French Directory between Extremes 547
Babeuf and Buonarroti met in 1795 in a Paris prison, where they were confined by
the Thermidorian Convention, along with others who were regarded as dangerous
or who had been active during the Terror. In October 1795, when the Directory
took over from the Convention, it did so against the royalist opposition shown in
the Vendémiaire uprising and the attempted Anglo- royalist invasion of western
France, and so made a bid for support on the Left, and released these political
prisoners. These men, as soon as liberated, began to publish journals like the Tri-
bun du peuple, and to gather in an assembly called the Pantheon Club, of which
Buonarroti was president for a time, and which had about 2,000 members. The
authorities closed the Pantheon Club on February 28, 1796. The officer who en-
forced its closing was none other than Bonaparte, who, having put down the royal-
ists in October, now did the same to the republican extremists, after which he went
off to his military campaign in north Italy. The ardent spirits of the Pantheon
Club, thus repressed, began to plot revolution. An inner circle composed of Ba-
beuf, Buonarroti, and five others formed themselves into a secret insurrectionary
committee. They worked through an outer circle of “revolutionary agents” who
were unknown to each other, and each of whom was to recruit followers, among
civilians and in the army, who were prepared to receive orders on the day of insur-
rection. The evidence is uncertain as to whether they intended to put the five Di-
rectors to death. One of the inner circle, Sylvain Maréchal, composed a Manifesto
of the Equals, a powerful statement of an ongoing revolution in which property
should be abolished; but the group never formally approved it, nor was it published
at the time. What was published, or placarded about the city, was an Analyse de la
doctrine de Babeuf, a declaration in twelve brief articles, very emphatic in its de-
mand for equality of wealth, education, and happiness, but not explicitly proposing
the abolition of private property, and ending up with a demand for the Constitu-
tion of the Year I.^5 Probably the inner circle intended, after the insurrection, to
govern as a revolutionary dictatorship, on the model of the Revolutionary Govern-
ment of the Year II, and following the principles enunciated by Robespierre, by
which a temporary dictatorship held power for a transitional period until the old
order was liquidated and the new one established.
The police, through an informant, broke up the conspiracy on May 10, 1796, a
few days before the day set for insurrection. At the ensuing trial Babeuf and one
other were condemned to death, and Buonarroti and others sent to prison.
sible, is evident from the fact that my own indebtedness at this point is chiefly to Saitta. Saitta empha-
sizes the differences between the real situation of 1796 and Buonarroti’s recollections as published in
his book of 1828.
5 Most historians have used the text of the Analyse as published by Buonarroti in 1828 with
amplifications. A version of the 1796 text was published by V. Advielle, Histoire de Gracchus Babeuf et
du Babouvisme, 2 vols. (Paris, 1884), 1, 207–8. For the importance of using the 1796 text see Saitta, I,
28, 262–63. The exact place of Marechal’s Manifeste des Egaux in the conspiracy has long been de-
bated, and various explanations have been given for the refusal of the insurrectionary committee to
adopt it: that these “communists” would not accept the barbarous phrase, perissent les arts·, that they
wished not to frighten the straight democrats among their allies; and, third, that for most of the com-
mittee “communism” and abolition of property were not of central importance to their program any-
way. Saitta inclines to the third explanation; M. Dommanget to the first in Sylvain Maréchal,
l ’ égalitaire, “ l ’ homme sans Dieu” (Paris, 1950), 322.