There is a police force that they have established in Paris that's supposed to keep public order. And when the directory tries to send the police to join armies fighting at the front, the police revolt. So there is this kind of growing fear, not just on the part of the government, but within the press as well.
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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