French Directory between Extremes 549
the seizure of power.” It is Soboul’s belief, which seems to be well founded, that the
“popular mass” in the movement (who may have numbered several thousands)
clung to the sans- culotte ideas of the Year II, but that the ideas of the inner circle
had undergone a “sudden mutation,” which was “the first form of the revolutionary
ideology of the new society born of the [French] Revolution itself.”^8
Thus Soboul connects certain subsequent features of Marxism with a group of
men in 1796 to most of whom such ideas were entirely foreign. The great majority
of persons in contact with the Babouvist movement were excited by ideas of direct
democracy, popular democracy, busy and spontaneous local activity, the massive
rising of the people, with an insistence on a degree of equality of respect, of dig-
nity, of education and material level of life, but with a strong emphasis on small
private property, small private enterprise and private workshops, by which small
men could preserve their individual independence. The inner circle, however, by a
“sudden mutation,” had passed beyond this somewhat pettifogging equalitarianism
to envision a truly socialist or communist world. The inner circle, who already per-
ceived or anticipated the “new revolutionary ideal,” kept its views concealed from
the mass of “democrats” whom it intended to lead or manipulate. One is reminded
of the manipulations of Martinovics in Hungary.
By the “sudden mutation” is meant also that the Babouvist inner circle was no
mere continuation of Robespierrism. Here the views of Soboul must be supple-
mented by the more refined analysis of Armando Saitta, the authority on Buonar-
roti. Saitta notes that two kinds of revolutionaries of the Year II came together to
form the Conspiracy of Equals of the Year IV.^9 One group was typified by Buon-
arroti, who had been a staunch Robespierrist in 1793–1794, had worked for the
Revolutionary Government, and remained faithful to Robespierre even after Ther-
midor; his belief in equality had a strong moral and religious tone, he was a fervent
Rousseauist, and he strongly supported the Worship of the Supreme Being. He
wanted to revolutionize or democratize Italy, his own native country, and joined
the Conspiracy of Equals with that purpose in mind, believing that only by a re-
vival of truly revolutionary forces in France could the right kind of popular revolu-
tion come in Italy, without exploitation by the French Directory and the French
armies. Over thirty years later, in the book which he published in 1828 and which
made the Babeuf conspiracy famous, Buonarroti had become a convert to “com-
munism,” but there is no sign that he cared much about “communism” in 1796; and
indeed Saitta suggests that when the Conspiracy of Equals is rightly seen, as a
8 Soboul, AHRF, No. 162, 455–56.
9 Saitta, AHRF, No. 162, 427–28; Filippo Buonarroti, I, 1–36, 252–79; II, 238–43. Very impor-
tant in Buonarroti’s development were the months he spent as the agent of the Revolutionary Govern-
ment at Oneglia, a territory belonging to the King of Sardinia, during the military operations of 1794.
(See, in addition to Saitta, Pia Onnis, “Filippo Buonarroti, commissario rivoluzionano a Oneglia,”
Nuova Rivista Storica, 1939, 353–79 and 477–500.) At Oneglia, Buonarroti made the acquaintance of
Augustin Robespierre and Bonaparte, became a rallying point for Italian refugees and patriots from
various parts of Italy, supervised policies of requisition, confiscation, price controls, military supply,
and delivered an address on the Worship of the Supreme Being (published in full by Saitta, I, 252–56)
which, without mentioning Robespierre by name, echoes the sentiments simultaneously expressed by
Robespierre in Paris.