Philippe Buonarroti

The deportees awaited their transport to Guyana for quite some time at the fort of Cherbourg. Finally, in the year VIII, they were taken to the island of Oleron. It was from there that Buonarotti, without having been told of either the cause or the execution of this measure, was removed and sentenced to surveillance in a city in the east. Perhaps the First Consul remembered that for a brief time he had lived in the same room and slept in the same bed with he whose noble misfortune caused him a too bitter remorse.

Nevertheless, the man who had heard Bonaparte cry out after May 31: “Here’s a good occasion to make myself King of France” and who had judged the man, didn’t hide his thoughts about the new emperor, exiled though he was. “The cause of freedom,” he said, “is once again condemned by the aristocrats, who prefer engorging themselves with gold, decking themselves with braids, and crawling under the scepter of a soldier, to living free and equal with the people.” He couldn’t remain in France and retired to the area of Geneva, where he lived modestly from his profession of composer. This was one more thing he had in common with J-J Rousseau, whose contemporary and devoted follower he was. Brought up in a Jesuit college he had been tormented there for having read Rousseau.

European diplomacy didn’t allow him any repose and obtained his expulsion from Swiss territory. He took refuge in Belgium and remained there until the July Revolution.

It can be seen how much he loved the people. He made the following reflections on the constitution of the year III, which can be applied to many others:

“In order to impose silence on all its pretensions and to forever close all paths to innovations favorable to the people, all of their political rights were either stolen or truncated. Laws are made without its participation and without their being able to exercise any kind of censure over them. The constitution forever enchains them, both themselves and their posterity, for it is forbidden to them to change it. It declares the people sovereign but any deliberation by the people is declared seditious. After having spoken in a confused fashion of equality of rights, the rights of the mass of citizens is taken from them there, and that of naming to principal state functions is exclusively reserved to the well-to-do. Finally, in order to forever maintain that unfortunate inequality, the source of immorality, injustice and oppression, the authors of that constitution carefully cast aside any institution tending to enlighten the entire nation, to form republican youth, to diminish the ravages and damages of ambition, to rectify public opinion, to improve morals, or to rescue the mass of the people from the idle and the ambitious."

“As soon as wealth was made the basis for the happiness and strength of society, they were necessarily led to refuse the exercise of political rights to all those who, through their fortune, don’t offer a guarantee of their attachment to that order, reputed to be the good par excellence.

“It’s a fact worthy of observation that the national energy for the defense of the revolution increases or decreases according to whether or not the laws favor equality or distance themselves from it. It’s the working class, so unjustly held in contempt, which gave birth to so many prodigious acts of devotion and virtue. Almost everyone else has constantly hindered public regeneration.”

Listen to his judgment on the goal proposed by Jean-Jacques:

“Rousseau proclaimed the rights inseparable from human nature. He pleaded for all men without distinction. He placed the prosperity of society in the happiness of each of its members and its strength in the attachment of all to the laws. For him public wealth resides in the labor and the moderation of its citizens; liberty resides in the might of the sovereign, which is the entire people, every element of which preserves the influence necessary for the life of the social body through the effect of the impartial sharing of joy and enlightenment.”

Finally, judge how much importance he attached to the power of morality:

“The reform of morality must precede the enjoyment of liberty. Before conferring on the people the exercise of sovereignty it is necessary to render general the love of virtue, and to substitute disinterestedness and modesty for avarice, vanity, and ambition, which maintain among the citizens a perpetual war. The contradiction established by our institutions between the needs of love and independence must be annihilated, and the means of misleading, frightening, and dividing must be torn from the hands of the natural enemies of equality. To renounce this preliminary reform means abandoning power to those who are the friends of all abuses and losing the means of assuring public happiness.”

Buonarotti was 70 when he returned to Paris in 1830. The thirty-five years that had passed since he left it, though devoured by prison or exile, had been entirely dedicated to study, under the inspiration of the most religious love of humanity. He had always employed his days and a part of his nights to work, and he only suspended his industrious habits when sickness had defeated him, less than three weeks before his death. The only book he produced is La Conspiration de Babeuf, but he left behind precious manuscripts that will not be lost. What is more, he was so modest that he never wrote anything with publicity in mind. He only studied and instructed himself so as to pour into the souls of his friends the treasures of his knowledge and, even more, his eminent virtue. His counsels were without showiness or vanity, like the rest of his life. He was a sage. He conversed with the old man, the mature man, with the young man or the child as the most intimate friend and brother. He was a witness to the most terrible epochs of our revolution and had taken part in them. Neither his body nor his soul had bent under nearly a half a century of the worst persecutions, and that soul, gifted with so much vigor, far from having been hardened by the struggle, preserved all its gentleness and goodness. No one had more of a right to be severe than Buonarotti, yet no one was more indulgent than he. But indulgent towards faults and reparable errors; inflexible towards the vices of the heart, towards the corruptions of money, towards the cowardly betrayals that sacrifice nations to mad pride or the cupidity of a few men.

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