Louis Auguste Blanqui was a French
socialist and political activist,
notable for his revolutionary theory of
Blanquism.
Biography
= Early life, political activity and
first imprisonment=
Blanqui was born in Puget-Théniers,
Alpes-Maritimes, where his father, Jean
Dominique Blanqui, of Italian descent,
was subprefect. He was the younger
brother of the liberal economist
Jérôme-Adolphe Blanqui. He studied both
law and medicine, but found his real
vocation in politics, and quickly became
a champion of the most advanced
opinions. A member of the Carbonari
society since 1824, he took an active
part in most republican conspiracies
during this period. In 1827, under the
reign of Charles X, he participated in a
street fight in Rue Saint-Denis, during
which he was seriously injured. In 1829,
he joined Pierre Leroux's Globe
newspaper before taking part in the July
Revolution of 1830. He then joined the
Amis du Peuple society, where he made
acquaintances with Philippe Buonarroti,
Raspail, and Armand Barbès. He was
condemned to repeated terms of
imprisonment for maintaining the
doctrine of republicanism during the
reign of Louis Philippe. In May 1839, a
Blanquist inspired uprising took place
in Paris, in which the League of the
Just, forerunners of Karl Marx's
Communist League, participated.
Implicated in the armed outbreak of the
Société des Saisons, of which he was a
leading member, Blanqui was condemned to
death on 14 January 1840, a sentence
later commuted to life imprisonment.
= Release, revolutions and further
imprisonment=
He was released during the revolution of
1848, only to resume his attacks on
existing institutions. The revolution
had not satisfied him. The violence of
the Société républicaine centrale, which
was founded by Blanqui to demand a
change of government, brought him into
conflict with the more moderate
Republicans, and in 1849 he was
sentenced to ten years' imprisonment.
While in prison, he sent a brief address
to a committee of social democrats in
London. The text of the address was
noted and introduced by Marx.
In 1865, while serving a further term of
imprisonment under the Empire, he
escaped, and continued his propaganda
campaign against the government from
abroad, until the general amnesty of
1869 enabled him to return to France.
Blanqui's predilection for violence was
illustrated in 1870 by two unsuccessful
armed demonstrations: one on 12 January
at the funeral of Victor Noir, the
journalist shot by Pierre Bonaparte; the
other on 14 August, when he led an
attempt to seize some guns from a
barracks. Upon the fall of the Empire,
through the revolution of 4 September,
Blanqui established the club and journal
La patrie en danger.
He was one of the group that briefly
seized the reins of power on 31 October
and for his share in that outbreak he
was again condemned to death in absentia
on 9 March of the following year. On 17
March, Adolphe Thiers, aware of the
threat represented by Blanqui, took
advantage of his resting at a friend
physician's place, in Bretenoux in Lot,
and had him arrested. A few days
afterwards the insurrection which
established the Paris Commune broke out,
and Blanqui was elected president of the
insurgent commune. The Communards
offered to release all of their
prisoners if the Thiers government
released Blanqui, but their offer was
met with refusal, and Blanqui was thus
prevented from taking an active part.
Karl Marx would later be convinced that
Blanqui was the leader that was missed
by the Commune. Nevertheless, in 1872 he
was condemned along with the other
members of the Commune to
transportation; on account of his broken
health this sentence was again commuted
to one of imprisonment. On 20 April 1879
he was elected a deputy for Bordeaux;
although the election was pronounced
invalid, Blanqui was freed, and
immediately resumed his work of
agitation.
= Ideology=
As a socialist, Blanqui favored a just
redistribution of wealth. But Blanquism
is distinguished in various ways from
other socialist currents of the day. On
one side, contrary to Karl Marx, Blanqui
did not believe in the preponderant role
of the working class, nor in popular
movements: he thought, on the contrary,
that the revolution should be carried
out by a small group, who would
establish a temporary dictatorship by
force. This period of transitional
tyranny would permit the implementation
of the basis of a new order, after which
power would be handed to the people. In
another respect, Blanqui was more
concerned with the revolution itself
than with the future society that would
result from it: if his thought was based
on precise socialist principles, it
rarely goes so far as to imagine a
society purely and really socialist. In
this he differs from the Utopian
Socialists. For the Blanquists, the
overturning of the bourgeois social
order and the revolution are ends
sufficient in themselves, at least for
their immediate purposes. He was one of
the non-Marxist socialists of his day.
= Death=
Following a speech at a political
meeting in Paris, Blanqui had a stroke.
He died on 1 January 1881 and was
interred in the Père Lachaise Cemetery.
His elaborate tomb was created by Jules
Dalou.
Legacy
Blanqui's uncompromising radicalism, and
his determination to enforce it by
violence, brought him into conflict with
every French government during his
lifetime, and as a consequence, he spent
half of his life in prison. Besides his
innumerable contributions to journalism,
he published a work entitled, L'Eternité
par les astres, where he espoused his
views concerning eternal return. After
his death his writings on economic and
social questions were collected under
the title of Critique sociale.
The Italian fascist newspaper Il Popolo
d'Italia, founded and edited by Benito
Mussolini, had a quotation by Blanqui on
its mast: "Chi ha del ferro ha del
pane",.
Blanqui's political activism and his
book L'Eternité par les astres were
commented on by Walter Benjamin in his
Arcades Project and are referenced in
the novel The Secret Knowledge by Andrew
Crumey.
See also
French demonstration of 15 May 1848
No gods, no masters
References
This article incorporates text from a
publication now in the public domain:
Chisholm, Hugh, ed.. Encyclopædia
Britannica. Cambridge University Press. 
Publications
FRENCH
L’Armée esclave et opprimée
Critique sociale, in 2 volumes: Capital
et travail and Fragments et notes
Instructions pour une prise d’armes
Maintenant il faut des armes
Ni dieu ni maitre
Qui fait la soupe doit la manger
Réponse
Un dernier mot
ENGLISH
“The Eternity According to the Stars,”
tr. by Mathew H. Anderson, with an
afterword by Lisa Block de Behar. In CR:
The New Centennial Review 9/3: 61-94,
Winter 2009. The first full-length
translation into English.
Eternity by the Stars, tr. with an intro
by Frank Chouraqui. First critical
edition.
External links
Louis-Auguste Blanqui Archive at
marxists.org
muse.jhu.edujournalsv009/9.3.editor.html
