Matthew Strupp looks at the transformation of the French revolutionary Gracchus Babeuf from Feudiste to Jacobin to one of the first Revolutionary Communists.

“The French Revolution is nothing but the precursor of another revolution, one that will be greater, more solemn, and which will be the last.” -Sylvain Marechal, Manifesto of the Equals, 1796

The specter of the French Revolution, if it ever left us in the first place, has returned in force. The leading publication of the reformist social-democratic Left in the United States is called Jacobin magazine, memes about guillotining billionaires and politicians are all over social media, and the weekly Gilets Jaunes demonstrations in France have produced a great volume of graffiti comparing the Fifth Republic to the Ancien Regime and Emmanuel Macron to Louis XVI.

In all of these cases, the Left has, as is its custom, compared itself to the Jacobins of 1789-94, who espoused radical-liberal republicanism that, even in its most radical codification, the Constitution of Year I (1793), enshrined property rights as “natural and imprescriptible.”¹ As communists, we know that private property is the poison pill of liberalism’s radical promise—a guarantee of class society’s continued existence even when democratic concessions in the cordoned off “political sphere” are made to the rabble, be it the sans-culottes or the proletariat. For the purposes of knowing our own history, we should understand that this insight did not originate with Marx and Engels, who of course did much to develop it. Rather, we can trace it to the French Revolution itself in the figure of Gracchus Babeuf, who transcended Jacobinism and came to a conception of communism that greatly influenced Marx and Engels.

The Road to Revolutionary Communism

Prior to the revolution, Francois Noel Babeuf was a feudiste, a legal specialist in feudal rights who essentially advised landowners on how to squeeze their peasants as efficiently as possible. However, rather than allowing his position within the old order to cause him to identify with it, Babeuf came to resent the Ancien Regime’s tangled and parochial legal structure, as well as the nobility who benefited from it. By 1789, when every commune in France was asked to select representatives for the Estates General and submit cahiers de doleances, or lists of complaints, for the body to address, Babeuf personally authored his commune’s proposal for the total abolition of feudalism and the consolidation of a single code of law. Babeuf was supportive of the revolution throughout its course, but was critical of the excesses Robespierre’s terror and the Jacobins’ failure to fully implement the Constitution of Year I, which unlike the Constitution of 1789 and the later Constitution of Year III (1795), would have established a republic with universal adult male suffrage.

Thermidor saw the replacement of the Jacobins, who were at least somewhat beholden to the will of the san-culottes, by the reactionary Thermidorian Convention, which quite openly represented the interests of the class of nouveaux riches that had emerged since the beginning of the revolution and had made their fortunes through speculation on the confiscated estates of royalist emigres. Babeuf reacted to these events by changing the name of his newspaper from Journal de la liberté de la presse to Tribun du Peuple, which reflected the shift in his focus from keeping the Jacobins accountable to the ideals of the revolution to polemic against the Thermidorians.² At this time Babeuf also adopted for himself the first name Gracchus, after the middle-republican Roman Tribune of the Plebs, Gaius Gracchus. Gaius and his brother Tiberius, who was Tribune a decade earlier, advocated redistributing public lands, illegally cultivated by wealthy patricians in massive latifundia, or plantations, to the propertyless inhabitants of Rome. These were the original proletarii, from the Latin proles or offspring, which was the only thing this stratum was seen as capable of contributing to the Republic. For this, Gaius Gracchus and his brother were both murdered by gangs loyal to the conservative senatorial patricians, a dire omen for Babeuf’s ultimate fate.

Through the Tribun, Babeuf breathed fire at the Thermidorians. After the enactment of the Constitution of Year III, which replaced the single legislative body and universal adult male suffrage of the Constitution of Year I with high property requirements for voting, a lower and upper legislative chamber, an extremely powerful five-man executive Directory, and a requirement that ⅔ of the new representatives be drawn from the existing reactionary Thermidorian Convention, Babeuf wrote in the Tribun: “If you want civil war, you can have it … You’ve cried ‘To arms.’ We’ve said the same to our people.”³ Babeuf was the originator of the demand “Bread and the Constitution of ‘93,” which motivated the ill-organized insurrection of I Prarial. This insurrection was soon crushed, and he was thrown in prison for his role.⁴

It was in prison that Babeuf developed his communism. He was certainly influenced by utopian writers like Thomas More and Etienne-Gabriel Morelly, but he also incorporated a primitive conception of class struggle absent from these writers. He wrote in a Prospectus for the Tribun, “We too know a little bit about what elements are used to move men. The best lever is their own interest,” and although he didn’t use the familiar Marxian terms, he had seen how the wealth of the now ascendant bourgeoisie had made Thermidor possible and began to theorize about the nascent class of wage-workers being a particularly revolutionary section of the sans-culottes.⁵ He also wrote in a later letter to one of his comrades an account of the ills of capitalist production that, while obviously less developed than the later work of Marx, displays remarkable sophistication:

Competition, far from aiming at perfection, submerges conscientiously made products under a mass of deceptive goods contrived to dazzle the public, competition which achieves low prices only by obliging the worker to waste his skill in botched work, by starving him, by destroying his moral standards through lack of scruples; 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 which manufactures any way 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.⁶ 

The “Conspiracy” of the Equals

After his release from prison, Babeuf began to speak at meetings of the Union of Friends of the Republic, which, due to its proximity to the Pantheon, was known as the Society of The Pantheon. The Society of the Pantheon was mostly made up of former Jacobins, and Babeuf was able to recruit many to his cause because he and his paper represented nearly the only resistance to the Thermidorian Reaction. However, the Directory soon got wind of the Society’s activities and sent the ambitious young general Bonaparte to suppress it. It was only after the suppression of the Society of the Pantheon that what became known as the Conspiracy of the Equals began to take shape.⁴

Conservative and revisionist historians, most notably Francois Furet, have seized on the name “conspiracy” to try to draw a direct line of hyper-vanguardist putschism from Babeuf through Blanqui to Lenin. Yet “Conspiracy of the Equals” is not a term that comes from Babeuf himself. Rather, it is derived from the Directory’s prosecution of Babeuf on charges of conspiracy. Babeuf only ever referred to his movement as “the Equals” and the organization that coordinated it as the “Insurrectionary Committee”. It is also simply untrue that Babeuf aimed to carry out a secretive coup. Rather, he was relying on the possibility of a mass insurrection for victory. As the state prosecutor testified at his trial:

Their means were the publication and distribution of anarchistic newspapers, writings and pamphlets … the formation of a multitude of little clubs run by their agents; it was the establishment of organizers and flyposters; it was the corrupting of workshops; it was the infernal art of sowing false rumors and spreading false news, of stirring up the people by blaming the government for all the ills resulting from current circumstances.⁶

These are not the activities of a group uninterested in mass support! As far as Lenin is concerned, Lars Lih in Lenin Rediscovered has done much to dispel misunderstandings of Lenin’s conception of the vanguard party, misunderstandings which are as common on the Left as anywhere.⁷ In both Lenin and Babeuf’s cases, to the extent that their organizations operated secretly, they did so out of necessity due to the ever-present threat of state repression.

It was such state repression that defeated the Equals. The movement was betrayed by an infiltrator, Georges Grisel, who had been involved in the leadership of the organization, and who gave the forces of the Directory enough information to find and arrest Babeuf and over 800 of his comrades. As Babeuf sat in a dungeon, several hundred of the Equals attempted one final attempt at insurrection despite the arrest of their movement’s leadership and the destruction of their organization. This insurrection was unsuccessful, and dozens were executed for their role in it after short trials by military commission. Babeuf himself was tried and sentenced to death on 7 Prarial, Year V (1796). After his sentence was given, he and a comrade of his tried to kill themselves in their prison cell with makeshift daggers, but were stopped by a guard. Babeuf was fed to the guillotine the next day, and with his death, so too died the movement against Thermidor.⁴

Results and Prospects

There are about thirty references to Gracchus Babeuf in the works of Marx and Engels, and although neither of them ever composed a systematic analysis of his thought, Babeuf’s influence on their politics is obvious. In The Holy Family, the beards write:

… the French Revolution gave rise to ideas which led beyond the ideas of the entire old world order. The revolutionary movement which began in 1789 in the Cercle Social, which in the middle of its course had as its chief representatives Leclerc and Roux, and which finally with Babeuf’s conspiracy was temporarily defeated, gave rise to the communist idea which Babeuf’s friend Buonarroti re-introduced in France after the Revolution of 1830.

From a historical materialist point of view, it’s clear that the material conditions in France were not ripe for anything approaching socialism; after all, the proletariat itself barely existed. Engels is correct to insist that it would have been “insane” to “attempt to jump from the Directorate immediately into communism” (although it would also be insane to attempt to jump from the conditions of the present immediately into communism, no matter what the communizers might say).⁸ The best that could have been hoped for had the Equals taken power in 1796 would have been similar to the best that Lenin hoped for in the event of an isolated Russian Revolution in 1905, a “democratic dictatorship of the (nascent) proletariat and peasantry.”⁹ This would not have allowed France to “leap over the natural phases of its development” or to “remove them by decree,” but it may have “shorten[ed] and lessen[ed] the birth pangs” of capitalism, as Marx puts it.¹⁰

Babeuf’s true contribution was his commitment to revolutionary action at the level of the state to transform society as a whole. Babeuf was considering writing a book titled “Equality” after he was released from prison. Had he done so, he would have been one of several utopian communist writers in the late  eighteenth century.⁶ Instead, he organized an insurrectionary committee to carry out what Marx called a “political revolution with a social soul,” an attempt to use the political act of revolution and the seizure of state power to extend the radical republican principles that dominated the political sphere at the height of the Jacobin revolution to the social sphere as well.¹¹

Our Tasks

We, like Gracchus Babeuf, are living in a Thermidor. His was in the wake of the defeat French Revolution; ours is in the wake of the defeat of the last century’s workers’ movement, exemplified by the isolation, bureaucratic degeneration, and eventual rollback of the Russian Revolution. For this reason, we can still learn from Babeuf’s example. We must overthrow the reactionaries that dominate our politics by means of mass organizing, as Babeuf attempted. We must, more effectively than Babeuf, watch out for the police spies in our midst as we do so. Finally, we must look past liberalism, even at its most radical, and extend its democratic-republican promises to the whole of society, which means abolishing class society. These are the tasks we share with Babeuf, and it is of paramount importance that we learn from the example, and the failures, of past revolutionaries like him as we endeavor to carry them out.

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1. Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen from the Constitution of Year I (1793)
2. Bax, Ernest Belfort, The Last Episode of the French Revolution: Being a History of Gracchus Babeuf and the Conspiracy of the Equals, Marxists Internet Archive.
3. Birchall, Ian H., The Babeuf Bicentenary: Conspiracy or Revolutionary Party?, International Socialism, Sept. 1996, Marxists Internet Archive
4. Bax
5. Babeuf, Gracchus. Prospectus for Le Tribun Du Peuple. 1795, Marxists Internet Archive
6. Birchall, The Babeuf Bicentenary: Conspiracy or Revolutionary Party?
7. Lih, Lars, Lenin Rediscovered, 2006
8. Birchall, Ian H., Neither Jacobin nor Utopian: Marx, Engels and Babeuf, 1996, Grim and Dim
9. Lenin, V.I., “The Revolutionary-Democratic Dictatorship of the Proletariat and the Peasantry,” 1905, Marxists Internet Archive
10. Marx, Karl, Preface to the First Edition of Capital vol. I, July 25, 1867
11. Marx, Karl, Critical Notes on the Article: “The King of Prussia and Social Reform. By a Prussian”, August 7, 1844, Marxists Internet Archive