Louis Blanc
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Louis Blanc | |
---|---|
national workshops | |
Member of the Minister of State | |
Provisional government | |
In office 24 February 1848 – 9 May 1848 | |
Personal details | |
Political party | The Mountain (1849–1852) Republican Union (1871–1882) |
Louis Jean Joseph Charles Blanc (
Following the Revolution of 1848, Blanc became a member of the provisional government and began advocating for cooperatives which would be initially aided by the government but ultimately controlled by the workers themselves. Blanc's advocacy failed; caught between radical worker tendencies and the National Guard, he was forced into exile. Blanc returned to France in 1870, shortly before the conclusion of the Franco-Prussian War, where he served as a member of the National Assembly for Seine. While he did not support the Paris Commune, he successfully proposed amnesty to the Communards.
Biography
Early years
Blanc was born in
Revolution of 1848
In 1847, Blanc published the two first volumes of his Histoire de la Revolution Française. Its publication was interrupted by the
The revolution of 1848 was the real chance for Louis Blanc's ideas to be implemented. His theory of using the established government to enact change was different from those of other socialist theorists of his time. Blanc believed that workers could control their own livelihoods but knew that unless they were given help to get started the cooperative workshops would never work. To assist this process along Blanc lobbied for national funding of these workshops until the workers could assume control. To fund this ambitious project, Blanc saw a ready revenue source in the rail system. Under government control the railway system would provide the bulk of the funding needed for this and other projects Blanc saw in the future.
When the workshop program was ratified in the National Assembly, Blanc's chief rival Émile Thomas was put in control of the project. The National Assembly was not ready for this type of social program and treated the workshops as a method of buying time until the assembly could gather enough support to stabilize themselves against another worker rebellion. Thomas's deliberate failure in organizing the workshops into a success only seemed to anger the public more. The people had been promised a job and a working environment in which the workers were in charge, from these government funded programs. What they had received was hand outs and government funded work parties to dig ditches and hard manual labor for meager wages or paid to remain idle. When the workshops were closed the workers rebelled again but were put down by force by the National Guard. The National Assembly was also able to blame Blanc for the failure of the workshops. His ideas were questioned, and he lost much of the respect which had given him influence with the public.
Between the sans-culottes, who tried to force him to place himself at their head, and the National Guards, who mistreated him, he was nearly killed. Rescued with difficulty, he escaped with a false passport to Belgium, and then to London. He was condemned to deportation in absentia by a special tribunal at Bourges. Against trial and sentence he alike protested, developing his protest in a series of articles in the Nouveau Monde, a review published in Paris under his direction. These he afterwards collected and published as Pages de l'histoire de la révolution de 1848 (Brussels, 1850).
Exile
During his stay in Britain, he made use of the unique collection of materials for the revolutionary period preserved at the British Museum to complete his Histoire de la Revolution Française 12 vols. (1847–1862). In 1858 he published a reply to Lord Normanby's A Year of Revolution in Paris (1858), which he developed later into his Histoire de la révolution de 1848 (2 vols., 1870–1880). He was also active in the masonic organisation, the Conseil Suprême de l'Ordre Maçonnique de Memphis. His membership in the London-based La Grand Loge des Philadelphes is unconfirmed.
Return to France
As far back as 1839, Louis Blanc had vehemently opposed the idea of a Napoleonic restoration, predicting that it would be "despotism without glory," "the Empire without the Emperor." He therefore remained in exile until the fall of the
Legacy
Blanc possessed a picturesque and vivid style, and considerable power of research; but the fervour with which he expressed his convictions, while placing him in the first rank of orators, tended to turn his historical writings into political pamphlets. His political and social ideas have had a great influence on the development of
The
Capitalism
Blanc is sometimes cited as the first person to use the word capitalism in something like its modern form. While he did not mean the economic system described by Karl Marx in Das Kapital, Blanc sowed the seeds of that usage, coining the word to mean the holding of capital away from others:
What I call 'capitalism' that is to say the appropriation of capital by some to the exclusion of others.[4]
— Organisation du Travail (1851)
Thought
Reformist socialism
Blanc was unusual in advocating for socialism without revolution first.[5]
Right to work
Blanc invented the right to work with his Le Droit au Travail.[6]
Religion
Blanc resisted what he perceived as the atheism implicit in Hegel, claiming that it corresponded to anarchism in politics and was not an adequate basis for democracy.
Instead, Blanc claimed that religion was foundational for revolution to take place, in keeping with the
Along with
See also
References
- ^ Finn, Margot C. (2003). After Chartism: Class and Nation in English Radical Politics 1848-1874. Cambridge University Press. p. 176.
- doi:10.1093/ref:odnb/92465. (Subscription or UK public library membershiprequired.)
- ^ Louis Blanc, Plus de Girondins, 1851, p. 92.
- ^ Conceptualizing Capitalism: Institutions, Evolution, Future
- ^ Herzog et al. 1884, p. 2205.
- ^ Day 1914, p. 85.
- ^ Moggach 2011, p. 319.
- ^ Marx & al 2001, p. 63.
- ^ a b Joskowicz 2013, p. 46.
- ^ Stirner, Byington & Martin 2012, p. 106.
- ^ a b Furet & Ozouf 1989, p. 902.
- ^ Malia & Emmons 2006, p. 59.
- ^ Comay 2011, p. 187.
- ^ a b Furet & Ozouf 1989, p. 700.
- ^ Eisenstein 1959, p. 136.
Sources
- Leo A. Loubère, (1961) Louis Blanc: His Life and His Contribution to the Rise of French Jacobin-Socialism
- G.D.H Cole, Socialist Thought, The Forerunners 1789-1850 (1959)
- Comay, R. (2011). Mourning Sickness: Hegel and the French Revolution. Cultural Memory in the Present. Stanford University Press. ISBN 978-0-8047-6127-7.
- Day, H.C. (1914). Catholic Democracy: Individualism and Socialism. Longmans, Green, and Company.
- Eisenstein, E.L. (1959). The first professional revolutionist. Harvard historical monographs. Harvard University Press. p. 136.
- Furet, F.; Ozouf, M. (1989). A Critical Dictionary of the French Revolution. Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. ISBN 978-0-674-17728-4.
- Herzog, J.J.; Schaff, P.; Jackson, S.M.; Schaff, D.S. (1884). "Socialism". A Religious Encyclopædia, Or, Dictionary of Biblical, Historical, Doctrinal and Practical Theology: Based on the Real-encyklopädie of H Erzog, Plitt and Hauck. T. & T. Clark.
- Joskowicz, A. (2013). The Modernity of Others: Jewish Anti-Catholicism in Germany and France. Stanford Studies in Jewish History and Culture. Stanford University Press. ISBN 978-0-8047-8840-3.
- Marx, K.; al, K.M. (2001). Marxism, Socialism and Religion. Resistance Marxist library. Resistance Books. ISBN 978-1-876646-01-1.
- Harry W. Laidler, A History of Socialist Thought (1927)
- Malia, M.E.; Emmons, T. (2006). History's Locomotives: Revolutions and the Making of the Modern World. Yale University Press. ISBN 978-0-300-13528-2.
- Moggach, D. (2011). Politics, Religion, and Art: Hegelian Debates. Book collections on Project MUSE. Northwestern University Press. ISBN 978-0-8101-2729-6.
- Stirner, M.; Byington, S.T.; Martin, J.J. (2012) [1982]. The Ego and His Own: The Case of the Individual Against Authority. Dover Publications. ISBN 978-0-486-12276-2.
- G.R.S. Taylor, Leaders of Socialism (1968)
- Attribution
- public domain: Chisholm, Hugh, ed. (1911). "Blanc, Louis". Encyclopædia Britannica (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press. This work in turn cites, in addition to Blanc's own works:
- L. Fiaux, Louis Blanc (1883)
This article incorporates text from a publication now in the
Further reading
- Hazareesingh, S. (2015). How the French Think: An Affectionate Portrait of an Intellectual People. Basic Books. p. 45. ISBN 978-0-465-06166-2.
External links
- New International Encyclopedia. 1905. .