ABSTRACT
Egalitarianism carried the important implication that the communist ideal was a Universalist one and suited all of humanity, which is what French communists surely believed. In Francois-Noel Babeuf’s imagination, communist France remained an armed fortress rather than an army on the march. Internationally, France had been fighting a series of wars with Britain over a hundred years, from 1688 to 1783, with, overall, unfavourable outcomes. The constitutionalist political system of the country that had been able to outgun France despite its much smaller population became an object of fascination for the French Enlightened public. With the French Revolution, egalitarianism turned from ideal to reality. The French Revolution had an ambiguous effect on communist thinking. The League of the Just soon turned to communism and fell under the influence of neo-Babouvism. In 1828 Filippo Buonarotti published an account of the 1796 Conspiracy of Equals that represented the starting point of neo-Babouvism as a doctrine.
