[In the following essay, Spitzer describes the life and evaluates the influence of the martyred anarchist and precursor of modern revolutionary socialism, Louis Auguste Blanqui.]

The fact and idea of revolution have been crucial to French political history ever since 1789. Throughout the nineteenth century an articulate minority advocated the revolutionary solutions of political problems and actively fostered the resolution of ideological conflicts by physical violence. However, the great French theorists of fundamental social change, St. Simon, Fourier, Proudhon, Cabet, and their disciples, contributed a body of “socialist” ideology which repudiated the political revolutionism so eagerly espoused by the radical wing of the contemporary republican movement. The combination of revolutionism and socialist theory was a minority tendency among French radicals before 1870, and one to which few memorable figures were committed. There was, however, one socialist who not only advocated political revolution,¹ but whose career virtually embodied the revolutionary aspects of the history of nineteenth-century France. This was Louis Auguste Blanqui.

THE LIFE OF BLANQUI

Blanqui began his active political career in the conspiracy of the French Carbonari against the Restoration monarchy and concluded it as a spokesman for the socialist opposition to Gambetta's republican Opportunism. He received the first of many wounds in 1827, during street demonstrations against Charles X,² and died in 1881, immediately after speaking at a mass meeting for total amnesty of the Communards.³ He spent forty of his seventy-six years in the prisons of all the regimes which governed France from 1830 through 1881. Blanqui faced every government as an implacable critic who was always ready to translate criticism into subversive political action. His star shone most brightly during those periods of social unrest and political violence which distinguished the history of nineteenth-century France, but on the day that “order” was restored Blanqui would take his stand among the partisans of révolution à outrance, an object of hatred and fear to the erstwhile revolutionaries who desired merely to consolidate what they had already won. Blanqui's commitment to a permanent revolution against all feudal, religious, and capitalist institutions condemned him to a role of perpetual opposition and guaranteed his political martyrdom, or impotence, depending upon one's point of view.

Blanqui was born at Puget-Théniers in the Alpes Maritimes on February 1, 1805. He was the second son of Dominique Blanqui, a former Girondist conventionnel and Napoleonic functionary whose job and security disappeared with the First Empire. The small income of the young and beautiful Mme Blanqui enabled the family to send their brilliant sons Adolphe and Louis Auguste to be educated in Paris. There Blanqui received a classical education and, after leaving the lycée laden with honors, supported himself as a private tutor while he undertook the study of both law and medicine.⁴ As a young student he developed a passion for politics which involved him with the Carbonari. These early political years probably had a lasting influence on his ideas of revolutionary technique. His biographer, Geffroy, has observed:

Blanqui, introduced to politics under the Restoration, assumed the habits of a conspirator of the Restoration period, and the Carbonarist cell became for him the ideal type of the secret society and of possible political opposition.⁵

He was one of the leaders of Paris student agitation during the last years of the Restoration, and was wounded three times during riots in 1827. He was in Paris, working as a parliamentary reported for the liberal journal, the Globe, when the Revolution of July, 1830, began. When the Paris workers poured into the streets to destroy the Bourbon monarchy, Blanqui scornfully left his vacillating and legalistic employers at the office of the Globe and plunged into the maelstrom, brandishing a rifle and the tricolor.⁶ For his part in the “three glorious days” of the Revolution he was later awarded the “Decoration of July” by Louis Philippe. This was the last award, aside from prison sentences, that he was ever to receive from the French government.

Almost immediately after the Revolution, Blanqui joined the radical opposition to the July Monarchy and soon aligned himself with a small minority of young republicans who demanded a complete social revolution which would free the poor from economic, as well as political, thralldom. Although Blanqui was not the only republican of the period to characterize the political struggle as a struggle between social classes, he seems to have formulated most precisely the vague revolutionary demands for social, or class, justice.

In 1832, he defended himself at the trial of the republican Société des Amis du Peuple in a speech which has been described as “the first socialist manifesto of this epoch.”⁷ When Blanqui was asked at this trial to give his profession, he made the famous reply: “Proletarian the class of thirty million Frenchmen who live by their labor and who are deprived of political rights.”⁸ The eloquent young firebrand was acquitted by the jury, but sentenced to one year in prison for his attempt, in the words of the court, “to trouble the public peace by arousing the contempt and hatred of the citizenry against several classes of people which he had variously described as the privileged rich or the bourgeoisie.”⁹

Upon his release from prison Blanqui plunged into the old Carbonarist atmosphere of clandestine organization which was revived as the Orleanist government severely curtailed freedom of association. He founded a secret revolutionary “Society of Families” in 1834, but his careful organization was shattered when he and the other leaders of the society were arrested in 1836 for the illegal possession of arms.¹⁰

When the amnesty of 1837 released him from prison Blanqui returned to Paris, for him the only possible arena of the class struggle. There, with the aid of two popular young republicans, Armand Barbès and Martin Bernard, he established another organization, “The Society of Seasons.” Classic conspiratorial techniques were utilized to form a tightly disciplined and hierarchical organization. The small isolated cells of the rank and file received orders from subaltern leaders who themselves were unaware of the identity of the mysterious directors of the conspiracy. All of the conspirators were sworn to unquestioning obedience. From time to time the small individual groups assembled in the streets at the word of their immediate superiors without ever knowing which call was to be the signal for the real coup.

During the economic and political crisis of May, 1839, Blanqui decided to make his attempt. On the twelfth of May, the little band of students and workers formed in the streets, broke into arsenals and gunshops, and tried to carry the city's key positions. The Paris of workers and artisans which was expected to transform the insurrection into a revolution stood by silently and apathetically while government troops easily crushed the rising.¹¹ Blanqui evaded arrest for a few months but was finally captured, tried by the Chamber of Peers, and sentenced to death.¹² His sentence was commuted to deportation by Louis Philippe, and he was sent to join most of his comrades in the prison-fortress of Mont-Saint-Michel.

For nine years he lived the role for which he is probably best remembered—L’Enfermé, the imprisoned one, the suffering but uncompromising hostage of the conservative forces of five successive regimes. The little society of the political prisoner, with its hopeless defiance of a barbarous prison administration, its perpetual effort to preserve a shred of personal integrity under the most degrading conditions, and its bitter and self-consuming factional struggles, was isolated and politically ineffectual, but an object of widespread interest and sympathy.

Blanqui remained a prisoner, at Mont-Saint-Michel,¹³ and then at Tours, until 1848, when the February Revolution released him and brought him hurrying to the center of the Paris stage. By this time the myth of Blanqui as the sinister incarnation of bloodthirsty anarchism was held not only by the good conservative families of France, but by most of his more moderate colleagues in the republican movement as well. Tocqueville's description of Blanqui at the rostrum of the National Assembly on May 15, 1848, is a fair picture of how this revolutionary appeared to the conservative politicians:

It was then that I saw appear in his turn on the tribune a man whom I have never seen since, but the recollection of whom has always filled me with horror and disgust. He had wan, emaciated cheeks, white lips, a sickly wicked and repulsive expression, a dirty pallor, the appearance of a moldy corpse; he wore no visible linen; an old black frock coat tightly covered his lean withered limbs; he seemed to have passed his life in a sewer and to have just left it. I was told it was Blanqui.¹⁴

A considerably different idea of Blanqui was cherished by a small but devoted coterie of disciples. To them this small, ascetic, prematurely aged man had unstintingly given his health and freedom to an ideal, and received and expected no rewards but prison, hatred, and contumely. Many more objective observers were impressed by his apparently exclusive and selfless devotion to a cause and by the magnetism of his dedicated personality. Delvau, who had been Ledru-Rollin's secretary, in his Historie de la Révolution de Février described his personal impressions of Blanqui in 1848 as follows:

At first sight Blanqui does not appear very attractive, but that is because suffering is not always very agreeable to watch. One is disposed to obey him, but not to love him. He does not attract, he dominates. Blanqui replaces the physical strength that he lacks with a virility of the soul, which on certain occasions is all-powerful.¹⁵

As soon as he had arrived in Paris, Blanqui formed a club to organize the dissatisfaction of the extreme radicals with what they considered the potentially counterrevolutionary activity of the Provisional Government. Apparently Blanqui eschewed revolutionary conspiracy while attempting to force the government to the left by the pressure of speeches, journals, and mass demonstrations.¹⁶ The provisional government, including its most radical members, repaid Blanqui's mistrust with fear and hatred. His growing influence was undermined by the publication of a document alleged to have been copied from a confession made by Blanqui which gave Louis Philippe's police information about the conspiracy of 1839.¹⁷ The accusation has never been decisively proved or disproved, but the supporting testimony of Barbès, Blanqui's former fellow conspirator who had become his bitterest enemy, struck a sharp blow to his prestige among the Paris militants.¹⁸

The tensions among the disparate groups which had taken over the heritage of the July Monarchy were heightened as the attempts of the Provisional Government to establish order according to moderate middle-class principles were met by the street demonstrations and incendiary manifestoes of the Paris radicals. The continuous agitation bore fruit on May 15, when a mob invaded the precincts of the newly elected and quite conservative Constituent Assembly. What had begun as a demonstration for a revolutionary war against the Russian oppression of Poland became an attempt to overthrow the government. Blanqui was reluctantly involved in the inception of this movement, but did not join the mob when it made its way to the Hôtel de Ville to proclaim a revolutionary government.¹⁹ Nevertheless, he was imprisoned along with most of the socialists and radical leaders after this improvised insurrection had been crushed by the bourgeois National Guard. Therefore he was unable to join the Paris workers in their last desperate attempt to achieve a social revolution in the bloody “June days” of 1848.

Throughout the next decade Blanqui languished in various republican and imperial prisons. There he read, lectured on political economy, and led his disciples in demonstrations against the prison authorities. A great deal of his energy was spent in factional clashes with fellow prisoners—disputes common to socialist politics. He was not entirely forgotten by the outside world for he managed to shock liberal opinion by condemnations of all of those republicans and moderate socialists, including Louis Blanc, who had in his opinion betrayed the workers in 1848. He emerged at this time as perhaps the first socialist “anti-participationist” who demands the absolute proletarian purity of his party.²⁰

In 1859 Blanqui was released from prison and went straight to Paris to do battle with the Second Empire. By 1861 he was back in jail, sentenced to four years for “conspiracy.”²¹ During this period he met and influenced a new generation of young intellectuals who had been imprisoned for various crimes against the security of the state. Some of them, “Blanquists of the second rank,” admired him without accepting his complete domination. In this group were Clemenceau and Ranc, among others, who were to become the stalwarts of the Radical Socialist Party.²² Other young militants subordinated themselves completely to the will of le Vieux and were the nucleus for a devoted revolutionary general staff after Blanqui escaped from a prison hospital in 1865.²³

In these last years of the tottering Empire, Blanqui naturally did all that he could to hasten its collapse. From his refuge in Belgium he guided an expanding group of young Blanquists in the formation of a revolutionary organization along the old conspiratorial lines, equally divided among students and workers.²⁴ Many of Blanqui's lieutenants were to play important roles in the Commune of 1871. Eudes, Tridon, Ferré, Rigault, and other communard leaders began their revolutionary careers under the tutelage of le Vieux, the old master revolutionary. Blanqui slipped into Paris from time to time to direct the activities of his approximately two thousand adherents. In August, 1870, he was reluctantly compelled by the impatience of his enthusiastic disciples, and by the fear that his organization would melt away, to lead a premature assault on the tottering Second Empire.²⁵ Adventures of this nature have stamped him with the somewhat invidious label of “insurrectionist.”

When the Empire did fall on September 4, 1870, power was immediately seized by the liberal politicians who were willing to accept a republic and eager to forestall a social revolution. They guided the country through its last hopeless writhings beneath the Prussian heel and handed it over to a National Assembly which was to arrange the surrender in approved constitutional fashion.

At first the Parisian radicals, including the Blanquists, had agreed to cooperate with the bourgeois government of National Defense in the face of the German menace. Blanqui, soon suspecting that the government preferred Prussian troops in Paris to armed French workers, began to attack the new administration on patriotic grounds in his newspaper La Patrie en danger. He had been raised in the peculiarly French atmosphere of leftist chauvinism which yearned for a war in the great revolutionary tradition, and whose main objection to conservative governments had been their relatively peaceful and internationalist outlook. When the news of the surrender of Metz impelled an angry crowd to seize the Hôtel de Ville on October 31, 1870, Blanqui followed it, and participated in the abortive attempt to set up a new government of revolutionary patriots. With this failure disappeared his last faint hope of inspiring Paris to fight a revolutionary war.²⁶

Heartbroken and disgusted by the surrender to the Prussians, Blanqui left Paris in February, 1871, and retired to the country. There he was arrested for his part in the attempted coup of October, and hustled into secret confinement on March 17, the day before civil war broke out in Paris. The government of Versailles refused the offer of the Communards to exchange all of their hostages for Blanqui, who in the words of his archenemy, Thiers, “was worth an army corps.”²⁷ The “mathematician of revolution” languished in a hidden prison while his followers fought their hopeless battle on the walls and in the streets of Paris.

For a few tragic months in 1871 the accumulated political bitterness of a century was distilled into the bloody struggle between the Paris of workers and radical intellectuals and the France of the middle class and the Catholic peasantry. The real nature of the Commune has been the subject of endless controversy. Its leaders were predominantly agitators and journalists of middle-class origin, its soldiers, as in the “days” of 1830 and 1848, were the workers. The ideology of the Commune was a mixture of neo-Jacobinism, Proudhonism, and Blanquism, and each of these loosely descriptive terms covers a multitude of political ideas.²⁸

The role of the Blanquists in the Commune is known to have been significant, but is also somewhat obscure and subject to various interpretations. It is certain that the Blanquists contributed a great deal to the consolidation of the spontaneous rising that gave birth to the Commune. They became the consistent supporters of vigorous direct action against Versailles, and of many of the acts of violence which marred the dying days of the Commune. The Blanquists did not function as an organized political party and confessed to a sense of confusion and lack of direction which they felt the missing Blanqui would have supplied.

The Blanquists who did not perish in the final holocaust fled abroad, especially to London. There they were somewhat influenced by Marxism, and supported Marx and Engels in their struggle against the anarchists in the First International. However, the Blanquists' exclusive devotion to a program of immediate revolution alienated Marx from them. A fear of Blanquist domination of the International was probably one of Marx's motives for moving the headquarters of the organization to New York.²⁹

While the Third Republic staggered through its first precarious years, Blanqui, the hero of a thousand battles for the republican ideal, remained behind the walls of a republican prison. In 1879 a campaign led by a group of young radicals resulted in Blanqui's election to the Chamber of Deputies by a Bordeaux constituency. The election was annulled by the Chamber which, at the same time, bowed to public opinion by giving him his liberty.³⁰ He became the editor of the newspaper Ni Dieu Ni Maître, and spent his last years stumping for a general amnesty of the Communards, and accusing the Opportunist republicans of a surrender to royalist and clerical forces. On December 27, 1880, he was felled by a stroke a few hours after speaking at a mass meeting in Paris. He died on January 1, 1881. His funeral was attended by a vast crowd of Parisian citizens, workers, and members of all leftist parties, for whom he had become the symbol of the long fight for socialism and for the Republic.³¹

After Blanqui's death his disciples tried to carry out his tradition in a “Blanquist” party, which eventually split over Boulangisme and was absorbed into the French Socialist Party.³² Blanquism as the basis of a specific political party was dead, but its influence, direct and indirect, has been manifest in French leftist politics until today. As late as 1928 Albert Mathiez felt impelled to publish and refute Blanqui's previously unpublished critique of Robespierre, on the following grounds:

Blanqui exercised a very important influence on the avant-garde of the French revolutionary parties during nearly a half-century from 1830 to 1880. Although of delicate health, he outlived all of his rivals from Barbès to Proudhon and Raspail, who could have counterbalanced his popularity. With the prestige of a martyr's halo, he became, after the Commune, a sort of patriarch whose judgments were oracles. He had fanatic disciples who extended his influence long after his death, until the coming of Jaurès began to push it little by little into the shadows. The violent hate that Blanqui bore Robespierre has thus imposed a decisive deviation on the attitudes that the socialists held toward the founder of French democracy. They had adored him until 1848. Blanqui taught them to detest him.³³

The persistence of Blanqui's influence in the French socialist movement is reflected in the controversy over Blanquism which disturbed the French Communist party a few years ago.³⁴

Although Blanqui was committed to a predominantly French, one might say parochial, brand of socialism and had relatively little contact with the international revolutionary community of his era, his influence did pass beyond the borders of his beloved France. In 1848 the German socialist Lassalle pasted Blanqui's “Manifesto to the People” upon the door of his prison cell.³⁵ Sixty-seven years later Mussolini took from this same proclamation the phrase “He who has steel, has bread,” for the masthead of his paper Il Popolo d’Italia.³⁶

The link between Blanquism and Russian Bolshevism was embodied by Peter Tkatchev, a nineteenth-century revolutionary who was studied and admired by Lenin. Tkatchev was one of the first to introduce the idea of a vanguard revolutionary party and of a revolutionary dictatorship into Russian socialism.³⁷ At Blanqui's funeral Tkatchev eulogized the Frenchman as a leader of the world revolutionary movement:

To him, to his ideas, to his abnegation, to the clarity of his mind, to his clairvoyance, we owe in great measure the progress which daily manifests itself in the Russian revolutionary movement.

Yes, it is he who has been our inspiration and our model in the great art of conspiracy. He is the uncontested chief who has filled us with revolutionary faith, the resolution to struggle, the scorn of suffering.³⁸

THE MEANING OF THE LIFE

Many subsequent radicals, while rejecting Blanqui's political tactics, have found in his dedicated career the embodiment of the struggle to realize the idea of the Great Revolution in the nineteenth century. Gustave Geffroy, the novelist and literary critic, who was a lifelong friend and journalistic collaborator of Clemenceau, wrote an impassioned tribute to Blanqui which is still the chief, albeit somewhat idealized, biography of the old revolutionary. He concluded this work with the observation: “Finally there is his life, which is itself a creation and his only doctrine—Blanqui was the political manifestation of the French Revolution in the nineteenth century.”³⁹

In 1885, Benoît Malon, the integral socialist and firm supporter of eclectic and humanitarian reformism, wrote that Blanqui, lacking the personal attraction of Barbès, Mazzini, Garibaldi, or Bakunin, surpassed them all by the extent of his knowledge, the power of his mind, and “by the unity of his life, without a ray of personal pleasure, a life of suffering and struggle, for the emancipation of humanity.”⁴⁰

In 1920, Stalin contrasted the proletarian leaders who were men of action but weak in theory with theorists such as Plekhanov and Kautsky who contributed nothing to revolutionary practice. Blanqui was among the former, one of the “leaders in times of storm, practical leaders, self-sacrificing and courageous, but who were weak in theory.”⁴¹

The almost universal agreement that Blanqui's career was a monument of indefatigable revolutionary purpose has not extended to his significance in the history of the socialist movement or to the substance of his social and political theory. The few lines assigned to Blanqui in histories of socialist thought usually characterize him as a naïve activist whose social theories are completely expressed in his career of abortive insurrections, candle-lit conspiracies, and perennial imprisonments.⁴² He is often described as an anarchist⁴³ or terrorist who thought of social progress only in terms of barricade and bomb.

There has always been a minority, however, which finds in Blanqui's life something more than a series of revolutionary anecdotes and in his writings an important prevision of modern revolutionary socialism. The triumph of the Bolshevist brand of socialism has considerably increased the interest in Blanqui as a theorist. Both friendly and hostile critics of Bolshevism and Blanquism have called attention to the similarities between Blanqui's faith in a compact, disciplined, insurrectionist organization and the Leninist concept of a Communist elite which will act as the “advance guard” of the proletariat, as well as their common proclamation of the necessity for a revolutionary dictatorship over the disarmed bourgeoisie.⁴⁴

The increasing interest in the possible relationship between Blanquism and contemporary ideologies has sharpened the controversy over the precise nature of Blanquism, especially in France where there is a very strong sense of the continuity between contemporary politics and its historical antecedents. Just as the heritage of the French Revolution or of the Commune of 1871 is claimed by the various publicists of the French left, each of whom finds his party the true heir of the French revolutionary tradition, so Blanqui, the personification of that tradition throughout the nineteenth century is retroactively enlisted in the ranks of the various factions. French political groupings, from the Radical Socialists to the Stalinists, have found something in Blanqui which is a reflection of their own ideologies, which they consider characteristic of all that is praiseworthy in Blanquism. They all distinguish between Blanquist errors and the true inheritance which has been passed to them alone.

Some of Blanqui's greatest admirers have denied that he exhibited any theoretical capacity whatsoever. Georges Clemenceau, who was a Blanquist in his youth, described his old master as virtually a democratic saint,⁴⁵ but so completely a man of action as to be a total stranger to systematic thought.⁴⁶ The great Radical Socialist politician was proud of his association with the old revolutionary and identified himself and his party with Blanqui's struggle against the nineteenth-century monarchies. Yet when one considers Clemenceau's career it seems obvious that the man who came to be such an enemy of revolutionary socialism must be considered not the heir, but the antithesis of Blanqui, unless the latter's expression of revolutionary and socialist values is completely discounted and only his qualities of leadership and disinterestedness are considered characteristic.

Benoît Malon, on the other hand, placed Blanquism in an essential relationship to late nineteenth-century socialism: “Blanqui's work gives us a sort of synthesis of Babouvist revolutionism and scientific socialism.”⁴⁷ This viewpoint has been expressed even more strongly by some modern French historians and socialists. For example, Maurice Dommanget, the outstanding contemporary biographer of Blanqui, not only credits him with a valid and clearly formulated social theory, but sees in his writings a brilliant theoretical edifice which in many ways is a precursor of Marxism and actually is congruent with it in all essentials. Dommanget flatly states,

the liaison between Babouvism and Bolshevism by way of revolutionary Marxism is realized, so to speak, through Blanquism. … Blanqui formulated, in nearly the same terms as Marx, the law of accumulation.⁴⁸

The relation of Blanquist theory to Marxism has been the subject of continuous interpretation by Marxists ever since Marx himself in 1852 described Blanqui and his followers as “the real leaders of the proletarian party, the revolutionary communists.”⁴⁹ Subsequently Blanquism has been the subject of rigorous criticism and moderate praise by Engels,⁵⁰ Lenin,⁵¹ and Stalin, and of course of special interest to French Communists. In 1951 a Parisian Society of the Friends of Blanqui was formed which opened its proceedings with an address entitled “Some Aspects of Blanqui's Activity” by André Marty, at that time still one of the leaders of the French Communist party.⁵² In this pamphlet Blanqui was given a position of considerable importance as a forerunner of modern Marxism-Leninism. Marty asserted that Blanqui's political role had been distorted by “bourgeois and social-democrat” historians who minimized his positive contributions and maximized his errors. Communists should realize that Blanqui is to be praised for his clear conception of the class struggle and its consequence, the bitter fight against the middle class, the instrument of capitalist domination of the workers. At the same time the two great Blanquist errors, the lack of interest in agitation for the workers' everyday economic demands, and the absence of any scientific conception of revolution, should be discussed as lessons for modern young revolutionaries and workers.

Marty himself was subsequently accused by the French Communist party of a lack of faith in the masses which has led him to attempt the substitution of “a narrow and sectarian Blanquist conception” for the Leninist-Stalinist idea of a party “immersed in the working class and the masses.”⁵³

Marty's political sins include an apparent scorn for mass propaganda efforts, such as the Stockholm peace petition; the heretical insistence that, in 1944, the Communists could have seized power in France; and “factionalist maneuvers” which are marked by covert demonstrations of hostility toward Maurice Thorez. An article in the January, 1953, issue of Cahiers du Communisme, the organ of the Central Committee of the French Communist party, attacked Marty's brochure on Blanqui as the theoretical manifestation of his opposition to the will of the party and to Leninist principles. According to the Communist historian Roger Garaudy, Marty has mistakenly credited Blanqui with a clear formulation of the class struggle; he has ignored Blanqui's essentially petit bourgeois economic ideas; and he has dismissed without sufficient criticism Blanqui's idealist interpretation of progress and historical development. Under the cover of Blanqui's well-deserved prestige he has attempted to smuggle “neo-Blanquist” errors of adventurism, nationalism, and factionalism into the organization.⁵⁴

The very elements of Blanquism which modern Communists do praise, such as the insistence upon a vanguard organization of professional revolutionaries and a post-revolutionary dictatorship, are often characterized by anti-Bolsheviks as Leninist perversions of true Marxism. In K. J. Kenafick's work on Marx and Bakunin, which has a definite anarchist orientation, Leninism is defined as “Marxism plus Blanquism” and the present Russian dictatorship is described as essentially Blanquist: “for it is based on the conception of a ‘vanguard party,’ a party of ruthless and violent action, and this is a Blanquist, and not a Marxist conception.”⁵⁵

Max Eastman, in his Marx and Lenin, remarked that Lenin “corrected the error of Blanqui which was to trust all to the organization of revolutionists,” but asserted that Lenin's insistence on centralized authority and military discipline in the party which leads the proletariat “smacks more of the tactics of Blanqui than of the philosophy of Marx.”⁵⁶

Communists have praised and anticommunists have criticized Blanqui's alleged uncompromising militancy and revolutionary authoritarianism. However, the image of Blanqui as activist and relentless conspirator is not the only one.⁵⁷ Many French socialists and republicans have interpreted his statements, especially those on education and universal suffrage, as fundamentally reformist. They argue that in the reactionary France of 1815-1871, a revolution was perhaps the only meaningful expression of political dissent for a sincere and selfless reformer. In a republic, even a bourgeois republic, which permitted freedom of speech, association, and the press, Blanqui would have eschewed conspiratorial techniques and carried on his fight through the press, the tribune, and the ballot box. The last two years of his life, in which he criticized the leaders of the Third Republic without attempting to overthrow its institutions are cited as evidence of his fundamentally reformist position. Therefore many parliamentarians and moderate reformers have accepted Blanqui's revolutionary career as a worthy contribution to the glorious French Republican tradition, while characterizing their own non-revolutionary position as a logical consequence of his ideas, applied in a different milieu.

In the Encyclopédie Socialiste of 1912, Compère-Morel affirmed Blanqui's revolutionism, but listed the bases of Blanquism as “Liberté, Laïcité, Instruction: These are the three ideas behind Blanqui's action. Communism will result from them quite naturally.”⁵⁸ Social Democrats have quoted this analysis out of context to prove that Blanqui was essentially a democratic reformer whose primary commitment was to universal secular education.⁵⁹ One republican anticlerical went so far as to maintain that in his last hours Blanqui saw the reversal of his belief in the necessity of violent revolution and the imminent solution of all social problems by the application of the new anticlerical laws.⁶⁰

Blanqui's fiery patriotism has often been cited as the truly French radical's answer to socialist pacifism or revolutionary internationalism. During the First World War especially, Blanqui's fierce anti-German polemics were exhumed and used to identify him as a spiritual forebear of Clemenceau's fighting nationalism, and as the antithesis of Marxian internationalism.⁶¹ On the other hand, in at least one speech delivered during a period when French socialism was strongly internationalist and pacifist, the lesson of Blanqui's life was found to be “a call to the fight against religion, capitalism, and patriotism.”⁶²

It is apparent that the essential nature of Blanquism, which seems so obviously embodied in Blanqui's singularly unified political experience, has been interpreted according to various predispositions, each of which can be supported by some relevant quotation from Blanqui's writings. Therefore Blanqui can, to some extent, be placed in a correct historical perspective by an analysis of the total content of his expressed ideas, the premises from which they were derived, and the historical context in which they were formulated. An understanding must be sought, not in the so-called “Blanquism” of his disciples, nor solely in the dramatic events of his crowded political career, but in the text of his own writings and speeches as well.

Unfortunately, not everything that Blanqui wrote has been preserved. His published writings make up only a segment of his intellectual output and actually give an incomplete and distorted impression of his total viewpoint. The bulk of his salvaged unpublished manuscripts is bound in twenty volumes in the Paris Bibliothéque Nationale.⁶³ From this disorganized mass of notes, letters, and drafts for speeches and pamphlets, from fragments which have been collected in his published works, and from the speeches he made at his various trials, one can piece together the outline of a social and political philosophy.

This material demonstrated, first of all, that Blanqui, “the activist,” was a self-conscious intellectual and omnivorous reader, interested in theoretical formulations of innumerable social, scientific, and philosophic problems. Among his notes are thousands of abstracts of books and periodical articles, often followed by his own comments. He read widely not only in contemporary political problems, but in the histories of every period, geographies, books on military science, collections of national population and economic statistics, philosophic treatises, and scientific articles of every description. His interests ranged from techniques for pressing grapes to the problem of the limits of the universe, and from the history of the early church fathers to the population statistics of Illinois.⁶⁴

This extensive intellectual preparation was to furnish the material for Blanqui's discursive theorizing which usually took the form of trenchant but rather unsystematic polemics written to define and defend the role of revolutionary socialism in France. Some of these ideas are now commonplace and so directly related to action that they are not usually dignified with the label of “theory.” Nevertheless a theory of action has as much instructive content as a carefully constructed Utopia, and a somewhat greater relevance to contemporary social movements.

Blanqui, the man of action par excellence, perfectly exemplified the fact that all political action, rational or irrational, is connected with certain ideas, unconscious or explicit, about reality, man, and society. Without an understanding of “Blanquist” theory, a full assessment of Blanqui's historical role in the socialist movement cannot be made.

Notes

1. See M. Ralea, L’Idée de révolution dans les doctrines socialistes (Paris: Jouve et Cie., 1923), p. 218: “Blanqui's primary importance rests in having transmitted the tactics of radical republicanism to socialism.”

2. H. Castille, “L. A. Blanqui,” Portraits politiques et historiques au dix-neuvième siècle (Paris: Ferdinand Sartorius, 1857), p. 9.

3. M. Dommanget, Blanqui (Paris: Librarie de l’Humanité, 1924), p. 44.

4. Blanqui's older brother, the conservative economist Adolphe Blanqui, wrote a touching account of this early period. J. A. Blanqui, “Souvenirs d’un etudiant sous la Restauration,” Revue de Paris (Nov.-Dec., 1918), pp. 159-61.

5. G. Geffroy, L’Enfermé (Paris: Les Éditions G. Crès et Cie., 1926), I, 38. When the entire work cited is not a translation, the translation in the text is the author's.

6. For his own impression of these events, see pp. 132-33 below.

7. J. Tchernoff, Le Parti républicain sous la Monarchie de Juillet (Paris: A. Pedone, 1901), p. 261.

8. Société des Amis du Peuple, Procès des Quinze (Paris: Imprimerie de Auguste Mie, 1832), p. 3.

9. Ibid., p. 148.

10. This organization was described in detail by the public prosecutor Mérilhou at Blanqui's trial in 1839, Cours des Pairs, Affaire des 12 and 13 Mai, 1839 (Paris: Imprimerie Royale, 1839), pp. 9-30.

11. A book has been devoted to this effort: A. Zévaès, Une Révolution manquée (Paris: Éditions de la Nouvelle Revue Critique, 1933). See also M. Dommanget, “Auguste Blanqui et l’insurrection du 12 Mai 1839,” La Critique Sociale, XI (March, 1934), 233-45.

12. La Gazette des Tribunaux, July 13-14, 1840.

13. F. Girard, Histoire du Mont Saint-Michel (Paris: Paul Permain et Cie., 1849); L. Noguès, Une Condamnation de Mai 1839 (Paris: J. Bry Ainé, 1850).

14. A. de Tocqueville, Recollections, tr. A. T. de Mattos (New York: Columbia University Press, 1949), p. 130. Cf. V. Hugo, Souvenirs personnels, 1848-1851, ed. H. Guillemin (Paris: Gallimard, 1952), pp. 167-70.

15. A. Delvau, Histoire de la Révolution de Février (Paris: Garnier Frères, 1850), I, 318.

16. A very fine work on Blanqui's role in 1848 is: S. Wasserman, Les Clubs de Barbès et de Blanqui (Paris: Édouard Cornély et Cie., 1913).

17. This document was published by a certain Taschereau in Revue Retrospective (Paris: Paulin, 1848), pp. 3-10. It is often referred to as the “Taschereau Document.”

18. A strong partisan of Blanqui has written a rather persuasive book mustering the evidence, although not the absolute proof, of Blanqui's complete innocence of the charge: M. Dommanget, Une Drame politique en 1848 (Paris: Les Deux Sirènes, 1948). For the opposite point of view: J. F. Jeanjean, Armand Barbès (Paris: Édouard Cornély et Cie., 1909), I, 159-70.

19. For a more detailed account of these events, see pp. 150-52 below.

20. There is a very full account of this period, including several important documents, in M. Dommanget, Auguste Blanqui à Belle-Ile (Paris: Librairie du Travail, 1935).

21. La Gazette des Tribunaux, June 14, 1861.

22. A. Ranc, Souvenirs—Correspondance 1831-1908 (Paris: Édouard Cornély et Cie., 1913), p. 27.

23. See Paul Lafargue's appreciation, “Auguste Blanqui—souvenirs personnel,” in La Révolution Française, April 20, 1879. Lafargue wrote: “To Blanqui belongs the honor of having made the revolutionary education of a section of the youth of our generation.”

24. C. Da Costa, Les Blanquistes, Vol. VI of Histoires des partis socialistes en France (Paris: Marcel Rivière, 1912), passim. Cf. M. Dommanget, “Les groupes Blanquistes de la fin du Second-Empire,” Revue Socialiste, XLIV (Feb., 1951), 225-31.

25. Blanqui's own description of this event appeared in his journal La Patrie en danger. L. A. Blanqui, La Patrie en danger (Paris: A. Chevalier, 1871), pp. 49-61. Cf. A. Zévaès, Auguste Blanqui (Paris: Marcel Rivière, 1920), pp. 216-20.

26. M. Dommanget, Blanqui, la Guerre de 1870-71 et la Commune (Paris: Éditions Domat, 1947), pp. 70-84.

27. B. Flotte, Blanqui et les otages en 1871 (Paris: Imprimerie Jeannette, 1885), p. 27.

28. Two relatively recent additions to the tremendous mass of literature on the Commune, which give well-reasoned but conflicting interpretations of its ideological composition are: E. S. Mason, The Paris Commune (New York: MacMillan Co., 1930), and F. Jellinek, The Paris Commune of 1871 (London: Victor Gollanz Ltd., 1937).

29. F. Mehring, Karl Marx (New York: Covici-Friede, 1935), p. 511. This can only remain a conjecture, but the Blanquists would have been one of the strongest sections of an International purged of the anarchists if it had maintained its headquarters in London.

30. Geoffroy, L’Enfermé, II, 199.

31. Ibid., II, 199.

32. Zévaès, Auguste Blanqui, pp. 232-46.

33. A. Mathiez, “Notes de Blanqui sur Robespierre,” Annales Historiques de la Révolution Française, V (July-Aug., 1928), 305-6.

34. See p. 22 below.

35. A. Schirokauer, Lassalle, tr. Edan and Cedar Paul (London: George Allen and Unwin Ltd., 1931), p. 124.

36. G. Megaro, Mussolini in the Making (London: George Allen and Unwin Ltd., 1938), p. 324.

37. M. Karpovitch, “A Forerunner of Lenin, P. N. Tkatchev,” Review of Politics, IV (July, 1944), pp. 336-50.

38. Ni Dieu Ni Maître, Jan. 9, 1881.

39. Geffroy, L’Enfermé, II, 218-20.

40. B. Malon, “Blanqui Socialiste,” Revue Socialiste, II (July, 1885), 597.

41. J. Stalin, “Lenin as the Organizer and Leader of the Russian Communist Party,” in Vol. I of V. I. Lenin, Selected Works (Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1950), p. 34.

42. For examples of this point of view: M. Prelot, L’Évolution politique du socialisme français, 1789-1934 (Paris: Éditions Spes, 1939), p. 42; J. Plamenatz, The Revolutionary Movement in France, 1815-71 (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1952), p. 45.

43. For example: D. Thomson, Democracy in France (London: Oxford University Press, 1946), p. 25. “Blanqui represents the simplest form of the revolutionary tradition, anti-parlimentarian and anarchist ”

44. E. Mason, “Blanqui and Communism,” Political Science Quarterly, XLIV (Dec., 1929), 498. R. W. Postgate, “The Prisoner,” Out of the Past (London: The Labour Publishing Co. Ltd., 1922), p. 54.

45. Clemenceau wrote a brief eulogy of Blanqui in Le Journal, Nov. 27, 1896.

46. Sylvain Molinier described a conversation with Clemenceau in which he expressed this viewpoint. S. Molinier, Blanqui (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1948), p. 69.

47. B. Malon, “Blanqui Socialiste,” Revue Socialiste, II (July, 1885), 597.

48. M. Dommanget, Auguste Blanqui à Belle-Ile, pp. 7-11.

49. K. Marx, “The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte,” Selected Works, ed. V. Adoratsky (New York: International Publishers, 1939), II, 323.

50. For Engels's critique of Blanquism see his letter to Der Volksstaat, 1874, No. 73; “The Program of the Blanquist Fugitives from the Paris Commune,” reprinted in K. Marx, The Civil War in France (Chicago: Charles H. Kerr and Co., 1934), pp. 133-44. There is also an interesting remark of Engels's to the effect that Russia was the only country in which a Blanquist conspiracy might succeed, in “A letter to Vera Zasulich, April 23, 1885,” reprinted in Marx-Engels, Selected Correspondence, Vol. XXIX of Marxist Library (New York: International Publishers, 1942), p. 437.

51. For Lenin's distinction between Blanquism and Bolshevism see: V. I. Lenin, On the Eve of October, Vol. XIII of Little Lenin Library (New York: International Publishers, 1932), pp. 5, 41.

52. A. Marty, Quelques Aspects de l’activité de Blanqui (Paris: Société des Amis de Blanqui, 1951). This also appeared in: Cahiers du Communisme, April, 1951, pp. 389-415.

53. Le Bureau Politique du Parti Communiste Français, “Les problèmes de la politique du parti, et l’activité factionelle des camarades André Marty et Charles Tillon,” Cahiers du Communisme, Oct., 1952, p. 951.

54. R. Garaudy, “Le Néo-blanquisme de contrebande et les positions antiléninistes d’André Marty,” Cahiers du Communisme, Jan., 1953, pp. 38-50.

55. K. J. Kenafick, Michael Bakunin and Karl Marx (Melbourne: Hawthorn Press, 1948), pp. 276-77.

56. M. Eastman, Marx and Lenin (New York: Albert and Charles Boni, 1927), pp. 144-45.

57. A. Rosenberg, Democracy and Socialism, tr. G. Roben (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1939), p. 94: “Blanqui was neither a fomenter of insurrections, nor an adventurer. Instead he was the living conscience of French democracy.”

58. C. Rappaport and Compère-Morel, Un Peu d’histoire, Vol. I of Encyclopédie Socialiste, ed. Compère-Morel (Paris: Aristide Quillet, 1912), p. 291.

59. Cf. F. Simon, L. A. Blanqui en Anjou, (Angers: Cooperative Imprimerie Angevine, 1939), pp. 51-54.

60. Sénés, “Blanqui,” in Provenceaux—Notes Biographiques (Toulon, 1904), p. 146.

61. E.g., A. Callet “Un Grand patriote méconnu. Auguste Blanqui,” La Nouvelle Revue, XXXV (May-June 1918), 111-18.

62. E. Albringues, Discours anniversaire de Blanqui, aux Jeunesse Socialiste Révolutionnaire, Groupe de Toulouse, Jan. 1, 1898 (Toulouse: Imprimerie Lagout et Sebille, 1898), p. 8.

63. Bibliothéque Nationale, Blanqui MSS, Nouvelles acquisitions françaises, 9578-9598. (Will henceforth be cited as Blanqui MSS, followed by Nouvelles acquisitions number, section, and page, e.g., Blanqui MSS, 9580 [part 2], p. 33).

64. This is attested by various fellow prisoners: Noguès, Une Condamnation de Mai 1839, p. 242; A. Scheurer-Kestner, Souvenirs de jeunesse (Paris: Bibliothèque—Charpentier, 1905), pp. 80-81.