Situating the trial of Gracchus Babeuf and his co-conspirators in its poisonous political setting, Mason provides a new perspective on the French Revolution’s downfall. She examines the Conspiracy of Equals and the show trial of the man whom Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels considered the first revolutionary communist, given maximum publicity by the corrupt ruling Directory in hopes of rallying public opinion for their centrist regime. Mason seeks to write “a history of the French Revolution for the twenty-first century,” worried about rising authoritarianism, faltering judicial integrity, and the erosion of democratic institutions (5).
In this fluent narrative history, the first book about the Directory era readily available for wide reading, Mason places Babeuf in his historical context. After a brief overview of Babeuf’s rise from a feudal notary’s apprentice to a Paris-provisioning official and subsequent imprisonment after the Thermidor Coup against Robespierre and his allies, Mason turns to the...