François-Noël Babeuf
byname
Gracchus Babeuf
born
November 23, 1760, Saint-Quentin, France
died May 27, 1797, Vendôme
early
political journalist and agitator in
Revolutionary France whose tactical
strategies provided a model for
left-wing movements of the 19th century
and who was called Gracchus for the
resemblance of his proposed agrarian
reforms to those of the 2nd-century-bc
Roman statesman of that name.
The son of a tax farmer, Babeuf worked
in the 1780s as a feudal law expert,
maintaining records of dues owed and
paid by the peasants to the local
seigneuries. His increasing distaste for
the injustices of this system led him to
begin an active career as a political
journalist (1788–92). In 1789 he wrote a
pamphlet advocating tax reform and went
to Paris in hopes of becoming a
journalist. He returned to his native
Picardy, where he was arrested and
briefly imprisoned in 1790.
Following his release he founded a
journal, Le Correspondant picard. He
advocated a program of radical agrarian
reforms, including the abolition of
feudal dues and the redistribution of
land. During this period he served as an
administrator in the Montdidier district
of the Somme, but in February 1793 he
returned to Paris, where, during the
Reign of Terror, Maximilien
Robespierre’s radical-democratic regime,
he was again arrested and imprisoned.
After his release following
Robespierre’s fall in July 1794, he
founded a new journal, Le Journal de la
liberté de la presse (shortly thereafter
renamed Le Tribun du peuple), in which
he at first defended the Thermidorians
and attacked the Jacobins. When he began
to attack the Thermidorians, he was
arrested (February 12, 1795) and
imprisoned at Arras.
During
this brief imprisonment, Babeuf
continued to formulate his egalitarian
doctrines, advocating an equal
distribution of land and income, and
after his release he began a career as a
professional revolutionary. He quickly
rose to a position of leadership in the
Society of the Pantheon, which sought
political and economic equality in
defiance of the new French Constitution
of 1795. After the society was dissolved
in 1796, he founded a “secret directory
of public safety” to plan an
insurrection.
On May
8, 1796, a general meeting of Babouvist,
Jacobin, and military insurrectionary
committees took place in order to plan
the raising of a force of 17,000 men to
overthrow the Directory and to institute
a return to the Constitution of 1793,
which the committee members considered
the document most legitimately
sanctioned by popular deliberation. On
May 10, however, the conspirators were
arrested after an informant revealed
their plans to the government. The trial
took place between February 20 and May
26, 1797. All conspirators were
acquitted except Babeuf and his
companion, Augustin Darthé, both of whom
were guillotined.
Babeuf
was revered as a hero by 19th- and
20th-century revolutionaries because of
his advocacy of communism and his
conviction that a small elite could
overthrow an undesirable government by
conspiratorial means.
