Babboof organized a conspiracy to overthrow the directory, which captured him and his fellow conspirators before they ever got the chance to try. The Directory does not want to see a resurrection of the Sankula movement; it also doesn't want to see an explosion of political clubs or sectional assemblies. So in closing down that arena, they radicalize quite a few people who belong to the Pantheon Club and drive them underground. And so it's not long after the Pantheon club is closed that a number of Baba's friends and political allies gather with him and say: Let's rise up and restore the Democratic Constitution of 1793.
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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