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culottes, the “Paris mob” who allied, sometimes uneasily, with the property-owning

Jacobins. His beliefs were influenced by Rousseau. He demanded radical measures to
help the poor such as price controls and an end to private property. But when the
Revolutionary government drifted more and more to the right, Babeuf tried to
overthrow it, in the armed “Conspiracy of the Equals” (1796). Quotations from his
writings were posted on hundreds of placards all around Paris, and replaced as fast
as opponents could tear them down:
• “All must put up with an equal amount of work, and draw from it an equal
amount of goods”

• “No one can, without committing a crime, exclusively expropriate the goods of
the earth or of industry”
• “Unhappiness and slavery flow from inequality, and the latter from property”
• Property is the greatest of society’s plagues. It is a veritable public offence”

• “The goal of the revolution is to destroy inequality and restore common
happiness.”

The Conspiracy failed; all were caught, tried and guillotined. One, Philippe
Buonarroti, survived and continued to preach “Babeuvism” into the 1830’s. Marx
may have first encountered communism from him. Babeuf had called himself an
“egalitarian”; he is now seen as a proto-socialist, communist and anarchist. The big
difference was that during the French Revolution there was as yet no large

proletariat.

th
What stages did 19 century socialism go through?
th
Socialism in the 19 century faced numerous obstacles: the hostility of the owners of
wealth, property and capital; their ability to have socialist organisations made illegal;
the difficulties and dangers of operating as conspirators; and a lack of agreement

among socialists themselves about how their ideals should be implemented. Broadly
th
speaking, 19 century socialism passed through several phases:
1. The Utopian socialists - mostly French; “Utopian” was an insult used by their
later opponents
2. The Anarchists - this began as a version of socialism but broke away as a
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separate movement in the later 19 century
3. The Marxists - inspired by German exiles and revolutionaries Karl Marx and
Frederick Engels from the 1840’s; later thinkers re-interpreted their ideas so it

was said that Marx wouldn’t consider himself a Marxist
4. The Revisionists - mostly German, they modified Marxism after 1848 to make
it more gradualist and reformist than revolutionary