Top 15 François-Noël Babeuf Quotes

Babeuf was made a public example by being taken to Vendôme in a cage—an indignity which not long before had filled the Parisians with fury when the Austrians had inflicted it on a Frenchman. His defense, which lasted for six sittings at the court and fills more than three hundred pages, is an impressive and moving document. Babeuf knew well that he was facing death and the Revolution was doomed. .. His defense is like a summary of the unrealized ideas of the Enlightenment and a vindication of their ultimate necessity. And it has moments of grandeur which it is not absurd to compare to Socrates' Apology.

The ultimate ideal of Babeuf and his Conspiracy was absolute equality. Nature, they claimed, calls for perfect equality; all inequality is injustice: therefore community of property was to be established. ... In the ideal communist society sought by the Conspiracy, private property would be abolished, and all property would be communal and stored in communal storehouses. From these storehouses, the goods would be distributed “equitably” by the superiors — apparently, there was to be a cadre of “superiors” in this oh so “equal” world!

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.

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.

Je fais vœu de d'appeler prêtre c'est-à-dire charlatans, imposteurs tous ceux que je verrai dévier de la ligne des droits de l'homme.

We must advance ... because Christianity and freedom are incompatible

Il faut avancer... parce que le christianisme et la liberté sont incompatibles

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

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.

L'éducation est une monstruosité lorsqu'elle est inégale, lorsqu'elle est le patrimoine exclusif d'une portion de l'association; puisqu'alors elle devient la main de cette portion, un amas de machines, une provisions d'armes de toutes sortes, à l'aide desquelles cette première portion combat l'autre qui est désarmé.

There has never been anything great done in the world except through the courage and resolve of one man who defies the prejudices of the multitude.

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.

... children of ignorance, who have at all times made the misfortunes of the human races.