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BABEUF'S CONSPIRACY.
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Babeuf's Reply to a Letter signed "M.V," published and addressed the 30th Pluvióse, to Gracchus Babeuf, Tribune of the People.


"In a veritable society there ought to be neither rich nor poor."

"The rich who will not renounce their superfluities in favour of the indigent are enemies of the people."

"The end of the Revolution is to destroy inequality, and to re-establish the happiness of all."

"Articles 7, 8, and 10 of the Analysis of the Doctrine of the Tribune, posted up and proclaimed the 20th of this month of Germinal."

The following truths, addressed in reply to the author of the letter of the 30th Pluviòse, ought to have been published sooner. I am not sorry, however, that particular reasons obliged me to wait till now. The doctrine discussed in this paper is more than ever the order of the day, and I flatter myself that I shall at present attract a reasonable attention to the greatest of all subjects which interest man.

Every true Republican ought to rejoice at the doubts advanced by the Citizen M. V., as to the possibility of executing the system of real equality. If the contest engaged in, touching this supreme point of human regeneration, be supported by the friends of liberty with the same warmth of zeal which they recently evinced in demolishing the scaffolding of feudality and monarchy, it is beyond doubt certain that we shall soon witness the fall of the barbarous system of private properties, and, as a consequence, the re-establishment on earth of the happiness of the Golden Age, and of practical fraternity, which ambition and avarice have hitherto entirely banished from our monstrous societies.

Generous souls!-you who launched into the revoiutionary career, impelled by the sole love of humanity, the time is come for attacking with the thunderbolts of reason, that ever-existing cause of all calamities, of all tyrannies-individual riches. The doctrine we preach has in support of it the cool calculations of philosophy, and the authority of some of the greatest men of antiquity and of our own age. It alone offers a reasonable boundary to the revolution which would be a crime, if in changing the mere form of oppression it left the mulDigitized by Google

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