BUONARROTI, FILIPPO. - Revolutionary and organizer of secret societies, b. at Pisa on 11 Nov. 1761, d. at Paris on 17 Sept. 1837. Having formed his intellect at the Pisan school of Sarti and Lampredi and having drunk deeply of the vague Masonic-Rousseauian humanitarianism of the time, he emigrated shortly after the outbreak of the French Revolution to Corsica, where he made himself noticed for the vehemence of his Jacobinism and anticlericalism. Appointed in Apr. 1794 national agent at Oneglia, B. attempted to carry out there, even after the fall of Robespierre, the latter's policy and to have the French leaders also accept an Italian program of typical Jacobin unitarianism.
Dismissed and imprisoned on 15 March 1795, he met in the prisons of Plessis the Baltauf and other Jacobins; with them he would join the following year in the well-known conspiracy, whose program, tending toward the community of goods and labor, goes back in good part to B. himself. Condemned for this to deportation, he was able to resume his revolutionary activity only in 1806, with his transfer under surveillance to Geneva, and for a whole thirty years in Switzerland first (1806-23), then at Brussels (1823-30) and finally at Paris, where his life henceforth becomes identified with that of many secret organizations ("Adelphi", "Sublime Masters Perfect," "World"), which sometimes directly, but more often hiding behind Masonic lodges or availing themselves of Carbonarist sales, tend to bring about a vast revolution of a republican character and with communistic premises. This sectarian activity was directed essentially toward Italy, where it would soon enter into competition with the Young Italy; in France, on the other hand, B. worked essentially through the publication, which took place in Brussels in 1828, of the Conspiration pour l'Égalité dite de Babeuf (Italian trans., Turin 1946), which had no small importance in the formation of the first revolutionary socialist groups.
Bibliography5 works
Armando Saitta