Autograph letter signed by Gracchus Babeuf, dated 8 Pluviôse [Year II] (27 January 1794). Two and a half pages on a reused bifolium, the letter written around an earlier inscription by Babeuf: “Histoire des Conspirations et des Conspirateurs du Département de la Somme ; Qui comprend celle des Persécutions et des quatre Procès criminels intentés, depuis 89, à un second Marat, son émule dans le Département”. 

Published (except for the title Histoire des Conspirations…, omitted in the description of the letter) in Victor Advielle, Histoire de Gracchus Babeuf et du babouvisme d’après de nombreux documents inédits, vol. I, 1884, pp. 101-102.

An extraordinary torrent of curse words by the revolutionary and proto-communist Gracchus Babeuf to his eldest son, who would later help spread his ideas. Babeuf writes on a reused leaf bearing the full title of one of his lost works hitherto known only in part: ”History of the Conspiracies and Conspirators of the Department of the Somme; Comprising that of the Persecutions and the Four Criminal Trials Brought, against a Second Marat, his Emulator in the Department, since ‘89”.

Published (except for the title Histoire des Conspirations…, omitted in the description of the letter) in Victor Advielle, Histoire de Gracchus Babeuf et du babouvisme d'après de nombreux documents inédits, vol. I, 1884, pp. 101-102. 

An extraordinary torrent of curse words by the revolutionary and proto-communist Gracchus Babeuf, addressed to his eldest son, who would later help disseminate babouvism. Babeuf writes on a reused leaf bearing the full title of one of his lost works hitherto known only in part.

"8 pluviôse [Year II].
The great joy of little Emile’s father.
To see that the damned pox is clearing off faster than it came, and leaving my child in peace. His [My] good advice to the little survivor so that the blasted thing does not come back from stuffing himself, and so that he does not stick his fingers so much into the cursed pustules, making himself uglier than a filthy backside.
Ah! damn it, I said all along that the blasted smallpox had only a few more days to torment you. That cursed illness meant to drag you into the grave. What a damned sight you would have made. But we have thoroughly outwitted that foul, aristocratic creature. We stood our ground, showed her we were strong enough to care nothing for her; we swallowed the elderberry and all the other remedies required, and the wretch was forced to leave our body, where she meant to stifle us. Ah, accursed jade, we care not a damn for you now. You may think to trouble us still by imagining that we shall eat like gluttons before you are quite in the devil’s hands, or that we shall scratch ourselves to look uglier than any sorry cur. You lie through your teeth, wicked brute. We shall do all that is needed to keep you from playing us any further tricks, and may the devil take you forever, damn it.
Babeuf" 

Robert Babeuf (called Émile in homage to Rousseau’s essay on education) was eight and a half years old when he received this letter from his father. Babeuf understood the social stakes of education and was an attentive tutor to his eldest son, who was to belong to an entirely new generation of citizens. In early 1794, Emile received from his father —then imprisoned in Paris — lessons in pedagogy, morality, and spelling, all in an affectionate tone.

The present letter alone displays this utterly singular style in Babeuf’s writings, riddled with insults and drawing an explicit analogy between the nobility and the smallpox afflicting his son. It is also one of the very few letters to his son not in Moscow or in the archives of the Somme.

This astonishing torrent of words has often been likened to the style of Père Duchesne, the newspaper of the sans-culotte Jacques-René Hébert, whose influence Babeuf shared at this time. The letter was written just weeks before Hébert’s downfall, which led him to the guillotine on 4 Germinal Year II (24 March 1794). Imprisoned, Babeuf escaped the purge of the Hébertistes before being released in July. Noël Charavay, autograph dealer and leading specialist on Babeuf, held that Emile acted as his father’s messenger when Babeuf felt himself under surveillance: this letter so unlike the benevolent advice Babeuf usually sent his son could therefore have been coded and bear a hidden meaning.

A second marat

Denouncing the grain-monopolists of Picardy, Babeuf had already been imprisoned three times before once again finding himself in the Parisian gaols. His unwavering support for peasant and workers’ revolts had won him many enemies and spurred him to prepare a major defence memorandum recounting his long struggle for fiscal equality and the rights of rural communities in Roye and Bulles. As Alfred Espinas notes, “It was during Year II that Babeuf’s attention began to turn to the idea of conspiracy. One of his biographers claims to have seen, ready for the press, a manuscript of an Histoire des Conspirations et des Conspirateurs du département de la Somme, which Babeuf is said to have written at this time.” Might this notion of conspiracy have led to Babeuf’s own uprising against the Directory, the famous Conspiracy of the Equals?

Contrary to Advielle, who claimed to have seen “the manuscript prepared for printing” of this work, scholars agree that the text remained unfinished. The present letter is, in all likelihood, the only document to bear the full title of this work that never saw publication. Babeuf had written it on the leaf before crossing it out entirely when reusing the paper to write to his son. No biographer has cited the second part of this title: “Qui comprend celle des Persécutions et des quatre Procès criminels intentés, depuis 89, à un second Marat, son émule dans le Département”. In this unpublished part, he adopts yet another epithet, that of a “second Marat” resurrected and ready to carry forward the fight for sacred equality.

The most provocative letter ever written by Gracchus Babeuf, in a deliberately ‘exaggerated’ Hébertiste tone, preserving the trace of an unfinished work.