Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition/Babeuf, François-Noel

BABEUF, François-Noel, surnamed by himself ​Gracchus Babeuf, the earliest of the French socialists, was born in 1762, in the department of Aisne. From his father, a major in the Austrian army, he received special instruction in mathematics, but was deprived of him by death at the age of sixteen. Established as a land-surveyor at Eoye, in the Somme department, he became a fervid advocate of the Revolution, and wrote articles in the Correspondant Picard, for which he was prosecuted in 1790. He was acquitted on that occasion, and was afterwards elected an administrator of the department; but a charge of forgery being brought against him, he was condemned by the Somme tribunal to twenty years imprisonment in 1793. Escaping to Paris, he became secretary to the Relief Committee of the Commune, and joined Garin in his denunciation of the Committee of Public Safety. This led to his incarceration, ostensibly under the former sentence. This was, however, annulled by the Court of Cassation; and he was also discharged by the Aisne tribunal (18th July 1794), to which he had been remitted. Returning to Paris, he entered on a violent crusade against the remains of the Robespierre party, and started the Journal de la Liberté de la Presse to maintain his views. In the following year (1795) the Girondists acquired supremacy in the Convention; Babeuf's journal was suspended, and himself imprisoned—first in Paris and then at Arras. Thrown into the society of certain partisans of Robespierre, he was Avon over by them, and was ready, on his release, to become the indiscriminating defender of the very men whom he had previously attacked (No. 34 of the Tribun, as he now called his journal). In April 1796 Babeuf, Lepelletier, and others, constituted themselves a "Secret Directory of Public Safety," and took the title of the "Equals;" while another association of self-styled "Conventionals" and "Patriots" met at the house of Ainar. The latter party aimed at the re-establishment of the revolutionary government, while Babeuf and his friends wanted besides to realise their schemes for the organisation of common happiness. Disputes naturally arose; and to reconcile the Equals and the Patriots, it was agreed, first, to re-establish the constitution of 1793; and secondly, to prepare for the adoption of true equality by the destruction of the Government. Everything was ready by the beginning of May 1796, and the number of adherents in Paris was reckoned at 17,000; but on the 10th the Government succeeded in arresting the main leaders of the plot. The army protected the Government, and the people of Paris looked on. The trial was opened at Vendome on Feb. 2, 1797, and lasted three months. Babeuf and Darthé were sentenced to death; Germain, Buonarroti, and five others, to transportation; Amar, Vadier, Duplay, and the remaining fifty-three, were acquitted. On the announcement of the sentence, Babeuf and Darthé stabbed themselves, but the wounds were, not mortal. They passed a frightful night, and next morning were borne bleeding to the scaffold. Ardent and generous, heroic and self-sacrificing, Babeuf had neither solid knowledge nor steadiness of judgment. "The aim of society is happiness, and happiness consists in equality," is the centre of his doctrine. Propagated under the name of Babouvism, it became the germ of contemporary communism. Babeuf s influence was fatal in a threefold way, because he re-established the memory of Robespierre among French Republicans, connected them with the theories of Rousseau, and paved the way for that school of Socialists which left the lessons of experience and observation for Utopian dreams.