Filippo Buonarroti
The first professional revolutionist was a descendant of Michelangelo’s brother; W.J. Fishman describes how, in Italy, France, and in exile, Filippo Buonarroti spent his life in radical conspiracy.
The consequences of the plot that Noel Francois Babeuf hatched in 17961 give him a place among the originators of the Communist tradition. They show the principles that would influence his successors, and the problems that, in the more sophisticated context of nineteenth-century growth and change, would become formidable.
Babeuf utilized many of the Utopian ideas of the Philosophers, as yet vague and untested, to postulate a means of effecting a political and economic reconstruction of society.
Although a countryman himself, he preached turban centralism—that is, the idea of a society based on dictatorship of town over country. He recognized that a politically emancipated peasantry was still under the tutelage of landlord and priest.
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