(Socialism Today No 18, May 1997)
27 May is the 200th anniversary of the death of Gracchus Babeuf, the great French revolutionary and ‚father of communism‘.
Peter Taaffe looks at his life and legacy.
Appropriately the anniversary of Babeuf’s death comes less than a month after the British general election whose victor, Tony Blair, ascended to power extolling the virtues of capitalism, thereby confirming the complete break of the Labour Party with socialism. Babeuf and his comrades in the ‚Conspiration pour l’Égalité‘ [Conjuration des Égaux] – the Conspiracy of Equals – recognised the inadequacies of capitalism when it was still in its youth and had just overthrown the remnants of feudalism. Blair, on the other hand, seeks to prop up a social system showing all the signs of senile decay – mass unemployment, a widening gap between rich and poor, and growing social upheavals.
The giant figure of Babeuf will be honoured by future generations while Blair and his counterparts elsewhere will hardly merit a footnote in history. Yet today Babeuf is hardly known even by socialists, although it was through his labours, alongside those of the heroic sans culottes (literally those ‚without trousers‘), that the ideas which were the germ of modern socialism took shape. The laws of revolution and counter-revolution were worked out by Marx and Engels through an assiduous study of the French revolution. Later, Lenin and Trotsky prepared themselves for the Russian revolution by studying the lessons of France.
By the time that the Conspiracy of Equals came to act, in 1795-96, the most heroic period of the revolution had passed. 1793 and 1794 was the time when the Jacobins and the sans culottes held the greatest sway, when the famous 1793 constitution was passed, in June of that year. For the first time in history a system of government was introduced which was both republican and democratic, based on the right to vote for all male citizens. A considerable measure of control was exercised by the population, in theory at least, over the representatives in the Convention (parliament), with regular elections and even the right of recall. The ‚controlled economy‘ and the ‚maximum general‘ limited the prices of many essential goods and services, seemingly cementing the alliance between the predominantly Jacobin Convention and the sans culottes who controlled the Paris Commune.
This period ended with the downfall of Robespierre. Robespierre had been necessary for the young French bourgeoisie, along with his extreme ‚terroristic‘ methods, so long as feudal counter-revolution still threatened. However, the defeat of foreign intervention alongside the continuation of ‚terroristic‘ methods when they were no longer required, together with the suppression of the ‚extreme left‘ of the Paris Commune, inevitably prepared his downfall. To begin with some like Babeuf welcomed Robespierre’s overthrow, because he had alienated the sans culottes by the execution of the extreme left leaders of the Hébertists in March 1794. But his downfall on 10th Thermidor (28 July 1794) opened the door to ‚Thermidorian‘ reaction. Under ‚Thermidor‘ power was taken away from the people and concentrated in the hands of a veiled dictatorship, the ‚Directory‘.
Thermidor reflected a deep-going rearrangement of class forces which had taken place. The Thermidorians themselves believed that little had changed, that a few ‚intransigents‘ had been removed. Yet it was the pressure of the possessing classes, first of all on the Jacobins themselves, which was reflected in Thermidor. The bourgeoisie wished above all to enjoy the fruits of their profits. Following Robespierre’s execution, the curve of revolution moved downwards. The Thermidorians reflected reaction, but it was reaction on the basis of the gains of the revolution.
Analogies were drawn by Trotsky at one stage between the Thermidorian period of the French revolution and the Stalinist counter-revolution in Russia. The development of the one-party totalitarian regime in Russia was separated by a river of blood from the heroic period of the Bolsheviks under Lenin and Trotsky between 1917-23. Nevertheless, the Stalinist bureaucracy rested on the foundation of the planned economy, the main conquest of the revolution. Stalin slaughtered those who made the Russian revolution and annihilated the Bolshevik party itself. In the same way, the Thermidorians, having dispatched Robespierre, sought to secure the power of the bourgeoisie by attacking the sans culottes and the gains which had accrued to them through the revolution.
An historian of the French revolution, George Rudé, correctly described the Thermidorian regime as ‚the republic of proprietors‘, those who had grown rich and powerful through the revolution. Their victory, however, encouraged the right, including the royalists. This, and the deteriorating economic condition of the masses, led to further uprisings of the sans culottes in Germinal and particularly the Prairial revolt in May 1795. On the bonnets of the insurrectionists were once again pinned the slogans of ‚Bread‘ and ‚the Constitution of 1793‘. The Thermidorian Convention was surrounded but the sans culottes were bought off by promises and failed to carry the insurrection through to its conclusion. The popular phase of the revolution was effectively over. Babeuf was imprisoned during the Prairial uprising, along with many other Jacobins. But the swing to the right only further encouraged the royalists, who staged an uprising on 5 October. 1795. After this the Directory swung to the left, attempting to re-invoke the ‚republican spirit‘. Concessions were made to the remnants of Jacobinism and the sans culottes. Jacobin activity began to revive and the clubs reopened.
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It was in this situation that Babeuf and the Conspiracy of Equals took shape. Francois-Noel Babeuf had evolved from a keeper of the manorial rolls, an agent of the feudal system and a comparatively well-paid job, to become the leader of the communist Conspiracy of Equals. He took the name Gracchus from the Gracchi of ancient Rome.
This movement appeared in the downswing of the revolution, in the last act so to speak, and when the working class had been exhausted by the proceeding struggle. Doomed to inevitable defeat, it is nevertheless a vital episode, a bridge from the plebeian sans culottes to the modern socialist movement.
Babeuf, Darthé, Buonarroti, and their comrades, stood for a communist organisation of society. Because of the undeveloped character of the productive forces – science, technique and the organisation of labour – the working class then was undeveloped and not clearly separated as a class from the plebeian masses in the cities. For this reason, Babeufs ‚communism‘ could not be the same as that of Marx and Engels, the ideas and programme of scientific socialism. But it was an important first attempt to formulate, in an inevitably rather idealistic fashion, the idea of a future, socialist, communistic society. No sooner had the capitalists carried through their revolution than they were faced, in embryo, with their future ‚gravediggers‘. Babeuf articulated both the masses‘ disappointment at the result of the revolution and their yearning for a society which could solve their problems. His solution was for equality, the sharing of goods in common. Later on, the idea of common ownership began to take shape. Babeuf began as a champion of the peasantry, coming to prominence in 1790 in a mass petitioning movement against indirect taxes on the rural population. He later wrote that his job as a keeper of manorial rolls allowed him to discover, amid the dusty archives, the ‚repulsive secrets of the nobility and the story of its usurpation of the land of France‘. During the revolution he became a firm advocate of ‚agrarian law‘, which for him meant the abolition of private property and of the division of society into exploiter and exploited. As early as 1791 he advocated land division as a step towards a classless society.
In prison he met with other revolutionaries, ex-Jacobins and sans culottes. It was at this time, in late-1795, that he met Buonarroti who, although from a noble family in Florence, had come to France ‚to be serviceable in the cause of liberty‘. As has happened many times in history, the prisons became the ‚universities of the revolution‘. The major divisions were between the ‚patriots of 1789‘, basing themselves upon the Jacobin tradition, and the ‚Les Egaux‘ (the Equals), with their ideas of equality and communism.
Babeuf was released in October 1795, full of hope and determined to rally the Parisian masses. But, as he emerged from the Abbaye prison, he could not fail to notice the passivity and inertia which gripped the masses. He wondered what had become of the heroic people of the Parisian suburbs. But as Trotsky pointed out: ‚A revolution is a great devourer of human energy, both in the individual and collective sense. The nerves give way, consciousness is shaken and characters are worn out, events unfold too swiftly for the flow of fresh forces to replace the loss. Hunger, unemployment, the death of the revolutionary cadres, the removal of the masses from administration, all this led to such a physical and moral impoverishment of the Parisian suburbs that they required three decades before they were ready for a new insurrection’. Nevertheless, in the most difficult of circumstances, Babeuf resumed the publication of his Tribune du Peuple in November 1795 and, together with other Jacobins, founded the Pantheon club. But whereas many Jacobins were ready to accept favours from a seemingly republican government, Babeuf was intransigent. ‘What’, he asked, ‘is the French revolution? An open war between patricians and plebeians, between rich and poor’.
Throughout this period he produced his journal while ‘on the run’. It became enormously popular, with 2,000 copies sold within weeks, being read out not only in Paris clubs and cafés, but in circles composed of former ‘terrorists’ in provincial towns. After only two issues the government tried to re-arrest Babeuf, but sans culottes sympathizers spirited him into hiding from where he continued to produce the journal.
His criticisms were directed against the fickleness of his fellow Jacobins as well as against the Thermidorian directory. This alienated him from some in the Pantheon club, former Jacobins who wanted to come to an accommodation with the regime. But when Babeuf’s wife was arrested Jacobin opinion in general swung his way. By the middle of February, 1796, the Pantheon club was giving thunderous applause to readings of Babeuf’s journal which denounced the Directors as tyrants. At the theatres, fierce patriotic pieces sustained this mood. The Irish revolutionary, Wolf Tone, was moved to tears: ‘I never knew what enthusiasm was before’.
Agitation largely concentrated on the need to re-establish the 1793 constitution. This was part of the price that Babeuf and the equals had to pay for their alliance with the left Jacobins. The 1975 constitution had added money qualification to the franchise so that, whereas 4.8 million could vote under the 1973 constitution, only 900,000 were now enfranchised. In April, the directors declared that advocacy of the 1793 constitution was a capital crime! In the documents of the Equals, however, their clear communistic ideas are shown. Their manifesto declared: ‚From time immemorial we have been hypocritically told – men are equal; from time immemorial does the most degrading and monstrous inequality insolently oppress the human race. Even now when it (equality) is claimed with a stronger voice, we are answered, ‚be silent misérables! Absolute equality is but a chimera; be content with conditional equality; you are all equal before the law. Rabble! What more do you want‘. What more do we want? Legislators, governors, rich proprietors – listen in your turn. We are all equal are we not? This principle remains uncontested, because without being self-convicted of folly one cannot seriously say that it is night when it is day… We desire real equality or death‘. The manifesto declaims: ‚And we shall have this real equality, no matter at what price. Woe to them who will interpose themselves between it and us. Woe to him who will offer resistance to so determined a resolve!‘
The manifesto anticipated some of the ideas contained in Trotsky’s future theory of the permanent revolution. It declared: ‚The French revolution is but the precursor of another, and a greater and more solemn revolution, which will be the last‘. Babeuf declared before the court after his arrest: ‚The aim of the revolution, furthermore, is to realise the happiness of the majority. If, therefore, the same is not fulfilled, if the people do not succeed in obtaining the better life, which was the object of their struggle, then the revolution is not over‘. He also boldly declared that the republic ‚was not just a word, a meaningless phrase. The slogan of liberty and equality, which was so long dinned into your ears, had a certain charm in the early days of the revolution, because you believed that it contained real meaning. Today this slogan means nothing to you any more; it is only an empty oratorical flourish. But we must repeat again and again that this slogan, notwithstanding all our recent painful experiences, can and should connote something of a deeper significance for the masses‘.
The Equals resorted to conspiratorial methods because of the massive repression of the government. It maintained itself in power by the use of a vast network of spies, summary arrests, laws illegalising political opposition, and other repressive methods. An underground organisation was set up with a directorate, amongst whom were included, apart from Babeuf himself, Buonarroti, Sylvain Maréchal, Félix Lepeletier, and AA Darthé. They set about mobilising the sans culottes, the body of Paris militants who still remained faithful to the original ideas of the revolution. Babeuf estimated that the forces at their disposal amounted to 17,000 men. Amongst these were the ‚legion of police‘, numbering 6,100, who rose in revolt just before the conspiracy was discovered. Against them would be ranged the government forces, helped by the royalists, who would defend property and would mobilise the reactionary national guard.
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Babeuf and the Equals made it clear that the source of all social calamities was the individual ownership of property. They declared: ‚Property is the greatest scourge of society; it is a veritable public crime… One portion of the people remain masters of the things necessary to existence, while the rest had only the right to such salaries, or wages that the former chose to pay them…
‚In a veritable society there ought to be neither rich nor poor… The revolution is not terminated, because the rich absorb all valuable productions, and command exclusively; while the poor toil like real slaves, pine in misery and count for nothing in the state… The end of the French revolution is to destroy inequality, and to re-establish general prosperity‘.
The ideas which the Equals stood for were later set down by Buonarroti, whose account of their work was to inspire the Chartists in Britain, the first really independent working-class movement in history. One of its leaders, Bronterre O’Brien, translated Buonarroti’s History of the Equals into English, including a proclamation to the soldiers made by the Equals, which stated: ‚The councils and the Directory, which showed themselves so humane and gracious towards the great and the respectable, have neither heart… nor ears, nor voice for the people‘. In a footnote, Bronterre O’Brien comments: ‚Might not one suppose that this description was intended for our own House of Commons?‘, which of course at that stage, was made up exclusively of ‚men of property‘. This is just one indication of the way that Babeuf and his comrades inspired the working class in its revolt against capitalism in the decades which followed.
Babeuf and the Babouvists comported themselves heroically before the Thermidorian courts. When the conspiracy was discovered, betrayed by Grisel, a police spy who had insinuated himself into the inner circle of the equals, 131 were arrested. Thirty were summarily executed. Babeuf and other leaders were imprisoned in Paris but later transported to Vendôme for trial, in cages specially constructed to make them appear like wild animals. Nine months after they were arrested, 65 defendants, some of them in absentia, were put on trial. Some futile attempts were made to free the prisoners but they failed.
The high point of the trial was undoubtedly the magnificent speech of Babeuf. Drawing on all the great writers who inspired the French revolution, such as Mably, Rousseau, Diderot, and others, Babeuf came out with a bold defence of his communist ideas. They were bound to be of a Utopian character, not really going beyond the sharing of goods in common, given the absence of large-scale industry and of a modern working class. And yet the tradition that he laid down in the festering slums of Paris and amongst the emerging working class was to be carried through to the 19th century from one generation to another. The heritage of Gracchus Babeuf, as with the other Utopian socialists such as St Simon, Fourier and Robert Owen, laid the foundations for the modern labour movement and scientific socialism.
Babeuf and Darthé were found guilty by the Thermidorian court and went to meet their death on 27 May 1797. Before meeting his executioner Babeuf wrote a moving letter to his wife and children (The Last Letter of Gracchus Babeuf): ‚My Dear children! What will become of you? I cannot this moment help feeling the most intense emotions… Think not that I feel regret for having sacrificed myself for the noblest of causes; even should all my efforts prove unavailing for it, I have fulfilled my mission‘. To his comrades he wrote: ‚My friends, I hope you will remember me, and often speak of me… I know not the way to render you happy, than by promoting the happiness of all‘.
Gracchus Babeuf will be remembered as a great forerunner of the working class today, one of its greatest heroes and martyrs. He will be remembered despite the efforts of the defenders of ‚property‘, of capitalism, to bury him and the Equals under a heap of historical distortions. It is only through the labours of the Parisian sans culottes that the ground was cleared for the development of industry and society, of the working class and of the modern labour movement. Therefore, in every sense, the working class stands on their shoulders. They struggled mightily for a society where want and privation would be abolished, but the material means were not at hand 200 years ago. Now they are. What stands in the way, however, is private ownership of the productive forces on one side, and the nation state, on the other.
In fighting for socialism today the new generation could benefit enormously by studying the French revolution, the role of the masses in this mighty event and, particularly, the role of those like Gracchus Babeuf and the Conspiracy of Equals. This would be the best way today to honour the memory of the great revolutionary who, 200 years ago, outlined ideas which had such a decisive effect in the 20th century and will inspire us to carve out a new socialist world in the future.
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