World revolution Author:Nesta Helen Webster Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III THE CONSPIRACY OF BABEUP Gracchus Babeuf The Panthebnistes Manifesto of the Equals System of Babeuf Plan of the Conspirators The Grea... more »t Day of the People Discovery of the Plot Execution of Babouvistes Illuminism in England Ireland The United Irishmen Bantry Bay Illuminism in America. Francois Noel Babeuf was born in 1762, and at the beginning of the Reign of Terror occupied the post of commissary in the Supply Department of the Commune, where he incurred the displeasure of the Comite de Salut Public by publishing a placard accusing the Committee of a plan to drive the people to revolt by means of a fictitious famine and so provide a pretext for killing them off.1 For this offence Babeuf and his colleagues in the same department were thrown into prison at the Abbaye, but Babeuf, being apparently regarded as mentally irresponsible, was soon afterwards released, and once more proceeded to attack the party in power, which was no other than that of Robespierre, Couthon, and Saint-Just. This is the more remarkable since the political opinions of Babeuf were entirely in accord with those of the Triumvirate; for Robespierre's " Declaration of the Rights of Man " Babeuf entertained the warmest admiration. But where, at this point in his career, Babeuf joined issue with Robespierre was in the method by which this ideal system should be brought about; for the plan of reducing the population of France by some fifteen millions in order to be able to provide bread and work for the remainder, which Babeuf later described as " the immense secret " of the Terror, seemed to him too drastic, and in his pamphlet Sur la depopulation de la 1 Babeuf el le socialisme en 179G, by Edouard Fleury, p. 20. France he denounced the noyades, fusillades, and guillo- ...« less