Auguste Blanqui – insurrectionary socialist
Born in the Alpes Maritimes in 1805, the son of a Girondin prefect of Italian descent, Blanqui studied law and medicine in Paris. His older brother was the renowned liberal economist Jérôme-Adolphe Blanqui. In 1824, Auguste was a member of the revolutionary Carbonari society. Injured in a street fight in 1827, he joined the Christian socialist Pierre Leroux’s Globe journal in 1829, before becoming involved in the revolution of July 1830. He then joined the Amis des Peuples (Friends of the People) society, meeting Philippe Buonarotti, the chemist and follower of Babeuf, the revolutionary François-Vincent Raspail and Armand Barbès, the leader of the Jacobin Society of the Rights of Man. Imprisoned in 1832, he inspired the May 1839 uprising. As a leading member of the Société des Saisons (Society of the Seasons), he was imprisoned for life in 1840, having originally been condemned to death.
Released during the 1848 revolution, he founded the Central Republican Society, but, seen by the moderate republicans as a revolutionary extremist, he was again imprisoned in 1849. He was in contact with the German social democrats in London, led by Karl Marx, to whom he sent an address from prison in 1851. In 1865, he escaped from prison, fleeing into exile, returning to France following an amnesty in 1869, before unsuccessfully leading an attempted further insurrection in 1870. Imprisoned again, he was unable to participate in the Paris Commune. Imprisoned again in 1872, he escaped deportation with the communards who were sent to New Caledonia. Freed in 1879, he was elected to the National Assembly for Bordeaux, though this was deemed invalid. He died in 1881.
Blanqui was a socialist in that he supported a distribution of wealth; he was opposed to parliamentary politics and believed that power should be captured by a small group through insurrectionary means with the establishment of a temporary dictatorship, after which power would be passed to the people, though he never set out how this was to be achieved. His writings focused on the means of insurrection rather than the social order of a future society. There were followers of Blanqui within French socialist exile groups, including within the London-based First International, notably Édouard Vaillant, as well as a Blanquist grouping in France, led by Raoul Rigault, Émile Eudes and Gustave Tridon, active in French politics under the Third Republic. ‘Blanquist’ was later used by some social democrats as a term of abuse for those socialists who favoured insurrectionary action by small ‘vanguard’ groupings of a revolutionary elite, rather than the development of mass movements and the use of democratic methods to achieve political power. Eduard Bernstein accused Marx and Engels of Blanquism. The Mensheviks attacked Lenin’s Blanquism.
The extract below is from an appeal to Parisians in 1848:
“With the exception of a small handful of rich idlers, the entire city only lives thanks to the workers: without workers, there is no more consumption, and thus no more business! The mass of retailers would fall into ruin, big business and industry would follow them into the abyss, and the faction that represents the victorious past would applaud the ruin of this Paris that it abhors because it has changed the face of the world.
But be just! The people have suffered for too long! They no longer can nor will suffer under the harsh conditions made for them by the rapacity of the moneyed. They ask for a more equitable one, and it is this demand that is rejected with violence, with fury…They persist, they claim to drive them to ask for mercy, they are hunted down through famine…But they don’t surrender! They will advance, shaking the dust from their feet.
There remains one chance for salvation: that you freely join the people in order to ensure that they receive what they ask for, i.e., well-paid work and, above all else, the choice of representatives who will want to accomplish these tasks without any delay and at whatever cost.
Paris, the capital of intelligence and labour, is the true national representative body, the gigantic and majestic congress where the whole country, through the elite of its united children – writers, artists, workers, scientists, industrialists – is ceaselessly occupied in making shine the labour of its grandeur and prosperity.”
Further Reading
Bernstein, Samuel Auguste Blanqui and the Art of Insurrection (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1971)
Spitzer, Alan. The Revolutionary Theories of Louis Auguste Blanqui (New York: Columbia University Press, 1957)
Greene, D E Communist Insurgent: Blanqui’s Politics of Revolution (Chicago: Haymarket, 2017)
Stewart, Neil Blanqui (London: Gollanz, 1939)
Hutton, Patrick. The Cult of the Revolutionary Tradition: The Blanquists in French Politics 1864-1893 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981)
De Costa, Charles Les Blanquistes (Paris 1912)
Blanqui, Louis Auguste (ed Le Goff and Hallward) The Blanqui Reader: Political Writings 1830-1880 (London; Verso, 2018)
Blanqui, Louis Auguste Le Patrie en Danger (Paris 1871)
Blanqui, Louis Auguste Oeuvres completes vol 1 Ecrits sur La Revolution ed Munster (Paris 1977)
Cole, G D H Socialist Thought: The Forerunners Ch 14 Blanqui and Blanquism (London: Macmillan 1953)
Braunthal, Julius History of the International 1864-1914 (London: Nelson, 1966)
Nomad, Max Apostles of the Revolution (New York: Secker and Warburg 1939)
Menard, Jean-Louis Emile Eudes: Generale de la Commune et Blanquiste (Paris 2005)