Anarchy and runaway inflation, unchecked by the…
February 1795 CE
Anarchy and runaway inflation, unchecked by the weakened government, threaten to destroy the French republic.
The royalists of the southeast conduct a “white terror”; gangs of Parisian draft-dodgers called la jeunesse doreé (“gilded youth”) persecute patriots.
Ardent revolutionary Francois Noel (“Gracchus”) Babeuf, repeatedly incarcerated after 1789, achieves notoriety through his paper the Tribun du peuple (“The Tribune of the People”).
In February 1795, Babeuf is again arrested, and the Tribun du peuple is solemnly burnt in the Théatre des Bergeres by the jeunesse dorée, young men whose mission it is to root out Jacobinism.
But for the appalling economic conditions produced by the fall in the value of assignats, Babeuf might have shared the fate of other agitators who have been whipped into obscurity.