The French political revolutionist and writer François Noel Babeuf (1760-1797) was active during the French Revolution. He was among the first to advocate socialism as a political institution for solving the problems of society.

François Babeuf was born in Saint-Quentin on Nov. 25, 1760. Before the French Revolution he was employed as a commissaire à terrien at Roye, a position in which he was supposed to help the landed aristocracy assert their feudal rights over the peasants. His occupation made him unpopular among the lower classes, and he himself did not like the nobility. In 1789, on the eve of the Revolution, he wrote the section of the petition from the village of Roye which requested the king to abolish all feudal rights.

In the early years of the Revolution, Babeuf held minor government posts in Somme, in Montdidier, and finally in Paris, where he settled in...