There are shortages of sugar and coffee because of colonial insurrections. France also goes to war against Prussia and Austria in the spring of 1792. And when they do that, France's very lucrative colonial sugar trade collapses. The debate has a particular edge because one of the groups they're most concerned to respond to are radical workers in Paris.
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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