Jean-Jacques Pillot

Last updated April 11, 2019

Jean-Jacques Pillot (9 August 1808 – 13 June 1877) was a French revolutionary and republican communist. He participated in the Revolution of 1848 and in the Paris Commune of 1871.

The 1848 Revolution in France, sometimes known as the February Revolution, was one of a wave of revolutions in 1848 in Europe. In France the revolutionary events ended the July Monarchy (1830–1848) and led to the creation of the French Second Republic.

The Paris Commune was a radical socialist and revolutionary government that ruled Paris from 18 March to 28 May 1871. The Franco-Prussian War had led to the capture of Emperor Napoleon III in September 1870, the collapse of the Second French Empire, and the beginning of the Third Republic. Because Paris was under siege for four months, the Third Republic moved its capital to Tours. A hotbed of working-class radicalism, Paris was primarily defended during this time by the often politicised and radical troops of the National Guard rather than regular Army troops. Paris surrendered to the Prussians on 28 January 1871, and in February Adolphe Thiers, the new chief executive of the French national government, signed an armistice with Prussia that disarmed the Army but not the National Guard.

Early life

Jean-Jacques Pillot was born in Vaux-Lavalette. He came from a pious family of humble means, entered the seminary at Marennes and became a priest. However, he deplored the role of the Catholic Church in propping up the Restoration régime and became increasingly doubtful about the existence of God. In the 1830s he underwent a crisis of conscience and prepared his exit from the Church by studying medicine. In 1837 he renounced his priesthood and became a doctor in Paris. He also proclaimed himself an atheist, a republican and a communist. Pillot increasingly devoted himself to political activism and journalism. From 1839 on contributed to and later edited the journal La Tribune du Peuple. He was an admirer of François-Noël 'Gracchus' Babeuf, the utopian communist revolutionary who had revolted against the Directory in 1796. Pillot called for a revolutionary coup d'état and the establishment of a republican régime that would collectivise all property and guarantee every citizen an equal share of the necessities of life. He is usually mentioned as a representative of Neo-Babouvism, along with writers like Philippe Buonarroti.

Vaux-Lavalette is a commune in the Charente department in southwestern France.

Marennes, Charente-Maritime Part of Marennes-Hiers-Brouage in Nouvelle-Aquitaine, France

Marennes is a former commune in the Charente-Maritime department in southwestern France. On 1 January 2019, it was merged into the new commune Marennes-Hiers-Brouage.

François-Noël Babeuf, known as Gracchus Babeuf, was a French political agitator and journalist of the French Revolutionary period. His newspaper Le tribun du peuple was best known for his advocacy for the poor and calling for a popular revolt against the Directory, the government of France. He was a leading advocate for democracy, the abolition of private property and the equality of results. He angered the authorities who were clamping down hard on their radical enemies. In spite of the efforts of his Jacobin friends to save him, Babeuf was executed for his role in the Conspiracy of the Equals.

Atheism

After leaving the priesthood, Pillot became a militant atheist. He saw belief in God as superstition, in the manner of the atheists of the Enlightenment, but he also accounted for this belief in a manner that resembles Ludwig Feuerbach's theory of religious alienation: because human beings are powerless, they project omnipotence onto an imaginary God; because they are poor and suffering, they project infinite luxury and happiness onto an imaginary heaven. Because people love an imaginary hereafter, they despise nature. (Pillot seems to have drawn an interesting link between religion, socio-political inequality and ecological depredation). To dispel religious superstition by means of science was an urgent necessity, because human beings must free their minds before they can free themselves socially. (By contrast, Marx saw religion as a consequence, not a cause, of social alienation and expected that the former would disappear with the latter. For Pillot, the abolition of religion was a condition of socialism; For Marx, socialism was a condition for the abolition of religion.^[1]

The Age of Enlightenment was an intellectual and philosophical movement that dominated the world of ideas in Europe during the 18th century, the "Century of Philosophy".

Ludwig Andreas von Feuerbach was a German philosopher and anthropologist best known for his book The Essence of Christianity, which provided a critique of Christianity which strongly influenced generations of later thinkers, including Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud, Friedrich Engels, Richard Wagner, and Friedrich Nietzsche.

Karl Marx was a German philosopher, economist, historian, sociologist, political theorist, journalist and socialist revolutionary.

Communist Activism and Revolution

Pillot was more of an activist than a theorist, however. In 1840 he was instrumental in organising the first explicitly communist reform banquet in Belleville. The banquet campaign was a common opposition tactic in France in the 1840s. Since expressly political meetings were illegal, meetings took the form of banquets, and political speeches were disguised as lengthy toasts. In 1841 he was sentenced to six months in prison for belonging to a communist secret society. After his release he resumed his conspiratorial activities and published a few pamphlets, including Histoire des Égaux ou Moyens d'établir l'Égalité absolue parmi les Hommes (1840), a popular history of Babeuf's 'Society of the Equals' with lessons for the present; Ni Châteaux, ni Chaumières, ou État de la Question sociale en 1840 (Neither Castles nor Cabins, 1840); and an account of his defence at his trial, La Communauté n'est plus une Utopie! Conséquence du Procès des Communistes (1841).

Pillot supported the February Revolution of 1848. He was unsuccessful in his efforts to get himself elected to the National Assembly, but sympathised with the collectivist theories of Constantin Pecqueur at the Luxembourg Commission of Labour. However, Pillot, who was associated with the extreme left wing of the Jacobin movement, soon grew disenchanted with the Second Republic. He was implicated in the workers' uprising of June, 1848, which was brutally put down. When Louis Bonaparte became President, Pillot fiercely opposed him, and after the Bonapartist coup d'état, Pillot was condemned to deportation to a penal colony and hard labour for life. He managed to escape to Brasil and eventually returned to France, where he worked as a producer of dentures, apparently unmolested.

Charles Constantin Pecqueur was a French economist, socialist theoretician and politician. He participated in the Revolution of 1848 and influenced Karl Marx.

Jacobin The most radical group in the French Revolution

The Society of the Friends of the Constitution, after 1792 renamed Society of the Jacobins, Friends of Freedom and Equality, commonly known as the Jacobin Club or simply the Jacobins, became the most influential political club during the French Revolution of 1789 and following. The period of their political ascendency is known as the Reign of Terror, during which time tens of thousands were put on trial and executed in France, many for political crimes.

The French Second Republic was a short-lived republican government of France under President Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte. It lasted from the 1848 Revolution to the 1851 coup by which the president made himself Emperor Napoleon III and initiated the Second Empire. It officially adopted the motto of the First Republic, Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité. The Second Republic witnessed the tension between the "Social and Democratic Republic" and a Radical form of republicanism, which exploded during the June Days uprising of 1848.

Syndicalism and the Paris Commune

In the 1860s Pillot supported the early French trade union movement and is therefore sometimes credited with being a pioneer of French syndicalism, although his role seems to have been minor. He joined the First International, whose French section was then dominated by followers of Proudhon. In 1870, with the siege of Paris during the Franco-Prussian War, Pillot resumed his revolutionary activities. He was a noted orator at the Club of the School of Medicine and was elected to the Council of the Commune as delegate from the first arondissement. In the Paris Commune, Pillot allied himself with the Blanquist and Jacobin factions and voted for the creation of a Committee of Public Safety. He was later accused of being involved in burning the Tuileries palace. On 31 October 1870, he participated in an armed uprising against the Versailles government. He was captured and imprisoned after the uprising. In May 1872 he was finally tried and sentenced to hard labour for life, but the sentence was commuted to life in prison. Pillot died in the central prison at Melun on 13 June 1877.

Syndicalism is a radical current in the labor movement and was most active in the early 20th century. According to the Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm, it predominated the revolutionary left in the decade preceding World War I as Marxism was mostly reformist at that time. Major syndicalist organizations included the General Confederation of Labor in France, the National Confederation of Labor in Spain, the Italian Syndicalist Union, the Free Workers' Union of Germany, and the Argentine Regional Workers' Federation. The Industrial Workers of the World, the Irish Transport and General Workers' Union and the Canadian One Big Union, though they did not regard themselves as syndicalists, are considered by most historians to belong to this current. A number of syndicalist organizations were and still are to this day linked in the International Workers' Association.

Pierre-Joseph Proudhon was a French politician and the founder of mutualist philosophy. He was the first person to declare himself an anarchist, using that term and is widely regarded as one of the ideology's most influential theorists. Proudhon is even considered by many to be the "father of anarchism". He became a member of the French Parliament after the Revolution of 1848, whereafter he referred to himself as a federalist.

The Franco-Prussian War or Franco-German War, often referred to in France as the War of 1870, was a conflict between the Second French Empire and later the Third French Republic, and the German states of the North German Confederation led by the Kingdom of Prussia. Lasting from 19 July 1870 to 28 January 1871, the conflict was caused by Prussian ambitions to extend German unification and French fears of the shift in the European balance of power that would result if the Prussians succeeded. Some historians argue that the Prussian chancellor Otto von Bismarck deliberately provoked the French into declaring war on Prussia in order to draw the independent southern German states—Baden, Württemberg, Bavaria and Hesse-Darmstadt—into an alliance with the North German Confederation dominated by Prussia, while others contend that Bismarck did not plan anything and merely exploited the circumstances as they unfolded. None, however, dispute the fact that Bismarck must have recognized the potential for new German alliances, given the situation as a whole.

Significance

Jean-Jacques Pillot is often grouped with Théodore Dézamy (1805–1850), Richard Lahautière (1813–1882), Albert Laponneraye (1808–1849) and Jules Gay (1807–1887) as a representative of materialist communism in France and was cited as a forerunner by Karl Marx.^[2] Pillot was not only a metaphysical materialist but is also credited with a rudimentary class analysis of political conflict.^[3] Pillot thus represents one of the links from Babouvism and utopian Jacobin communism to Marxism.

Alexandre Théodore Dézamy was a French socialist, a representative of the Neo-Babouvist tendency in early French communism, along with Albert Laponneraye, Richard Lahautière, Jacques Pillot and others. He was also an early associate of Louis-Auguste Blanqui. He and his colleagues formed a link between the extreme left wing of the French Revolution (Babeuf) and Marxism.

Auguste-Richard Lahautière (1813–1882) was a French socialist, journalist and lawyer. He is commonly grouped with Théodore Dézamy, Albert Laponneraye, Jean-Jacques Pillot and others as belonging to the Neo-Babouvist tendency in French nineteenth-century socialism, which formed a link from the utopian communism of Gracchus Babeuf to Marxism.

Albert Laponneraye was a French republican socialist and a journalist, popular historian, educator and editor of Robespierre's writings. He was a representative of the Neo-Babouvist tendency in the 1840s, along with Richard Lahautière, Jean-Jacques Pillot and others. He combined Jacobin republicanism with egalitarian communism and anti-clericalism. He was influenced by the doctrines of Philippe Buonarroti and Étienne Cabet. In the 1830s and 40s Laponneraye was one of the best known advocates of republican communism. He is viewed as a forerunner of Karl Marx.

Sources

The Great Soviet Encyclopedia. Moscow, 1979.
Billington, J., Fire in the Minds of Men: The Origins of the Revolutionary Faith. New Jersey, 2009 [1980].
Lowell, D.F., 'The French Revolution and the Origins of Socialism: The Case of Early French Socialism.' French History (1992) 6 (2), pp. 185–205.
Garaudy, R., Les Dources françaises du Socialisme scientifique. Paris, 1948.
fr:Jean-Jacques Pillot

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References

↑ Cp. Garaudy, R., Die französischn Quellen des wissenschaftlichen Sozialismus. Berlin, 1954, pp. 194-195.
↑ Jean-Louis Lacascade, « Bévue de Proudhon et/ou traquenard de Marx. Lecture symptomale de leur unique correspondance » [archive], Genèses, n° 46, 2002/1, p. 138-158
↑ James Billington attributes to V. Volgin the claim that "Pillot used a sophisticated if functional class analysis of the roles played in the reaction by different 'castes'." Billington, J., Fire in the Minds of Men: The Origins of the Revolutionary Faith. New Jersey, 2009 [1980], p. 587.

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[1] Cp. Garaudy, R., Die französischn Quellen des wissenschaftlichen Sozialismus. Berlin, 1954, pp. 194-195.

[2] Jean-Louis Lacascade, « Bévue de Proudhon et/ou traquenard de Marx. Lecture symptomale de leur unique correspondance » [archive], Genèses, n° 46, 2002/1, p. 138-158

[3] James Billington attributes to V. Volgin the claim that "Pillot used a sophisticated if functional class analysis of the roles played in the reaction by different 'castes'." Billington, J., Fire in the Minds of Men: The Origins of the Revolutionary Faith. New Jersey, 2009 [1980], p. 587.