When Bebof is released from prison, he learns that his daughter starved to death. Her mother left her alone with a pot of cooked potatoes and she ate them all. She lingered for two months and she died. He didn't know any of this when he was in the Arras prisons,. Because the authorities in theArras prisons were holding all of his mail. So Bebof learned that while he was thinking about a new way to guarantee social equality.
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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