellion against the old feudal privileges that was spilling over to open revolt. According to Ian Birchall, Babeuf “played a leading role in a campaign in support of local inn-keepers against the tax – aides – on drinks; these complex, multiple taxes were particular unpopular with producers, retailers and customers.”Babeuf was also allied with the peasantry and campaigned against the “champart, a tax in kind whereby local lords took a certain proportion of the peasants' crops -say one sheaf in twelve, or more. The peasants claimed with some justification that this right had expired with the Revolution.”He was also pushing for the “division of commons among those who looked to him for leadership.” The resentment against indirect taxation was so acute in Picardy that it “found expression in the cahiers of the nobility and the Third Estate of Peronne, even though many among the clergy, nobility, and bourgeois who were responsible for the their drafting were privileged and personally more or less exempt from the full weight of the aides and other taxes.”Thus Babeuf found fertile ground to engage in concrete revolutionary struggle and further refine his ideas.
One of Babeuf's major efforts was to develop a new style of radical journalism that would “not merely instruct from above, but also to act as a a vehicle for pressures from below.”This attempt was expressed in developing the journal known as le Correspondant Picard, which, although a financial failure, laid the foundation for Babeuf's later journalistic efforts.Babeuf had a portion of le Correspondant Picard set aside for “local correspondence, intended as a free forum for the discussion of ideas.”Babeuf also learned the value of democratic petitions. For example, in the municipality of Mery the peasants refused to pay their feudal dues. In setting out the petition, Babeuf justified the peasantry's refusal to pay their dues“by way of a general attack on seignueral property ... [by way of] a more empirical and historical perspective of the origins of feudalism ... [where] all feudal rights had, thus, been established by fraud and usurpation.”Although the push against feudal property was in line with the growing peasant revolts across France, Babeuf argued for going much further. He believed “that the National Assembly must nationalize all fiefs and seigneuries.”Thus Babeuf was going past what even the radical wing of the revolution was advocating at this point. It would not be until the National Assembly passed the law of July 17, 1793 that feudal property was compensated without any compensation.
In the anti-tax campaign, Babeuf's strength as an agitator is coming to the fore. According to Rose, Babeuf “revealed an almost instinctive genius for linking the theoretical and the practical ... His invariable technique in tackling any specific local issue was to shift the discussion immediately to the plane of general principles, and in drafting a petition to a specific body ... to appeal to the the public at large through propaganda and publicity to secure immediate practical support but also (and more importantly) to educate and to proselytize.”Although Babeuf hadn't developed the appropriate political organization or to base himself on a concrete social agent for change, his use of a newspaper/journal as an agitator would be a present in his future revolutionary efforts. In fact, Babeuf's use of a newspaper prefigures that of Lenin who would say that “the Social-Democrat’s ideal should not be the trade union secretary, but the tribune of the people, who is able to react to every manifestation of tyranny and oppression, no matter where it appears, no matter what stratum or class of the people it affects; who is able to generalise all these manifestations and produce a single picture of police violence and capitalist exploitation; who is able to take advantage of every event, however small, in order to set forth before all his socialist convictions and his democratic demands, in order to clarify for all and everyone the world-historic significance of the struggle for the emancipation of the proletariat.”Through Babeuf's efforts in Picardy, we thus see the foundations of how future socialists and communists would use the popular press in a revolutionary manner.
Two other questions also came to preoccupy him in Picardy, that of democracy and property. For Babeuf, democracy was not just about electing representatives, but is a part of a continual process of supervision and accountability of representatives to ensure they remained faithful to the demands of the people. For instance, he was deeply critical of the deputy from Roye, named Prevost, who “was one of the of the most conservative among the representatives of the Third Estate. Babeuf tried to get up a petition to demand the recall of Prevost.”Babeuf's “practical advocacy of the mechanisms of direct democracy (the popular initiative, mandate, referendum, and recall) indicates the region in which ... the solution might be found.”He also wanted debates on proposed laws to be held publicly and for those laws subject to the people's scrutiny. Needless to say, Babeuf's belief in direct democracy made him extremely critical of the division of French society into active and passive citizens. Babeuf said of the passive citizens, that they are“excluded from public employment, deprived of the right to participate in the election of our leaders and of any part in deliberations on matters of common concern, in a word victims of more contempt than the insolence of the rich ever dared to pour on unhappy virtue.”103 Babeuf also believed that until passive citizens, “ have regained possession of them [our natural rights], we declare ourselves to be exempted from the slightest duty towards the fatherland that rejects us, exempted from all military service, exempted from any taxation, direct or indirect, and if that does not suffice, we shall also exempt ourselves from using the labor of our hands for anyone who does not belong to the order of the patards [the extreme poor].”Babeuf was advocating the right of the people to insurrection in order to gain the natural rights which the government denied them.
Babeuf's attack on feudal property left him open to the charge supporting the agrarian law. The agrarian law was“a general redistribution of the property of the rich among the poor.”Such a law was deeply frowned upon by the nobility and the bourgeoisie, who did not want their property touched. However, Babeuf did not support the agrarian law rather, he favored the common ownership of land, however he was inconsistent with this position, supporting the agrarian law as a tactical measure in the direction of equality. For instance, in correspondence with Coupe, a fellow radical and a legislator, Babeuf offered tactical support for the agrarian law and “painted a picture of an idyllic future society of independent householders, each firmly anchored in security to a basic inalienable patrimony of land large enough to ensure a minimum subsistence, and for the satisfaction of the rest of their needs exchanging the fruits of their labors on the basis of the equal valuation of all work.”Now on the one hand, this advocacy of small peasant proprietorship may appear a step backwards, but it could be interpreted differently since, according to Birchall, “he welcomed any popular demand that moved in the direction of equality.”While Babeuf had the ultimate end goal of the common happiness in mind, according to Rose, “he was still prepared to accept the temporary necessity of something nearer to the minimum program as a transitional measure. The two aspects of Babeuf's thought, the speculative and the practical, were now closer and more directly linked; but they still remained separate and distinct.”Later in 1795 and 1796, agitation in support of the 1793 Jacobin Constitution would provide the bridge between the minimum and maximum programmes. What we see here is a young man learning to experiment and develop the ideas and educate the popular movement in a communist direction. Babeuf was showing a keen sense of organization and strategy. If Babeuf was at times inconsistent in his positions, notably the agrarian law, we can only ask what other revolutionaries have not changed their positions in the midst of a revolution as dictated by concrete circumstances?
In 1792, as the situation in France was worsening with galloping inflation, riots over food and war with Austria and Prussia, Babeuf was elected to local office. His platform was one of support “for a republic and for 'pure democracy' with referendum and recall.”He also supported the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen with three amendments: universal suffrage, free state education and and the right to subsistence for every citizen.This was not an avowedly revolutionary program, but fell within the larger Jacobin orbit and Babeuf, according to Rose, “ still believed that that the way to the achievement of the ultimate goal lay through a limited political reform.” While in office, Babeuf zealously preformed his duties such as “persecuting the emigres and preventing them from evading the sequestration of their property. At the news of the execution of Louis XVI, he inspired a political autodafe of twelve royal portraits and of other royal paraphernalia. He discovered a conspiracy to surrender Peronne to the enemy and checked a famine organized by the counter-revolutionists.”Despite the diligence with which Babeuf took his duties, “it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that Babeuf's dedication to his new role was anything less than entirely genuine- and that caught up in the exciting day-to-day challenge of holding revolutionary power, he had for the moment, relegated the ultimate dream of social revolution to the distant future.”Still, Babeuf was clearly on the revolutionary left and his clear advocacy of the popular interest had already earned him enemies among the propertied classes and they waited for the opportunity to discredit and remove this agitator from office.
That chance came during a dispute about the ownership of public farmland, Babeuf changed the name of of a purchaser on an official document and replaced it with another name. Babeuf had engaged in forgery and regardless of his (undoubtedly sincere) desire to serve the people, this was a serious charge and his enemies had every intention of prosecuting him. However, Babeuf planned to correct this error, and according to Bax, he immediately “repaired to Amiens to justify himself for what was undoubtedly due to an accidental negligence, but there he was at once arrested on the charge of forgery in connection with the affair. Probably aware that he was not likely to have a fair trial, Babeuf profited by an opportunity which offered itself for escape from his gaolers.”Babeuf left Roye for Paris in early 1793 to escape the unpleasant fate of prison. Babeuf's experience of the vibrant popular movement in Paris that would crown itself in the Republic of Virtue would leave definite traces upon him.
IV. The Republic of Virtue
In early 1793, the newly formed French Republic had just executed Louis XVI and was now fighting for its life against Europe and internal counter-revolution. The call for war had initially been supported by the conservative sections of the bourgeoisie in the Assembly, notably the Girondin faction. They had hoped that a foreign war would distract France from solving its pressing internal problems. Robespierre was almost alone in arguing against the declaration of war which, according to Bernstein,“would pervert the aims of the revolution ... divert the people from immediate objectives, fulfill the purpose of ambitious men and invite the return of reaction.”However, when war was declared in April 1792, Robespierre and the Jacobins moved to support the government and “called for a people's war. The internal enemy had to be fought as much as the foreign one. The internal enemy had secretly prepared the war and looked upon the Revolution as the great occasion for acquiring power.”Although the Girondin wanted a war to prevent radical changes in France, the war would go badly for France, producing deeply radical changes in the country. When France declared war, they were not only facing the combined armies of Europe, but treason in their own ranks. For example, General Dumouriez, the commander of French forces in Belgium, went over to the Austrians in April, leading to a stunning military reversal. Very soon, the forces of the enemy were“taking the war on to the soil of France, and at the very moment when the recruitment of three hundred thousand was unleashing internal revolt in the Vendee.” The end result would be not be the forestalling of radical changes in France itself, but in fact the triumph, tragedy and glory of the Jacobin Republic of Virtue.
Although the Girondin had pushed for war, they were not willing to do what it took to win,which was popular mobilization to defend revolutionary gains at home and repel the enemy abroad. The invasion of France, the economic crisis, free trade in grain and the continued existence of feudal property was not challenged by the Girondin. According to Albert Soboul, the Jacobins believed that “the declaration of war would necessitate the arming of passive citizens and the regeneration of public mindedness among the people.”The treason of Dumouriez and the disastrous foreign invasion had revealed ineptitude of the Girondin to the masses and the Jacobins. A massive sans culottes revolt,at the end of May of 1793 replaced the Girondins by the firm resolve of the Jacobin club. The Republic of Virtue, the most radical phase of the French Revolution, had arrived.
For unlike the leadership of later Marxist revolutions, which were composed of the proletariat and/or the peasant in opposition to the bourgeoisie and the nobility, the Jacobins were a section of “the liberal middle class [which] was prepared to remain revolutionary up to and beyond the brink of anti-bourgeois revolution.”The Jacobins established a new Constitution that made France a democratic and social republic with full manhood suffrage, although it was suspended and was not going to be put into effect until peace was declared.The laws of 1791 which had punished the popular movement for interfering with the grain trade, curtailed political clubs, and punished those who refused to pay feudal taxes were abolished. On July 17, 1793, the Jacobins passed a law that abolished feudal property titles without any compensation to their previous owners.No French government, even during the Restoration would alter this law. In February 1794, in response to a massive slave revolt in Haiti, the Jacobins abolished slavery throughout all the territories governed by the Republic.
The Jacobins also had two other major problems to overcome if they were to safeguard the revolution: provisioning the army and feeding the people. To tackle the food problem, in September 1793 the Jacobins passed the law of the maximum where a “list of essential foodstuffs was drawn up, prices of commercial profits were fixed in relation to urban and rural wages which were increased, and markets were controlled by the creation of public granaries in each commune.”The law of the maximum and the imposition of a controlled economy went against the free trade, which many Jacobins believed in. However, due to the necessities of war and to maintain their alliance with the sans culottes, the Jacobins were willing to compromise their professed beliefs in the free market to secure the revolution. And as long as the maximum was in place, the people of Paris were assured a supply of bread. As one carpenter remarked during the Directory, when the Jacobins were overthrown and the maximum was abolished by free trade, “under Robespierre, blood ran and we had bread; today blood does not run and we don't have any bread.”For the lower classes, according to Bernstein, the Republic “would bring comfort to the poor, plenty to the hungry, property to the propertyless and peace and security to all. In some minds republicanism was synonymous with a vague socialism and communism ... There will be neither rich nor poor in the land of freedom.”Although Babeuf would push past the radical Jacobinism of 1793-4 in many respects, there is no denying the impact of “this rich experience of economic, social and political democracy ... [which] inspired the project which Babeuf and the Equals put forward in 1795-6.”Yet a great deal of the impetus for a controlled economy was done out of sheer necessity to provide for national defense since “to arm and feed huge numbers of men who would fulfill the conscription lists ... it was absolutely necessary to impose a controlled economy.”The Jacobins accomplished their herculean task by the Summer of 1794. By this time, the armies of the Republic was one of the greatest fighting forces in the world that had crushed counterrevolutionary revolts in the provinces and was on the offensive, advancing into Belgium against the monarchs of Europe.
However, one aspect of Jacobin rule seems to overshadow that of all others: the decision to use Terror against enemies of the revolution.For revisionist historians of our day, notably Francois Furet and Simon Schama, the Jacobin Terror is nothing more than the precursor to 1917 and the gulag. It should be stated forthwith that the Terror was absolutely necessary to purge France of counterrevolutionaries and aristocrats, attack speculation, and was necessary to channel the rage of the people.
The origins of the Terror can be traced to the murder of the popular revolutionary journalist Jean-Paul Marat. Marat's death on July 13, 1793 by a counterrevolutionary royalist had meant to destroy one of the symbols of the revolution, but the assassination according to Soboul, “provided the Montagne with new found strength and gave new life to the revolutionary movement. For Marat was very popular among the sans culottes for whose welfare he had shown a deep-seated concern and sympathy. His murder caused great anger and bitterness, and to the desire for vengeance was added the demand for measures of public safety.”The impetus for the Terror also came from the sans culottes and the workers who had suffered under the old regime, who had friends and family fighting on various battle fronts and were fearful of plotting by the counter-revolution. The popular classes demanded immediate punishment of the enemies of the revolution, while the Jacobins were slow in taking up the call for terror.
When the Jacobins began the Terror, it was not to institute a bloodbath, but rather to contain the popular rage exploding from below (as evidenced by the September Massacres). According to Sophie Wahnich, the Jacobins sought to channel feelings of rage into the“establishment of a specific mechanism that aimed on the contrary to pacify it.”The Terror was “thus a desperate and despairing attempt to constrain both political crime and the legitimate popular violence that could result from it.”The Jacobins thus quickly set up the laws and mechanisms by which to carry out the Terror,from above and to prevent an uncontrollable popular explosion from below. According to Georges Danton, “let us be terrible, to save the people from being so”
The feelings of fear which inspired the Terror, such as counterrevolutionary plots did not exist in the minds of deluded fanatics. They were all too real. In 1793, a royalist and Catholic army had turned the Vendee was engaged in fighting the armies of the Republic and had turned the province to flames.In Lyons, Marseilles, and Toulin royalists who had seized control promptly massacred republicans.In fact, the worst of the Terror did not occur in Paris, which was firmly in revolutionary control, but in regions that were held by the counter-revolution or where fighting with the enemy was at its most intense.The Terror was the expression of an emergency government fighting for its life in a war against an enemy who had proven that they would show no mercy if victorious.
The Terror also had a very clear economic motives, since it “sanctioned the application of the maximum, which had guaranteed the people their daily bread.”Considering that the people of Paris and the armies needed food if they were going to live and defend the Republic, it only made natural sense to go after speculators and hoarders (who cared more for profit than the right of the people to live). The Jacobins did this in order not to break their alliance with the sans culottes and imperil the Republic. This policy was a success, for example, in Paris, the Commune “controlled the distribution of goods, especially through the introduction of ration cards for bread; it also authorized the sectional commissioners for investigating hoarding to proceed to make visits to people's homes; and it attempted to see that the fixed prices were adhered to by restoring to acts of repression.”Although the current patrons of the free market would have us frown on price controls and central planning, we should do well to remember that the Terror and the maximum allowed for the French Republic to feed its people and defeat its adversaries on the battlefield.
And those who have only words of condemnation for the Jacobin Terror almost always forget the violence of the counter-revolution and the old regime which preceded it and was a thousand times more severe. History seems to remember a single privileged noble who suffered the legitimate vengeance of the people, as opposed to the millions of French people lived under terror, misery and degradation the old regime. When judging the Terror of the French Revolution, we would do well to keep in mind these words of Mark Twain:
There were two "Reigns of Terror," if we would but remember it and consider it; the one wrought murder in hot passion, the other in heartless cold blood; the one lasted mere months, the other had lasted a thousand years; the one inflicted death upon ten thousand persons, the other upon a hundred millions; but our shudders are all for the "horrors" of the minor Terror, the momentary Terror, so to speak; whereas, what is the horror of swift death by the axe, compared with lifelong death from hunger, cold, insult, cruelty, and heart-break? What is swift death by lightning compared with death by slow fire at the stake? A city cemetery could contain the coffins filled by that brief Terror which we have all been so diligently taught to shiver at and mourn over; but all France could hardly contain the coffins filled by that older and real Terror -- that unspeakably bitter and awful Terror which none of us has been taught to see in its vastness or pity as it deserves.
Babeuf would find himself shaped by the experience and legacy of the Republic of Virtue. There would be certain aspects of it that he would uphold ( Babeuf defended, with qualifications, the rule of Robespierre) and others that he would reject (the defense of private property found in the Constitution of 1793). Babeuf's agitation showed continuities with the practice with Jacobins, but there discontinuity as he developed in a new direction of communist practice.
V. Paris
By the time Babeuf arrived in Paris in February of 1793, Girondin rule was approaching its end. The Girondin faction had shown their sheer ineptitude at conducting the war and providing basic necessities for the people. When Babeuf arrived in Paris in February 1793 , he entered a new world of vibrant revolutionary politics with powerful section clubs that was propelling the Jacobins forward with ever more radical measures, against the Girondins who had shown their ineptitude in waging the war and indifference to the people's need for bread. As mentioned earlier, one of the chief demands of the sans culottes, with all their differing class interests, was for “reasonably stable food prices [which] were essential for survival.”The sans culottes were also fired by a revolutionary zeal to fight for the Republic and reshape society which Babeuf found infectious. He later wrote to his wife, “this is exciting to me to the point of madness. The sans culottes want to be happy, and I don't think it is impossible that within a year, if we carry out our measures aright and act with all necessary prudence, we shall succeed in ensuring general happiness on earth.”Babeuf quickly found himself in the larger Jacobin movement, albeit on its left-wing.
Babeuf endeavored to make contacts with the revolution's left. His first political connection in Paris was with a man (of dubious reputation) named Claude Fournier l'Heritier.Fournier was one of the moving forces behind the Legion of People's Volunteers, who were “an elite corps of revolutionary superpatriots who were to be raised among the volunteers of Paris.”Babeuf worked with Fournier as a secretary where “he drafted several petitions and pamphlets for him.”The legion was closely aligned with another group known as the Defenders of the Republic who “acted as revolutionary 'stormtroopers,' stopping 'unpatriotic' theater performances and forcibly evicting ;suspect elements' from the cafes of the Palais Royal. Politically the Defenders threw their weight behind the developing Enrage campaign for action to check inflation and punish speculators.”Considering Babeuf's own role in attacking speculation and in support of price controls in Picardy, he naturally supported the same measures in Paris. One of the chief movements in Paris in pursuit of price controls were The Enrages. The Enrages were a radical section of the Parisian sans culottes, who were behind several riots in support of the enforcement of the maximum for bread at a price the people could afford. During the uprising of May 30 that brought the Jacobins to power, the Enrages had a maximum program that “included a general massacre of [Girondin] deputies and a merciless war on the rich.”The Jacobins were able to take up the popular demands for price controls and come to power in May. However, the Jacobins were not willing to support the Enrages' extremist calls and eventually had them arrested in August 1793.
After Babeuf left his job with Fournier in April, he did not join up with the Enrages,rather he aligned himself to the Jacobins. According to Rose, Babeuf was also“impressed by Robespierre's emergence as a fierce critic of the unlimited right of property during the the contemporary Convention debate on the new French constitution ”To Babeuf, the Jacobins were the best defenders of the popular interest and for the enforcement of the maximum. However, Babeuf did share the Enrages' criticism of the maximum since both believed the price of bread should be lowered “to a price all can afford.”
In May, thanks to his support of the Jacobins, Babeuf managed to secure a position in the Commission des subsistences, which administered the Parisian food supplies. As Birchall points out, this was a crucial experience for Babeuf who “saw food supplies, not from the point of view of the rural food producers, but from that of urban consumers. He became aware of the poverty of the urban masses, and his awareness changed his conception of social change.”Indeed, the central control of the Jacobin economy would figure prominently in Babeuf's later thinking and shape his criticism of the evils of the unregulated free market or as he called it, competition .
Although the Commission was involved in the monumental task of feeding the population; it was caught in a vice between “the population- with its pathological distrust of ... anyone who had anything to do with the bread supply ... and, on the other hand, the granary areas, resentful of the maximum and politically hostile to the pretensions of the capital.” One such attack by the popular was directed against Babeuf's superior in the commission, a man named Etienne-Francois Garin. Babeuf ably took up the defense of Garin by writing a number of pamphlets, since his superior was a firm defender of the maximum. Garin was criticized Marat for corruption in his enforcement of the maximum. Garin was also coming under attack from Jacques Roux (for not going far enough to attack speculators), a central figure of the Enrages and Roux's attacks “ undoubtedly helped to widen the political gulf between Babeuf and the Enrages.”
Although Babeuf performed his job in the commission well, the forgery charge from Picardy caught up with him. Since Babeuf had already been convicted in abstentia by a Picardy court, the government removed him from his position and on November 14 he was sent to serve prison term of twenty years. Babeuf suffered in horrible prison conditions, nearly dying of fever but he managed to survive. Despite the serious of the charge, Babeuf's family and friends stood by him. Babeuf was successfully able to appeal his conviction and “On the 28th Floreal (18th of July 1794), however, the judges of the supreme tribunal of the Aisne, at Laon, on examination of the evidence, unanimously declared that there was no case on which to proceed against the accused. Thus Babeuf’s honour was finally rehabilitated.”A mere ten days after his release from jail, Robespierre and leading Jacobins were overthrown and guillotined in a coup known as the Thermidor (the name of the month of the revolutionary calendar in which the coup it occurred). It would be under the post-Jacobin regime that Babeuf's communist practice would finally coalesce.
VI. Thermidor
In the aftermath of the Thermidorian coup Babeuf would fully develop his program, build the alliances and develop the political organization and identify the social agents needed to achieve communism. However, in order to fully understand Babeuf's political practice during the Thermidor, we need to ask ourselves two questions: (1) why did the Jacobins fall? (2) what was the nature of the regime that Babeuf challenged?
In regards to question one, we have already discussed that the Jacobins, in order to defend and consolidate the revolution had to transgress its bourgeois limitations. The Jacobins violated the free market in favor of price controls, enlarged the franchise, used terror against the counter-revolution and secured an alliance with the sans culottes by supporting their radical demands. Ultimately, according to Antonio Gramsci, the Jacobins,
despite everything, always remained on bourgeois grounds is demonstrated by the events which marked their end, as a party cast in too specific and inflexible a mould, and by the death of Robespierre. Maintaining the Le Chapelier law, they were not willing to concede to the workers the right to combination; as a consequence they had to pass the law of the maximum. They thus broke the Paris urban bloc: their assault forces, assembled in the Commune, dispersed in disappointment, and Thermidor gained the upper hand. The Revolution had found its widest class limits.
Although Jacobins such as Robespierre believed that their efforts were motivated by the belief in virtue, which “was none other than love of the homeland and its laws”that would establish a new society of small property owners. These property owners would then be guided by the virtues of serving the nation and not their own class interests. According to Georges Lefebvre, among the Jacobins “there was no awareness that, in contradiction to freedom of competition within the economy which made the future safe for capitalist enterprise, this ideal could not be realized.”The Jacobins would go no farther than restricting the rights of property and not its abolition. Robespierre dismissed a communism or a system of common ownership by saying that an “equality of possessions is a chimera.”In the end, the very success of the Jacobins in saving the revolution would find that the bourgeoisie, now free to develop capitalism had no need of a small property owning republic guided by virtue.
While the Jacobins enforced a price maximum on bread, they also extended the maximum to wages which in the words of Ian Birchall meant “an effective wage cut for many workers who had pushed up wage levels in the context of war economy. By attacking the emergent working class, the Jacobin government was cutting away the branch that it was seated upon.”Even as the Jacobins adopted many of the measures of the sans culottes, at the same time, “Robespierre began a crackdown on sans culottes organizations – in mid-September [1793] Jacques was arrested; in October Claire Lacombe's Society of Revolutionary Republican Women was dissolved; and finally, in March, Hebert and several others were guillotined.”Robespierre also feared those among the Jacobins who could destroy the revolution by putting their own narrow needs above the greater good. This characterization applied to Georges Danton, who was “a man capable of enormous revolutionary courage and enthusiasm, but also attracted by the rewards available from mixing with dubious wealthy figures.”When Danton formed a faction around himself in January/February of 1794, Robespierre feared for the safety of the revolution and had him arrested and executed. Thus Robespierre and the Jacobins were growing isolated not merely from the sans culottes and those farther left, but also from members in their own faction.
By the Summer of 1794, the armies of the French Republic were victorious on nearly all fronts. The emergency situation which threatened the revolution had now seemingly passed. According to Soboul, victory for the Republic created meant that “business interests among the bourgeoisie were unwilling to tolerate government control of the economy; they wanted as quickly as possible to return to total liberty of production and exchange which they had gained from the revolution of 1789. They also feared possible attacks on their property rights.”The attitude of the bourgeoisie showed that the Jacobins were isolated not only from the sans culottes, now reduced to impotence, but members of their own class. It was now the turn of the Jacobins to be swept aside. The climax came on the 9th Thermidor, Year II (27th of July 1794), when Robespierre was overthrown as the masses watched passively and a new regime took over.
In regards to the social significance of the coup, Leon Trotsky says that the “overturn of the Ninth Thermidor did not liquidate the basic conquests of the bourgeois revolution, but it did transfer the power into the hands of the more moderate and conservative Jacobins, the better-to-do elements of bourgeois society.”The rule of capital was enshrined and protected by the Thermidorians, who saw themselves as a regime of law, order, property and stability.The Thermidorians, feared the popular masses, Jacobin economic controls, now wanted to ensure that they could at last enjoy their wealth without worrying about popular upheaval or the demands of virtue. The Thermidorians, over the next two years, undid the popular conquests of the revolution as “democratic institutions were dismantled, the Commune of Paris was abolished and democratic representatives were purged. The policy of the maximum was rescinded, the unlimited freedom of trade was reestablished and the food weapon became lethal.”Without the maximum, the population of Paris suffered horribly from rampant inflation of basic necessities. According to Bernstein, as
from 1790 to 1795, a bushel of flour rose from two francs to 225 francs, of beans and peas from four francs to 120 and 130 francs each. In September, 1795, bread was selling at twenty francs a pound. Two months later it shot up to forty and sixty francs. A load of wood cost eight hundred francs and a pair of boots twelve hundred francs. Wages could never keep pace with such a rise in prices.
The rise in food prices was accompanied by “the substitution of one worthless paper franc for another [which] only prolonged the suffering of the poor.”The result for the French sans culottes was that “by 1795, the economic situation of the poor had become more critical. Paris was threatened with famine. The abolition of the maximum and the execution of Robespierre were not followed by the prosperity which the politicians had promised. On the contrary, abuses became more numerous, food arrived in Paris with less regularity and the lines in front of bakeries and butcher shops grew more turbulent. The women particularly became clamorous. It was they who had to wait long hours on line to procure the ration of a half- pound of bread. Their protests grew louder as food became scarcer.”For the sans culottes, the situation in Paris (and elsewhere in France) was growing ever volatile with the spectre of famine and unemployment. The poor were looking back on the Republic of Virtue (which they had created) as a golden age where the virtue was upheld, when they had been able to live in security and afford to eat and enemies of the revolution had been swiftly punished.
To further prove how far the Thermidor was from the Ideals of the Republic of Virtue, in October 1795, a new Constitution was put in place. The new Constitution that vested power in a five-man Directory and limited the right to vote to those who were wealthy enough to pay taxes.The class interests defended by the Constitution were made clear by its drafter Boissy d'Anglas, who said, “we must be governed by the best, the best are the most educated, and you will only find such men among those who own property, are attached to the country which contains it and to the laws which protect it.”Babouvist conspirator Philippe Buonarroti said bitterly that the Constitution of 1795 “preserve[s] opulence and misery – such is the spirit which pervades every sentence of it.”In The Constitution, according to Lefebvre showed its break with the earlier egalitarian documents of the Revolution by “omitt[ing] the famous article, 'men are born and remain free and equal in rights,' because of the dangerous implications. Care was taken to specify that 'equality means that the law is the same for all men.' Also lacking were the articles of the Declaration of 1793 that justified social democracy. It goes without saying that economic liberty was expressly confirmed.”This Constitution would remain a target of the Babouvists in exposing the class nature and anti-democratic nature of Thermidoran France. The Babouvists would (critically) uphold the Jacobin Constitution of 1793 as a document that ensured social justice and democratic rights.
The Thermidorian regime was one of open assault on the sans culottes, working class, and their democratic conquests while rights and rights were reserved for the wealthy few. Babeuf would challenge the Thermidor by uniting the pressing immediate needs of the suffering masses with a vision of a n equal society that would see farther than the glories of Year II. While Babeuf was animated by the great democratic and popular upheavals of 1789 and 1793, he believed that the ideals of the French Revolution (liberty, equality, and fraternity) could not be realized by the Directory or under any regime that protected inequality. Rather, the realization of those ideals would require the overthrow of the bourgeois order and all class society.Babeuf's confrontation with the Directory would unite the scattered radical and republican opposition in a new body of truth. Even if the goal of this truth was unrealizable, due to immature objective and subjective conditions, Babeuf's failed struggle would create the conditions for future revolutionary struggles and victories.
VII. ‘If you want a civil war, you can have it’
Following the overthrow of Robespierre, Babeuf initially maintained a vacillating attitude toward the Thermidor. In fact, he welcomed the fall of the Jacobins wholeheartedly. In September 1794, when he returned to Paris, Babeuf founded a new paper de la liberte de la presse, which according to Bax, “seem[s] to have been directed against the party of Robespierre and the old revolutionary government. He was indeed at this time on terms of intimacy with several of the Thermidorian leaders, notably Tallien and Fouché, who subsequently became his bitter enemies. ”Babeuf took up analyzing the Jacobins in his paper. He said in criticizing the Jacobins that “we did indeed make a revolution five years ago; but we must have the good faith to recognize that since then we have allowed a counterrevolution to take place; and this later event dates precisely from the time when we permitted the first encroachments on the freedom of opinion, whether spoken or written. Thermidor makes the date since when we have been working for the rebirth of freedom.”Babeuf's position was one of attacking the Jacobins from the left, since they had stifled freedom of the press and believing that the new regime would bring about the freedom that Robespierre had betrayed. Naturally, Babeuf's position angered those Jacobins still at liberty.
While Babeuf was a leftist critic Jacobins from the left, his critique should be taken more seriously that his contemporaries. For instance, Babeuf's collaborators on de la liberte de la presse were former Jacobins who were cynical sellouts to the new regime in power. Babeuf's criticisms of the Jacobins was different, he was not seeking a place in the new Thermidorian order by renouncing the revolutionary dream and succumbing to the temptations of power, rather his critique of the Jacobins (and ultimately of the Directory) was part of the development of a new communist political practice.
Babeuf was harshly critical of the Jacobins for “the espirit dominateur in men, the tendency of those who govern to seek to impose their arbitrary will on the governed.”This spirit of domination was exemplified in Babeuf's eyes by Robespierre. However, in assessment of Robespierre Babeuf would “distinguish two persons, that is, Robespierre the sincere patriot and lover of principle up to the beginning of 1793 and the ambitious Robespierre, a tyrant and the worst of scoundrels after that date: this Robespierre, I say, when he was a citizen, is perhaps the best source for great truths and forceful arguments for the rights of the press.”For Babeuf, a major failing of Robespierre and the Jacobins was that they did not uphold the values of democracy and freedom of the press. By contrast, he sincerely believed that the Directory would help the people “reclaim their lost liberties.”
Babeuf says that the masses supported the Jacobin dictatorship and did not resist the infringements on their liberties because “ they did not lack the most necessary goods, there was plenty of work available and the remuneration of all workers was advantageous. By this means it was possible to stabilize the tyranny.”Although Babeuf's criticisms of the Jacobins were sincere, according to Birchall he went too far and “there is no doubt that he seriously underestimated both the social achievements of Jacobin rule and the severity of the threat to the Revolution that had made it necessary.”As Babeuf witnessed the profound suffering of the masses under the Thermidor and as he moved into opposition, he would maintain continuity with key aspects of the Jacobin traditions, while his discontinuity would be in the development a unique communist practice.
It did not take Babeuf long to see the true nature of the Thermidor. After return to Paris, Babeuf joined the Electoral Club which was composed Enrages and Hebertists. Babeuf used his paper as part of a broader campaign to demand the revival of “a democratic sans culotte and sectionnaire movement.”In early September, the Club sent a petition to the Convention “demanding the complete freedom of the press and the popular election of all public officials. The petition was not heeded, but the Club did not surrender. It sent another delegation to the Convention to urge not only repeal of the laws on food speculation and on requisitions - a demand to which Babeuf did not subscribe -but also the restoration of the communal government with its democratic assemblies and the practical application of the principles of the Rights of Man.”It quickly dawned upon Babeuf that “the 9th Thermidor ... was not a revolution; it was only a change of rulers.”Babeuf reproached the Directory for a host of crimes against the people and the revolution such as “price rises, laws to benefit emigrees, sacking of patriots, revival of prostitution and superstition.”
The democratic revival was supported by many section clubs in Paris and also fueled by the economic crisis and a mass movement against the empty promises of the Directory. Although the democratic campaign would prove to be a failure, it did represent a breakthrough in the development of Babeuf's political strategy. As Rose explains, “throughout the early years of the Revolution, democratic political thought ... had been dominated by naïve Rousseauist conceptions of popular sovereignty and the general will. According to these ideas, the undifferentiated mass of the people, in its natural goodness, could be relied upon to impose its will through the machinery of section and commune assemblies, and, in the last resort, through 'holy insurrection.'”What was Babeuf's specific breakthrough? Well, he moved to support for a faction which would “come to to represent for Babeuf a concrete organization with the essential attributes of a democratic political party ... it was to the popular societies that Babeuf looked as the as fundamental cells of the democratic organization.”It is here that Babeuf finally began to reach for the answer to the questions that had dogged him in his criticisms of Malby, Rousseau, and Collignan, how to connect means and ends. Although he is still feeling his way towards the solution, Babeuf stumbled upon the need for a revolutionary political organization to seize power. This idea would develop and deepen further in the course of Babeuf's practical struggle.
Since Babeuf was proposing transforming the political clubs in Paris into a political party, it remains to be asked: what was this just an elitist party or something else? Far from being an elitist (as many historians often portray him), Babeuf was arguing for a wide-range democracy in the operation of a party. He believed that “all formalities of entry, membership and organization must be abandoned.”As a firm believer in equality, Babeuf wanted the marginalized to participate and develop their talents and since “it is from his mouth that the best truths, the best accounts of the general interest will emerge.”He also broke with the largely masculine Jacobin tradition and argued for the involvement of women by saying, “Let your womenfolk participate in the interests of the fatherland; they can do more than you think for posterity.”While the political clubs would not implement these ideas (since they were crushed by the Directory), Babeuf proposed practice of a political party prefigures the best of the later revolutionary Marxist tradition.
Babeuf also believed that newspapers had an important role to play in a revolutionary political organization. In Picardy, he had developed a revolutionary press that linked immediate concerns of the people to the larger social questions about how power and wealth was distributed . Further, Babeuf had seen the role of a newspaper as an educator and proselytizer among the people. When Babeuf founded a new paper on October 5, Tribun du Peuple, he expanded on the previous model. Just by looking at the name of this paper, we can see the role that Babeuf envisioned for the press in the revolutionary struggle. In calling his paper, Tribun du Peuple, Babeuf was harkening back to an institution of ancient Rome that preserved and protected the interests of the poor plebeians from the rich patricians: The Tribune of the People. The role of the Tribune was discussed by Rousseau in the Social Contract (Babeuf was no doubt familiar with the basic argument), “although [the tribune] is unable to do anything, it can prevent everything. It is more sacred and more revered as a defender of the laws than the prince who executes them and the sovereign who gives them. This was clearly apparent in Rome when the proud patricians, who always scorned the entire populace, were forced to bow before a humble official of the people, who had neither auspices nor jurisdiction.”Babeuf's paper would help play the role of Tribune amongst the poor plebeians and make the politicians and patricians of the Thermidor bow to the interests bow before their interests.
However, the Thermidorians were showed no signs of listening. In October, the Directory moved against the democratic movement by launching an “n offensive against the popular societies. New regulations were decreed requiring popular societies to declare a list of their members, and forbidding them to form federations or carry on correspondence as collective entities.”The space for legal opposition in the clubs and the press was quickly evaporating. At the same time, the achievements of Year II were being rolled back such as the maximum, while unemployment, inflation and famine gripped Paris.
The reactionaries were also on the march and they “hoped to wreak vengeance on the Jacobins and the sans culottes by turning the Terror against them.”This White Terror didn't just involve restricting democratic rights but also the organization of armed bands known as the “jeunesse doree [gilded youth], cynical young profiteers of the revolution determined to consolidate their administrative and military careers and defend their new 'bourgeois' comforts by a demonstrative anti-Jacobinism and a violent contempt for the sans culottes.”The jeunesse doree “were the law in their sections. They took over the streets and attacked the patriots with cudgels under the complacent eyes of the police. The Jacobins succumbed.”For Babeuf, there was no questioning where he stood when the Jacobins and sans culottes were under attacked. He declared war on the Directory in the Tribun,“if you want a civil war, you can have it ... You've told your people to be ready. You've cried 'to arms.' We've said the same to our people. Our workers, our districts are already lined up; they're asking if it will be soon.”In the face of reactionary assaults, Babeuf had no problem in advocating revolutionary violence as completely legitimate and just.
Babeuf's agitation resulted in a brief arrest in October (he spent four days in jail). Rose believes that his lenient treatment by the government was because Babeuf “ may have agreed to abandon his attacks as a quid pro quo for his release.”Babeuf quickly broke any promises and resumed his attacks on the Directory. Not only was he advocating revolutionary violence against the jenesse doree, he was supporting it against the Directory by saying in the Tribune that “when the government violates the people's rights insurrection becomes the most sacred right.”The Directory placed a warrant for Babeuf's arrest shortly after, but he went into hiding and would remain at liberty until February 7, 1795.
Although the democratic movement had energized the sections, Babeuf noted that popular involvement was small in the Electoral Club, in which “400 members of the club only thirty or forty could be counted on attend sessions and only a dozen were ready to sign their names to declarations or protests.”Despite the confrontation between the Thermidorians and the popular societies, the masses were largely indifferent. Babeuf wanted to change the indifference of the masses to one of active support for revolutionary struggle. To this end, he saw the role of a paper as not only exposing and agitating against the abuses of the Directory, but going further to “prepare for the conquest of power by a propaganda campaign to 'direct' public opinion.”However, writing and publishing a paper was not easy going for a declared enemy of the state and fugitive. As Birchall explains, “[for the Tribun] there were just ten issues up to 1 February 1795 ... there was a two month gap from mid-October to mid-December when no issues at all appeared ... Some copies did not reach subscribers because of difficulties with postal services, and there were threats to ban sellers from meetings of societes populaires ... By January 1795 he was operating semi-clandestinely.”Babeuf's arrest in February put an end to his paper, but his efforts were far from fruitless.
Before Babeuf's capture, he saw the struggle with the Thermidorians as a reflection of a much deeper division in society. Babeuf later in the Manifesto of the Plebeians, identified between
two parties diametrically opposed by their system and their plan for the public administration ... I am ready to believe that both desire the republic, but each wants a republic after its own fashion. One wants it to be bourgeois and aristocratic; the other believes that they have achieved it, and that it should remain wholly popular and democratic. One wants the republic of a million which was always the enemy, the dominator, the exactor, the oppressor, the bloodsucker of the twenty-four other millions, of the million which has disported itself in idleness for centuries at the expense of our sweat and labor; the other party wants a republic of those other twenty four millions, who laid down its foundations and cemented them with their blood, who are defending it and dying for its safety and glory.
These are undeveloped, non-dialectical and rather primitive observations on the nature and functioning of class society. Class struggle is viewed seen as an eternal and unchanging struggle between the rich and poor. There is no mention of modes of production or of the division of the classes that were coming into emergence due to the French Revolution. Babeuf does not identify the specificity of capitalism here (although he would move in that direction while imprisoned). True, Babeuf had earlier analyzed the origins of feudal property as due to usurpation, but that is not integrated in this piece. This was not a Marxist, critique., but it was a communist one. Babeuf was agitating against private property, inequality and for popular power regardless of the system of control.
Following Babeuf's imprisonment, the popular movement in Paris spilled over into open revolt. Babeuf's agitation clearly played a major role, but it was abolition of the maximum coupled with a cold winter and scare food, and unemployment caused the people to rise. On April 1, 1795 (Germinal ) women and the workers of Paris demonstrated against the government, with slogans demanding bread and the Constitution of 1793. The government did not accede to the demands of the people, but ordered arrests of ringleaders. Although food was brought in and the number of troops near Paris was reinforced to protect the government. The situation was still volatile and on May 20, 1795 (I. Prairial Year III), the workers and artisans of Paris staged another uprising. They circulated a manifesto declaring that the government had starved the people and demanded “Bread and the Constitution of 1793.” The rebels also wanted the release of political prisoners and urged soldiers to fraternize with the people. An armed mob made its way to the Convention and killed a deputy before it was dispersed by the army.
Several objective factors helped account for the failure of Prairial revolt. One was that the sans culottes were not a coherent class, according to Soboul, “the sans culottes did not form a class. Artisans and shopkeepers, compagnons and day-laborers joined with a minority of bourgeois to form a coalition which unleashed an irresistible force against the aristocracy.”The heterogeneous nature of the sans culottes meant that while “they were united in their general hostility towards nascent capitalism, the motives behind their attitudes often diverged.”Among the sans culottes were , workers who had not quite achieved knowledge of themselves as a distinct social class and artisans and shopkeepers, ruined by the economic policies of the Directory, who feared falling into the ranks of the working class; Lastly, bourgeois members of the sans culottes, however much they may've supported Jacobin virtue and the people ultimately had more in common with the Thermidorian rulers who protected private property. These divergent interests among the sans culottes were breaking this mass apart as capitalism developed. Lastly, the Germinal and Prairial revolts were the last of the popular uprisings that characterized the French Revolution. By 1796, France had gone through nearly six years of continuous revolution, famine, and repression which had driven them = close to the point of demoralization and exhaustion.
Yet there was another lesson to be drawn from the failure of the Prairial revolt: the lack of revolutionary leadership and organization. During the Prairial revolt, the Jacobins had refused to assume leadership of the masses. According to Soboul, “the Paris sans culottes were always lacking an effective weapon of combat: a disciplined party, based on recruitment along class lines and on drastic purges. Though a great many militants endeavored to bring discipline into the popular movement, an equally great number had no sense whatever of the need for social and political discipline.”Babeuf understood the need for a revolutionary combat organization that would rely upon the force of the people to achieve political. When he emerged from prison, he would be fired by a new communist truth that would seek to animate the people, despite their exhaustion and differing interests, to overthrow the Directory.
VIII. ‘There will be neither upper nor lower, neither first nor last’
Babeuf was in prison from February 7 to October 12, 1795, ultimately being released as the result of a general amnesty. He was initially imprisoned in Plessis before being moved to Arras. It was while in prison that Babeuf a communist pole formed around him that would be instrumental in forming his later conspiracy. While imprisoned, Babeuf began a long correspondence with a fellow inmate who was interested in radical ideas, Charles Germain.The relationship between Babeuf and Germain, according to Rose, “quickly developed into that of master and disciple, as the correspondents debated the details of a new revolutionary program for the final achievement of equality.”It was through long discussions with Germain that Babeuf was able to clarify and refine his ideas.
When Germain wrote a long letter that offered a critique of commerce and in favor of a planned economy, Babeuf wrote a long reply. In his reply, Babeuf offered his own critique of the emerging market economy, which he called competition, which he condemned in no uncertain terms:
Competition, far from aiming at perfection, submerges conscientiously made products under a mass of deceptive goods contrived to dazzle the public, competition achieves low prices by obliging the worker to waste his skill in botched work, by exhausting him, by starving him, by destroying his moral standards, by setting an example of unscrupulousness; competition gives the victory only to whoever has most money; competition, after the struggle, ends up simply with a monopoly in the hands of the winner and the withdrawal of low prices; competition manufactures anyway it likes, at random, and runs the risk of not finding any buyers and destroying a large amount of raw material which could have been used usefully but which will no longer be good for anything.
Babeuf's critique is remarkably similar to the later Marxist critique of capitalism with its unplanned economy, exploitation and alienation of workers, and its monumental waste in order of resources to enrich a small few. Granted Babeuf's condemnation of competition is embryonic and underdeveloped, but this makes sense since capitalism was just emerging in France. Capitalism or 'competition' was the system that was given free reign to develop since Thermidor and Babeuf planned to destroy it before it could grow.
Babeuf planned to replace competition“with a planned society where all would be at once producers and consumers. "There will be neither upper nor lower, neither first nor last." The work of all "will constantly converge toward the great social aim, the common prosperity." There would be neither exploiters nor exploited."As opposed to the crude leveling communism, that would sacrifice arts and luxury for the sake of equality, which Babeuf has often been seen a proponent of, he told Germain that in his vision “neither arts, nor sciences, nor industry would be endangered, far from it. They would receive an impulse in the direction of general utility, and would be transformed in their application in such a way as to increase the sum of the enjoyment of all.”
Furthermore, Babeuf also believed in utilizing the use of labor-saving machinery which under the common happiness“would be a true advantage for humanity, whose labors they would lessen, while increasing the abundance of of necessary and agreeable things. Today, by suppressing a great quantity of manual labor, they take the bread out of the mouths of a mass of men, in the interests of a few greedy speculators whose profits they increase.”Babeuf was clearly thinking in terms of an equal society that with a planned economy that would develop human potential the fullest. Babeuf's vision can easily be seen in the later view of communism put forth by Marx and Engels in the Communist Manifesto: “In place of the old bourgeois society, with its classes and class antagonisms, we shall have an association in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all.”This was a Truth that Babeuf and Germain believed had universal appeal,worth fighting for, and has inspired countless revolutionaries in the past two hundred years.
Yet Babeuf's society of common happiness was not just a utopia drawn up in his mind. Babeuf was not like the later utopians who often appealed to the ruling class for support for their projects, rather he openly declared war on them.To bring the common happiness to fruition, Babeuf saw the necessity of political organization and popular support. Germain was in favor of a sudden general uprising to bring about communism while Babeuf argued for the use of popular education (which he'd been doing via journalism for years). As Babeuf later said, “everything can be done by public opinion, and when you succeed in directing it towards a particular system, you are making sure this system prevail, for the opinion of people, as has been well said, is its strength, and the strength of the people is everything.”For Babeuf to win over order the people, he would need to propagate his views openly, something that the Directory would not allow. This contradiction Babeuf would resolve by developing a tightly centralized political organization in face of repression while propagating revolutionary views openly wherever possible.
One interesting path that Babeuf considered to implement communism was to retreat to the countryside and “form a sort of plebeian Vendee, for the purpose of obtaining by force, what it appeared to him no longer possible to obtain by any other means.”However, Babeuf later changed his mind and decided to focus on seizing power in Paris. This made perfect sense: Paris the central administrative hub of France and experience had shown that since.1789, that that whenever revolutionaries took the capital, they were likely to gain control of the country as whole (although focused on seizing power in Paris, Babeuf did not ignore building links with organizations in the provinces).
For Babeuf, communism was not just a utopian ideal to be speculate about, it was a practical ideal worth struggling for. His vision built upon the accomplishments of the Jacobins, but pushed past them both theoretically and practically. Babeuf, fired with this truth was able to make many converts when he was transferred to Arras prison. French prisons under the Directory were being filled with Jacobins, Hebertists, sans culottes, workers from the abortive revolts of Germinal and Prairial and former terrorists. As Buonarroti observes, “the prisons of Paris ... were at that time the foci of a great revolutionary fermentation.”In transferring Babeuf to Arras, the Directory was throwing a match into a pool of gasoline and spreading the fires of revolutionary opposition.
Although the French left had been disoriented since Thermidor, this was not so at Arras, where the prisoners“whom the aristocracy had plunged into them, lived frugally in the most intimate fraternity, honored one another for their chains and their poverty, devoted themselves to work and study, and conversed only on the calamities of their common country, and on the means of bringing them to an end.”Babeuf was able to make many converts to the cause of equality in Arras. Among the many converts whom Babeuf was able to make to the cause of equality, arguably the most important was Philippe Buonarroti, a central leader of the Conspiracy and its historian (Buonarroti was born in 1761, he was an Italian aristocrat and was the former Jacobin administrator of Corsica).In October 1795, there was a general amnesty of Republican prisoners in response to a royalist uprising in Paris on 13 Vendemaire.The uprising had nearly captured the city before being put down by troops loyal to the Directory under General Napoleon Bonaparte.
The uprising of the royalists came after the new Constitution (which greatly restricted the franchise) had been approved in September. At the same time, the economic crisis continued to worsen with growing unemployment and rising prices. Worst of all was hunger, according to Lefebvre which by 1796, saw “more than 10,000 deaths [of starvation] ... recoded in the department of the Seine.”The Thermidorians in protecting their own privileges had hounded and persecuted the Jacobins and other radicals; yet they had also opened the door to the return of royalists and reactionaries who were organizing openly and offered the alternative of a return to the old regime in place of the discredited Directory. The Directory was growing more isolated and to regain legitimacy, they amnestied imprisoned republicans and moderates in order to rally them to the defense the Republic. Yet once the moment of crisis passed, Babeuf and his comrades got to work organizing for the revolution.
Although conditions in France were growing desperate, the left was far from united. As Buonarroti says “the democratic party was not numerous, and the mass of patriots feeble, and scarcely recovered from their fright, were disposed to suffer themselves to be again intimidated at the least appearance of a new persecution.”Among the surviving Jacobins and Republicans, there were some predisposed to work with the Directory (despite the restrictions the Constitution placed on their activity) out of fear of provoking a royalist reaction and others such as Babeuf who remained utterly irreconcilable.Since the Electoral Club had collapsed, Babeuf and his co thinkers began working within the Pantheon Club (founded in October 1795), which was becoming the focal point of opposition to the Directory.
The Pantheon Club was a broad alliance of “2,000 members [which] included critical supporters of the government as well as outright opponents.”Yet the Pantheon Club was not well a organized political organization since its members “feared any resemblance to the old societies [Jacobins – P. B.], their prudence went beyond even the shackles forged by the new Constitution against the right of assembling. To have a body of rules – a President, secretaries, minutes, a form of admission- this, they taught was to copy too closely the Jacobin model, and to expose their flanks to a new persecution.”The Pantheon conducted activities such as raising funds for poor patriots, reading journals, correspondence, and discussing current events. Since there were no other options open for the left, the Pantheon grew,while Babeuf and his co thinkers gained a predominant influence.
In the Pantheon, Buonarroti identified two trends, one being the “patriots of 1789 [who] might be recognized by their eagerness to exercise on the Government an influence favorable to their own repose and interests.”These patriots were seeking to put pressure on the government and have their interests protected, but this position was was scarcely going to win much support in the streets of Paris. The second trend in the Pantheon was composted of Babeuf and the Equals, who according to Buonarroti, “made themselves remarkable for their zeal to enlighten the people and to revive a respect for the doctrines of equality.”Part of the reason that Babeuf and the Equals were able to assume leadership that “he had a social philosophy. He was a tireless worker, full of revolutionary passion and guided by a fixed aim. Moreover, he was a journalist with a fiery and caustic pen.”Key to this influence was the resurrected Tribun du peuple which was now“less concerned with purveying news or even comment on immediate events than with the exposition of 'first truths.'”
In the dire economic situation, Babeuf was dismayed that many people were listening to royalists who were saying “we were much better off under a king.”In order to rally the people to fight the Directory, Babeuf believed that the old slogans of the revolution were not enough, instead he declared in the words of Alain Badiou, a new “truth of politics ... in which the radical will that aims at the emancipation of humanity is affirmed.”And that truth, proclaimed in the Manifesto of the Plebeians was the“common happiness, the aim of society.”In the Manifesto of the Plebeians, Babeuf threw down the communist gauntlet in his declaration of war upon the Directory. He proclaimed that “the alleged right to dispose of property is an infamous genocidal outrage.”Society was set up in such a way “that you can only succeed in having too much by arranging for others not to have enough.”According to Babeuf the objections to the communist Truth were “questioned by bad faith, prejudice and thoughtfulness ... [and] that there is no truth more important than that which we have already cited.” For Babeuf, talking about the best form of government (or Constitution) was useless since “you will have achieved nothing as long as you have failed to destroy the seeds of greed and ambition.” To achieve a society of equals, it was necessary to “suppress private property ... to deposit the products in kind in the common store; and to establish a simple administration of distribution.”
With that Truth proclaimed, Babeuf knew that he needed popular support and “to let everyone know how things are, and what it is necessary to do, to speak to all the evils and remedies and to get everyone interested in cooperating in putting things right.”Babeuf knew that nothing was worse than “to isolate oneself, to reduce oneself to a handful of activist patriots, to separate oneself from the people, to abandon their opinion and their force.”Yet he realized that a great deal of the people had been corrupted by the Directory and did not understand their own interests or the need for insurrection. Yet he believed it was essential to organized and that “someone has to begin.”And to maintain the fidelity to the Truth he'd proclaimed and bring about the common happiness, Babeuf was willing to make the tough choices to be as ruthless as the situation demanded. The need for harsh measures meant that now he justified Robespierre's policies in a way that he would not have done two years ago by saying “a regenerator must mow down everything that gets in his way, everything that obstructs his route, everything that can prevent him arriving promptly at the end he has set for himself.”Certainly, these words of Robespierre no doubt reflected Babeuf's new found commitment, they served another purpose.
Babeuf wanted to form a common front with Hebertists, Jacobins and other republicans. His defense of Robespierre and the terror was bound to strike a receptive cord in a society that had turned its back on the radical phase of the revolution and coalesce the opposition around him. The Equals believed they could make common ground with the Jacobins and the popular movement in Paris by rallying around the Constitution of 1793. According to Buonarroti, the Equals, “saw in the Constitution of 1793 this preparatory step towards a greater good, and that circumstance, joined to the motives which made members justly respect it as the sovereign will of the French people, freely and solemnly set forth, determined them to adopt that Constitution as the rallying point of the patriots and the people.”Adoption of the Constitution as a rallying point made sense, the Republic of Virtue was being looked upon as a golden age by the sans culottes in contrast to the misery spawned by the Directory and competition. The two major revolts by the Parisian poor in 1795 had raised the slogan of bread and the Constitution of 1793. To call for the implementation of the 1793 Constitution, with all its social and democratic measures was to indict the unequal and undemocratic social order of the Directory as illegitimate. Yet many of the Equals (such as Babeuf) believed that the Constitution had its faults such as“defining the right of property, consecrate it in all its appalling latitude. Nevertheless, they acknowledged that never before had a work of this kind approached so near to perfection; and they applauded its provisions as opening a vast field for future ameliorations.”In other words, the Equals saw advocacy of the 1793 Constitution as a transitional demand that could bring together a united front of Jacobins, Republicans, and sans culottes around a slogan that was more than a minimum demand (but was not the maximum demand calling for the common happiness) that questioned the whole ruling order and had the potential to go further in the direction of equality.
On February 27, 1796, despite all their precautions, the Directory sent in Napoleon to shut down the Pantheon Club. Babeuf and his comrades did not despair or lose focus. On March 30, they formed a new organization which brought together a wide coalition of political and social forces with the clear goal of bringing down the Directory and ushering in the common happiness.
IX. The Day of the People
Now that all the legal avenues for organizing closed were closed to Babeuf, he formed the Secret Directory of Public Safety (also known to history as the Conspiracy of Equals and Babouvists) to organize underground a military coup and popular revolt against the Directory.In forming the Secret Directory, the Conspirators sought “to avenge the people, whenever, as now, its rights are usurped, its liberty ravished, and even its existence is compromised.”The Equals did not cut themselves off from the masses, rather they planned to“assume the initiative of all movements intended to lead the people to the recovery of its sovereignty.”To this end, the Conspiracy was preparing for a military strike and organizing the people against the Directory. While such preparations required secrecy as a matter of course, the conspirators knew it was necessary to involve the people. Whenever possible, Babeuf believed that the Equals had to ”conspire aloud, [since ]we give the greatest publicity to our conspiracy.”For the next forty-one days until Babeuf's arrest on May 10, all the elements of his thinking and action finally came together: the use of a newspaper as a popular agitator; the linkage of immediate, transitional, and maximum demands; revolutionary organization and trust in the people; all animated by a communist Truth.
There was a single pressing question for the Conspirators: how would they consolidate their hold on power after the coup? The Equals decided that following their victory, power in France would be held by a dictatorship“composed of a small number of tried democrats.” As Buonarroti says, the Equals imagined the dictatorship as “an extraordinary authority ... to be charged with the double plan of proposing to the people a plan of legislation simple, and suited to ensure to it equality, and the real exercise of its sovereignty; and to dictate provisionally the preparatory measures necessary to dispose the national to receive it ... it being impossible to achieve so bold and important task unless by the aid of a perfect unity of thought and action.”A dictatorship was considered necessary by the Equals since the “people, so elongated from the natural order of things, was but poorly qualified to make a useful choice, and had need of an extraordinary means to replace it in a condition in which it would be possible for it to exercise effectually, and not in mere fiction, the plenitude of its sovereignty.”Although, the Equals saw the need for exceptional measures against the Directory and the old ruling power to secure their position following an uprising, they did not expect or want the people to be passive observers.
Babeuf, believed that a transitional dictatorship was necessary to prepare and educate the people to live in a fully democratic society. was to follow According to Birchall, Babeuf's idea was that after the insurrection the dictatorship “would act as the government of the republic for three months during 'opinion' would be raised to a higher level and then elections based on the 1793 Constitution would be held.”The short time frame of the transition and the raising of popular consciousness shows how overly optimistic and unrealistic Babeuf was in achieving change. The experience of later communist revolutions in Russia, China and Cuba shows that the power of the ruling class and habits of class dominated society could not be completely destroyed and replaced in a manner of months. Buonarroti was undoubtedly right when he said of Babeuf that “no one has taken less account of the time necessary to operate such changes in the feelings and habits of men.”It is entirely possible that the men of virtue who'd govern in a Babouvist republic would be corrupted by power or that the coup would degenerate into a prolonged civil war in which power would have to be held by the Equals for a considerable amount of time. Then there is the real danger of foreign intervention from the monarchs of Europe, who would certainly not let a communist republic develop in peace (as evidenced in the twentieth century foreign powers who military intervened to overthrow communist revolutions). Regardless, the question of the nature of a Babouvist dictatorship can only be one of speculation since it never came to pass.
Although the Equals never had state power to effect a change in popular attitudes, they made full use of the revolutionary press to “undeceive the people. It was expedient to show the latter that its sovereignty had had been usurped by the existing authority – that the Constitution of 1793 was the only legitimate one – that the happiness of the whole could result only from the real equality of all.”Babeuf's Tribun “developed the spirit of the insurrectionary institution..”The efforts of the Tribun, or the insurrectionary institution reached far beyond the press and had an appreciable impact on the workers and sans culottes of Paris. On the surface the Tribun had only only 590 subscribers, we would do well to follow Soboul here in arguing that those figures are deceptive because “we cannot mechanically deduce the influence of a newspaper from its circulation.” For one, there were public readings of the Tribun, where a single reading could start a fire in the minds of the oppressed. Furthermore, revolutionary papers not only “circulated by the thousands, but their influence reached tens of thousands. Cafés and homes often became the shelters of clubs where one read aloud and the unlettered many listened.”Thus, Babeuf's revolutionary message was able to reach the dissatisfied masses across Paris.
The press was one way of spreading the revolution message. Also essential to agitation were “posters, pamphlets and songs [which] played a considerable part in the tactics of the Babouvists.”
In ancient times, when yet our race was young
Nor gold nor war the soul to madness stung,
Each in the land possessed an equal share,
No kingly luxury known, no gaunt despair;
Then peace and competence went hand in hand,
Unfear'd the assassin's knife, the foeman's brand-
These days are our's again if we'll but bravely stand!
cannot carry out anythingBabeuf’sBuonarrotiideanew world order
Bibliography
Furet, Francois. The French Revolution: 1770-1814. New York: Wiley-Blackwell, 1981.
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