#Gracchus Babeuf

[lohinen]

Original picture

[ianchinich]

"The organization of real equality, the only one that responds to all needs, without causing any victims, without costing any sacrifice, will not at first please everyone. The selfish, the ambitious, will tremble with rage. Those who possess unjustly will cry out about injustice. The loss of the enjoyments of the few, of solitary pleasures, of personal ease will cause lively regret to those heedless of the pain of others. The lovers of absolute power, the henchmen of arbitrary authority, will with difficulty bow their superb heads before the level of real equality. Their shortsightedness will penetrate with difficulty the imminent future of common happiness; but what can a few thousand malcontents do against a mass of happy people"

-Gracchus Babeuf, French Revolutionary and member of the "Conspiracy of Equals", executed 27 May 1797 by the French Directory after a failed revolt.

[transrevolutions]

maximilien robespierre (6 may 1758-6 may 2024) and the ways he's been described. sources for each quotation under the cut.

disclaimer: I don't agree with everything quoted here, and some of them are truly incomprehensibly batshit (looking at you, betty from finance). primary sources are in bold. no discernable order.

wikipedia introduction louis-marie stanislas freron ARBR petition bertrand barere several deputies defended by robespierre germaine de stael mary duclaux peter mcphee georges lefebvre alexandre dubois-crance lazare carnot jonathan israel vladimir lenin alphonse aulard marc bloch citizen garnier (prenom unknown) pierre-joseph cambon manon roland honore mirabeau jeremy popkin sieclesetcieux on tumblr gracchus babeuf ruth scurr marie-helene huet

[nesiacha]

Short note that I will expand upon when I have time (I have other priority projects). Through my posts, and like all of you, we fight against the black legend of Robespierre. However, he is clearly not one of my favorite revolutionaries from the French Revolution period. One of the reason is that while he was quite engaged on some points very important , he was not enough so compared to some actors of the French Revolution.

On slavery, although he was against it, it is unfortunate that he did not go further in supporting the Haitian revolt, unlike Marat or Chaumette, for example. He completely missed the boat regarding women's rights. While as a young lawyer he supported the entry of Louise de Keralio into the Academy of Sciences, Letters, and Arts, he was against women's right to vote and their more active participation in civic life (unlike people like Charles Gilbert Romme, etc.).

On social issues, he went much less far than the Hébertist movement, the group known as the Enragés, Gracchus Babeuf, etc. Moreover, I have often discussed that if Robespierre was demonized, those who were further to the left than him, like the Hébertists, are even more demonized ( except Hebert that I truly dislike like a lot of you, I find them a lot very interesting and I really like Momoro or Hanriot even if it is important to said that Hanriot would be a supporter of Robespierre in the end and will follow in his fall) or outright forgotten (the Enragés or the Babouvists) in popular culture.

This was just a point of view, far from me the idea of bashing, just an explanation of why Robespierre is clearly not in my top 20. He was engaged ,that truth and got admirable qualities I can't deny it ( even if he make a lot of things that we can reproach he and the majority of Convention), but not enough for my taste compared to some of his colleagues. I have the impression that he was always in the middle without going too far in social ideas unlike others.

P.S: In fact, I greatly admire Couthon, who was close to these ideas because despite his increasing and painful paralysis, he showed admirable courage in the retaking of Lyon ( as I said, no one achieves a feat alone; in a revolution only one hero the people). Unlike other envoys on a mission, he did not commit a horrible massacre (unlike Carrier), and his restraint did not come from racketeering or lining his pockets (unlike Tallien). With other people, he demonstrated that one can be effective in functions while being severely handicapped.

[collapsedsquid]

If you ask ChatGPT for the business secrets of Gracchus Babeuf it speaks positively of the things he worked towards but if you ask for the business secrets of Charles I it speaks of him in terms of his failures, his business secrets are all negative., things to avoid I think that this proves that chatGPT is woke.

[piffle-poff]

‘LMAOOOO JD Vance fucked a couch and the right are coping har-‘

You bolt upright. The year is 1796. You are Gracchus Babeuf. You feel more conviction than ever. This future must not come to pass. The directory cannot be allowed to continue, and you cannot allow yourself to fail.

[redsolon]

I suspect people miss my header image and assume its a Greek temple. If you look at the pillars for a second though, you'll see that it's very modern looking, even surreal. It is, in fact, a Serbian monument called "The Mausoleum of Struggle and Victory" from the socialist era. The aesthetic combines Modernism and Neo-Classicism. The photo itself is by Yang Xiao, as part of a series combining artificial lights with decaying socialist-era monuments at night, called "Eternal Monuments in the Dark."

By framing socialist bloc architecture as classical ruins, and placing the democratic revolutions of Greece along side modern socialist revolutions, I'm making a point about historical narratives and associations. Ancient Mediterraneans didn't associate themselves with Northern Europeans, and to this day people are shocked by how "Eastern" Greek culture is. In many ways Islamic culture is more Roman than Western Culture. The Fascist fantasy of the past is just that: a fantasy. A tool they use for their political goals. They homogenize the diversity of Rome, they whitewash Greek statues, and they impose modern Classical music on cultures that wouldn't recognize it.

Liberals talk about how Ancient Greece is the foundation of Western Civilization™️, but they have no greater claim to it than Muslims or Buddhists. (The Greeks got around.) There is nothing in bourgeois political forms that's reminiscent of Athens, except perhaps for their hypocrisy towards their slaves. Many of the things the peasants and proletarians of Greece and Rome fought for were actively despised by Hamilton, Jefferson, and that whole lot of grifters. They hated universal male suffrage, they hated mass assemblies, they hated ballot measures, they hated rotation and sortition, and they hated land reform and debt abolition. They didn't love "the ancients," they loved their aristocrats.

Socialists have long loved the defeated reformers and revolutionaries of the ancient past. The first modern communist called himself "Gracchus Babeuf." What I'm doing isn't special. The point is to take the things the bourgeois order claims it's built on, and show how fake it all is.

One day, the role the Classical Mediterranean plays in the modern superstructure will be replaced by the Socialist Bloc: a defeated experiment whose ruins global Communism will rest on. Their monuments, now covered in graffiti, will one day be visited by tourists the way the Parthenon is, to marvel at their glorious ambitions.

[anotherhumaninthisworld]

Why was Robespierre blamed for everything? I know that a lot of people have criticized the Committee and their deeds, but everyone blames him exclusively, as if he is the only individual in the Committee of public safety. Always blamed for everything that happens while others hardly being mentioned when some of them cause any disaster. I don't say he was a perfect but why him exactly??

And thank you for your precious time.

It’s an interesting question, the answer to which I would say mainly lies in how Robespierre’s personal fame looked compared to that of the other CPS members.

If you’re wondering why Robespierre was blamed for everything by the people who overthrew him, the answer is pretty simple — it was a question of survival. Those who overthrew Robespierre didn’t (mainly) do so because they disagreed with his principles or actions, they did it because they were afraid he had it in for them. Of course, they couldn’t use that as a charge against him (in fact, if you check out the minute for the session during which Robespierre was denounced and arrested, you’ll notice that, besides the confusing charge of being ”a tyrant,” all the concreate things he’s reproached for are mostly small details) and lucky for them, they didn’t have to either, as they found a way to outlaw Robespierre & co, thus avoiding the complications of a trial and Robespierre getting a chance to defend himself. Yet if they had thought that getting rid of Robespierre meant saving their lives, they soon faced a whole new obstacle, because, quite naturally, his death had to be followed by a rejection of everything associated with him. This meant that those who had just overthrown him (who had often been just as implicated in ”the terror” as Robespierre had) were now in danger yet again. They saved themselves a second time by rewriting the past, in order to hold Robespierre (sometimes along with the people executed together with him) as the only culprit(s) for everything that had happened the previous year. To quote the speech held by Tallien on August 28 1794, which is perhaps the most famous one on the subject:

”This was Robespierre’s system. He was the one who put it in practise with the aid of several subalterns, some of whom were killed alongside him and others of whom are buried alive in public hatred. The Convention was a victim, never an accomplice.”

If you want to put a positive spin on it (which I’ve honesty never seen anyone do bc everyone on here REALLY hates that guy), you could argue that by saying this, Tallien was trying to put an end to even more political killings (which the Convention had certainly seen more than enough of already). Because, since every member of the Convention actually had their fair share of the blame for ”the terror,” portraying it as something that should be rejected technically meant everyone needed to be punished. Using Robespierre as a scapegoat was a way to safely back away from what had happened without risking even more political divides (the thermidorians probably feared, just like Robespierre had half a year before them, that these would prove fatal to the struggling republic), and instead declare some sort of amnesty (though it would perhaps be ignorant of me not to mention that the Convention still went on to purge a few of it’s deputies (Collot d’Herbois, Billaud-Varennes, Vadier, Barère, Carrier, Lebon) as ”Robespierre’s accomplices” in the months that followed.

That the thermidorians had such success when painting Robespierre as a tyrant after his death was probably also due to the fact that their image was upheld by people on both the right (see for example Abbé Proyart and his La Vie et les Crimes de Robespierre: surnommé Le Tyran: depuis sa naissance jusqu’à sa mort from 1795) and the left (like Gracchus Babeuf and his Robespierre et les tyrans from 1794)

If you’re wondering why Robespierre in today’s popular culture is more or less blamed for everything that went down during ”the terror,” that is, of course, again, tied to the fact that he was slandered after his death. The saying ”it’s the victor that writes history” rings very true here. If Robespierre had survived thermidor and gotten to write his own history, it’s possible the general image we have of him today would have been completely different. By painting Robespierre as the only one responsible, his enemies could downplay their own actions, and that is to a large extent the reason barely no one remembers their names today, while Robespierre’s has become eternally etched to words like ”terror” and ”guillotine.” 

On the other hand, if the propaganda spread against Robespierre after his death is a key element to understanding why he’s presented as main responsible for ”the terror” today, it’s also not enough to explain everything. It is for example worth remembering that allegations about Robespierre as bloodthirsty/a tyrant/more powerful than the other committee members predated his death and the slander spread after it. To give a few examples of it, after the death of Danton, the Belgian newspaper Courrier Belgique affirmed that ”Robespierre now has gotten rid of some of his most dangerous enemies.” Likewise, on June 21 1794 Robespierre complained about being called ”king of France and Navarre” in ministerial cabinets abroad. In an undated, anonymous letter found among his papers, Robespierre was accused of aiming at dictatorship and described as a ”tiger covered with the purest blood of France,” but he also received letters from locals thanking him exclusively for actions that were really made by the CPS collectively (1, 2). When Cécile Renault was questioned about why she had gone to Robespierre’s house armed with two knives in May 1794, she responded that she ”had only wanted to see what a tyrant looked like.” Finally, in a diary entry from the same day as the execution of Robespierre, a woman already claimed that he had wanted to ”massacre 60 000 men in Paris […] recognize himself as King in Lyon and in other departments and marry Capet's daughter.” That allegations like these existed is not all that weird, because even though they technically weilded the same amount of power, Robespierre was still way more famous than the other CPS members, and dare I say the other members of the Convention. Robespierre was a ”man of myth” even before his death, and towards the end of his life weilded an influence that his collagues simply didn’t share. Robespierre can also be called somewhat of the ideologue of the Committee, while many of his collegues kept a more private profile during their time on there. Although everyone was instrumental to keeping ”the terror” going, Robespierre went further by also justifying and making sense of it in his famous speech on February 5th 1794. All of this combined has lead to even modern historians who I would argue hold a balanced or even symphathetic view of Robespierre admitting that he can still be said to have been ”a (CPS) member without portfolio” (McPhee 2010), ”the first of twelve” (Leuwers, 2014) and even that the claim that Robespierre exercised a dictatorship of opinion at the Convention ”certainly isn’t false.” (Jourdan, 2016)

So my answer to why he’s so often exclusively blamed for what went down in 1793 and 1794 is that it’s because he became the figurehead of that era. He partly achived this status while still alive, through his own actions, thoughts and fame, and partly after his death, through his colleagues using his reputation as a handkerchief to remove the blood from their own hands. This doesn’t mean it’s factually correct to hold Robespierre as the only one responsible for ”the terror,” but it is nevertheless something that tends to happen with figureheads.

[citizen-card]

Link Gracchus Babeuf and Matthew Hopkins

Hopkins went around hunting witches with female assistants (clearly this means he supported women's rights like Babeuf did)

Hopkins used torture on suspected witches. Babeuf supported using torture on political opponents (we know this because he likes Robespierre, who used long boring speeches as a form of torture against deputies

[whencyclopedia]

Gracchus Babeuf & the Conspiracy of Equals

On 10 May 1796, in the later stages of the French Revolution (1789-1799), a group of leftwing agitators were arrested in Paris, charged with plotting to overthrow the French Directory. After a series of trials, two of them were guillotined and seven were deported, and the extremist Jacobins were once again kept from regaining power in France.

The Trial of Babeuf

Unknown (Public Domain)

Continue reading...

[nesiacha]

During the night of September 9 to 10, 1796: The Affair of the Grenelle Camp

Attaque du camp de Grenelle par des conspirateurs : le 24 Fructidor, An 4.eme de la République. Paris, BnF, département des estampes et de la photographie, 1802.

Hundreds of people, including a number of Babouvists, headed towards the Grenelle camp to try to incite the garrison to revolt. It didn’t work, and they were killed. The survivors and others identified as Babouvists would later be judged by a military commission, which, according to historian Jean-Marc Schiappa, appeared quite illegal, and whose judgments would eventually be overturned.

Here is a text excerpt from Schiappa: "Unlike the events of Prairial Year III, Vendémiaire Year IV, or the mutiny of the Police Legion, no real threat (in the military sense) existed here. Military means were used to crush a political opposition that had demonstrated it was disarmed. This is a form of coup d'état, the first in a long series under the Directory."

The most famous people executed were General Maximilien Henri Nicolas Jacob and three former convention members: Claude Javogues (apparently shot while singing the Marseillaise), Joseph-Marie Cusset (one of the last ‘Crêtois’), and Marc-Antoine Huguet. Among those sentenced to death were the former mayor Antoine-Marie Bertrand (despite several favorable testimonies on his behalf, apparently) and the painter Jean-Nicolas-Victor Gagnant. In total, around 30 people were executed by firing squad.

Here is an excerpt from historian Jean Tulard: "The Affair of the Grenelle Camp is the decisive episode of the Conspiracy of the Equals, led by Gracchus Babeuf. This former feudalist, who dreamed of an agrarian communism, was preparing a plot in collaboration with former Montagnards. After the failure of the Germinal and Prairial uprisings of Year III (April 1 and May 20, 1795), it was necessary to abandon the idea of a popular uprising because the suburbs were disarmed. The Babouvists, who had made contacts within a force responsible for maintaining order in Paris—the Police Legion—hoped for a military uprising in the Grenelle camp against the Directory. The denunciation by Grisel, an officer involved in the conspiracy, allowed the Minister of Police, Cochon de Lapparent, to orchestrate a massive crackdown on the 21st of Floréal Year IV (May 10, 1796). Babeuf and his key accomplices were arrested. The last supporters of the Equals tried, during the night of 23 to 24 Fructidor (September 9-10), to incite the soldiers of the Grenelle camp to revolt. Carnot, a member of the Directory at the time, and Cochon de Lapparent allowed the insurrection to develop before deploying the cavalry. Several people were killed on the spot, and thirty were executed. Babouvism was crushed. Its missteps, especially in the Grenelle affair where it was manipulated by provocateurs, were harshly criticized by Marx."

I will conclude with a quote from Jean-Marc Schiappa: "The coup at Grenelle is measurable: the Directory developed a taste for the army, and the sword that Sieyès would seek in Brumaire had already struck," and he adds, "the episode at Grenelle is also a turning point in the history of the Directory"

P.S: What I find in Gallica Trial of twenty-five individuals from the Grenelle Camp affair but it is in french sorry :( https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k41290c/f4.item

[strixhaven]

there’s guys in history just called shit like gracchus babeuf and billings learned hand but people still have the audacity to say that modern trans people’s names are weird

[yespat49]

Découvrir toute l'horreur des guerres de Vendée en lisant "Du système de dépopulation" de Gracchus Babeuf 1795

Fin 1795, Gracchus Babeuf publie, à l’occasion du procès de Jean-baptiste Carrier (l’auteur des noyades de Nantes), un livre doublement révolutionnaire par son titre et par son contenu : “Du système de dépopulation“. Il y fait un réquisitoire impitoyable contre la politique dictatoriale des conventionnels et de Robespierre en 1793 et 1794, qui devait conduire, entre autres, à l’anéantissement et…

[moja-co]

39 名前：サイベリアン(茨城県) [SE][] 投稿日：2023/07/31(月) 16:47:57.74 ID:y/9hU9HH0 [1/4] 暴力革命を成し遂げたフランスは 共産主義者にとって 憧れの聖地みたいなもんだ

46 名前：ユキヒョウ(茸) [ﾆﾀﾞ][sage] 投稿日：2023/07/31(月) 16:51:00.12 ID:nqwd8lGd0 >>39 当時共産主義ねえよバカウヨw

61 名前：アビシニアン(千葉県) [AU][sage] 投稿日：2023/07/31(月) 17:01:32.05 ID:heE99sRy0 [2/3] >>46

フランソワ・ノエル・バブーフ （François Noël Babeuf, 1760年11月23日 – 1797年5月27日）は、 フランスの革命家、思想家である。 通称グラキュース・バブーフ（Gracchus Babeuf）。 平等社会の実現を目指して私有財産制を否定し、 いわゆる「バブーフの陰謀」を企てたが、失敗して処刑された。 「共産主義」や「独裁」という用語を 現代の意味で初めて使用した人物の一人であり、革命は少数の革命家による権力奪取と 革命独裁によってのみ実現可能と主張して 後の共産主義思想に大きな影響を与え、 「共産主義の先駆」とも呼ばれる。

役にたちましたか？

[piffle-poff]

Gracchus babeuf would have loved jojos bizzare adventure I just know it

[whencyclopedfr]

Gracchus Babeuf et la Conjuration des Égaux

Le 10 mai 1796, dans les dernières phases de la Révolution française (1789-1799), un groupe d'agitateurs de gauche fut arrêté à Paris, accusé de comploter dans l'intention de renverser le Directoire français. Après une série de procès, deux d'entre eux furent guillotinés et sept déportés, et les Jacobins extrémistes furent une nouvelle fois empêchés de reprendre le pouvoir en France.

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