French Directory between Extremes 553
It is impossible to imagine Robespierre (or Marx) using such language. Yet
within a few weeks of writing the Plebeian Manifesto Babeuf made his great retrac-
tion. He declared that he had been mistaken in following Hébert, and that Robes-
pierre had been right all the time. “We must remember,” he said, “that we are only
the second Gracchi of the French Revolution.” Robespierre and Saint- Just, the
first “Gracchi,” we are told, had perished for attempting what Babeuf and his
friends now meant to do. Hébertism, as Babeuf now saw it, had been only factious,
local, Parisian, deviationist. Robespierrism was the true course of the true Revolu-
tion. “The reason is simple: it is that Robespierrism is democracy, and that these
two words are absolutely identical.”^20
What are we to make of such a body of ideas? Let us try to avoid both the aver-
sion that Babeuf has aroused in conservatives, and the deference with which the
modern Left has regarded its Precursor. Let us remember that the best Marxist
historians agree that Robespierre was never more than an advanced bourgeois dem-
ocrat, and that Babouvism was never more than a futile conspiracy, an agitation
among intellectuals with few followers, not at all like the true popular upheaval of
sans- culottism three years before. What, then, is the place of Babeuf and Ba bouv-
ism in the history of the French Revolution and of modern revolutions in general?
It seems likely, at least to the present author, that Babeuf might have been soon
forgotten, or no better remembered than others like Sylvain Maréchal, if the Di-
rectory, on suppressing his conspiracy, had merely imprisoned him and then re-
leased him under police supervision, as it did with other such exaggérés; if it had
not brought him to trial, given him a courtroom forum, made his name a by- word
and his execution a martyrdom; and if Buonarroti, whose life was spared at the
same trial, had not published thirty years later his Conspiration pour l ’Egalité dite de
Babeuf, in which the realities of 1796 were naturally seen through intervening ex-
perience, and transformed by the desire to speak to a newly rising revolutionary
and socialist generation.
It is only by an effort that Babeuf ’s rabid equalitarianism can be seen as a form
of socialism or communism, since it is hard to find in it any conception of orga-
nized society. Nor can it be called democracy if democracy means a form of
government, in which he had no interest. It was an extreme form of radical de-
mocratism so far as democracy signified a state of equality. His insistence on
“real” equality should not be taken lightly; it was an ideal that he shared with
Rousseau, Robespierre, and Condorcet, and the modern world has moved in the
direction they indicated, toward greater equality of income, education, and living
standards, though hardly by the methods that Babeuf proposed. But no society
20 Babeuf ’s letter to Bodson, in Dommanget, 284–86. For men who claimed to be the “second
Gracchi,” it is notable that neither Babeuf nor Buonarroti, if we may argue ex silentio, had any recol-
lection in the Year IV of the Ventose laws of the Year II (above, p. 457) in which Saint- Just and
Robespierre had proposed to transfer property from suspects to poor patriots. When Buonarroti wrote
his book of 1828, however, doubtless having made discoveries by historical research in such sources as
the Moniteur, he declared that the Equals of 1796 had wished to carry forward this program of Robe-
spierre’s. This became a standard belief in some socialist and some Chartist circles. The political im-
portance of the Ventose laws, stressed by Mathiez, has been discounted by Soboul and Lefebvre, and
the failure of the Babouvists to mention them, only two years later, seems proof that their importance,
for the Left at least, was very slight.