The Last Revolutionaries: The Conspiracy Trial of Gracchus Babeuf and the Equals by Laura Mason

Abstract

Situating the trial of Gracchus Babeuf and his co-conspirators in its poisonous political setting, Mason provides a new perspective on the French Revolution’s downfall. She examines the Conspiracy of Equals and the show trial of the man whom Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels considered the first revolutionary communist, given maximum publicity by the corrupt ruling Directory in hopes of rallying public opinion for their centrist regime. Mason seeks to write “a history of the French Revolution for the twenty-first century,” worried about rising authoritarianism, faltering judicial integrity, and the erosion of democratic institutions (5).In this fluent narrative history, the first book about the Directory era readily available for wide reading, Mason places Babeuf in his historical context. After a brief overview of Babeuf’s rise from a feudal notary’s apprentice to a Paris-provisioning official and subsequent imprisonment after the Thermidor Coup against Robespierre and his allies, Mason turns to the troubled history of the Directory regime’s attempt to combat polarization on both the neo-Jacobin left and pseudo-royalist right while its own ranks became beset with corruption, careerism, and authoritarian manipulation. The content of Babeuf’s conspiracy, and even the trial, receive little detailed attention; instead, Mason examines how the Directory enthusiastically publicized the Conspiracy of Equals as a scare tactic against the political left, first publishing its papers and then paying stenographers to transcribe the courtroom proceedings and thus ensure the fullest possible coverage in France’s newspapers. Opposition papers, however, treated the Equals as heroes. An able scholar of French Revolutionary print culture, Mason’s extensive research captures the press’ vibrancy during an often-overlooked period. The book successfully explores the Directory’s bizarre politics and its ultimate failure, as regime candidates were badly trounced in the next election. Rather than seeking compromise thereafter, Directors undertook several coups to stay in power, before ultimately being unseated during and after Napoleon Bonaparte’s 18 Brumaire seizure of power in 1799.Though effectively deconstructing the trial’s political context, Mason pays surprisingly little attention to Babeuf’s ideas about equality or to the complex but powerful meanings that revolutionary conceptions had assumed over the revolution’s radical phase. She dismisses fellow conspirator Filippo Buonarotti’s memoir about Babeuf as hagiography without detailed refutation. She claims that Babeuf “misread” Enlightenment philosophers’ egalitarian writings, but she refrains from discussing the processes of creative adaptation and inspiration that had marked revolutionary thought (172). The Babeuf of this history seems little more than the Directory’s discursive creation.Mason also attempts to smother any hopes for either the Conspiracy of Equals or the Neo-Jacobin left, claiming that “the French Revolution was [already] over and the people had been defeated.” Yet even the dismantling of radical networks since Thermidor did not necessarily doom future movements, given the spontaneous uprisings that had marked the revolution’s earlier phases (100–101). She also seeks to distance Babeuf from the “neo-Babouvists” of the 1840s who helped to inspire Marx (227). The Last Revolutionaries is a dispiriting title for anyone interested in Babeuf’s legacies. Her avoidance of the revolution’s continued radical potential risks falling into the Directory’s own centrist trap.