On 27 May 1797, the 8th of Prairial according to the new Republican calendar, François-Noël Babeuf, sometimes called “Gracchus” Babeuf, was executed by guillotine. A death sentence had been passed by the Therimdorians the day before. At the time of his death, Babeuf stood at the head of a clandestine organization that was attempting to undo the Thermidorian reaction, to return to the days of the Jacobin Terror, and to use the weapons built by Maximilien Robespierre and his allies to establish the first truly egalitarian society on earth in the form of a simple, agrarian communism. Babeuf’s plan, the so-called “Conspiracy of Equals” failed, and he died under the guillotine blade. However, many of the other members of the Conspiracy survived, as did their principle writings, and the Conspiracy of Equals would live on: first, in 1830 during the July Revolution; then again, in 1839 in the Blanquist coup, once more in 1848 in the February Revolution; and at last in 1871 in the formation of the Paris Commune. Babeuf’s shadow could be seen outside of France in the 1825 Decembrist Revolt of Russia. He was much admired by Karl Marx himself, it was through the living conspirators of the Society of Equals that the Society’s legacy has been passed down, even to this day.

What was the Society of Equals? What did they want? Where did they come from? The last children of the Jacobin political club, the Society cannot be understood without placing it in its context: the counter-revolutionary coup of Thermidor.

The French Revolution and Thermidor

The French Revolution began in 1789 with the public bankruptcy of the state. King Louis XVI’s ministers tried to raise money through various new taxes, but conflict erupted between the nobility and the royal administration over the right to levy new taxes. France was then divided into a patchwork of uneven territorial administrations. Its people were divided into three “feudal” orders or “estates”: the First Estate was the clergy, comprising roughly one-half of one percent of the population; the Second Estate was the nobility, roughly one percent; and the remaining 98.5% of the French population, the Third Estate, the commoners.

In 1789, after years of wrangling with King Louis and his ministers, the Second Estate forced the king to call the Estates General, a medieval decision-making body that the jurists and lawyers claimed was the only authority in France that could approve new taxes. Leading up to the Estates General, the crown permitted every region and estate in French society to submit a list of grievances. These cahiers de doléances were drawn up in every village, hamlet, city, and town, and for the first time the common people of France felt they might have a say in their government. To the surprise and horror of the First Estate, the Third Estate was united in its broadest grievance: that the Estates General should not vote by estate (such that the First and Second Estates could overrule the Third), but by head — and that the Third Estate should receive double the number of deputies than the other two Estates, for it was the Third Estate that made the country.

In the words of the Abbé Sieyès: “What is the Third Estate? Everything. What has it hitherto been afforded in the political order? Nothing. What does it desire to be? Something.”

When Louis threatened, or appeared to threaten through his ineptitude, to double the Third Estate’s deputies but to force the Estates to vote “by order” (that is, one estate, one vote), the Revolution truly began. Angry Third Estate deputies, locked out of their meeting room, convened in an indoor tennis court at Versailles and swore the famous Tennis Court Oath not to be parted until the country had a new constitution. For some, this meant a constitutional monarchy to replace the old “absolute” monarchy of the Valois and Bourbon kings, but to others, notably the Breton Club (which would soon become the Jacobin Club), this meant a republic.

Through many twists and turns of revolutionary history, the Jacobins became ascendent after the so-called Girondins dragged the young republic into war with Austria. King Louis, attempting to evade the revolution and flee his role as “father of the Nation,” gave in to his wife Marie Antoinette, and fled toward the Austrian border so he could return at the head of an army. He was captured in the town of Varennes, having been recognized by his distinctive nose through the eyes of an astute postmaster who had long seen the king’s profile on the stamps, seals, and coins of the realm. After the Flight to Varennes, the Republic was born. Louis was tried as a traitor and executed, stripped even of his name, and called “Citizen Capet” before the guillotine.

During this “second revolution” of 1792-93 when the monarchy became a republic, the city of Paris and its urban working class drove the reforms. Essentially every country in Europe attacked France, at first in response to the revolutionary government’s warlike posturing and invasion of Austria, but soon to combat the spreading virulence of anti-monarchism. The “sans culottes” or urban working class and the women of Paris demanded radical action to destroy old feudal rights, property rights, and so forth, while also demanding the government protect the economic lives of the people — by, for example, enacting maximum prices on grain to prevent hoarding.

For a time thereafter, the Jacobin Club and its guiding genius Maximilien Robespierre sought to advance the revolution forward at a steady pace along a narrow line of virtue. The wartime conditions and erupting counter-revolutions caused the Convention to convene a special executive body with plenary powers: the Committee of Public Safety. It was from this Committee that Robespierre crafted and executed the so-called Terror, and while sitting on this Committee that he justified its use.

[I]n order to lay the foundations of democracy among us and to consolidate it, in order to arrive at the peaceful reign of constitutional laws, we must finish the war of liberty against tyranny and safely cross through the storms of the revolution: that is the goal of the revolutionary system which you have put in order. You should therefore still base your conduct upon the stormy circumstances in which the republic finds itself; and the plan of your administration should be the result of the spirit of revolutionary government, combined with the general principles of democracy….

Since the soul of the Republic is virtue, equality, and since your goal is to found, to consolidate the Republic, it follows that the first rule of your political conduct ought to relate all your efforts at maintaining equality and developing virtue….

If the mainspring of popular government in peacetime is virtue, amid revolution it is at the same time both virtue and terror: virtue, without which terror is fatal; terror, without which virtue is impotent. Terror is nothing but justice: prompt, severe, inflexible. It is therefore an emanation of  virtue. It is less a special principle than a consequence of the general principle of democracy applied to our country’s most pressing needs.

It has been said that terror was the mainspring of despotic government. Does your government, then, resemble a despotism? Yes, as the sword which glitters in the hands of liberty’s heroes resembles the one with which tyranny’s lackeys are armed. Let the despot govern his brutalized subjects by terror; he is right to do this, as a despot. Subdue liberty’s enemies by terror, and you will be right, as founders of the Republic. The government of the revolution is the despotism of liberty against tyranny. Is force made only to protect crime? And is it not to strike the heads of the proud that lightning is destined?…

Social protection is due only to peaceful citizens; there are no citizens in the Republic but the republicans. The royalists, the conspirators, are, in its eyes, only strangers or, rather, enemies….

Tyranny kills; liberty argues. And the code made by the conspirators themselves is the law by which they are judged.

Maximilien Robespierre, On the Principles of Public Morality, Speech to the National Assembly of 5 February 1794

The republicans created a new calendar, new ten-day weeks, new rationalized months of thirty days each, and feasts of virtue. They renamed the streets of Paris to remove the names of saints. They set about changing the very geography in which they lived.

And yet, counter-revolutionary forces were at work behind the scenes. Some radical Jacobins sought to enrich themselves during the chaos. Conservative, “whites” (white was the color of the Bourbon monarchy) and slave-holding plantation owners from the French colonies, linked hands and joined together to protect themselves. When the radical Jacobins announced a new wave of investigations into financial impropriety among the politicians of the National Convention, a plan was drafted to destroy the radical leadership.

On 27 July 1794, what was 9 Thermidor II under the new calendar, Maximilien Robespierre and Louis Antoine de Saint-Just were murdered by counter-revolutionary opponents in the National Convention. The Jacobin revolution was over, killed by the bourgeois forces of counter-revolution that had once supported it. After Thermidor, the coup plotters established the anti-democratic Directory. Political repression was the norm, elections were regularly annulled, and a small clique of powerful politicians took over the country.

In the late 18th century, Paris was the engine of revolutionary sentiment and the center of progressive thought in the whole decaying kingdom. It was the second-largest city in Europe only outsized by London, and contained some 600,000 people. The vast majority of the city was inhabited by the working poor. There were 40,000 domestic servants working for petit-bourgeois families of which only about 5% were born in Paris; the rest came to the city from the provinces of the kingdom, looking for work. The city was replete with small handicrafts, and was dominated by the guilds. Unskilled labor was paid at a rate of roughly thirty sous a day; most families had to set all their members to work, including the children. Women made approximately 15 sous a day. The primary diet of the Parisian working poor was bread: two four-pound loafs, the average comestible intake of a family of two with two children, cost roughly eighteen sous throughout most of the 18th century and sometimes doubled or tripled in price during bad harvests.

In addition to the vast numbers of the working poor, Paris is estimated to have hosted approximately 13,000 to 14,000 on royal assistance and between 150,000 and 200,000 totally indigent persons at the beginning of the 18th century, with this number swelling as the period went on. By 1789, years of bad harvests and warfare had driven hundreds of thousands of new working poor into the city center and its extramural faubourgs. These urban poor were the engine of the revolution, and it was to them, the sans culottes, that Babeuf and the Equals now turned. Throughout the Revolution, whenever radical policy stalled or the conservative noble elements had attempted to regain control, they were always checked by the convention of a huge mass of protestors in Paris. In 1789, during the early stages of the Revolution, the city of Paris not only tore down the Bastille and executed its governor, they killed their own mayor and paraded his head through the streets, then established what became known as the Insurrectionary Commune of Paris — an elective assembly in the city that was far more radical than the National Assembly, and which often summoned mobs to threaten the Assembly when it attempted to renege on its more radical policies.

But France was more than Paris, and the Directory had eschewed the politics of the radical insurrectionary commune. In fact, they suppressed it, targeting radical deputies and paying the so-called Muscadins, bourgeois “gilded youth” dressed in expensive finery and armed with clubs, to roam the streets beating sans culotte patrols and suppressing the radical commune.

Babeuf came onto the public stage after the Thermidorians outlawed political clubs. He sought to revive the old Republic of Virtue championed by Robespierre and the radical Jacobins, and through his agitation he created the Society of Equals: a conspiracy with the goal of overthrowing not only the Thermidor government, but of abolishing all private property in France.

Early Communism and the Conspiracy

Where the radical Jacobins of Robespierre’s stripe represented the propertied interests of the petit-bourgeoisie and the bourgeoisie and Thermidor was a liberal-noble reaction, the sans culottes and Babeuf were anti-propertarian proletarians: proto-Communists. Babeuf was not interested in the mere redistribution of some of the land of France; he advocated for, and convinced others in the Society of Equals of, the necessity for the redistribution of the fruits of the land. That is, the collective ownership of all land and the distribution-by-need of its products.

François-Noël Babeuf was a petit-bourgeois lawyer of the ancien régime, specializing in the feudal land law, keeping records of what peasants owed in rent and fees to the nobility, and working as a clerk for the nobles. He supported the revolution and the radical Jacobins. When Robespierre was sent to the guillotine and the National Convention was replaced by the dictatorial right-leaning Directory, he opened his own press and began to publish for the people.

The Conspiracy was formed in November 1795 and was directed by eight men, including Babeuf: Philippe Buonarroti, Augustin Alexandre Darthé, Sylvain Maréchal (who drafted the Manifesto of Equals), Félix Lepeletier, Pierre-Antoine Antonelle, Debon, and Georges Grisel. Jean Antoine Rossignol, the revolutionary general, was in charge of managing the Conspiracy’s agents. The leading members of the Conspiracy met in the prisons of Paris, having been jailed by the Thermidorians. They made their rallying cry “Insurrection, revolt, and the Constitution of 1793!” — the constitution which had promised the most egalitarian society to that point ever designed or dreamt of.

Babeuf put it this way in his newspaper, the Tribun du Peuple: “I have distinguished two diametrically opposed parties: I understand well enough that both want a republic, but one party wants it to be bourgeois and aristocratic, the other party for it to be a popular and democratic republic.” It was this popular and democratic republic that the Conspiracy of Equals was devoted. The Tribun du Peuple of 30th November 1794 included the paragraph: “the only way is to establish common administration, abolish private property, put each man to work according to his talents and the industry he knows, oblige him to hand over the fruits of his labour to the common stock, and establish a simple administration of distribution”. He wrote that the “French Revolution was just the harbinger of another much greater revolution, a far more important one: the last.”

Maréchal’s manifesto, which was meant to guide the Equals, was truly radical and truly Communist in its scope:

PEOPLE OF FRANCE!

For fifteen centuries you lived as slaves and, consequently, unhappy. For the last six years you barely breathe, waiting for independence, freedom, and equality.

…

The Agrarian law, or the partitioning of the land, was the spontaneous demand of some unprincipled soldiers, of some towns moved more by their instinct than by reason. We lean towards something more sublime and more just: the common good or the community of property! No more individual property in land: the land belongs to no one. We demand, we want, the common enjoyment of the fruits of the land: the fruits belong to all.

We declare that we can no longer put up with the fact that the great majority work and sweat for the smallest of minorities.

Long enough, and for too long, less than a million individuals have disposed of that which belongs to 20 million of their kind, their equals.

Let it at last end, this great scandal that our descendants will never believe existed! Disappear at last, revolting distinctions between rich and poor, great and small, masters and servants, rulers and ruled.

Sylvain Marechal, The Manifesto of Equals

Organizing the Conspiracy

The Equals met in the Paris prisons, held there by the Thermidorians for publishing seditious materials or for sedition itself. The Equals formed a revolutionary party in March 1796 and created an insurrection committee. In every arrondissement of Paris, the committee maintained agents. These distributed pamphlets, created clubs in private homes, collected funds, recorded hiding-places, drew up lists of sympathizers, and organized citizens. They reported directly to the insurrectionary committee about how much force the Conspiracy had, and where.

Unlike the loosely organized political clubs (the Jacobins, the various reactionary clubs, the Club Massaic, even the Pantheon Club), the Conspiracy of Equals divided into committees tasked with individual mandates. There was a military committee, which organized the armed wing of the Conspiracy, the “familial clubs” which organized on the ground level. The Conspiracy of the Equals was the very first insurrectionary communist party ever organized as a political organization.

The Conspiracy grew in leaps and bounds as the economic crisis of the Thermidorian Directory intensified. In the 40th issue of the Tribun, Babeuf praised the September Massacres of 1792 and demanded a more complete 2 September to annihilate the Directory itself, which he said was made up of “starvers, bloodsuckers, tyrants, hangmen, rogues, and mountebanks.”

Lack of ideological unity laid the groundwork for the Equals’ failure. The leading members of the Equals were not all committed Communists or proto-Communists. Babeuf and Maréchal alone were committed to the abolition of private property. The other Equals, some of whom had been rich nobles before the Revolution, balked at the more radical proposals in the manifesto. By the time of May 1797, Babeuf and Maréchal were disgusted with their former compatriots. Babeuf did not attend their last meeting; he said these “democrats lacked strength or means,” that is, they were insufficiently revolutionary.

One of the members of the insurrectionary committee, Georges Grisel, was a paid agent of the Directory. He turned over the Conspiracy and, on 2 May 1796, the Directory disarmed the Paris police legion because it had been “seduced by the Babouviste faction.” The Directory’s spy agency, the bureau central, knew that the uprising was set for 11 May 1796 and the Equals planned to unite with the remnants of the Jacobin Club. They had been receiving reports from Grisel for some time, and so acted before the Conspiracy could. On 10 May, Babeuf was arrested, along with many of his associates. Sylvaine Marèchal was never apprehended. The conspirators were tried over the next two months and most were executed. The former Jacobins were mostly acquitted and permitted to return to political service.

Aftermath: The Revolution to Come

Marèchal carried on the revolutionary tradition; the English word “communism” was coined by the English socialist Goodwyn Barmby after he spoke with living Babouvistes in the 1830s or 1840s. Those members of the Conspiracy who were not killed, and those who read Babeuf but did not act, would go on to influence French and revolutionary history in Europe. Most triumphantly, the heirs of Babeuf were deeply involved in the creation of the second insurrectionary commune of Paris, the 1871 Commune, from which Marx drew his most instructive lessons about the dictatorship of the proletariat.

Indeed, Babeuf’s personal files remain preserved not only in the National Archives of Paris, but in the Institute of Marxism-Leninism of the Party Central Committee of the former Communist Party of the Soviet Union. The Conspiracy of Equals, although it was a failure, would serve as the century-long wellspring of revolutionary fervor from which the scientific socialists of the 19th century would draw. It is through the clandestine organization of militants that Marxist-Leninsts have achieved revolutionary success not only in Europe, but in all corners of the globe. There is no doubt that Lenin’s formulation in his works on the structure of the revolutionary organization (What Is to Be Done? and One Step Forward, Two Steps Back come to mind) draw from the well first sunk by the socialist martyr François-Noël Babeuf.