The years of relaxation under the Directory which followed the fall of Robespierre were troubled by the activities of a man who called himself Gracchus Babeuf.
With the Directory the French Revolution had passed into the period of reaction which was to make possible the domination of Bonaparte. The great rising of the bourgeoisie, which, breaking out of the feudal forms of the monarchy, dispossessing the nobility and the clergy, had presented itself to society as a movement of liberation, had ended by depositing the wealth in the hands of a relatively small number of people and creating a new conflict of classes. With the reaction against the Terror, the ideals of the Revolution were allowed to go by the board. The five politicians of the Directory and the merchants and financiers allied with them were speculating in confiscated property, profiteering in army supplies, recklessly inflating the currency and gambling on the falling gold louis. And in the meantime, during the winter of 1795–96, the working people of Paris were dying of hunger and cold in the streets.
Babeuf was the son of a Protestant who had been sent abroad by the Calvinists to negotiate a union with the Lutherans and who had remained to serve as a major in the army of Maria Theresa and later to tutor her children. Returned to France, he had fallen into misery, and the son had had to learn his letters, he said, from papers picked up in the street. His father taught him Latin and mathematics. On his deathbed, the old man gave him a Plutarch and told him that he himself could have wished to play the role of Caius Gracchus. He made the boy swear on his sword that he would defend to the death the interests of the people.
This was in 1780. When the Revolution occurred, Babeuf was twenty-nine. He was present at the taking of the Bastille. He had been employed as a clerk to a registrar of seignorial rights in the little town of Roye in the Somme, and now he burned the seignorial archives. Thereafter, as journalist and official, he threw himself into the work of the Revolution with an earnestness that kept him in continual hot water. He incited the tavern-keepers of the Somme to rebel against paying the old wine tax, which the Constituent Assembly had abolished; he sold up the expropriated estates and divided the village common among the poor. Babeuf went too fast for his province. The landlords and the local authorities kept arresting him and clapping him in jail. At last in 1798 he was given a post in Paris in the Bureau of Subsistence of the Commune. The privation in Paris was terrible, and Babeuf found a leak in the bureau’s accounts. He came to the conclusion that the authorities were deliberately producing a famine in order to exploit the demand for foodstuffs, and he had a commission of investigation appointed. The government suppressed the commission, and Babeuf soon found himself pursued for what were apparently framed charges of fraud in connection with his administration in the provinces.
After Thermidor, he rallied around him those elements of the Revolution who were trying to insist on its original aims. In his paper, The Tribune of the People, he denounced the new constitution of 1795, which had abolished universal suffrage and imposed a high property qualification. He demanded not merely political but also economic equality. He declared that he would prefer civil war itself to “this horrible concord which strangles the hungry.” But the men who had expropriated the nobles and the Church remained loyal to the principle of property itself. The Tribune of the People was stopped, and Babeuf and his associates were sent to prison.
While Babeuf was in jail, his seven-year-old daughter died of hunger. He had managed to remain poor all his life. His popularity had been all with the poor. His official posts had earned him only trouble. Now, as soon as he was free again, he proceeded to found a political club, which opposed the policies of the Directory and which came to be known as the Society of the Equals. They demanded in a Manifesto of the Equals (not, however, at that time made public) that there should be “no more individual property in land; the land belonged to no one… . We declare that we can no longer endure, with the enormous majority of men, labor and sweat in the service and for the benefit of a small minority. It has now been long enough and too long that less than a million individuals have been disposing of that which belongs to more than twenty millions of their kind… . Never has a vaster design been conceived or put into execution. Certain men of genius, certain sages, have spoken of it from time to time in a low and trembling voice. Not one of them has had the courage to tell the whole truth… . People of France! open your eyes and your heart to the fullness of happiness. Recognize and proclaim with us the Republic of Equals!”
The Society of Equals was also suppressed; Bonaparte himself closed the club. But, driven underground, they now plotted an insurrection; they proposed to set up a new directory. And they drafted a constitution that provided for “a great national community of goods” and worked out with some precision the mechanics of a planned society. The cities were to be deflated and the population distributed in villages. The State was to “seize upon the new-born individual, watch over his early moments, guarantee the milk and care of his mother and bring him to the maison nationale, where he was to acquire the virtue and enlightenment of a true citizen.” There was thus to be equal education for all. All able-bodied persons were to work, and the work that was unpleasant or arduous was to be accomplished by everybody’s taking turns. The necessities of life were to be supplied by the government, and the people were to eat at communal tables. The government was to control all foreign trade and to pass on everything printed.
In the meantime, the value of the paper money had depreciated almost to zero. The Directory tried to save the situation by converting the currency into land warrants, which were at a discount of 82 per cent the day they were issued; and there was a general belief on the part of the public that the government had gone bankrupt. There were in Paris alone some five hundred thousand people in need of relief. The Babouvistes placarded the city with a manifesto of historical importance; they declared that Nature had given to every man an equal right to the enjoyment of every good, and it was the purpose of society to defend that right; that Nature had imposed on every man the obligation to work, and that no one could escape this obligation without committing a crime; that in “a true society” there would be neither rich nor poor; that the object of the Revolution had been to destroy every inequality and to establish the well-being of all; that the Revolution was therefore “not finished,” and that those who had done away with the Constitution of 1793 were guilty of lèse-majesté against the people.
In the cafés, they were singing a song composed by a member of the society: “Dying of hunger, dying of cold, the people robbed of every right … newcomers gorged with gold, who have given neither work nor thought, are laying hold on the hive; while you, the toiling people, eat iron like an ostrich… . A brainless double council, five frightened directors; the soldier pampered and petted, the democrat crushed: Voilà la République!”
Babeuf’s “insurrectionary committee” had agents in the army and the police, and they were doing such effective work that the government tried to send its troops out of Paris, and, when they refused to obey, disbanded them. During the early days of May, 1796, on the eve of the projected uprising, the Equals were betrayed by a stool pigeon and their leaders were arrested and put in jail. The followers of Babeuf made an attempt to rally a sympathetic police squadron, but were cut down by a new Battalion of the Guard which had been pressed into service for the occasion.
Babeuf was made a public example by being taken to Vendôme in a cage—an indignity which not long before had filled the Parisians with fury when the Austrians had inflicted it on a Frenchman.
His defense, which lasted for six sittings of the court and fills more than three hundred pages, is an impressive and moving document, Babeuf knew well that he was facing death and that the Revolution was doomed. The French had been finally exhausted by the birth-throes of the seven years that had passed since the taking of the Bastille. All the fervor of which they were still capable was siphoned off into the revolutionary army, which that spring was being led by Bonaparte to the victories of the Italian campaign. At home, since the Terror, they were shy of violence. Babeuf had united with the last of the Jacobins, and the people had had enough of them. Uncompromising principles and the guillotine were inextricably associated in their minds; they were glad to be free to live, and a period of frivolity had set in. And the bourgeois instinct for property was already becoming the overmastering motive, taking the place of other instincts and ideals: all those who had succeeded in getting anything clung to it with desperate tenacity; the idea of redistribution frightened them out of their wits. And the poor were no longer prepared to fight. Babeuf knew all this, and his defense has a realism and a sobriety which suggest much later phases of socialism. It is no longer the rhetoric of the Revolution, grandiose, passionate and confusing. At a time when people in general were able to think only of the present, Babeuf looked both backward and forward; at the moment when a society still talking the language of the ideals of the Revolution, libertarian, equalitarian and fraternal, had passed completely into the hands of a new owning class, with its new privileges, injustices and constraints, Babeuf, with great courage and insight, was able to analyze the ambiguous situation. His defense is like a summing-up of the unrealized ideas of the Enlightenment and a vindication of their ultimate necessity. And it has moments of grandeur which it is not absurd to compare to Socrates’ Apology.
The real issue in this case, says Babeuf, is less the question of conspiracy against the government than the spreading of certain ideas subversive to the dominating class. He has seen under the Directory, he says, the sovereignty of the people disregarded, and the right to elect and be elected reserved to certain castes. He has seen privilege brought back again. He has seen the people deprived of freedom of the press and assembly, and the right to petition and the right to carry arms. He has seen even the right to ratify the laws taken away from the citizens and vested in a second chamber. He has seen an executive power set up which is out of the reach of the people and independent of popular control. He has seen relief and education forgotten. And finally he has seen the Constitution of 1793, which had been approved by nearly five million votes with genuine popular feeling behind them, replaced by an unpopular constitution, put over by scarcely a million dubious ones. So that if it were true that he had conspired (it was true, though at the trial he denied it), it would have been against an illegitimate authority. The cause of revolutions is the bending beyond what they can bear of the human springs of society. The people rebel against the pressure; and they are right, because the aim of society is the good of the greatest number. If the people still finds itself bent double, it doesn’t matter what the rulers say: the revolution is not finished yet. Or if it is, the rulers have committed a crime.
Happiness, in Europe, is a new idea. But today we know that the unhappy are the really important powers of the earth; they have the right to speak as the real masters of the governments that neglect them. We know that every man has an equal right to the enjoyment of every benefit, and that the real purpose of society is to defend that right and to increase the common benefits. And work, like enjoyment, should be shared by all. Nature has decreed that we all must work: it is a crime to evade this duty. And it is a crime to take for oneself at the expense of other people the products of industry or the earth. In a society which was really sound, there would be neither poor nor rich. There would be no such system of property as ours. Our laws of heredity and inalienability are “humanicide” institutions. The monopoly of the land by individuals, their possession of its produce in excess of their wants, is nothing more nor less than theft; and all our civil institutions, our ordinary business transactions, are the deeds of a perpetual brigandage, authorized by barbarous laws.
But you say that it is my ideas, he goes on, which would send society back to barbarism. The great philosophers of the century did not think so; and it is they whose disciple I am. You should be arraigning the monarchy for having shown itself so much less inquisitorial than the government of our present Republic; you should arraign it for not having prevented me from getting hold of the pernicious books of the Mablys, the Helvétius, the Diderots, the Jean-Jacques. Philanthropists of today! if it had not been for the poisons of these older philanthropists, I might share your moral principles and your virtues: I might have been moved by the tenderest solicitude for the minority of the mighty of this world; I might have been pitiless for the suffering mass. Didn’t you know that you had included in your indictment a passage I had quoted from Rousseau, which was written in 1758? He had spoken of “men so odious as to dare to have more than enough while other men are dying of hunger.” I do not hesitate to make this revelation because I am not afraid of compromising this new conspirator: he is beyond the jurisdiction of your tribunal. And Mably, the popular, the sensitive, the human, was not he an even deeper-dyed conspirator? “If you follow the chain of our vices,” he said, “you will find that the first link is fastened to the inequality of wealth,” The Manifesto of the Equals, which had never been brought out of the dust of the box where we had put it but about which so much fuss has been made, went no further than Mably and Rousseau. And Diderot, who said that from the scepter to the crozier, humanity was ruled by personal interest, and that personal interest arose from property, and that it was idle for philosophers to argue about the best possible form of government so long as the ax had not been laid to the roots of property itself—Diderot, who asked whether the instability, the periodic vicissitudes of empires, would be possible if all goods were held in common, and who asserted that every citizen should take from the community what he needed and give to the community what he could and that anyone who should try to restore the detestable principle of property should be locked up as an enemy of humanity and a dangerous lunatic!—Citizens, “dangerous lunatic” is precisely what you have called me for trying to introduce equality!
And Tallien and Armand de la Meuse, who are now sitting in the Directory and the legislature—why have they not been called to the bar? Tallien, only a few years ago when he was editing The Sans-Culottes’ Friend, was telling us that “the anarchy would cease as soon as wealth was less unequal.” And Armand de la Meuse was assuring the Convention that “every candid person must admit that political equality without real equality is only a tantalizing illusion,” and that the “crudest error of the revolutionary bodies has been their failure to mark the limits of property rights and their consequent abandonment of the people to the greedy speculations of the rich.”
Christ has told us to love our neighbor and to do as we would be done by; but I admit that Christ’s code of equality caused him to be prosecuted for conspiracy.
The way that things were going would have been brought home to me even if I had not been able to see them. When I was sent to jail for my writings, I left my wife and my three unfortunate children helpless during the horrible famine. My little girl of seven died when the allowance of bread was cut down to two ounces; and the others grew so thin that when I saw them again, I could hardly recognize them. And we were only one among thousands of families—the greater part of Paris, in fact—whose faces were blighted by the famine, who tottered when they walked.
And if I have desired for them a better system, it is not that I have expected to impose it by force. All I want is that the people should be enlightened and convinced of their own omnipotence, of the inviolability of their rights, and that the people should demand their rights. I want, if need be, that they should be shown the way to demand their rights; but I want nothing except subject to the people’s consent.
But where Mably and Diderot and Rousseau and Helvétius have failed, how should I have hoped to succeed? I am a lesser disciple of theirs, and the Republic is less tolerant than the monarchy.
He reminded them of the fact that the royalists of the Vendémiaire conspiracy had all been pardoned and set free, and that the party of the Pretender had been openly saying that the new constitution would suit them very well if there were one director instead of five. The Society of Equals had reason to believe that a massacre was being plotted against them, like the massacres of republicans in the Midi, and Babeuf launched upon so provocative a picture of the hounding of the republicans by the forces of reaction that the judges made him stop his speech and would not let him go on till the next day.
Babeuf declared in conclusion that the death sentence would not surprise or frighten him. He had got used to prison and violent death in the course of his revolutionary mission. It was abundant consolation, he said, that his own wife and children and those of his followers had never been ashamed of what had happened to their husbands and fathers, but had come there to the courtroom to sustain them.
“But, oh, my children,” he concluded, “I have from my place above these benches—the only place from which my voice can reach you, since they have even, contrary to law, made it impossible for me to see you—I have only one bitter regret to express to you: that, though I have wanted so much to leave you a heritage of that liberty which is the source of every good, I foresee for the future only slavery, and that I am leaving you a prey to every ill. I have nothing at all to give you! I would not leave you even my civic virtues, my profound hatred of tyranny, my ardent devotion to the cause of Liberty and Equality, my passionate love of the People, I should make you too disastrous a present. What would you do with it under the monarchic oppression which is infallibly going to descend on you? I am leaving you slaves, and it is this thought alone which will torture my soul in its final moments. I should equip you, in this situation, with advice as to how to bear your chains more patiently, but I do not feel that I am capable of it.”
The vote, after much disagreement, went against Babeuf. One of his sons had smuggled in to him a tin dagger made out of a candlestick; and when he heard the verdict pronounced, he stabbed himself in the Roman fashion, but only wounded himself horribly and did not die. The next morning (May 27, 1797) he went to the guillotine. Of his followers thirty were executed and many sentenced to penal servitude or deportation.
Before he died, Babeuf had written to a friend, to whom he had confided his wife and children: “I believe that in some future day men will give thought again to the means of procuring for the human race the happiness which we have proposed for it.”
His defense did not reach the world for almost a hundred years. The newspapers reported only part of it, and the full text was never published till 1884. His name remained a bugbear for decades.