Louis Auguste Blanqui

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"Blanqui" redirects here. For the economist, see Jérôme-Adolphe Blanqui.
Louis Auguste Blanqui
philosopher
Known forBlanquism
Parent
  • Jean Dominique Blanqui (father)
RelativesJérôme-Adolphe Blanqui

Louis Auguste Blanqui (French pronunciation:

political activist, notable for his revolutionary theory of Blanquism
.

Biography

Early life, political activity and first imprisonment (1805–1848)

Blanqui was born in

Louis Philippe (1830–1848). During the 1832 trial of the Amis du People at the cour d'assis in Paris Blanqui declared, "You have confiscated the rifles of July--yes. But the bullets have been fired. Every bullet of the workers of Paris is on its way round the world."[2][3] 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 (1848–1879)

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 (written in the Prison of Belle-Ile-en-Mer, 10 February 1851) to a committee of social democrats in London. The text of the address was noted and introduced by Karl Marx.[4]

In 1865, while serving a further term of imprisonment under the Empire, he escaped, and continued his

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.

Photo of Blanqui

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

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

Main article: Blanquism

As a socialist, Blanqui favored what he described as a just

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

The grave of Auguste Blanqui, Père La Chaise Cemetery, Paris

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 (1872), 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 (1885).

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 ("He who has iron has bread").[5]

Blanqui's political activism and his book L'Eternité par les astres were commented on by Walter Benjamin in his Arcades Project and are referred to in the novel The Secret Knowledge by Andrew Crumey.

See also

Works

French

  • L'Armée esclave et opprimée
  • Critique sociale: Capital et travail
  • Critique sociale: 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 translations

  • The Eternity According to the Stars, tr. by Mathew H. Anderson, with an afterword by Lisa Block de Behar ("Literary Escapes and Astral Shelters of an Incarcerated Conspirator"). In CR: The New Centennial Review 9/3: 61–94, Winter 2009. The first full-length translation into English.[6]
  • Eternity by the Stars. Frank Chouraqui, trans. New York: Contra Mundum Press, 2013.

Footnotes

  1. ISBN 978-2-7483-5392-1
    . Retrieved 31 August 2015.
  2. ISBN 0674008022
    .
  3. ^ Blanqui, Auguste (1805-1881) Auteur du texte (1832). Défense du citoyen Louis Auguste Blanqui devant la Cour d'assises : 1832 (in French). p. 14.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: numeric names: authors list (link)
  4. Marxists.org
    , last retrieved 25 April 2007
  5. ^ Christopher Hibbert, Mussolini: The Rise and Fall of Il Duce, New York: NY, St. Martin’s Press, 2008, p. 21. First published in 1962 as Il Duce: The Life of Benito Mussolini
  6. ^ "Editors' Note".

Further reading

  • Mitchell Abidor (trans.), Communards: The Story of the Paris Commune of 1871 as Told by Those Who Fought for It. Pacifica, CA: Marxists Internet Archive, 2010.
  • Doug Enaa Greene, Communist Insurgent: Blanqui's Politics of Revolution. Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2017.
  • Patrick H. Hutton, The Cult of the Revolutionary Tradition: The Blanquists in French Politics, 1864-1893. Berkeley CA: University of California Press, 1981
  • OCLC 984463383
    .

External links

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