Jean Jacques Pillot

Born Aug. 9, 1808, in Vaux-Lavalette; died June 13, 1877, in Melun. French revolutionary.

A priest in his youth, Pillot subsequently broke with Catholicism and fought against religious views. He practiced medicine in the late 1830’s, but before long he devoted himself to political journalism. In 1839 he began contributing to the journal La Tribune du peuple, which he later headed. Pillot belonged to a revolutionary current of Utopian communism, neo-Babouvism, and propagandized for a revolutionary coup d’etat and the establishment of a society founded on the equal distribution of all necessities among its members. In 1840 he was one of the organizers of the first communist banquet in Belleville; these banquets, at which political toasts were made, played their part in the struggle for reform. Pillot published the pamphlets Neither Castles Nor Shacks (1840) and Communism Is No Longer a Utopia (1842). He was exiled from France after the Bonapartist coup d’etat of 1851.

Pillot again became involved in the French revolutionary movement after the revolution of Sept. 4, 1870. He took an active part in the uprising of Oct. 31, 1870, against the policies of the Government of National Defense. A member of the Paris Commune from April 1871, he was affiliated with the Jacobin-Blan-quist majority. After the suppression of the Commune, he was sentenced to hard labor for life. This sentence, however, was replaced by imprisonment for ten years. Pillot died in prison.