French Directory between Extremes 551
the French government,” said Buonarroti, “to aid the revolution in Italy by every
possible means”—to assist the Italians in dethroning the kings of Sardinia and
Naples, the archdukes of Tuscany and Milan, and also the Pope, so that 18,000,000
people could enjoy political freedom and the true equality that Jesus himself had
taught. Italy should be remodeled on the lines of the Batavian Republic. Italian
liberty, added to French and Dutch, would checkmate the monarchs and assure the
liberation of mankind.
Buonarroti rightly believed that the Directory was unlikely to take up any such
crusade. He attributed this hesitation in the Directory to its bourgeois and moder-
ate character, and thought that if true democrats were in power in France, if the
real people could only make its voice heard, if the great days of Robespierre and
the Year II could come again, there would be more support in France for the Ital-
ian republicans and the patriots of all countries. In short, Buonarroti associated
democracy with world- revolutionism. It is doubtful whether this belief had any
foundation. The great Committee of Public Safety had always been skeptical of the
foreign revolutionaries; it had in fact suppressed those in Paris as “ultras”; and
Robespierre had never had any faith in the universal rising of peoples. Probably the
Revolutionary Government of the Year II, had it faced the same situation, would
have taken much the same attitude as the Directory did, asking the same questions
of the Italian revolutionaries of 1796 as it asked of the Batavian revolutionaries of
1794—whether they were significant enough to be useful, what resources they
could bring to a common war effort, whether they could control their own coun-
tries in a way favorable to the French Republic.^14 Buonarroti, a faithful Robespier-
rist, who had served the Revolutionary Government in the distant outpost at
Oneglia, had never been privy to its inner counsels. In his hostility to the Direc-
tory, he credited the former Revolutionary Government with ideas it had never
had. That Robespierre would have deeply concerned himself with revolution in
Italy was a myth.
Babeuf ’s association of himself with Robespierre involved delicate problems.
For one thing, he had been anti- Robespierrist in 1793–1794. For another, he had
undergone a “mutation.” He did not believe in private property, and in that sense
was “communist.”
Babeuf derived his communism from a widely respected conception of the En-
lightenment, le bonheur commun, the common welfare or public happiness, which,
however, he believed must lead to the communauté, or equal sharing, of material
goods and other enjoyments—“comfort for all, education for all, equality, liberty
and happiness for all.” He derived it also from the democratic movement: “Our
dogmas are pure democracy, equality without blemish and without reserve.”^15 He
believed in 1796 that this bonheur commun had almost been reached in 1794, and
that all that now stood in the way of its realization was the reaction that had set in
since Thermidor, perpetuated by the crude and callous republicans of the Direc-
tory, “banal republicans” who preached “no more than any kind of republic.” In the
face of such a regime, and sensing the hopes of 1794 slipping away, he was tor-
14 Above, pp. 420–22.
15 Dommanget, Pages choisies de Babeuf, 240, 247.