Jean-Jacques Pillot

However, he deplored the role of the Catholic Church in propping up the Restoration régime and became increasingly doubtful about the existence of God.

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 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.

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!

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.

He managed to escape to Brasil and eventually returned to France, where he worked as a producer of dentures, apparently unmolested.

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.

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.