546 Chapter XXIII
The Tribun du peuple, of which about 2,000 copies were printed, was sold both
in the streets of Paris and by subscription, and had a national circulation. A surviv-
ing list of 590 subscribers has been analyzed. Of these subscribers, 238 were in the
departments and 345 were in Paris. In the departments a majority of the subscrib-
ers were people in the more comfortable social positions—the big merchants
called négotiants, engineers, lawyers, doctors, public officials, army officers, and the
like. In Paris a majority of the subscribers were artisans and small shopkeepers,
such as house- painters, wine- merchants, and proprietors of cafes—the kind of
people who had been sans- culottes and section committeemen in the Year II. Ve-
hement revolutionism, it is clear from these lists, was relished by a precarious com-
bination of provincial bourgeoisie and Parisian populace. All kinds of persons read
Babeuf.^2
Further to the Left than most readers of political papers was a much smaller
category of activists for whom political agitation had become a habit, and who,
having called attention to themselves by leadership in the Paris sections after
August 1792, or in the Parisian armée révolutionnaire of 1793, or in other ways,
were now regularly watched by the police. From the police records of the Direc-
tory it appears that there were some 200 or 250 such men whom the police re-
peatedly arrested and re- arrested between 1795 and 1800, simply on general
grounds of their past records, as a preventive measure to stop insurrectionary
turbulence before it could flare up. By arresting, questioning, confining, liberating,
and again arresting these same individuals, the police of the Directory, in the
words of R. C. Cobb, “decapitated the democratic movement,” so that there was
no successful popular uprising between 1795 and 1830. From this same category
of small- scale militants much of the secondary leadership in the Babeuf con-
spiracy was recruited.^3
With Babeuf and with his co- worker Philippe Buonarroti, a French citizen of
Italian birth, and with their Conspiracy of Equals of 1796, we reach the extreme
Left of the French Revolution.^4 The bare facts of the conspiracy are briefly told.
2 A. Soboul, “Personnel sectionnaire et personnel babouviste,” in AHRF, No. 162 (1960),
438–46.
3 R. C. Cobb, “Notes sur la répression contre le personnel sans- culotte de 1795 à 1801,” in
AHRF, No. 134 (1954), 23–49.
4 The literature is large, and the subject has attracted increasing historical interest in recent years
in many countries. The basic documents are the proceedings at the High Court at Vendome, with
speeches and papers submitted in evidence, published by the Directory under various titles in 1797.
They have become very rare, but six volumes of them are at the Princeton University Library. Impor-
tant also as a source is Filippo Buonarroti, La conspiration pour l ’Egalité dite de Babeuf, 2 vols. (Brussels,
1828), reprinted with a preface by Georges Lefebvre, 2 vols. (Paris, 1957); Eng. trans, by Bronterre
O’Brien (London, 1836). For current work see AHRF, No. 162 (Oct.- Dec. 1960) where the whole
issue is devoted to Babeuf in honor of the bicentennial of his birth. It is introduced by an extensive
bibliographical survey by J. Godechot, “Les travaux recents sur Babeuf,” and contains articles by
French, Italian, Norwegian, East German, and Russian historians. See also A. Galante Garrone,
Buonarroti e Babeuf (Turin, 1948), and S. Bernstein, Buonarroti (Paris, 1949). Babeuf ’s writings are
most easily consulted in M. Dommanget, Pages choisies de Babeuf (Paris, 1935); for Buonarroti’s writ-
ings of 1795–1796 see A. Saitta, Filippo Buonarroti, 2 vols. (Rome, 1950). Where Godechot holds that
the recent interest in Babouvism reflects the movement of historical science, Elizabeth Eisenstein in
The First Professional Revolutionist: Filippo Michele Buonarroti (Cambridge, Mass., 1959), relates it to
ideological interests of the modern Left. That the Left may be “scientific,” and that agreement is pos-