Boissel, François

Born 1728; died 1807. French revolutionary and Utopian communist.

In 1789, Boissel published Catechism of the Human Race, in which he sharply criticized the “corrupt, man-killing, antisocial order” founded on private property and contrasted it with an ideal social structure based on collective property and common labor. During the Great French Revolution he was one of the prominent members of the Jacobin Club and became its archivist in 1793. He conducted a resolute struggle against the Girondists and took part in the popular movements in Paris. Regarding communism as the final aim of the revolution, in spring 1793, Boissel developed a program establishing the revolutionary government of the sansculottes. His plan stipulated the disfranchisement and disarming of all the wealthy strata, state control of property and the entire economy, and a combination of economic measures on the limitation of property with unitary national education of the younger generation for the purposes of the later establishment of communist systems. Boissel’s theories were developed by the Babouvistes.