Jean-Jacques Pillot

Jean-Jacques Pillot (9 August 1808 – 13 June 1877) was a French revolutionary and republican communist. He participated in the Revolution of 1848 and in the Paris Commune of 1871.

Jean-Jacques Pillot was born in Vaux-Lavalette. He came from a pious family of humble means, entered the seminary at Marennes and became a priest. However, he deplored the role of the Catholic Church in propping up the Restoration régime and became increasingly doubtful about the existence of God. In the 1830s he underwent a crisis of conscience and prepared his exit from the Church by studying medicine. In 1837 he renounced his priesthood and became a doctor in Paris. He also proclaimed himself an atheist, a republican and a communist. Pillot increasingly devoted himself to political activism and journalism. From 1839 on contributed to and later edited the journal La Tribune du Peuple. He was an admirer of François-Noël 'Gracchus' Babeuf, the utopian communist revolutionary who had revolted against the Directory in 1796. Pillot called for a revolutionary coup d'état and the establishment of a republican régime that would collectivise all property and guarantee every citizen an equal share of the necessities of life. He is usually mentioned as a representative of Neo-Babouvism, along with writers like Philippe Buonarroti.

After leaving the priesthood, Pillot became a militant atheist. He saw belief in God as superstition, in the manner of the atheists of the Enlightenment, but he also accounted for this belief in a manner that resembles Ludwig Feuerbach's theory of religious alienation: because human beings are powerless, they project omnipotence onto an imaginary God; because they are poor and suffering, they project infinite luxury and happiness onto an imaginary heaven. Because people love an imaginary hereafter, they despise nature. (Pillot seems to have drawn an interesting link between religion, socio-political inequality and ecological depredation). To dispel religious superstition by means of science was an urgent necessity, because human beings must free their minds before they can free themselves socially. (By contrast, Marx saw religion as a consequence, not a cause, of social alienation and expected that the former would disappear with the latter. For Pillot, the abolition of religion was a condition of socialism; For Marx, socialism was a condition for the abolition of religion.

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