The man and the Theory

Richard Cobb

Gracchus Babeuf: The First Revolutionary Communist R.B. Rose (Arnold £12.95) Was Babeuf a Communist? What sort of a Communist was he: a backward-looking one concerned to halt urbanisation, to return to a past golden age of innocence and mythical rural collectivism? Or a forwardlooking 'one, already aware of the revolutionary potential of les proMtaires? Was he the initiator of the concept of revolutionary dictatorship? Was he a precursor of Fourier, Blanqui and Bakunin? Or of Marx, Lenin, and Stalin? And so on and SO on. I must say I don't care. But the debate has been going on ever since 1828; and it is likely to acquire new stridency as a result of what deserves to be a definitive study (for this is a very good book); but, unfortunately, nothing about Babeuf is ever definitive. Would that it could be. For Babeuf, even more than Robespierre, simply will not go away; and for les pro/es, these are important questions, objects of theological dispute to be conducted in cellular discussions behind closed and locked doors, in groupuscules consisting of Bill, Bert, Gert, Sid, Pat, Jock, Jim, Jack, Stan, Nan, Dan, Rod, Bob, Jill and Phil, in the smoky chumminess of collective certitude reserved only for the Elect (those who have Christian — sorry, I mean Given — names of one syllable).

Whatever sort of Communist or preCommunist he may have been, the one thing that is clear about Francois-Noel 'Camille' Gracchus' Babeuf (and he called one of his sons `Caius') is that he was the most awful bore. How unrelentingly he could go on; in speech, in whining epistolary arrogance (offering his services where they were not wanted, to one unsuitable, uninterested, but long-suffering person after another — one could not tot up an odder bunch than Dubois de Fosseux, le comte de Lauraguais, Coupe de l'Oise, Fournier l'Americain, le Chevalier Rutledge, Pottofeux, Chaumette, Guffroy, Cambaceres, each of whom, at one time, he latched onto) and above all (alas) in print plugging his message of universal happiness and hate. Think of it: a barrage of pamphlets, 12, 13, 14, 16, 18;20 April 1796; and, before that, a series of newspapers, each with a pretentious title, with a circulation of never more than 500. For, like most bores, he had a limited appeal among fellow-bores; and the map of France that could be based on his abonnes could provide the outline — heavy concentration here, blank there' — of a car tography of crankdom, a many-shaded sottisier national, the regional incidence of dottiness and rancour.

Two hundred years after his birth there was even a Grand Congress of Bores, a colloque of babouvistes, reading one another papers, in, I think, Copenhagen (or was it Loughborough?). At his final trial, when not smashing dinner plates or making a nuisance of himself in some other trying way, or turning his back on the judges (I have said he was very modern in his bloody-mindedness), or (oh mercy!) refusing to speak, because he did not recognise the court, he would, on the contrary, address it for three and a half hours on end. In short, he had the stamina and the single-mindedness of the truly accomplished, full-time,, round-the-clock bore. And, like any true bore, he had a club, several clubs (Chretien, Pantheon, Exclusif — justly named — Archeveche, Cardinaux), most of them in cellars.

Had it not have been for the Revolution, Babeuf would not have had the opportunity to bore more than a very small circle of Picard provincial borabiles. Like other monopolists of the Truth, One and Indivisible he was never in doubt that the Revolution had been put on for his exclusive benefit, in order to provide a vehicle for his Idea. First, he latched onto the publicans of RoYe; next, he latched onto the peasantry of a series of Picard villages; later, he latched onto the revolutionary bureaucracy, while making a snatch at the sansculottes; and, in the end, he was left with a tiny band of fellow-fanatics and (not so secret, but blabbing) conspirators. As he was a muddler and a messer, quick to take offence, insensitive to the nuances of human behaviour, and much given to whining and weedling, the circle of those exposed to his boringness constantly receded, a sort of political peau de chagrin: perhaps a thousand or so in 1789-1790, a few hundred by 1795, only a score or so (many of them police agents) by 1796.

Like the worst sort of bore, Babeuf was convinced that he had found the overall solution to the sufferings of the human condition. This was to be total equality (l'egalite parfaite), which would provide le bonheur commun. One shudders at the mention of bonheur for it had been used by the horrible Saint-Just; but the adjective is even more sinister — as if happiness could ever be collective, or anything other than individual, private, or familial! Happiness was not to be for all. It could only be achieved first of all by a national blood-bath (Babeuf, a chauvinist, reserved his patented happiness for the French; foreigners were not to get a look of it; he was not an internationalist, though the Latter Day-Babouvist-Saints have become so) of all those who were unequal or unworthy, intelligent, well-educated, sophisticated, artistic, rich, lazy, frivolous, indifferent, selfish, private, well-born, well-spoken. highly literate, greedy, vain, sceptical. It was the thought of the blood-bath that kept Babeuf going tlirough a personal Revolution compounded of frustration, successive failures, bungling, pretty ineffective demagogy, a nasty little spot of fraud (that would not go away), and intermittent (and well-earned) spells in prison, while his wife and unfortuniate children starved (the poor mites were even trundled out to starve outside the prison by their mother, babouviste Card-Holder No 2). He was quite upset when, in July 1789, he happened to see the heads of Foulon and de Flesselles on the end of pikes; but he soon got over it. Later, he wrote relishingly of the September Massacres — a dainty dish indeed, for many priests were killed, and he hated Christianity; and before the final — and one could certainly see it coming, anyone but Babeuf and his fellow-fanatics, the sanguinary Darthe and the millenarian former Protestant, Germain — before the final disaster, he was busy working out the Day of the People, a journee to outdo all previousjournies. Not that the People were to be allowed even a hacking or stabbing hand in it, for the job was to be left to small groups of selected (and listed) killers. Babeuf, who for a time in 1793-4, had served on the Paris Food Commission — before that job predictably packed up — had much enjoyed being a bureaucrat; and he had acquired a healthy respect for the Revolutionary Government, itself quite a hand at organised killing. So the Day of the People was to be on the bureaucratic model, and the killing would be directed by local cells.

Even after Their Day, the People would have to wait for at least three months while the cleansing operation got underway. Not all unequals were to be killed; there was a secondary category who were to be sent to labour camps for re-education and equalisation. He thought three months would be enough to get France cleaned up and ready for le bonheur commun, massive bureaucracy and a controlled economy. But he was probably the victim of his persistant optimism. Things that are called temporary (an adjective almost as sinister as commun) tend to go on, especially in a bureaucratic structure, and Babeufs elitist (and secret) rehash of the Revolutionary Dictatorship (which, whatever its horrors, had not been secret: everyone knew the names of the Twelve Who Ruled) would no doubt not have phased itself out On the dot of 12 July 1796. It is an academic point; but, with the experience of the present century, we know more about it.

Babeuf was not quite so single-minded as I have made out. Certainly he was a fanatic and a terrorist full of hate, a muddled, self-educated utopian. But he could, at times, take his mind off his horrid blue-print and he had a much greater enjoyment in life than his contemporary (and latter-day hero) Robespierre. He seems to have been a drinking man, among drinking men (one of the causes of the failure of the inept paper conspiracy); and there is one instance in Professor Rose's book in which he displays a most un-robespierriste sense of humour, in an exceedingly funny speech about the aides. A man so readily popular with publicans must have had some spark; and it is clear that he sometimes took time off from le bonheur commun in the interest of private enjoyment. Nor was he averse to money. though that would go once the System got under way; he was constantly badgering people for payment, constantly on the look-out for even the humblest job under the Revolution. He was not out for prestige. but he needed the money. In this respect. he was quite unlike the other eighteenth-century utopians and revolutionary elitists. For him poverty was a reality, not a theoretical rather desirable state of moral virtue. His children were nearly always hungry; indeed one seems to have died of hunger: and in the winters of 1794 and I 795, they were very cold. Babeuf had had more than a bureaucratic experience of food problems. He had lived amidst the horrors of rural poverty, in the bitter Picard plains; and he knew what hunger could do to a man or a woman. It made him very angry indeed. For this, at least, we should not judge him too harshly. He was not just a theorist, working out his System, dans le secret du cabinet, in front of a blazing fire. He was not d'une seule piece, as his disciples would like him to be; he was a man of contradictions, who, at the time of his death, in his mid-thirties, had not succeeded in sorting himself out.

So we must attempt to separate the man from the Theory, if only because it is the latter that has stalked on, through Buonarroti and the sillier Chartists, Blanqui, to present-day Marxists, of whatever Connection. The Theory might be seen as a sort of poor man's fantasy, a hideous toy, an inventor's plaything, constantly to be tinkered with, readjusted and qualified. As a man. Babeuf provokes pity as well as irritation and horror. He got things so hopelessly wrong, he nearly always misjudged people, he had no tact, and nearly everything he put his hand to came away in it. He would have been much more at home as a character in a Dairy of a Nobody than in a Secret Conspiracy; and, at times, he is not far off being a comic figure. He was not made for success, though he sought it again and again, after each predictable disaster, with a Micawber-like buoyancy and a Picard obtuseness. His concern for his children was touching, even though he succeeded only too well in indoctrinating them with his own impossible ideas, saddling on them a costly militancy that would drive one of the boys to suicide as a young man, and the other and the girl to futile underground activities. His conspiracy was comically inept; and though he elaborated a doctrine of class hate, his hate was somewhat theoretical; he hated categories of people and does not seem to have hated anyone in particular, save perhaps the Directors and some of the Thermidorians, such as Boissy-d'Anglas not the nicest of men. He loved his patient and devoted wife and his children; and there was plenty of fun in him. It is doubtful if even the Minister of Police took his paper conspiracy something that might have been written out in green ink in a score of lined school exercise books seriously, though he was quick to exploit its discovery and to blow it up (in this respect, he was babouviste Card-Holder No 3). And his execution seems completely disproportionate to the sheer mediocrity and silliness of the fellow, born with a comic-sounding surname, and piling comic on comic with self-chosen `Grak' in Russian, so we learn). Surely one does not decapitate a Babeuf much less a Grak? Yet it is so often so with martyrs. The one thing that Babeuf did not muff was the manner of his departure. It is a pity it should have been so, for as a result, like 'Padraig' Pearse (who also dabbed in educational theory), he will not go away. The Directory would have done much better to have sent him to Guyana or the Seychelles Islands where it did send some of the lower-ranking Bores, where he would soon have been forgotton and where local conditions would have been much better suited to le bonheur commun. He could have lived, like Billaud-Varene, in a hut made of palm-leaves, and gone about naked.

Professor Rose thinks Babeuf important natural enough in a biographer but he has written a judicious, sensible, compassionate and very well-researched account of a man who was neither judicious nor sensible, who was in too much of a hurry to carry out careful research, but who, when faced with the poor and the hopeless, was moved to compassion. It was probably what set him off on his disastrous course. His book could not be bettered. It deserves to be Babeufs definitive monument. But there is every reason to fear that it will not be.

THIS WEEK'S CONTRIBUTORS Richard Cobb is Professor of Modem History at Oxford University. His books include A Sense of Place, Tour de France and, most recently, Death in Pans.

Taki Theodoracopulos is preparing a dissertation on the role of women in Greek myth.

Benny Green's last book was Shaw's Heroes.

Alan Watkins is columnist with the Observer and a former political columnist of the Spectator.

Ted VVhitehead's plays include Alpha Beta and Mecca

Richard Ingrams is editor of Private Eye. His most recent book was God's Apology.