François Noël Babeuf

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François-Noël Babeuf, engraving by an unknown artist, 18th century. (credit: Courtesy of the Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris)

(born Nov. 23, 1760, Saint-Quentin, France — died May 27, 1797, Vendôme) French political journalist and agitator. During the era of the French Revolution he advocated an equal distribution of land and income. For his part in a conspiracy to overthrow the Directory and institute a return to the Constitution of 1793, he was guillotined. His tactical strategies provided a model for left-wing movements of the 19th and 20th centuries.

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The French political revolutionist and writer François Noel Babeuf (1760-1797) was active during the French Revolution. He was among the first to advocate socialism as a political institution for solving the problems of society.

François Babeuf was born in Saint-Quentin on Nov. 25, 1760. Before the French Revolution he was employed as a commissaire à terrien at Roye, a position in which he was supposed to help the landed aristocracy assert their feudal rights over the peasants. His occupation made him unpopular among the lower classes, and he himself did not like the nobility. In 1789, on the eve of the Revolution, he wrote the section of the petition from the village of Roye which requested the king to abolish all feudal rights.

In the early years of the Revolution, Babeuf held minor government posts in Somme, in Montdidier, and finally in Paris, where he settled in 1794. He is credited with having applied the word "terrorists" to the Jacobins of 1793-1794. After the Jacobins fell on 9 Thermidor (July 27, 1794) Babeuf supported the men who had defeated them. In 1794 he began to publish the Journal de la liberté de la presse, later known as Le Tribun du peuple. In an article written shortly after the Thermidorian coup, Babeuf expressed radical democratic ideas. At this time he began to call himself Caius Gracchus Babeuf, after the Roman social reformer.

In October 1794 Babeuf was arrested for attacking the government's economic policies. After his release the following year, he became one of the Directory's most violent critics. In Le Tribun du peuple he put forth his socioeconomic ideas and called for the establishment of a republic of equals. His theories, which formed the basis for 19th-century socialism and communism, were offensive to the Thermidorians. But he soon attracted a following of former Jacobins, and they opened a club at the Panthéon. In February 1796 the government closed the club and planned to take actions against the group, which was becoming a political menace.

Meanwhile, Babeuf and his supporters were plotting an attack upon the government. They wanted to implement the Constitution of 1793, because they believed that it would place governmental power in the hands of the people. However, their plan was betrayed by the spy Georges Grisel, and on May 10 Babeuf and the other leaders of the movement were arrested. On April 26, 1797, Babeuf was condemned to death, and he was executed the next day.

Further Reading

The two best works on Babeuf in English are Ernest B. Bax, The Last Episode of the French Revolution: Being a History of Gracchus Babeuf and the Conspiracy of the Equals (1911), and Philippe M. Buonarroti, Babeuf's Conspiracy for Equality (1828; trans. 1836; repr. 1965). Both books are not only biographies, but histories of the "socialist" conspiracy. Also very good on the conspiracy is David Thomson, The Babeuf Plot: The Making of a Republican Legend (1947).

Babeuf, François-Noel, known as ‘Gracchus’(1760-97) French socialist. Before the French Revolution, he proposed moderate reform of land tenure based on collective leases. After it, he proposed a centralized distribution system for all produce to ensure complete equality, and collectivization of the industrial sector. He was executed after failure of a coup d'état based on that of the sans-culottes in 1793.

— Carl Slevin

Babeuf, François-Noël, known as Gracchus (1760-97). Militant French Revolutionary, claimed by Communism as one of its first martyrs. Initially Babeuf was active in the rural revolution in Picardy (1789-91), winning the approval of Marat. Next, in Paris, he played a useful, if subordinate, role on the far Left of the urban revolution working for Chaumette and the Paris Commune. Abhorring State Terror, he then travelled some way with Thermidor and produced, in Le Système de dépopulation (1794), a (doubtless officially encouraged) denunciation of Carrier's excesses in the Vendée. But detecting Thermidorian betrayal of that Revolution for which, since 1790, he had suffered privation and imprisonment, Babeuf adopted the symbolically combative name Gracchus (5 October 1794) and re-entitled his periodical Le Tribun du peuple. It was then that, fully exploiting his talents as a publicist, he occupied the ground that had been deserted since the liquidation of the Enragés. Transforming what had hitherto been his egalitarian Messianism into a visionary political programme (see his Manifeste Des Plébéiens, November 1795), he slowly realized his ambition to exercise a tribunate over public opinion and became the galvanizer of that new type of faction which was to be baptized the ‘Conspiration des Égaux’. After the failure of the conspiracy (was it manipulated by the authorities?), Babeuf was put on trial and condemned to death.

[John Renwick]