The Talk of the Town: Information and Community in Sixteenth-Century Switzerland by Carla Roth

Abstract

Mason pays surprisingly little attention to Babeuf ’s ideas about equality or to the complex but powerful meanings that revolutionary conceptions had assumed over the revolution’s radical phase. She dismisses fellow conspirator Filippo Buonarotti’s memoir about Babeuf as hagiography without detailed refutation. She claims that Babeuf “misread” Enlightenment philosophers’ egalitarian writings, but she refrains from discussing the processes of creative adaptation and inspiration that had marked revolutionary thought (172). The Babeuf of this history seems little more than the Directory’s discursive creation. Mason also attempts to smother any hopes for either the Conspiracy of Equals or the Neo-Jacobin left, claiming that “the French Revolution was [already] over and the people had been defeated.” Yet even the dismantling of radical networks since Thermidor did not necessarily doom future movements, given the spontaneous uprisings that had marked the revolution’s earlier phases (100–101). She also seeks to distance Babeuf from the “neo-Babouvists” of the 1840s who helped to inspire Marx (227). The Last Revolutionaries is a dispiriting title for anyone interested in Babeuf ’s legacies. Her avoidance of the revolution’s continued radical potential risks falling into the Directory’s own centrist trap.