Paris, there were tentative efforts at a riot with a view to rescue, but these were easily suppressed. The attempt of five or six hundred Jacobins (7 September 1796) to rouse the soldiers at Grenelle met with no better success. A shoot-out greeted them, leaving about 20 dead, 132 captured and many others wounded. The trial of Babeuf and the others, begun at Vendôme on 20 February 1797, lasted two months. The government, for reasons of its own, depicted the socialist Babeuf as the leader of the conspiracy, even though people more important than himself were implicated; and his own vanity played admirably into their hands. And Darthé, who has himself locked up in utter silence during the debates was accused of writing an order for the execution of the Directors. On Prairial 7 (26 May 1797) Babeuf and Darthé were condemned to death. On hearing his death sentence, Babeuf struck himself in the courtroom with several blows, and was carried dying the next day to the scaffold. Darthé, who had also tried to commit suicide, was guillotined alongside him on at Vendôme, Prairial 8 (27 May 1797), without appeal. Some of the prisoners, including Buonarroti and Germain, were deported; the rest, including Vadier and his fellow former-Montagnards, were acquitted. Drouet succeeded in making his escape, according to Paul Barras, with the connivance of the Directory. Legacy The Conspiracy of Equals would probably have disappeared in the flood of great events of the Revolution, but the publication in 1828 of Buonarroti's book, Conspiracy of Equals, kept it in the history books. Friedrich Engels and Karl Marx recognized in the Conspiracy of Equals "the first appearance of a truly active Communist party". Leon Trotsky would echo these sentiments, stating that the foundation of the Communist International marked a ‘carrying on in direct succession the heroic endeavours and martyrdom of a long line of revolutionary generations from Babeuf’. Indeed, The Conspiracy of Equals can be seen as the first example of a form of French leftism distinct from that of the Jacobins, more focused upon real equality as opposed to abstract equality in the eyes of the law (‘Manifesto of the Equals’, ll. 3-11). Whereas the French Revolutionaries actively sought to guarantee property rights, a guarantee enshrined in the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, Babeuf and his followers desired instead the abolition of property entirely (‘We lean