During the decade of the 1840s the word "communist" came into general use to describe those who hailed the left wing of the Jacobin Club of the French Revolution as their ideological forefathers.[1] This political tendency saw itself as egalitarian inheritors of the 1795 Conspiracy of Equals headed by Gracchus Babeuf.[1] The sans-culottes of Paris which had decades earlier been the base of support for Babeuf — artisans, journeymen, and the urban unemployed — was seen as a potential foundation for a new social system based upon the modern machine production of the day.[2]