"GRACCHUS" AND THE
CONSPIRACY OF THE EQUALS
(From Fried and Sanders, Socialist Thought, Doubleday Anchor, pp, 43-71) On
May 11, 1796, after almost two years of the moderate republican rule that had
succeeded Robespierre's dictatorship and was to
last until Napoleon's coup d'etat in 1799, the
leaders of a group that called itself the Society of the Pantheon were
accused of plotting to overthrow the government and arrested. This "conspiracy of the
equals," as it came to he called, was at first regarded as one of many
plots uncovered during the period of the Directorate, and the government even
treated it as a royalist conspiracy. But the leader of the group, the
journalist Francois Noel Babeuf, who had indicated his choice of spiritual
antecedents by styling himself "Gracchus," used the trial as an
opportunity to denounce the decline of the Revolution, and to restate its
aims in terms of a vision of communist egalitarianism. Babeuf was
sentenced to death, along with Darthe, another of
the group's leaders, and they were executed the following year; the others
were sentenced to short terms and ultimately released. Among
those whose lives were spared was an Italian named Buonarroti,
a descendant of the family of Michelangelo, who went on to write an account
of the conspiracy that transformed Babouvism into a
legend. The book became a source of inspiration for such middle-class
revolutionary movements as the Carbonari, as well
as for socialist movements such as Chartism. Babeuf can be said to be the bridge between eighteenth-century
communism and modern socialism. Graccus Babeuf was among the humblest in
social origin of those who achieved political eminence in this period. Not
that he was from the very bottom of the social scale--such a thing could not
have come about in eighteenth-century France, even at the time of the
Revolution. His father, an ex-army major, claimed to trace his ancestry back
to the founder of the village of Babeuf in Picardy; but he had been reduced
for a time to working as a hired laborer. The Babeufs
came of a line of independent peasant proprietors, in a part of France where
yeoman traditions were strong--Robespierre was also from Picardy. By the time
his son was born, on November 23, 1760, the elder Babeuf had obtained the
modest post of a local tax-collector in the town of Saint-Quentin. The future
conspirator for equality seemed to have no greater prospects than his father
for any other life than that of a provincial functionary; after marriage to a
servant girl at the age of twenty-two, he settled down as a struggling family
man and clerk. His post was that of commissaire a terrier, a minor professional
position widespread in provincial France at that time, which had as its
primary function the task of keeping straight the archives and transactions
of feudal estates. Babeuf thus came to know a great deal about feudal
property and its abuses. Even
before the outbreak of the Revolution, he developed higher aspirations than
prudence should have allowed him. He steeped himself in the writings of the
philosophes, and came to think of himself as a man of letters. In 1785 in
response to the annual prize question posed by the Academy of Arras, he
submitted an essay on ways of improving the roads in the province of Artois.
As it turned out, his essay was submitted too late to be eligible for that
year, but the secretary of the Academy, a nobleman named Dubois de Fosseux, found it so interesting that he began a
correspondence with its author. This remarkable exchange of letters, which
continued for three years, provided Babeuf with his first opportunity to
write down his ideas on a range of subjects-literature, politics,
agriculture, and many others--that might be frightening in its scope to any
but the eighteenth-century imagination, In these letters he first set down
his glimmers of a radical egalitarian social vision, one that was apparently
taken far more seriously by the earnest clerk than by his aristocratic
correspondent. Babeuf's later letters barely conceal his growing impatience
with the mere play of sensibility that the dialogue was becoming. He stopped
writing altogether immediately after the death of his daughter. It needed
only the catalyst of 1789 to turn him into a full-blooded agitator, first in
Arras, where he was sentenced to a long prison term but managed to evade
arrest, and then in Paris, where he became the editor of his own newspaper,
the Tribune of the People,
and the center of attraction for the group of radicals who were rounded up
and imprisoned in May 1796. The
Doctrine of Graccus Babeuf 1. Nature has bestowed upon each and every individual adequate right to the enjoyment of property [tous les biens]. 2. The purpose of society is to defend such equality, often assailed by the strong and the wicked in the state of nature, and to augment the general welfare through the co-operation of all. 3. Nature has imposed upon each and every individual the obligation to work; anyone who evades his share of labor is a criminal. 4. Both work and benefits must be common to all. 5. There is oppression when one person is exhausted by labor and is destitute of everything, while another lives in luxury without doing any work at all. 6. Anyone who appropriates exclusively to himself the products of the earth or of manufacture is a criminal. 7. In a real society there ought to be neither rich nor poor. 8. The rich who are not willing to renounce their surplus in favor of the poor are enemies of the people. 9. No one, by accumulating to himself all power, may deprive another of the instruction necessary for his welfare. Education ought to be common to all. 10. The aim of the French Revolution is to destroy inequality and to re-establish the general welfare. 11. The Revolution is not complete because the rich monopolize all the property and govern exclusively, while the poor toil like slaves, languish in misery, and count for nothing in the State. 12. The Constitution of 1793 is the real law of Frenchmen, because the people have solemnly accepted it; because the Convention had no right to change it; because, in order to supersede it, the Convention has caused people to be shot for demanding that it be put into effect; because it has pursued and slaughtered deputies who were performing their duty by defending it; because terror against the people, and the influence of émigrés, have presided over the fabrication and the alleged acceptance of the Constitution of 1795, despite the fact that it is not supported by a quarter of the votes obtained by that of 1793; because the Constitution of 1793 has sanctioned the inalienable right of every citizen to consent to the laws, to enjoy political rights, to meet in assembly, to demand what he deems useful, to receive education, and not to die of hunger; rights which the counter-revolutionary Act of 1795 openly and totally violated. 13. Every citizen is obligated to re-establish and defend the will and welfare of the people in the Constitution of 1793. 14. All powers emanating from the so-called Constitution of 1795 are illegal and counter-revolutionary. 15. Those who have raised their hands against the Constitution of 1793 are guilty of common high treason.
|