554 Chapter XXIII
could long live with a principle of equality in which differences of ability were
called a “social scourge.”
What Babouvism had to offer later revolutionaries was above all the passionate
commitment to revolution itself, a perpetual revolution, or revolutionism, drawing
its force from the belief in an everlasting and irreconcilable war of classes. “The
French Revolution,” said Marechal, in the Manifesto of Equals which the Babeuf
group did not actually adopt, “is only the forerunner of another revolution far
greater, far more solemn, which will be the last.”^21 What Babeuf came to admire in
Robespierre, and the reason why he found Robespierre a more useful model than
Hébert, was not so much Robespierre’s goals or objectives, which were different
from Babeuf ’s, but his skill as a revolutionary theorist and tactician, his prestige as
a man who seemingly had almost succeeded, and his prominence as a leader and
spokesman of an effective and militant revolutionary dictatorship. To these ideas
Babeuf added lessons in the techniques of conspiracy and manipulation, or the no-
tion of producing revolution by handfuls of professional revolutionaries, which
would appeal, not indeed to Karl Marx, but to a great many practicing revolution-
aries of later times.
In its immediate effect, and perhaps in its longer- range effects in French his-
tory, it was an unfortunate consequence of Babouvism to confuse the whole ques-
tion of political democracy with insurrectionism and social radicalism. One of the
main results of the Revolution, the real French Revolution, the one which really
happened, was to make France more self- consciously than ever a nation of
property- owners. Nowhere else, thanks in part to the Revolution, was real property
so widely owned. A movement to abolish private property had no conceivable
chance of success. It could only frighten very large numbers of people. Babeuf ’s
writings in the Tribun du peuple were public, and the proofs of conspiracy offered
at the trial were genuine and convincing. He insisted, at his trial, that he had done
no more than belong to a Society of Democrats, who, he said, were principally
concerned to prevent the restoration of the Pretender. If “democrats” were like
Babeuf, who would not fear them? He insisted that his views were only the natural
outcome of the Enlightenment, no different from those of Diderot or Rousseau
and perfectly harmonious with the general principles of the French Revolution.
This was precisely the doctrine of the extreme Right, which also held that Enlight-
enment and Revolution led inevitably to the kinds of things that Babeuf did and
said. It was all very discouraging for the growth of moderate political life. It made
moderates hesitate to embrace democratic ideas, it weakened political democrats
by associating them vaguely with anarchists, and it gave governments an excuse, if
not indeed an actual duty, to repress agitation on the Left.
The Throne and the Altar
If from a hypothetical dead center one looked to the Right, the first to be seen
would be the moderates and conciliators already described. They included some
21 Dommanget, Maréchal, 311.