This study of Babeuf as a political thinker, based on an analysis of his extensive writings, and on scholarship unavailable in English, shows him to be a major precursor of the modern revolutionary socialist tradition. The first part traces Babeuf's political evolution in the context of the French Revolution; the second examines his changing reputation among subsequent historians. The final section assesses the originality of his thought, showing him to be neither a Jacobin nor a Utopian.

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OF all the leading actors in the great drama of the French Revolution, there is probably none less known to the average reader of history than the subject of the present volume. The Revolution, properly speaking, had run its course before Babeuf appeared on the scene. The principal leaders were fallen or dispersed, the ragged levies of the people's quarters of St Antoine and St Marceau had risen en masse for the last time, and had been beaten and disarmed by the forces of the new governing class that had installed itself in the seats of the old royal and feudal authorities. François Noel Babeuf, the subsequent Gracchus, played no political role of any importance while the Revolution was at its zenith. His name became first prominent in the year IV. (1795), when the Society, which later on met near the Pantheon, was formed. The usual fate of secret movements, of conspiracies, overtook Babeuf's. It was killed by treachery - killed, as its promoters fondly believed, on the eve of success. In a word, the movement was a failure, and its memory with the great world soon tended to pass into oblivion. Nevertheless, for students of the earlier democratic movements, and of the precursors of modern Socialism, the agitation of Babeuf in the last decade of the eighteenth century must be of keen interest.