462 Chapter XIX
Anacharsis Cloots, for example, who may well have been mad, had at first called
himself the orateur du genre humain, and now called himself the orateur des sans-
culottes. He was in touch with the revolutionaries in Holland, and with the am-
biguous Chevalier d’Eon in London. An extreme sponsor of radical Dechristian-
ization, he presented the Convention, as an insult to Christianity, with a copy of
his Certainty of the Proofs of Mohammedanism. He was hardly a man of the people;
rich and titled by origin, he wrote laughingly to his brother that he had bought one
of the confiscated estates near Paris, and was living well “for a sans- culotte.” To his
constituents (he was a member of the Convention) he expressed “bourgeois equal-
ity” with fatuous complacency: “all being equal before the law, if some are wealthy,
others industrious, all have their qualities.”^19 He urged them to forget their own
disagreements in a campaign against la tyrannie européenne.
The Dutch banker, Kock, lived in a fine house at Passy with nine children, a
private preceptor, numerous servants, and facilities for entertainment. Hébert and
other radicals from the Paris Commune and government bureaus were among his
most frequent guests. It has been argued that they had no common political inter-
ests, and that the gatherings were purely for relaxation; but this seems unlikely,
since Mme Kock complained that Mme Hébert talked too much politics, and
Kock, who had been a member of the Batavian Revolutionary Committee since
1792, signed a petition of this committee to the Committee of Public Safety, on
March 9, 1794, urging the French to invade and revolutionize Holland.^20 What
Kock and Hébert had in common was a dislike of the personnel and policies of the
Revolutionary Government of the Year II. They both accused it of “moderatism.”
Cloots, Kock, and other Dutch émigrés supported a paper in Paris, Le Batave. It
lasted under different titles for over three years, and is among the rarest, in libraries
today, of all French Revolutionary journals that had so long a life. In general, it
closely followed the line of Hébert’s Père Duchesne. It lauded the Worship of Reason
in Paris, and gave admiring publicity to the most violent episodes of the Terror. It
was full of reports on revolutionaries in Holland and various other countries, whom
it presented as oppressed patriots eagerly awaiting the moment of liberation.
There was also the Batavian Legion. Or rather, at the end of 1793, there were
apparently two organizations by this name.^21 One was in the field with the French
army, as in 1792. The other, which remained closer to Paris, was composed of non-
descripts and persons without visible means of support, recruited from half a dozen
nationalities, but including Frenchmen also. One of these was “Gracchus” Babeuf,
who, between periods in prison on ordinary criminal charges, kept away starvation
by briefly joining the Batavian Legion at the end of 1793.
19 A. Tuetey, Répertoire général des sources manuscrites de l ’ histoire de Paris pendant la Révolution
(Paris, 1912), X, No. 2482. Much else on Cloots, Proli, Kock, and others may be found here, and in
the preface to Volume XI.
20 Colenbrander, Gedenkstukken der algemeene geschiedenis van Nederland van 1795 tot 1840 (The
Hague, 1905) I, 337. On Kock see also Tuetey, op.cit., and pp. 394 and 420 above.
21 Le Batave, No. 265, Nov. 7, 1793. On Babeuf ’s membership in the Batavian Legion, see M.
Dommanget, Sylvain Maréchal: l ’ homme sans Dieu (Paris, 1950), 303. On the dissolution of the le-
gions, and arrest of foreigners, see Mathiez, La Révolution et les étrangers (Paris, 1918), 168–188.