Louis Blanc: Republican Socialist
Louis Blanc was born in Madrid in 1811, where his father was an inspector general of finance for Joseph Bonaparte during the French occupation of Spain. Studying in Paris, he founded the journal Revue du Progres. A historian, he published a two-volume history of the first French revolution and a further two volumes – The History of Ten Years – on French politics in the period 1830-1840. He also published as a series of articles in 1840, later expanded into a book, his most famous work on the Organisation of Labour. The book was an attack on the competitive system and advocated a form of co-operation or associationism, drawing on the views of Robert Owen and Fourier. With the establishment of a republican government in February 1848, Blanc became Minister of Labour. He established the Luxemburg Commission to consider options for organising labour. The National Assembly agreed Blanc’s plan for a network of state funded national workshops. However, Emile Thomas, not Blanc, was put in charge of the project, which made little progress. A programme of work for the unemployed was established but consisted of hard labour such as digging ditches with little pay for some and idleness for others, and with the workshops being closed, Blanc got the blame for the failure. Blanc was in a minority within the Government, with the moderate leadership seeking to discredit both him and his ideas. Blanc found himself caught between militants such as Blanqui and Barbes and his more conservative government colleagues. In July, he tried to put together his own list of candidates for election, but failed to win sufficient support. Blanc was then accused of seeking to overthrow the assembly, which led to an investigatory commission. The assembly voted to remove Blanc’s parliamentary immunity. To avoid trial, Blanc fled to Brussels and then to London.
In London, Blanc spent much of his time defending his record in the revolution. He established a journal, Le Nouveau Monde, sought to collaborate with an increasing number of republican exiles from France, Italy and Hungary and mixed with English radicals and former Chartists. His Organisation of labour was published in an English edition and Blanc published in a range of radical journals including George Julian Harney’s Democratic Review and William Linton’s Republic. The exiles were however divided. In 1851, the radicals, mainly followers of Blanqui, held a banquet at the St John’s Institution, while Blanc’s socialist group held a banquet of equals at the Highbury Barn tavern.In 1852, Blanc joined a Revolutionary Committee of British based French republicans, together with the former Jacobin interior minister, Ledru-Rollin, who was moving towards socialism, Pierre Leroux, the Christian socialist and the Blanquist, Felix Pyat, only to find wide differences of approach. Ledru- Rollin’s group published their own journal – Le Voix de Proscrit. Blanqui, in a French prison, denounced Blanc as a traitor to the revolution. In 1855, the Italian Mazzini, the Hungarian Kossuth and Ledru-Rollin published their own internationalist revolutionary manifesto, with Blanc then publishing his own socialist critique. A further attempt to form a Republican Union, which involved Barbes and Victor Hugo also failed. Hugo and his fellow Jersey exiles, who were influenced by Mazzini, wanted action, while the London based group led by Blanc and Ledru-Rollin wanted to focus on propaganda. In 1865 Blanc published in English and French two volumes of Letters from England.
Blanc did not return to France until the fall of Napoleon III’s Second Empire in September 1870. He served as a member of the National Guard and in February 1871, was elected to the National Assembly. While maintaining his republican position, he did not support the Paris commune. He remained in the National Assembly and it was Blanc who in 1879 proposed an amnesty for the exiled communards, which was agreed. He died in 1882 and was given a state funeral and buried in the Pere Lachaise cemetery in Paris.
Further Reading:
Loubere, Leo Louis Blanc (Northwestern University Press 1961)
Renard, Edouard Louis Blanc: Sa Vie, Son Ouevre (Hachette 1928)
Pilbeam, Pamela French Socialists Before Marx (Acumen 2000)
Von Stein, Lorenz The History of the Social Movement in France (reprint, Bedminster Press 1964)
Cole, G D H History of Socialist Thought. Vol 1. The Forerunners (Macmillan 1953)
Jones, Thomas C French Republican Exiles in Britain (Cambridge University thesis 2010 – online)
Jones, Thomas and Tombs, Robert The French Left in Exile (2013 -online)
Blanc, Louis History of Ten Tears 1830-1840 (1848)
Blanc, Louis A Catechism of Socialism (1849)
Blanc, Louis Organisation of Labour (1848 edition)
Blanc, Louis 1848. Historical Revelations (1858)