Louis Auguste Blanqui

Born Feb. 1, 1805, in Puget-Théniers, near Nice; died Jan. 1, 1881, in Paris. French revolutionary, a Utopian Communist. Born into the family of a subprefect.

Blanqui was an active participant in the republican and democratic movement during the period of the Bourbon restoration (1814–30), the July Revolution of 1830, and the July Monarchy. Being under the strong influence of Babeuvist ideas, he came to Communist convictions in 1832–34. In 1835–39 he organized and led the secret republican societies the Society of Families and the Society of the Seasons. After the suppression of the uprising of May 12, 1839, in Paris, Blanqui was condemned to death, but the sentence was commuted to life imprisonment. Released by the Revolution of 1848, Blanqui founded the club the Central Republican Society and led the most revolutionary proletarian elements, who fought against the bourgeois policy of the provisional government and the illusions of Louis Blanc. After the demonstration of May 15, 1848, in Paris, Blanqui was arrested and sentenced to ten years in prison. Amnestied in 1859, he returned to Paris. From 1861 to 1865 he was again imprisoned. In 1865 he escaped from prison and settled in Brussels. On Aug. 14, 1870, with the defeat of the French army in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–71, Blanqui, who had secretly arrived in Paris, made an attempt to stage an uprising, which ended in failure. After the September 4 Revolution and the fall of the Second Empire, Blanqui published the newspaper Patrie en Danger, in which he called for a most vigorous struggle against the Prussians. After he became convinced of the treasonable policy of the “government of national defense,” Blanqui actively participated in the uprising of Oct. 31,1870, for which he was again sentenced to life imprisonment. During the Paris Commune of 1871, Blanqui was elected member of the Commune in absentia, but the attempts of the Commune to have the Versailles government release him were not successful; Blanqui remained in prison until 1879. In his last years, Blanqui continued his socialist and democratic propaganda and tried to rally his partisans (Blanquists) into a party organization.

While he was a follower of the 18th-century French materialists, Blanqui was an idealist in the interpretation of history and believed that the decisive force of the historical progress is the enlightenment of the people. Blanqui recognized the class struggle and emphasized the antagonistic class interests of the proletariat and the bourgeoisie, but he did not single out the proletariat from the general mass of the exploited. Blanqui held that only a socialist revolution could abolish class exploitation. The success of the revolution, in his view, depended on a well-prepared conspiracy by a tightly knit organization of revolutionaries, who, supported at the decisive moment by the popular masses, would establish a revolutionary dictatorship. A revolutionary dictatorship in the transition period from capitalism to Communism would have the tasks, as Blanqui said, of disarming the counterrevolutionary classes, arming the proletariat, and defending the new system against attacks by its enemies. Blanqui attached an enormous importance to the organizational aspect of the preparation of the uprising, but he did not consider the social conditions under which it should take place. The classics of Marxism-Leninism, while expressing a high opinion of Blanqui as a revolutionary and an ardent partisan of socialism, nevertheless criticized Blanqui’s conspiratorial tactics and his failure to understand that an armed uprising can succeed only if the revolution is carried out by the masses of the working people under the leadership of the revolutionary party.