As the trial was coming to an end in 1797, voters went to the polls and the election delivered a reactionary landslide. But you write that the French Revolution was already over well before the equals even launched their conspiracy. And that's because the Jacobins had repressed in demobilized popular power.
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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