Versailles government. He was captured and imprisoned after the uprising. In May 1872 he was finally tried and sentenced to hard labour for life, but the sentence was commuted to life in prison. Pillot died in the central prison at Melun on 13 June 1877. Significance Jean-Jacques Pillot is often grouped with Théodore Dézamy (1805–1850), Richard Lahautière (1813–1882), Albert Laponneraye (1808–1849) and Jules Gay (1807–1887) as a representative of materialist communism in France and was cited as a forerunner by Karl Marx. Pillot was not only a metaphysical materialist but is also credited with a rudimentary class analysis of political conflict. Pillot thus represents one of the links from Babouvism and utopian Jacobin communism to Marxism. Sources The Great Soviet Encyclopedia. Moscow, 1979. Billington, J., Fire in the Minds of Men: The Origins of the Revolutionary Faith. New Jersey, 2009 [1980]. Lowell, D.F., 'The French Revolution and the Origins of Socialism: The Case of Early French Socialism.' French History (1992) 6 (2), pp. 185–205. Garaudy, R., Les Dources françaises du Socialisme scientifique. Paris, 1948. :fr:Jean-Jacques Pillot References 1808 births 1877 deaths French socialists French communists 19th-century French journalists French male journalists 19th-century male writers Neo-Babouvism Communards