Advocate of substantive equality in the Conspiracy of the Equals
Born François-Noël Babeuf, he was a journalist and activist during the French Revolution who challenged inequalities of property and living conditions beyond legal equality. He participated in the 1796 Conspiracy of the Equals against the Directory, was arrested and was executed in 1797. Sylvain Maréchal wrote the Manifesto of the Equals; it is neither a text authored by Babeuf nor a record of enacted policy. Later socialists received and transformed this legacy rather than simply inheriting an unchanged doctrine.
The Equals against the Directory
Babeuf held that the legal equality proclaimed in 1789 had not resolved poverty, property inequality, or political exclusion. Under the Directory he used journalism and clandestine organisation to argue for equality in subsistence and a more radical reordering of land and property. Here equality meant more than equal opportunity: it made unequal conditions of life a political question.
The Conspiracy of the Equals of 1796 aimed to overthrow the Directory and establish a common economic order, but it was detected before it could be carried out. Sylvain Maréchal wrote the manifesto, and the movement itself contained differences over its language and strategy. Babeuf should therefore not be made the sole author of the whole declaration or the founder of an already realised communism. Later socialist and communist traditions received its language of material equality, but developed their theories of organisation, state, and class under different conditions.