François-Noël Babeuf Quotes

The husband and the wife must be equal.

Relearning and more difficult than learning.

Prior to the middle of the nineteenth century, the ideal of equality was an aspiration that occasionally produced social violence but lacked both a theory and a strategy. Thus, in seventeenth-century England, Gerrard Winstanley, the leader of a radical group called the Diggers, exhorted his followers to seize the commons and turn them into arable land. He formulated something like a communistic doctrine that denounced commerce in land or its product. During the French Revolution, a century and a half later, the French radical François-Noël Babeuf organized a “Conspiracy for Equality,” which called for the socialization of all property. Neither man, however, had a doctrine capable of demonstrating how the kind of social revolution he advocated would come into being. The same held true of socialist idealists active in the early nineteenth century, such as the Comte de Saint-Simon and Charles Fourier, who pinned their hopes on persuading the rich to part with their wealth.

François-Noël Babeuf, the self-educated son of a gabellou and himself a man whose business it was before 1789 to show the rich how they might become richer by squeezing the peasants for feudal dues, did somehow produce the first modern and coherent communist political strategy.

N'impose pas non plus silence à ce sexe qui ne mérite pas qu'on le méprise.

Le vrai Citoyen préfère l'avantage général à son avantage.

Nul ne peut par l'accumulation de tous les moyens priver l'autre de l'instruction nécessaire pour son bonheur; l'instruction doit-être commune.

Education is a monstrosity when it is unequal, when it is the exclusive patrimony of one class of the society; because it then becomes the controlling hand of this class, a mass of mechanisms, a provision of weapons of all kinds, with the aid of which the ruling class combats the other, which is disarmed.

We shall distinguish in Robespierre two men, apostle of liberty, and Robespierre the most infamous of tyrants.

No one can by the accumulation of all mediums deprive others of the instruction necessary for their happiness; the instruction must be communal.

Il ne s'est jamais rien fait de grand dans le monde que par le courage et la fermeté d'un seul homme qui brave les préjugés de la multitude.

La propriéte est odieuse dans son principle et meurtrière dans ses effets.

The knowledge of feudal practices is the reason why I was perhaps the most formidable scourge of feudalism.

Admitting inequality is subscribing to a depravity of the species.

I vow to call a priest, in other words, charlatans, impostors, all those whom I shall see deviate from the line of the rights of man.