Neo-Babouvism

Neo-Babouvism is a term commonly used to designate a revolutionary communist current in French political theory and action in the nineteenth century.

It hearkened back to the 'Society of the Equals' of Gracchus Babeuf and his associates, who tried to overthrow the Directory at the end of the French Revolution. Babeuf's programme of radical Jacobin republicanism and economic collectivism was propagated after his execution by Philippe Buonarroti, who had been associated with the 'Society of the Equals' but had survived. Buonarroti's writings influenced many French revolutionaries in the 1830s and '40s, among them Théodore Dézamy, Albert Laponneraye, Richard Lahautière and Jacques Pillot. The Neo-Babouvists represented the extreme left wing of the Neo-Jacobin republican movement. Many of them participated in the revolutionary events of the nineteenth century, such as the Revolution of 1848 and the Paris Commune. They provided a link between the utopian communism of the French Revolution and Marxism. Louis-Auguste Blanqui is sometimes also grouped with the followers of Babeuf, and Babouvists and Blanquists were often allies (for example in the Paris Commune). However, Blanqui regarded himself as a political descendant of Jacques Hébert and his followers, not of Babeuf, and he had no organisational ties to the societies of the Babouvists. He also lacked the clear committment to economic communism of the Babouvists. The writings of Buonarroti and through them the doctrines of Babeuf also had a considerable influence on some socialists within the British Chartist movement, notably on James Bronterre O'Brien.

Neo-Babouvism largely disappeared in the second half of the nineteenth century, although an echo of it may be found in the small non-Marxist Alliance Révolutionnaire Communiste that existed briefly in the 1890s.