Autograph letter signed “ta merre famme Babeuf” by Marie-Anne Babeuf, addressed to her son Émile. 3 pages on a bifolium.

An exceedingly rare and unpublished letter written from prison by Marie-Anne Victoire Babeuf (née Langlet), a revolutionary and wife of the celebrated leader of the Conspiracy of Equals, Gracchus Babeuf.

This appeal from a modest chambermaid turned political activist dates precisely from a period of her life about which almost nothing is known. For want of sources, few of Babeuf’s biographers have concerned themselves with the fate of this woman, remembered only as a wife and then a widow. This disillusioned letter to her son is one of her very few known letters after her husband’s execution.

The daughter of a humble ironmonger from Amiens, Marie-Anne was twenty-six when she married the famous forerunner of communism and “formalized a partnership that would be exceptional in any age for its mutual respect and profound loyalty.” (Laura Mason, The Last Revolutionaries). She played an active role in Babeuf’s revolutionary activities, distributing and managing subscription campaigns of his journal Le Tribun du Peuple alongside her son Emile, the recipient of this letter. Against a backdrop of food shortages, rising prices, and mounting repression of the sans-culottes, Marie-Anne tirelessly denounced the betrayal of the ideals from 1793, notably the principle of equality and the right to subsistence.

On charges of complicity, the Thermidorian government sent her to the Petite Force, a prison for female criminals and women of ill repute, where “they deprived her of food to force her to reveal her husband’s hiding place. But they had underestimated their prey. The tribune’s wife was as resolute as the tribune himself and gave up nothing” (Laura Mason). She shared her husband’s convictions whose Conspiracy of Equals also encompassed the equality of the sexes: “Let your wives take part in the affairs of the nation; they are capable of more than one might think for its prosperity” Babeuf had proclaimed in a essay on equality and women’s political rights. Marie-Anne’s involvement came at immense personal cost: she lost a child to hunger, and managed clandestine communication with the babouvists during her husband’s repeated imprisonments which also forced her to work odd jobs to support the household.

In 1796, the Directory executed Babeuf and dismantled his Conspiracy of Equals; by 1801, Bonaparte was moving to eliminate what remained of the Babouvist circle. The royalist assassination attempt known as the “machine infernale” affair provided a pretext to incriminate the republican and neo-Jacobin left. Marie-Anne, by then working as a street hawker of clothing and trinkets in Paris, was still active in the movement and was arrested along with dozens of other former companions of Babeuf. This letter dates from this second detention, held this time at the prison des Madelonettes, as indicated in her manuscript heading. Her confinement proved considerably longer than the first: “So you do not know that it has been forty-three days since I have been here without being questioned” she writes in erratic spelling, imploring her sixteen year old son Émile to come to her aid.

Marie-Anne literacy has been a matter of scholarly debate. Even Babeuf claimed his wife couldn’t read or write to protect her from police repression. Yet this letter and the few others we know of attest to the contrary. Betraying her humble origins, they are “ill-written, riddled with errors, in a simplistic spelling” (Legrand, Babeuf et ses compagnons de route).

The present letter is wholly consistent with this phonetic style, like that of many poor women of the time who had little access to education. The couple left behind fragments of their correspondence. Far more letters from Babeuf to his wife survived than her own replies. After her husband’s execution, according to Robert Legrand, only four letters in Marie-Anne’s hand are known to survive until her own death (which probably occurred sometime after 1840). This letter takes its place among an exceptionally limited corpus of manuscripts, which remain the only direct sources into the life of this egalitarian militant.

She owed her imprisonment to none other than Joseph Fouché in an ironic twist of fate since Fouché had counted for a time among Babeuf’s circle. But Babeuf had swiftly denounced his machinations after Fouché had attempted to corrupt him. After the Revolution, eager to demonstrate his newfound loyalty to Bonaparte, Fouché himself made the list of Babouvist suspects to be imprisoned, on which Marie-Anne’s name appeared. In this letter she nonetheless charges her son to seek help from the very man who imprisoned her:

“Go and see Minister Fouché, and ask him to whom you must apply to find out why I have been thrown in here without knowing why. I want you to write me the truth, for every letter you have written me until now has been altogether worthless [...] so you would have me rot here without knowing why” Her young son Caïus, born just months before Babeuf’s execution, shared her cell. One can only imagine her state after more than a month of confinement with an infant without any information. Babeuf’s biographers who mention her misfortunes do not record the date of her release — only this letter sheds some light on this episode of political repression she endured. But the persecution did not end there: in June 1808, her home was searched during the first conspiracy of General Malet. The police seized her papers along with those of Émile. After this final episode, nothing further is known of her life which did not spare her the deaths of two of her sons, one during the fall of Paris in 1814, the other by suicide in 1815.

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Scarce letter by a neglected Revolutionary and egalitarian militant, addressed to her son who later disavowed her origins and attempted to rewrite his family’s history: “It is false that my mother was a chambermaid” wrote Emile who had been renamed by his father after Rousseau’s celebrated treatise on education.