In the 20th century, scholars were interested in how revolutions come about. They wanted to know what drives a population to attack their existing government and overturn it. The French Revolution offers us an important example of how a republic by attacking popular democracy brings itself down.
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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