The Defense of Gracchus Babeuf before the High Court of Vendôme (review)

468 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY in the actions of all creatures. Ferrier analyses Chalmers' theory and questions whether, in spite of the author's pretensions, it was really Thomist, or whether it actually was a form of Scotism applied to the issues of the day. In pressing the logic of God's omnipotence vis-a-vis the liberty of his creatures, Ferrier suggests that Chalmers ignored the metaphysical and theological levels of the problem. His logical scholasticism lacked the power of the Augustinian mysticism of Gibieuf. Chalmers was obviously a very minor character of the first half of the xvnth century, playing a slight and not very exciting role in one of the great controversies of the time. This study of him, done as a thesis in Paris, throws a little light on the movement of ideas and suggests further lines of investigation. Chalmers brought certain Scotist themes into the Oratorian world, themes which may have influenced Descartes and Malebranche. Chalmers, and others like him, were points of contact between the Scotch intellectual world and that of France. With their national loyalties, their intellectual heritage, these Scots may have had an impact in the circles where they lived on the Continent. The Catholic philosophers and theologians from the British Isles who were refugees in France deserve more study. The interaction of their ideas with those of Continental thinkers resulted in some of the new currents of the time. The book is most carefully documented using much manuscript material and includes a central text, with French translation, of Chalmers' argument. Ferrier's study ably fills in a small lacunae in the history of ideas in the xvnth century. RmHARD H. POPKIN University o/Cali/ornia, San Diego The De/ense o~ Gracchus Babeu/ Before the High Court of Vendome. Ed. and trans. John A. Scott, with an essay by Herbert Marcuse, and illustrations by Thomas Cornell. (Amherst: Univ. of Massachusetts Press, 1967) This is a volume for the revolutionary who has everything. For $6.00 the University of Massachusetts Press presents a handsomely printed translation of a portion of Babeuf's defense at his trial before the high court of Vend6me in 1797, an introduction and notes by the translator John Anthony Scott, a set of 18 portrait etchings of revolutionary and other xvinth-century dignitaries by Thomas Cromwell (for which he received an award from the National Institute of Arts and Letters) and a concluding essay by Herbert Marcuse. For those who wish to consult the entire defense in French, the most accessible source is still Volume II of Victor Advielle, Histoire de Gracchus Babeuf et du Babouvisme (Paris, 1884). For those who wish to grasp a sense of the Babeuf literature from a good, free English translation, Scott's edition presents the first of the four parts of the defense as well as the famous peroration beginning "si cependant notre mort est rrsolue; si l'horloge a sonn6 pour moi.... " To this the editor has added the text of the Manifesto of Equals by Sylvain Marrchal, which is also one of the major documents for Babeuf's Conspiracy of Equals. It is beyond this reviewer's competence to evaluate the artistic merits of the work. It can scarcely be evaluated as a thorough scholarly edition, which it does not pretend to be; the selected text is only briefly annotated, the editor's introduction is intended as just that and not as a definitive discussion of the background of the text and Marcuse's concluding "thoughts" refer only to aspects of Babeuf's defense that seem of immediate interest to Marcuse. Both the introduction and conclusion are illuminating BOOK REVIEWS 469 but have not fully exploited the considerable recent literature on Babeuf. The book can certainly be justified with some qualifications as a useful introduction in English to Babouvist texts. The editor's decision to present only the first portion of the defense, to exclude the long passages where Babeuf meets the charges point by point, and the analyse pr~liminaire with which he introduces his plea is certainly defensible, in the knowledge that this selection, even with Mart~hal's Manifesto, presents only a partial and special element of Babouvist...