Before the revolution, there is an official print network. Cheap paperback books circulate and often bring popularized notions of some enlightenment ideas to a broader audience. There's also an underground literature prohibited books that are smuggled in from other countries. Literacy varies at different parts of France.
Featuring Laura Mason on her book The Last Revolutionaries: The Conspiracy Trial of Gracchus Babeuf and the Equals. Mason discusses Babeuf's call to abolish property, his radically egalitarian conspiracy against the Directory government, and the end of the French Revolution. How a centrist government turned its back on popular democracy, presided over growing inequality and working-class poverty, and abetted the rise of the reactionary right that would ultimately overthrow it.
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