François Noël Babeuf

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François Noël Babeuf
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François Noël Babeuf (called Gracchus Babeuf; born November 23, 1760 in Saint Nicaise near Saint-Quentin , † May 27, 1797 in Vendôme ) was a journalist and a left-wing revolutionary French agitator during the First French Revolution . After Robespierre's fall and the end of the Terreurs in 1794, he was a radical critic of the rule of the Directory and, as the founder of the Conspiracy of Equals ( French Conjuration des Égaux ), demanded the establishment of the draft constitution of 1793 .

Babeuf's historical significance lies in the fact that he was one of the first to propose socialism as a practical policy and, as an early socialist, conveyed ideas to later social revolutionary movements.

Life

Babeuf's father Claude deserted the French army in 1738 and entered the service of the Austrian Empress Maria Theresa . There he is said to have risen to the rank of major. After an amnesty in 1755 he returned to France, but soon became impoverished and was forced to work as a day laborer for his wife and family. The hardships during this period may help explain many of Babeuf's later views.

His father had given him superficial training in the liberal sense, but until the outbreak of the revolution he was a house servant, and from 1785 he held the ungrateful office of commissaire a terrier, in which he assisted nobles and priests with old, forgotten feudal rights against peasants to assert. On the eve of the revolution, Babeuf was in the service of a surveyor in Roye . His father had died in 1780, so that he was now the sole breadwinner not only for his wife and children, but also for his mother, brothers and sisters.

Since November 13, 1782 Babeuf was married to Marie Anne Victoire Langlet (1757-1840). The following children were born from this marriage:

  1. Catherine Adelaide Sophie (September 1783 - November 13, 1787)
  2. Robert, called Emile (born September 29, 1785 - † January 23, 1842)
  3. Catherine Adelaide Sophie (September 3, 1788 - July 16, 1795)
  4. Jean-Baptiste Claude, called Camille (born November 26, 1790, † August 24, 1815)
  5. Gaius Gracchus (January 28, 1797; † 1814)

Turning to politics

François Noël Babeuf at the age of 34, graphic by François Bonneville

He was a tireless writer, and the first hint of his later advocacy of socialism is found in a letter dated March 21, 1787 to the secretary of the Academy of Arras , with whom he corresponded mainly on literature. In 1789 he wrote the first article of the complaints booklet of the voters in the Landvogtei Roye, in which the abolition of feudal rights was demanded. From July to October he stayed in Paris and supervised the publication of his first work, Cadastre Perpétuelle , which he had written in 1787 and published in 1790.

In the same year Babeuf published a pamphlet against feudal exploitation and the Gabelle (salt tax), for which he was denounced and arrested, but then temporarily released. In October, after his return to Roye, he founded the newspaper Correspondant Picard (later renamed Scrutateur des Décrets ), whose heated character earned him another arrest. In November he was elected a member of Roye Municipality but expelled. In March 1791 he was appointed agent for the national property ( biens nationaux ) of the city, and in September 1792 he was elected as a member of the Parliament of the Somme department . As everywhere else, his position became untenable because of the radicalism of his attitude, so that he was soon given the post of administrator of the municipality of Montdidier . Here he was accused of fraud because he had replaced one name with another in a document for the transfer of national goods. It was probably just a mistake out of negligence, but since he did not trust the impartiality of the Somme judges, he fled to Paris and was sentenced in absentia to twenty years imprisonment on 23 August 1793.

Title page of an edition of the Tribun du peuple from 1795 (subtitle Le Defenseur des Droits de l'homme, translated: The Defender of Human Rights )

In the meantime he had been appointed Secretary des comité des subsistances (Food Administration) of the Paris Commune. However, the judges of Amiens pursued him with an arrest warrant, which was carried out in November 1794. The Court of Cassation overturned the judgment on a formal error and opened a new trial before the Aisne Tribunal, from which he was acquitted on July 18.

Babeuf then returned to Paris and published the first edition of his Journal de la liberté de la presse on September 3, 1794 , the title of which was changed to Le Tribun du peuple on October 5 . The execution of Robespierre on July 28 ended the reign of terror, and Babeuf - now the self-styled " Gracchus " - defended the men of Thermidor and attacked the fallen members of the terrorist regime with his usual ferocity. But he also attacked the economic results of the revolution from the standpoint of his socialist theories. This view found few supporters, even in the Jacobin Club, and in October Babeuf was arrested and sent to prison in Arras . Here he came under the influence of various prisoners of the terror regime, above all Lebois , editor of the Journal de l'égalité , then of the Ami du peuple , newspapers that were in the Marat tradition . He also met Filippo Buonarroti , who joined him.

He came out of prison as a radical opponent of the government, convinced that his utopia, which he proclaimed in No. 33 of his tribune , could only be put into practice by restoring the constitution of 1793. Now he was in open conflict with the development of public opinion. In February 1795 he was arrested again and the Tribun du peuple was solemnly burned in the Theater des Bergeres by the “jeunesse dorée”, the young men whose mission it was to drive Jacobinism out of the streets and cafes. Had it not been for appalling economic conditions due to the inflation of the assignats , Babeuf would have shared the fate of other agitators and would have disappeared into obscurity.

It was the Directory's attempts to respond to the economic crisis that gave Babeuf its real historical significance. The new government was forced to abolish the unjust system by which Paris fed itself at the expense of all of France, and it decided to end the distribution of bread and meat at nominal prices from February 20, 1796. The announcement caused widespread consternation. Not only the workers and the large class of idlers who had been lured to Paris by the existing system, but also pensioners and civil servants, whose incomes were paid in assignats on any scale set by the government, saw themselves threatened with starvation. The government gave in to the emerging public outcry; but the makeshift remedies with which she tried to defuse the disaster, especially the division of those entitled to assistance into classes, only contributed to increasing the discontent and horror.

Societé des Égaux

The general misery offered Babeuf's attacks on the existing order a surface to attack and made him heard. He gathered a small circle of followers known as the Societé des Égaux (Community of Equals), who met in the Panthéon . In November 1795 he was put on record with the police for publicly preaching riot, revolt and the French constitution of 1793 .

The government let him go for a while while they kept abreast of his activities. The Board of Directors was pleased to continue the socialist agitation in order to deter the population from supporting the royalist movements to overthrow the existing regime. Moreover, the mass of workers - even those of extreme views - were repelled by Babeuf's bloodlust; the police spies reported that his agitation converted many people into supporters of the government. The Jacobin Club of Faubourg Saint-Antoine refused to accept Babeuf and Lebois on the grounds that they were "égorgeurs" (cutthroat in the literal sense). However, as the economic crisis unfolded, Babeuf's influence increased.

After the Pantheon Club of Bonaparte was closed on February 27, 1796, its aggressive activities redoubled. In Ventôse and Germinal he published a new magazine called “Lalande, soldat de la patrie”, the Éclaireur du peuple ou le défenseur de vingt-cinq millions, which was secretly distributed from group to group in the streets of Paris. At the same time, No. 40 of the Tribune caused a huge sensation. In it he praised the perpetrators of the September massacres and proclaimed that a more consistent second September was necessary to crush the current government, which consists of bloodsuckers, tyrants, executioners, villains and charlatans. The plight of all classes continued to be dire; In March, the attempt by the board of directors to replace the assignats with newly issued mandates caused renewed dissatisfaction after initial hopes. The cry rang out that national bankruptcy had been declared, and thousands of the lower working classes began to rally around Babeuf. On April 4, the government was informed that 500,000 people in Paris were in need.

From April 11, posters with the title Analyze de la doctrine de Baboeuf, tribun du peuple were posted in Paris with the opening sentence “La nature a donné à chaque homme un droit égal à la jouissance de tous les biens” (Nature has given every person an equal right to enjoy all goods); it ended with a call to restore the 1793 constitution. Babeuf's song Mourant de faim, mourant de froid (dying of hunger, dying of cold) became a popular tune and was sung in cafes with increasing applause.

Arrest and execution

Reports went around that the discontented troops were ready to take part in an uprising against the government. The Directory now felt it was time to act; through spies, especially Capitain Georges Grisel, sufficient evidence had been gathered for an armed uprising planned by a conspiracy of Jacobins and socialists for the 22nd Floréal IV (May 11th 1796). On May 10, Babeuf and many of his comrades were arrested, including Augustin Alexandre Darthé and Filippo Buonarroti , ex-members of the convent, Robert Lindet , Jean-Baptiste André Amar , Marc Guillaume Vadier and Jean Baptiste Drouet , famous as the postmaster of Saint- Menehould, the Louis XVI. had arrested and was now a member of the Council of Five Hundred .

The last edition of the Tribune appeared on April 24th, but Lebois tried to incite the soldiers to revolt in the Ami du Peuple, and at times there were rumors of a military uprising. The trial of Babeuf and his accomplices was to take place before the newly formed court in Vendôme. On the 10th and 11th of Fructidor (August 27th and 28th), when the prisoners were transferred from Paris, there were hesitant attempts at riot to free them; but these were easily crushed. The attempt by five or six hundred Jacobins (September 7th) to revolt the soldiers at Grenelle was also unsuccessful. The trial of Babeuf and others began on February 20, 1797 and lasted two months. For reasons unknown, the government portrayed the socialist Babeuf as the leader of the conspiracy, even though there were more important people involved than him; his own vanity played into their hands. On the 7th Prairial (May 26, 1797), Babeuf and Darthé were sentenced to death; some of the prisoners, including Buonarroti, were exiled; the rest, including Vadier and his comrades from the convent, were acquitted. According to Barras, Drouet had escaped with the government's tacit consent. Babeuf and Darthé were guillotined on the 8th Prairial in Vendôme .

literature

  • Philipp Buonarroti : Babeuf and the conspiracy for equality, with the process initiated by them and the documents (= International Library. Volume 49). Translated and introduced by Anna and Wilhelm Blos . J. H. W. Dietz Nachf., Stuttgart 1909 ( digitized version ).
  • Hermann Wendel : Review of Philipp Buonarroti, Babeuf and the conspiracy for equality with the trial initiated by them and the pieces of evidence. Translated and introduced by Anna and Wilhelm Blos. Publishing house by JHW Dietz Nachf., Stuttgart (International Library). In: The new time . Weekly of the German Social Democracy. 28.1909-1910, 1st volume (1910), issue 10, pp. 347-348 ( digitized version ).
  • Viktor M. Dalin: Babeuf Studies. Commemorative volume on the occasion of the 200th birthday of Gracchus Babeuf on November 23, 1960 (= Werner Krauss [Hrsg.]: German Academy of Sciences in Berlin. Series of publications of the working group on the history of the German and French Enlightenment. Volume 16). Introduced and ed. by Walter Markov . Akademie-Verlag, Berlin 1961, DNB 450863417 .
  • Karl Hans Bergmann: Babeuf. Equal and unequal. Westdeutscher Verlag, Cologne and Opladen 1965.
  • John Anthony Scott (Ed.): Francois-Noel Gracchus Babeuf, The Conspiracy for Equality. Speech on the legitimacy of resistance (with essays by Herbert Marcuse and Albert Soboul ), Junius Collection, Hamburg 1988, ISBN 3-88506-402-2 .
  • Peter Fischer (Ed.): François Noël Babeuf. The war between rich and poor - articles, speeches, letters. Verlag Klaus Wagenbach, Berlin 1975, ISBN 3-8031-2009-8 .
  • Joachim Höppner, Waldtraud Seidel-Höppner: From Babeuf to Blanqui (= RUB. Volume 645 and 646). 2 volumes. Philipp Reclam jun., Leipzig 1975.
  • Ian Birchall: The specter of Babeuf. Palgrave Macmillan Publisher, Basingstoke 1997, ISBN 0-312-17365-2 .
  • Katharina and Matthias Midell: François Noël Babeuf. Martyrs of equality. Biography. New Life Publishing House, Berlin 1988, ISBN 3-355-00604-1 .
  • Ralf Höller: François Noël Babeuf. The last hero of the French Revolution. In: Same: I am the fight. Rebels and revolutionaries from six centuries (= construction paperback. Volume 8054). Structure of the Taschenbuch-Verlag, Berlin 2001, ISBN 3-7466-8054-9 , p. 105 ff.
  • Françoys Larue-Langlois: Gracchus Babeuf: Tribun du peuple (= Les marginaux ). Le Félin publishing house, Paris 2003, ISBN 2-86645-496-0 .

Literary adaptations

  • Ilja Ehrenburg : The Conspiracy of Equals ( Заговор равных ). Petropolis Publishing House, Berlin 1928.

Web links

Commons : François-Noël Babeuf  - Album with pictures, videos and audio files
Wikisource: Gracchus Babeuf  - Sources and full texts (French)

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ biography of the couple. In: s.bourdreux.free.fr, accessed on January 27, 2020 (French).
personal data
SURNAME Babeuf, François Noël
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Babeuf, Gracchus
BRIEF DESCRIPTION French agitator and journalist
DATE OF BIRTH November 23, 1760
PLACE OF BIRTH Saint Nicaise near Saint-Quentin
DATE OF DEATH May 27, 1797
Place of death Vendôme