first explicitly communist reform banquet in Belleville. The banquet campaign was a common opposition tactic in France in the 1840s. Since expressly political meetings were illegal, meetings took the form of banquets, and political speeches were disguised as lengthy toasts. In 1841 he was sentenced to six months in prison for belonging to a communist secret society. After his release he resumed his conspiratorial activities and published a few pamphlets, including Histoire des Égaux ou Moyens d'établir l'Égalité absolue parmi les Hommes (1840), a popular history of Babeuf's 'Society of the Equals' with lessons for the present; Ni Châteaux, ni Chaumières, ou État de la Question sociale en 1840 (Neither Castles nor Cabins, 1840); and an account of his defence at his trial, La Communauté n'est plus une Utopie! Conséquence du Procès des Communistes (1841). Pillot supported the February Revolution of 1848. He was unsuccessful in his efforts to get himself elected to the National Assembly, but sympathised with the collectivist theories of Constantin Pecqueur at the Luxembourg Commission of Labour. However, Pillot, who was associated with the extreme left wing of the Jacobin movement, soon grew disenchanted with the Second Republic. He was implicated in the workers' uprising of June, 1848, which was brutally put down. When Louis Bonaparte became President, Pillot fiercely opposed him, and after the Bonapartist coup d'état, Pillot was condemned to deportation to a penal colony and hard labour for life. He managed to escape to Brasil and eventually returned to France, where he worked as a producer of dentures, apparently unmolested. Syndicalism and the Paris Commune In the 1860s Pillot supported the early French trade union movement and is therefore sometimes credited with being a pioneer of French syndicalism, although his role seems to have been minor. He joined the First International, whose French section was then dominated by followers of Proudhon. In 1870, with the siege of Paris during the Franco-Prussian War, Pillot resumed his revolutionary activities. He was a noted orator at the Club of the School of Medicine and was elected to the Council of the Commune as delegate from the first arondissement. In the Paris Commune, Pillot allied himself with the Blanquist and Jacobin factions and voted for the creation of a Committee of Public Safety. He was later accused of being involved in burning the Tuileries palace. On 31 October 1870, he participated in an armed uprising against the