Biliana Kassabova History of Political Thought Workshop December 4, 2017

Blanqui’s note Nov. 23, 1848

Blanqui between Myth and Archives: Revolution, Dictatorship, and Education

This piece, very much a work in progress, aims to make sense of the revolutionary ideas and actions of Louis-Auguste Blanqui. It complicates our ideas of political thought regarding revolution in the nineteenth century, by arguing that the binary of centralized versus popular revolution needs to be revised. It is part of a larger project on concepts of revolutionary leadership in France from the French Revolution of 1789 until the Paris Commune of 1871. Within this historical trajectory, Blanqui is an interpreter of 18th century ideas into 19th century contexts, a political thinker and actor who plays a key role in the various reformulations of the revolutionary tradition.

1848 does not enjoy a stellar reputation among historians of France. The revolution of

February that year saw the overthrow of the last king of France, followed by the establishment of a

new French republic. This republic, however, lasted for only three years, brought little and short-lived

social change, remained rather conservative, though was also laden with bitter parliamentary strife,

and ended through a coup d’état that inaugurated a new authoritarian régime, a Second Empire with

Napoleon III at its head. To add insult to injury, even the attempts at establishing a viable

parliamentary republican system were famously seen by political observers and participants from

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almost all parts of the political spectrum as derivative, incompetent, and worse yet – laughable. “There

have been more mischievous revolutionaries than those of 1848, but I doubt if there have been any

stupider,”1 quipped Alexis de Tocqueville in his posthumously published Recollections. Father of

modern anarchism Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, for entirely different reasons, had anticipated this

mockery in his 1849 Confessions of a Revolutionary: “notre histoire, depuis février, ressemble à un conte

de fées. Quand cesserons-nous de jouer au trône et à la révolution ? Quand serons-nous véritablement

hommes et citoyens ?”2 (“since February, our history resembles a fairy tale. When shall we stop playing

games of thrones and revolutions? When shall we truly be men and citizens?”) Most memorably, in

reference to both the February 1848 revolution and the December 2, 1851 coup d’état, Karl Marx began

his Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte with “Hegel remarks somewhere that all great, world-historical

facts and personages occur, as it were, twice. He has forgotten to add: the first time as tragedy, the

second as farce.”3 1848 is early on accepted to be a failure of historical imagination and a failure of

political thought.

And yet, concurrently with the farcical imitation of the Revolution of 1789, 1848 revealed for

the same Marx the true beginnings of a new type of revolutionary consciousness. With the workers’

insurrection of June 1848 and especially with its brutal suppression by the armed forces of the elected

government, “[t]he veil that shrouded the republic was torn asunder.”4 In Marx’s analysis, the

insurrection of June, born out of the contradictions of the promises and politics of the Second

Republic, finally brought to light the struggle “between the two classes that split modern society.”5

Beyond laying the groundwork for his theory of historical progression, Marx thus urges his readers to

1 Alexis de Tocqueville, Recollections (New Brunswick: Transactions books, 1987), 96. 2 Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, Les Confessions d’un révolutionnaire (Paris: Garnier Frères, 1851), 113. All translations from

French are mine. 3 From “The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte” in Robert C. Tucker, Ed. The Marx-Engels Reader, (New

York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1978), 594. 4 From “The Class Struggles in France” in Tucker, Marx-Engels Reader, 589. 5 Tucker, Marx-Engels Reader, 589.

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see with him something new where everyone else finds only a repetition of the old, and to discover

with him the germs of future victory in the debris of past defeat.

Historiography sometimes suffers from a problem similar to that of the revolutionaries of

1848 – it takes upon itself to repeat the formulae of the past and use them as a shorthand, thereby

failing to notice nuances and innovations. Case in point – Louis-Auguste Blanqui, the symbol of

revolutionary activity in 19th century France, and even 19th century Europe, and, more particularly, a

key, albeit also somewhat tangential, actor in the events of 1848. Within his lifetime, and to this day,

Blanqui’s name has been synonymous with insurrectionary conspiracy, putschism, and revolutionary

authoritarianism. There are good reasons for this. However, the very weight of this reputation has

contributed to the occlusion of a different Blanqui, the one who can be found in the archives.

The oversimplification of Blanqui’s ideas of revolution and his consequent relegation to the

backburners of history are all the more striking when we remember that he was the towering figure of

revolution in the 19th century, beginning his (known) political activity at the age of 22 during an armed

protest in Paris in 1827, ending it with his death in 1881, having spent an estimated total of 33 years

in the prisons of the monarchist, republican, and imperial regimes during which he lived and against

which he fought. Revered in France and elsewhere in Europe (his contemporary admirers include

French anarchist Communard Jules Vallès and Italian revolutionary nationalist Giuseppe Garibaldi,

among others), he was seen by various French regimes as a living threat to their existence. Marx, too,

despite his many differences with Blanqui, saw him as the symbol of socialist revolution and the source

of terror of conservatives, claiming that “the proletariat rallies more and more round revolutionary

socialism, round communism, for which the bourgeoisie has itself invented the name of Blanqui.”6

Nowadays, Blanqui barely figures on the pages of history and, whenever he is mentioned, it is as a

6 Tucker, Marx-Engels Reader, 592.

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caricature of a rouser of masses that do not want to be roused and as a failed revolutionary would-be

dictator.

With this paper, I hope to shed some light on this forgotten Blanqui, complicate our

understanding of his revolutionary ideas, and, by extension, reveal yet another aspect of the political

thought emerging from the failures of 1848. The first part of this piece will provide a brief overview

of the early revolutionary activity of Blanqui, which contributed to the creation of his myth and to the

late 19th and early 20th century repurposing of his ideas by European thinkers of socialism and

revolution. I will then continue by dispelling some of those inherited commonplaces about Blanqui’s

thought through an overview and analysis of archival material, largely consisting of unpublished letters

and drafts. Using the failure of the revolution of February 1848 as a mirror through which to view the

revolution of 1789-1794, Blanqui condemned old models of centralized revolution, most prominently

through the figure of Robespierre. Blanquist revolutionary strategy instead shifted toward spreading

knowledge among the people in order to transform it into an active and essential participant in the

revolution to come. The revolutionary mimicry of 1848 thus serves to reassess the models of the past

and re-imagine revolutionary ideology as a whole. The paper will conclude with some thoughts on the

larger implications of this new direction of analysis of Blanqui’s ideas for the study of the history of

revolutionary thought.

The Myth of Blanqui

On February 19, 1872, the right-wing paper Le Figaro published a short commentary on

Auguste Blanqui. The old revolutionary conspirator had stood trial, and on February 17 been

convicted to life in prison, for his involvement in the events leading up to the Paris Commune of

1871, more specifically for his two attempted armed insurrections in August and in October 1870. Le

Figaro’s assessment read:

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C’est que Blanqui est de l’école de De Maistre et de Bonald sous ce rapport. C’est un absolutiste comme eux. […] Ce démagogue n’est pas démocrate : il ne croit pas au peuple, il ne croit pas à l’opinion publique ; il ne croit qu’en lui et dans les quelques hommes que, patiemment, il a groupés autour de lui, élevés, pétris, façonnés de ses mains. […] Il dit avec De Maistre : Ce n’est point le peuple qui fait les révolutions : quatre ou cinq personnes suffisent. […] Il s’occupe alors de réunir ses acolytes ; il fait un plan d’insurrection ; et puis, un beau matin, il fixe le jour. Il n’y a rien dans l’air que sa volonté. Alors, lui et ses amis descendent dans la rue ; le peuple les regarde avec étonnement : il ne comprend pas.7 (That’s because Blanqui belongs to the school of De Maistre and of Bonald on this point. He’s an absolutist like them. […] This demagogue is not a democrat: he does not believe in the people, he does not believe in public opinion; he does not believe in anyone but himself and his several men that he has patiently assembled around himself, that he has brought up, moulded, fashioned with his own hands. […] Like De Maistre, he says : It is not the people that makes revolutions: four or five men are enough. […] He then takes charge of gathering his acolytes ; he makes a plan of insurrection ; and then, one beautiful morning, he chooses the day. The air is full with nothing but his will. Then, he and his friends descend onto the street the people look at them with stupefaction: they do not understand.)

The accusation levelled against Blanqui – that though paying lip service to a republican and socialist

revolution with equality as its ideal, he was, in fact, a centralizing authoritarian even in his revolutionary

politics – is neither entirely baseless, nor the vitriol of a lone political antagonist. An active and

influential, if technically rather unsuccessful, revolutionary figure, Blanqui established his reputation

as an arch-conspirator in the 1830s when, after participating and being imprisoned for his activities in

the Société des amis du peuple (the Society of the Friends of the People), he organized and led first the Société des

familles and then the Société des saisons, the latter of which would head the unsuccessful coup de main of

May 12 and 13, 1839. Throughout the nineteenth century, it was with his name that the idea of a

revolution brought about by a network of small revolutionary cells, headed by a tight insurrectionary

core, whose leaders would then establish a temporary revolutionary dictatorship, was connected.

As James Billington has pointed out, the structure, goals, and mechanisms of the Blanquist

organizations of the 1830s show that they followed in the footsteps of previous occult and political

7 Francis Magnard, “Paris au jour le jour” Le Figaro February 19, 1872. BNF-Gallica.

http://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k2744195.item (accessed November 26, 2017).

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secret societies.8 What built Blanqui’s reputation of centralized conspiratorial revolutionary activity,

however, is specifically the almost obsessively structured hierarchy of the revolutionary societies he

helped organize – a hierarchy that was complemented with a jealously observed secrecy about the

extent of the network. Each member of a “week” (the smallest revolutionary cell, consisting of six

men, headed by a leader, a “dimanche” (a “Sunday”)) knew only his fellow “days” from the same

“week,” but had little or even no idea as to the number of weeks in the overall organization; in the

same way, the dimanches, though perhaps cognizant of other dimanches did not know much of the

number and organization of the months.9 The only members of the society who were in a position to

be aware of the size and state of the conspiracy were the années themselves, of whom there were by all

accounts three – Blanqui himself, Armand Barbès, and Martin Bernard.10 “Je suppose,” Nouguès, a

participant in the May 12-13 insurrection, said during his subsequent interrogation, “d’après le nombre

de chefs que j’ai vus, qu’il n’y avait pas plus de trois années.”11 (“I suppose, given the number of leaders

whom I’ve seen, that there were no more than three years”) The language used by Nouguès in his

statements at his trial – “je suppose,” “j’ai entendu dire,” “à ce que je crois” (“I suppose,” “I’ve heard

it being said,” “it seems to me”) points to the deep secrecy shrouding the organization even for those

who were its devoted members.

This complicated structure was seen as requisite for the protection of the network as a whole,

as the disappearance or betrayal of no single member could bring with it the destruction of the system.

8 See James H. Billington, Fire in the Minds of Men, (New York: Basic Books, Inc., 1980), 178-182. 9 This structure of revolutionary secret societies is reproduced in a nightmarish, yet also ultimately comical, fashion in

G. K. Chesterton’s 1908 novel on the anarchist underground, The Man Who Was Thursday, which portrays a late nineteenth century anarchist organization, in which the secrecy is such, that eventually quasi all the members turn out to be police agents. See Gilbert Keith Chesterton, The Man Who Was Thursday (Bristol: Arrowsmith, 1933).

10 In connection with this, let us recall Dostoevsky’s dark and biting satire of this model of revolution – in his Demons, the quintets of ridiculous “revolutionaries” in the little provincial town believe they are among myriads of similar groups, linked throughout Russia. To the contrary, there is just Pyotr Stepanovich, whose own idea of revolution is summarized in the musings he shares with the stunned Stavrogin “No, this democratic rabble, with its quintets, is a poor foundation; what we want is one magnificent, despotic will, like an idol, resting on something fundamental and external.... Then the quintets will cringe into obedience and be obsequiously ready on occasion.” (Dostoevsky, Demons, 527).

11 Joseph Merilhou, Attentat des 12 et 13 mai 1839. Rapport fait à la cour, (Paris: Imprimerie Royale, 1839), v.1, 113.

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However, concurrently, this organization also meant that the society conspiring for the people’s liberty

was dissociated from the people itself by multiple layers of hierarchy, by the extremely limited number

of men who were recruited to participate in it, by the complete secrecy that separated the

insurrectionary units, and the very restricted number of leaders who were aware of the workings and

size of the organization. Thus, the society’s attempted insurrection of May 12, 1839, after briefly

managing to capture the Hôtel de Ville, was a resounding fiasco, failing to bring any sort of

revolutionary momentum or even much sympathy from the Parisian population. The people did not

follow its leaders.12

Related to the intricate hierarchical organization of the revolutionary networks was another

key element of the myth of Blanqui – the insistence and indeed the centrality of a post-revolutionary

dictatorship to the plans of the conspirators. Not only was the organization of the group that is

supposed to bring about the revolution highly centralized, but so was the post-revolutionary order.

“Il est incontestable qu’après une révolution opérée au profit de nos idées, il devra être créé un pouvoir

dictatorial avec mission de diriger le mouvement révolutionnaire […qui] représentera bien

évidemment la volonté éclairée de la grande majorité de la nation,”13 (“it is undisputable that after a

revolution based on our ideas, a dictatorial power ought to be created, whose mission would be to

direct the revolutionary movement [which] would quite obviously represent the enlightened will of

the great majority of the nation,”) a text found in the possession of one of the participants in the

12 Nouguès continues: “Je me repens d’avoir pris part à une telle entreprise: les chefs, qui nous disaient que le peuple

était pour nous, qu’il suffisait de se montrer, nous ont trompés, ou ils ont été trompés. Je me repens, parce qu’une révolution tentée par une minorité est toujours coupable…” Since that’s a statement that he gave at his trial, it should be taken with a grain of salt; however, it is notable that Nouguès is repentant not for the goals of the revolution, but for its methods. Contemporary observer and fellow republican Sebastien Commissaire recalls the failed insurrection in his memoirs and attributes that to the very limited number of republicans among the people – the revolutionary situation was not ripe: “Cette insurrection fut comprimée facilement par la troupe et par la garde nationale. Le moment n’était pas encore venu, les républicains ne formaient alors qu’une faible minorité dans le pays. Pour qu’une insurrection se change en révolution, il faut que la disaffection soit devenue générale, il faut que le gouvernement ou le chef du pouvoir, par une série de fautes, se soit aliéné l’opinion publique. Quand il est arrive à ce degré, il est perdu, personne ne le defend et une poignée d’hommes audacieux suffit quelquefois pour le renverser.” See Sébastien Commissaire, Mémoires et Souvenirs, t. 1 (Lyon: Meton, 1888), 77.

13 Merilhou, Attentat, v. 2, 25.

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combat proclaimed. The Blanquist leaders had the role of channeling the enlightened forces and goals

of society while the newly liberated citizens get accustomed to the new order, rights, and duties.

Concentrated in the hands of a few “hommes capables, énergiques, amis du peuple, connus de lui, ou

du moins de ses têtes de colonnes,”14 (“men who are capable, energetic, friends of the people and

known by the people, or at least by its leaders”) this imagined post-revolutionary governing body is a

veritable reincarnation of the Committee of Public Safety of 1793.

Indeed, much like their predecessors of the Terror of 1793, Blanqui and his followers

envisioned the deferral of any constitution’s implementation: “toutes les lois seront suspendues; le

dictateur pourvoira immédiatement aux divers services publics.”15 (“all laws will be suspended; the

dictator will immediately tend to the various public services.”) Thus, while discussing the egalitarian

goals of the dreamed-of new world and while pointing out the social reforms that were to be instituted

for those goals to be achieved, the Blanquist blueprint for the post-revolutionary order spoke of the

necessity of an extra-legal executive body of indefinite duration. The dictators would implement the

changes necessary for the civic and moral improvement of society and its members, while the people

itself would not have much of a role in the process, other than being the beneficiary of the revolution.

Only after a certain time of transition passes – after the definitive defeat of the enemies of the

revolution and the transformation of the heretofore oppressed people into a truly virtuous and free

citizenry – can true liberty and equality take place. A model of revolutionary dictatorship first

borrowed from Robespierre by Babeuf, then from Babeuf by Buonarroti, the Blanquist one imagined

an undisturbed continuation between the tribunes who organize the people’s revolution in a small,

exclusive conspiratorial circle, and the dictators whose role is to prepare “les nouvelles bases

14 Merilhou, Attentat, v. 2, 27 In addition, the conspirators imagined this extra-constitutional government to be a

triumvirate of virtuous men, so as to avoid the abuse of power likely if the dictator is only one and the lack of purposiveness inherent in a bigger executive body. Compare this with Buonarroti’s account of the imagined revolutionary government in Buonarroti, Conspiration, v. 1, 113-114.

15 Merilhou, Attentat, v. 2, 27.

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d’organisation sociale, et conduire le peuple, enfin, du gouvernement révolutionnaire au

gouvernement républicain régulier.”16 (“the new bases of social organization, and finally lead the

people from the revolutionary government to a regular republican government.”) However, as the

events of May 1839 showed, the people of Paris (and even less so – the people of France) did not

follow their leaders suddenly bursting out from the secret societies into the streets and the people’s

tribunes, those would-be dictators of the provisional revolutionary government, would spend the next

several years in prison.

Despite this insurrection’s lack of success, and despite similar failures in May 1848, August

1870 and October 1870, all this served to cement Blanqui’s reputation as a prophet of an authoritarian

centralized revolution that puts almost exclusive focus on the leaders, rather than the people for whom

it claimed to fight. It, furthermore, determined the assessment widely given to Blanqui not only by the

right, as Marx’s writings of 1848 and the 1872 clipping from Le Figaro would testify, but by the socialist

left as well. In an 1874 piece, though admiring of Blanqui’s dedication to revolution, Friedrich Engels

dubbed him “a revolutionary of the preceding generation” because of his reliance on a “small

revolutionary minority” before the reversal of the old order and on a dictatorship of “one or several

individuals,” rather than of the proletariat, after the revolution.17 This critical interpretation of

Blanqui’s intellectual and political heritage was soon taken up and amplified both by socialists who

broke away from Marxism and by different branches of Marx’s intellectual heirs, thus transforming

the word “blanquist” into a choice derogatory appellation for socialist thought one did not agree with.

Thus in 1900 Eduard Bernstein claimed that in fact “Apart from the rejection of putschs,” Marx and

Engels “are permeated throughout with what is, in the last analysis, a Blanquist […] spirit;” they, like

Blanqui, err in “the overestimation of the creative power of revolutionary force for the socialist

16 Merilhou, Attentat, v. 2, 27. 17 Friedrich Engels, “The Program of the Blanquist Fugitives from the Paris Commune” (1874) in The International

Socialist Review, vol IX (Chicago: Charles H. Kerr & Company, 1909), 100.

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transformation of modern society.”18 For the leader of turn-of-the-century German social-democracy,

one of the big intellectual and programmatic failures of Marx and Engels was that, despite their claims

to developing a “scientific socialism” based on economic conditions, they too relied primarily on

violent and permanent revolution, just like Blanqui.

Russian revolutionaries similarly took part in this heritage, with social-democrat Georgi

Plekhanov famously accusing in 1906 the Bolshevik leaders of being “contemporary Blanquists,”19 in

other words dictatorial centralizers. Plekhanov’s indictment of Lenin and his collaborators is based,

not surprisingly, on Engels’s assessment I quoted above. The Bolsheviks’ defense, in turn, was not

that Blanqui’s theory of revolution was any different from this limited view presented by Plekhanov,

but, to the contrary, that it is a grave misunderstanding of Leninism to conflate Lenin’s ideas with the

dated blanquist model. Thus, for example, Trotsky wrote: “An active minority of the proletariat, no

matter how well organized, cannot seize the power regardless of the general conditions of the country.

In this point history has condemned Blanquism. […] Moreover, nobody waged a more implacable

struggle against the system of pure conspiracy than Lenin.”20 The Blanqui passed on to the generations

succeeding him was thus one who had little or no use of workers’ involvement in the purportedly

liberating movement that the revolutionary leader was to start. The masses, unorganized and ignorant,

ought to be led by a highly structured, highly motivated small group of revolutionary tribunes, and

then submit to a temporary – though of undetermined length – revolutionary dictatorship.

A rare voice of dissent against this characterization of “blanquist” tactics comes in 1906 in the

face of Rosa Luxemburg, who questioned Engels’s interpretation taken up by everyone else and noted

that “in 1848 Blanqui did not foresee his club forming a “small minority” at all; on the contrary, in a

18 Eduard Bernstein, The Preconditions of Socialism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 38, 41. 19 “Letters on Tactics,” Курьер No 23 (June 11, 1906) and No 24 (June 13, 1906) in Georgi V. Plekhanov, Sotchinenya,

t. XV. http://az.lib.ru/p/plehanow_g_w/text_1906_pisma_o_taktike.shtml. 20 Leon Trotsky, The History of the Russian Revolution (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2017), 743.

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period of powerful revolutionary upsurge, he was certain that, upon his call, the entire working people

– if not in France, then at least in Paris – would rise up to fight […] the bourgeois government.”21

Where does this important, albeit rather forgotten, argument come from? To answer this question, let

me finally turn to the thought and writings of Blanqui himself, specifically those from after the

revolution of 1848. By doing this, we will get a more nuanced and complicated version of Blanqui’s

ideas of revolution, and more largely, of revolutionary political thought of the middle of the nineteenth

century.

From 1848 to 1793 and Back

After the failure of his attempted coup of 1839, Blanqui spent much of the next nine years

incarcerated, moving from prison to prison. When the July monarchy was finally, though rather

unexpectedly, overthrown in February 1848, and the Second Republic was proclaimed, Blanqui eagerly

adapted and applied his revolution-from-above method to the circumstances that had newly arisen.

In the three months between February and May 1848, he repeatedly called for postponing the

announced parliamentary elections, so as to have the time to educate the people of France – “l’élection

immédiate de l’Assemblée nationale serait un danger pour la République.”22 (“the immediate elections

for a National Assembly would be a danger for the Republic.”) What Marx would later pinpoint as

the core problem of French electoral politics – the conservative, backward leaning peasant masses –

was already part of Blanqui’s diagnosis of the political culture of the fledgling republic. Thus, while

attempting to appeal to a newly emerging democratic liberal sensibility, Blanqui was nevertheless

arguing for withholding power from the people for an extended period of time, until the workings of

a newly liberated popular press can instill a true republican sentiment within the people. Dictatorship

21 Rosa Luxemburg, “Blanquism and Social Democracy” (June 1906) in

https://www.marxists.org/archive/luxemburg/1906/06/blanquism.html 22 Louis-Auguste Blanqui, Œuvres complètes, v. 1 (Paris: Editions Galilée, 1977), 163.

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was excluded from his pronouncements, but there was a continued sense that though the revolution

is completed, freedom is to be withheld until the people is enlightened by virtuous tribunes.

Blanqui and other leftists were successful in postponing the elections with a few weeks, but

the vote finally took place at the end of April. Тo Blanqui’s consternation, the resulting Republican

Assembly was quite similar to the Monarchist one that had preceded it – with the notable exception

of a Montagne that claimed to be the heir of the Jacobins of 1793, but was widely perceived as inept,

caricatural, and far from progressive enough.23 In light of this failure, Blanqui made a new attempt at

a coup in the Hôtel de Ville. On May 15, he and his followers occupied the assembly hall but – highly

ineffective and disorganized, they were quickly dispersed by the police and Blanqui was soon caught

and thrown in prison. He would spend his next ten years in Belle-Ile-en-Mer, musing on the experience

of 1848 and on the ways in which his theory and practice of revolution ought to be improved if it is

to lead to any notable and permanent results.

This re-thinking of the revolutionary tradition and the ways it should be read forward into the

future began with a re-assessment of the heritage of Robespierre. As I mentioned earlier, the younger

Blanqui’s ideas of revolutionary dictatorship were at least indirectly influenced by Robespierre and his

Committee of Public Safety. In Blanqui’s writings from the 1850s and 1860s, however, a sovereign

scorn for Robespierre emerges – one influenced by the experience of 1848 and that, conversely, also

sheds light on the politics of the moment. The present political situation helps the analysis of the past,

which in turn brings a better understanding of the need for future action.

23 Alexis de Tocqueville remembers: “Most of the colleagues elected with me had belonged to the old dynastic

opposition; only two had professed republican opinions before the revolution and were, as it was called in the slang of the day, “republicans of yesterday.” It was the same in most parts of France.” Tocqueville, Recollections, 96. Similarly, Marx in The Eighteenth Brumaire: “The National Assembly, which had met on May 4, 1848, having emerged from the national elections, represented the nation. It was a living protest against the presumptuous aspirations of the February days and was to reduce the results of the Revolution to the bourgeois scale.” Tucker, Marx-Engels Reader, 600.

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Blanqui’s prison time notes, housed in the Bibliothèque Nationale de la France, but largely

unpublished in any systematic way to this day, show a Robespierre put to trial by history, because of

his dictatorial ambitions: “Robespierre voulait fonder sa dictature par la restauration du passé.

Napoléon avorté, il prenait son point d’appui sur les rois et sur les prêtres.”24 (“Robespierre wanted

to establish his dictatorship on the restoration of the past. A failed Napoleon, he used kings and priests

as his support.”) There is a triple accusation at work here: the Incorruptible’s rule was not forward

looking, but instead harkening back to the ancien régime; his revolution was one aimed at autocracy,

rather than liberation; in order to assure this regressive move, he relied on (a new sort of) priesthood.

Elsewhere in the manuscripts, Blanqui elaborated on this attack on Robespierre, arguing that the

Incorruptible had killed the revolution in three strikes: the scaffolds of Danton and Hébert (in other

words, of revolutionaries deemed to be true spokesmen of the people) and the altar of the Supreme

being (in other words, a new kind of religion, aimed at enslaving the people).25 Though the myth of

Blanqui sees him as a modernized version of Robespierre, projecting an indefinite period of

extraconstitutional rule of a virtuous revolutionary minority, the real Blanqui attempted to dissociate

himself from a dictatorship that stifled the voice of the people. Such politics, Blanqui argued, far from

progressively bringing agency to the common man, confound him, and destroy all revolutionary spirit:

“[le peuple] se retire de la lutte qu’il cesse de comprendre, et perd toute confiance, toute estime pour

des hommes qui mettent le calcul à la place des convictions. Le mépris et le dégout succèdent à

l’enthousiasme et au dévouement.”26 (“[the people] retreats from the battle that he stops

understanding, and loses all confidence and all respect for the men who substitute convictions with

calculations. Contempt and disgust supplant enthusiasm and devotion.”) Blanqui is shaking himself

24 Blanqui’s note on Lamartine’s Histoire des Girondins in NAF-MSS 9581, 51. 25 Blanqui, NAF-MSS 9584-2. 26 Blanqui’s note from November 17, 1864 in NAF-MSS 9591-2.

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off of a certain Jacobin myth in a search for a more popular, more viable, more lasting model of

revolutionary politics.

These brief, undeveloped in much detail musings on past revolutionary ideas acquire an

elaborated form and a more contemporaneous substance in Blanqui’s preface to his follower Gustave

Tridon’s 1864 essay Les Hébertistes, which draws an explicit parallel between the French Revolution of

1789 and the February Revolution of 1848. Here, the so-called new Mountain – the most left-wing of

the elected members of the Constituent Assembly of 1848, who styled themselves after the

Montagnards of 1792 – is judged by Blanqui as not only inept, but in fact a band of “bourgeois

déguisés en tribuns”27 (“bourgeois masked as tribunes”) and their leader, Ledru-Rollin, as the

“mitrailleur de juin”28 (“the assassin of June.”) But even more importantly, for Blanqui it is not simply

the incompetence of the 1848’s (pseudo-) revolutionaries that is revealed by the historical comparison

between the revolutions of 1789 and 1848, but also, retrospectively, the truth about those who had

heretofore been hailed as the tribunes of 1793:

C’est le présent qui m’a révélé le passé. Lorsqu’on voit les prétendus hommes de 48 ligués avec la répression contre tout initiateur […] ; lorsque leur voix, la seule autorisée, ne vise qu’à mystifier les masses et à les endormir dans les byzantineries […] on comprend 93, et la lueur du moment illumine l’horrible farce jouée par l’histoire, les abimes de l’ambition et de la tartufferie humaines.29 (The present laid bare the past for me. When we see the so-called men of 48 allied with the repression against all innovation […]; when their voice, the only one allowed, has as its sole goal to mystify the masses and to lull them to sleep with pointless debates […] we understand 93 and the glow of the moment illuminates the awful farce played by history, the abyss of ambition and that of hypocrisy.)

27 “Avis au peuple” in Blanqui, Oeuvres complètes, v. 1, 329. 28 Blanqui’s notes in the donjon de Vincennes, December 1848, Nouvelles Acquisition Françaises MSS 9584-2,

Bibliothéque Nationale de France, 334-338. Blanqui is here making reference to the workers’ insurrection of June 1848 and accusing Ledru-Rollin of being complicit in its brutal suppression because, despite being a member of the Constituent Assembly, he did nothing to prevent the massacre.

29 Gustave Tridon, La Commune de Paris 1793: Les Hébertistes (Bruxelles: J. H. Briard, 1871), 8.

15

The tartufferie, the hypocrisy of the first French revolution exposed by history, it is very important to

note, is once again not simply that of men traditionally accused of being pseudo-revolutionaries, such

as La Fayette or the Girondins; much more crucially, it is the hypocrisy of Robespierre, who is listed

in this introduction as one of the traitors of the revolution.30 Pandering to the people, appealing to

promises of future freedom, Robespierre and those who emulate him in 1848, Blanqui argues, usurp

the people’s sovereignty. Those false tribunes lull the people into thinking their rights are protected,

while in fact they stay just as enslaved as before. The experience of 1848 has killed for Blanqui and his

followers the reverence for their erstwhile model tribune of choice, and they need to find a new one.

Such a new model they discovered in the person of Jacques Hébert – the editor of the common

man’s revolutionary paper from 1793, Le Père Duchesne. For my purposes here it is beside the point to

elaborate on Hébert’s actual activities and revolutionary thought, or on his involvement in the French

Revolution. Instead, what is at stake here is the Blanquist idea of him as a porte-parole of the people –

a leader who had no claims or aspirations to actual political power, but who wanted to give a voice to

the voiceless, using their own language. For Blanqui and Tridon, the role of Hébert during the French

Revolution was the one that new tribunes of the people ought to assume – that of an educator of the

masses. The revolutionary political will and agency should reside in the people – and not in men who,

like Robespierre – a “dictateur contre-révolutionnaire”, assume supreme political power in the

people’s name.

Indeed, in Les Hébertistes (reprinted in 1871 under the suggestive name: La Commune de Paris de

1793: Les Hébertistes), Tridon undertook to mend what he sees as the wrongs of historical memory, by

arguing that the scorn and hatred that history has reserved for the titular characters of his work is as

30 “Mais la Révolution éclate, et l'implacable dynastie se jette sur elle pour l'étouffer. Le Roi, La Fayette, les Girondins,

Robespierre, les Thermidoriens, lui servent tour à tour de bélier dans cet assaut sans quartier. Elle rue contre son ennemie toutes les factions, tous les complots, tous les mauvais instincts, et, fidèle au plus méchant, la victoire lui reste.” Blanqui’s preface of Tridon, Les Hébertistes, 6.

16

undeserved as the praise that has been lavished upon Robespierre and his associates. In Tridon’s

retelling of the revolution, despite his pretense of working for the people, Robespierre was simply one

more member of the “dynasty” of traitors of the people – a dynasty, whose main goal was to suppress

the Revolution and with it, the voice and the will of the people. Robespierre, in fact, is in many ways

judged to be even more dangerous than others because, under the guise of instituting reforms for the

benefit of the revolution, has actually destroyed the revolutionary spirit - “châtré par la vertu de

l’incorruptible, catéchisé par la morale de Saint Just, voué pour tout avenir aux joies de l’ascétisme, le

génie de la révolution râlait.”31 (“emasculated by the Incorruptible’s virtue, catechized by Saint Just’s

morality, devoted forever to the joys of asceticism, the genius of the Revolution gasped in its death

throws.”)

In the quote above we see an additional, a somewhat clearer, aspect of Tridon’s accusations

against Robespierre and his associates. They – like their royal predecessors – depended on religious

rituals to enforce civil obedience32 and transformed themselves into the priests of a new religion

(Tridon refers to Robespierre as a new Loyola33 and to his rule as a “papacy.”34) Instead, the real type

of tribune needs to be one closer to the people, a leader of the masses who does not isolate himself

through his language, actions, and reforms from those he claims to lead. Hence, it is Hébert and his

associates, who in the Père Duchesne speak of the goals of the people in their own language, all the while

educating them in science, progress, and freedom, that deserve to be hailed as defenders of the people:

“l’avènement des Hébertistes fut l’avènement de la science et de la raison sous la forme la plus

énergique et la plus populaire, mais aussi sous la forme qui pouvait être la seule en assurer le triomphe

31 Tridon, Les Hébertistes, 19-20. 32 Patrick Hutton, The Cult of the Revolutionary Tradition: the Blanquists in French Politics, 1864-1893 (Berkeley: University

of California Press, 1981), 49. 33 Tridon, Les Hébertistes, 27. 34 Tridon, Les Hébertistes, 42.

17

définitif.”35 (“the advent of the Hébertists was the advent of science and of reason in their most

energetic and most popular form, which was also the only form that could ensure their definitive

victory.”) In a neo-Enlightenment fashion, the struggle between duplicitous and real revolutionaries,

between false and true leaders of the people, is expressed as a struggle between religion and reason,

and catechism and science.

What is perhaps even more important is the new Blanquist vision of the people as a whirlwind

of will and power, which is in great contrast with the received 1830s idea of the people as an inert

mass that needs to be put into motion by a highly organized revolutionary cell. In Tridon’s analysis of

1793, it was the people only that was truly revolutionary:

La Révolution n’est pas ce théâtre à phrases […] cette scène épique et tragique où déclament des orateurs emportés par le flot populaire ; elle réside dans les entrailles de la plèbe […] dans ces hommes obscurs ou exécrés, toujours en action, qui exaspéraient les forts, ranimaient les faibles, semaient partout la haine des tyrans et des dogmes, et ramenaient dans la voie révolutionnaire, à la bouche des canons, les conventionnels, beaucoup trop surfaits.36 (The Revolution is not a theatre of phrases […], an epic and tragic stage where orators carried by the popular swell recite their speeches ; it resides in the guts of the plebs […] in those obscure and loathed men who, always in action, frustrated the strong, rallied the weak, sowed everywhere the seeds of hatred against tyrants and dogmas, and brought at gunpoint the overrated members of the Convention back on the revolutionary road.)

The revolution, in this new Blanquist conception born after the failure of 1848, is incorporated by the

people; it rejects the grand locutions suitable only to classical theatre and instead embraces action and

passion. The goal of all true tribunes ought to be nothing else than to educate and protect the people

from the counter-revolutionary flatterers who try to enslave it à la Robespierre by weakening its resolve

and distracting it from its real revolutionary goals.

35 Tridon, Les Hébertistes, 20. 36 Tridon, Les Hébertistes, 14.

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“Les ouvriers de la pensée”: education as revolution

This assessment of the situation in 1793 France goes full circle back to Blanqui’s understanding

of the failures of 1848. In this new revolutionary epoch, it is not only the political leaders that are

bankrupt – in fact the whole bourgeois class, in Blanqui’s estimation, is incapable of revolutionary

action: “Tout ce qui porte un habit sur le dos est gangrené jusqu’à la moelle. […] Les hommes de la

nuance la plus prononcée, au point de vue socialiste et révolutionnaire, se retirent de l’arène et rompent

complètement avec la politique active ».37 (“All those who wear clothes on their backs are rotten to

the core. […] The men with the most developed socialist and revolutionary convictions withdraw

from the arena and break away completely from active politics.”) Those who one would have

traditionally thought of as the intellectual and insurrectionary core of the revolution to come are

politically bankrupt.

The only hope, then, that Blanqui sees for a successful future revolution lies in the masses

themselves; the masses to whom he refers sometimes with the romantic le peuple and sometimes with

the socialist les prolétaires. Abandoned by hypocritical political leaders, the people, whose very physical

wellbeing depends on the change of political system ought to create for itself the conditions for its

liberation. And yet, despite the revolutionary sentiment with which the masses are infused, they too

linger in apathy, in Blanqui’s assessment: “Les instincts restent bons. L’idée révolutionnaire vit au fond

du cœur. Mais il y a l’inertie complète […] Et certes, le contraire serait un miracle. Il n’y a plus ni

presse, ni tribune, nul enseignement démocratique, plus l’ombre de propagande écrite ni verbale.”38

(“The instincts are remain good. The revolutionary idea still lives in the hearts. But there is a total

inertia […] And indeed, the opposite would have been a miracle. There is no press, no tribune, no

democratic education, not even the hint of either verbal or written propaganda.”) The revolution that

37 Blanqui’s letter from April 7, 1860. MSS 9584-1. 38 Blanqui’s letter from April 7, 1860. MSS 9584-1.

19

overthrew the July monarchy failed to create a true republic on the one hand because of false tribunes,

and, on the other, because of the lack of civic education in the people. The inertia and the ignorance

of the large mass of the French populace during the first months of the second French republic pre-

determined both the republic’s conservative character and its untimely and inglorious end at the hands

of a new Bonaparte.

On peut renverser une dynastie, sur ses ruines fonder la république. C’est un progrès, une conquête sur le mal, un jalon planté dans la voie du bien. Mais cette aventure d’un jour ne transforme pas les masses et ne leur infuse pas le savoir. Si les lumières ne descendent pas dans les masses pour leur enseigner le self-government, la science de se gouverner elles-mêmes, bientôt sur le terrain demeuré stérile, de nouvelles tyrannies se relèvent plus écrasantes; la révolution porte la peine de son impuissance.39 (We can topple a dynasty, and on its ruins establish a republic. This is a progress, a victory over evil, a milestone on the path to the Good. But this ephemeral adventure does not transform the masses and does not infuse them with knowledge. If enlightenment does not descend down upon the masses to teach them self-government, the science to govern themselves, soon from the soil that has remained infertain new, more crushing, tyrannies will sprout ; the revolution carries the punishment of its importence.)

A revolution may happen by accident (such as the one in 1848) or through a coup de main such as

Blanqui had advocated and indeed tried to actuate in the 1830s, but if the people are not ready to

assume an active part in the new polity, the return to oppression is inevitable. The election results

from April and December 1848, the passivity of the large mass of the French population during the

June uprising, as well as later, and the conservative character of the short-lived republic, Blanqui

argues, are the logical result of the intellectual oppression that this people has been subjected to in the

preceding decades. If a revolutionary change of society and state is to last, it ought to be preceded by

a thorough re-education of the public.40

39 Blanqui’s note, undated (probably 1851), NAF-MSS 9581, 23. 40 For another angle of analysis of Blanqui’s thought after 1848, see Lehning, From Buonarroti to Bakunin, 84-85. Lehning

catches on to another strand of Blanqui’s assessment of the revolutionary situation after the failure of February-June 1848 – the situation, according to the conspirator, required a Parisian dictatorship over the rest of France, as the capital is “une veritable représentation nationale” (Blanqui, Capital et travail, in NAF-MSS 9590-1, 375-381, quoted by Lehning). Dictatorship is still necessary, but it is that of the most revolutionarily enlightened city in the country. Lehning’s and my analyses differ, though are not mutually exclusive; however, unlike Lehning, I find the break in Blanqui’s idea of the role

20

Thus, the educational process, which Blanqui had previously imagined should occur during

the obligatory dictatorship following the successful revolution, is indispensable prior to the revolution.

“Le seul veritable agent révolutionnaire, c’est l’instruction,”41 (“The only true agent of revolution is

education.”) writes in his prison notes the famous arch-putschist. Blanqui’s substitution of

Robespierre with Hébert as a model of a revolutionary is symbolic of this Blanquist re-incarnation of

revolutionary processes. In the place of the authoritarian figure forcing revolution on the people

comes the educator, the friend of the people who speaks their language and raises them up to a level

of civic responsibility from which they can truly uphold the revolution on their own. (Once again, I

am here using Robespierre and Hébert not to make a point about their actual goals and methods, but

in the way that Blanqui understands them in the 1850s and 1860s). Much of the revolutionary activity

of Blanqui and his large group of younger followers in the 1860s consequently revolves around anti-

clerical propaganda published in journals and, as Patrick Hutton has shown, rituals aiming to include

and inspire a large following among the lower classes.42

Even more, Blanqui is cognizant of and indeed inspired by the existence of a core of educated

workers, who can in turn educate and lead the masses that are still enveloped in darkness (the word

ténèbres recurs constantly in Blanqui’s writing).

Des milliers de gens d’élite languissent dans le bas-fonds de la misère. Ils sont l’horreur et l’effroi du capital. Le capital ne se trompe pas dans sa haine. Ces déclassés, arme invisible du progrès, sont aujourd’hui le ferment secret qui gonfle sourdement la masse et l’empêche de s’affaisser dans le marasme. Demain, ils seront la réserve de la Révolution.43 (Thousands of leading men languish in the depths of misery. They are the horror and the fright of Capital. Capital does not err in its hatred. Those men belonging to no class, this invisible weapon of progress, are today the secret leaven that quietly makes the masses rise and prevents them from sinking in stagnation. Tomorrow, they will form the reserves of the Revolution.)

of the tribune and the people prior to the revolution essential to understanding the general trajectory of tribunal thought in the nineteenth century.

41 Blanqui’s note, undated, Oeuvres complètes, v. 1, NAF-MSS 9581, 23. Spitzer has also hinted, though in passing, at this, in his words, “most un-Blanquist” adherence to a revolutionary program of literacy and education. See Alan Spitzer, The Revolutionary Theories of Louis Auguste Blanqui (New York: Columbia University Press, 1957), 84-85.

42 Hutton, The Cult of the Revolutionary Tradition, 11-12 and 35. 43 Auguste Blanqui, Critique sociale, t. 1. Paris: Ancienne Librairie Germer Baillie ̀re et Cie, 1885, 219-220.

21

In other words, contrary to later interpretations of his thought both on the right and on the

revolutionary left, Blanqui saw an agent of revolt within the very masses that ought to rise up. While

not explicitly denying the need for revolutionaries like himself, he underscored the essential role of

intellectual guides who are part of the proletariat and as such are the most apt to inspire, spread

knowledge, and lead.

A new sort of Enlightenment is at work here, one that consciously builds the path toward

revolution. Its agents are also the ones who most urgently need its results. They are “ouvriers de la

pensée,” (“workers of thought”) as Blanqui names them, in more than one sense. Belonging to the

working classes and engaged in intellectual activity, they are also those who work in order to produce

thought for the use of others. Their aim is to focus on secular, republican education and to combat

the unified attempt of state and church to dominate the people. It is in this context that the infamous

Falloux laws of 1850, ostensibly put in place to provide wider access to primary education to French

children, but practically putting that education in the hands of Catholic congregations, are judged by

Blanqui and his followers as essential to the state’s conscious effort to surreptitiously suppress

insurrectionary thought. The church, seen as working together with the Empire to produce an

ignorant, docile populace, broken up into parishes and having no conscience of a common social goal,

is the first and most significant stumbling block on the way to the egalitarian future. Tridon’s

vehemence against Robespierre expressed in anti-clerical terms that I sketched above needs to thus

be seen in the light of his and Blanqui’s efforts at weakening the church’s influence, especially with

their 1860s publications, most notably the newspaper Candide. Blanqui’s new version of revolution is

one that aims to create an enlightened French people, which, once free from the chains of ignorance

will readily be the agent of their own political and social liberation.44

44 Though, it should be added, this propaganda through publication has very limited popularity. As Dommanget has

rightly argued, Blanqui saw as essential the union of the “intellectuels déclassés” and the masses and so in the 50s and

22

In a letter to a friend from April 7, 1860, Blanqui very explicitly expounds on his change of

heart regarding successful revolutionary tactics:

J’avais eu d’abord votre pensée. C’est celle qui se présente première : constituer un noyau, un personnel, soit pour la lutte, soit pour l’expectative. J’ai bientôt reconnu la chose impraticable. Cette organisation, si restreinte qu’on la suppose, n’est réalisable dans un monde comme le nôtre, qu’avec la perspective d’un but prochain, avec le stimulant de l’agitation publique. Il n’y a que les légitimistes pour jouer gravement aux comités dans le fond du sépulcre. […] J’ai compris que je faisais fausse route et qu’avant de grouper des hommes, il s’agissait d’abord de les lever de leur léthargie.45 (At first I shared your idea. That’s the one that first comes to mind: to form a core, a workforce, either for the combat or for its anticipation. I soon understood that this is unviable. This imagined limited organization is not possible in a world like ours, unless there is a goal that is close at hand, and the inspiration of public activism. Only Legitimists play solemn games of committees buried deep into sepulchers. […] I soon understood that I had taken the wrong path and that before assembling men, one has to first awake them from their lethargy.)

If the 1830s saw the blossoming of revolutionary activity precisely “dans le fond du sépulcre,” the

second half of the nineteenth century brings about a new understanding of successful revolutionary

processes. The role of the leader of revolution, in Blanqui’s understanding, shifts from that of a

conspirator heading an exclusive and tightly centralized organization of dedicated men, to that of an

educator aspiring to awaken the people’s civic sensibilities and their drive to social justice. Popular

sovereignty being the end goal of the revolution, it needs to be slowly prepared in the hearts and minds

of all men, before the current régime of oppression is to be decisively overthrown. Borrowing once

again from the heritage of 1789-1794, the revolutionary tradition is reincarnated in a less elitist, more

encompassing form. No dramatic, meaningful, and lasting change of social conditions can occur

before those who are to benefit from it understand and embrace the movement. To quote Blanqui

especially the 60s constantly looked for a platform, a tribune, from which to spread the revolutionary word; however, these brochures and publications were not really with accessible to the larger public. “On sent [que les brochures] naquirent dans une ambiance d’intellectuels, selon les possibilités et les inclinations, non selon les besoins. […] De fait, Blanqui n’édita point de brochures vraiment populaires, traitant de sujets à la portée du peuple, en un langage peuple.” (Maurice Dommanget, Les Idées politiques et sociales d’Auguste Blanqui (Paris: Librairie Marcel Rivière et Cie, 1957), 341-349.

45 Letter from Blanqui to N., from April 7, 1860 in NAF-MSS 9580, 113-121.

23

himself once again – “Les révolutions doivent être faites dans les esprits avant de s’accomplir dans la

rue.”46 (“Revolutions must first happen in the minds, before being realized in the streets.”)

Rethinking Blanqui

Is this a completely different Blanqui from the one we have come to know through standard

accounts of French history and, more specifically, through Marxist historiography? Yes and no. We

are not dealing with a starry-eyed teacher, instead of a prophet of revolution. In 1869, around the same

time that he penned much of what I referred to above regarding the need for public education, the

old revolutionary also wrote one of his few complete works, and also one of a few published within

his lifetime, Instruction pour une prise d’armes (Manual for an Armed Insurrection). In this short piece, Blanqui

focused on the military strategy of the streets and gives hands-on, almost obsessively minute advice

on how to build a barricade, how to maintain order, how to go about the streets of Paris. In other

words, this is a technical handbook on how to start a revolution through an coup de main.

The militant Blanqui remains, then, and so does he of the centralizing, dictatorial convictions.

This is, however, where Rosa Luxemburg’s passing observation I mentioned toward the beginning of

this piece “in 1848 Blanqui did not foresee his club forming a “small minority” at all; on the contrary,

in a period of powerful revolutionary upsurge, he was certain that, upon his call, the entire working

people – if not in France, then at least in Paris – would rise up to fight […] the bourgeois government”

becomes clearer, and can be fully explained. Concurrently with the Manual, in the period 1869-1870

Blanqui composed another piece, focusing not so much on the military, but on the intellectual,

economical, and socio-political aspects of the revolution. Capital et travail is notable, for our purposes

here, in that it briefly talks about the post-revolutionary order, though like his contemporary Marx,

46 Blanqui’s note from November 22, 1852 in NAF-MSS 9584-2, 112-115.

24

Blanqui avoided the danger of going into much detail and thus succumbing to utopian dreams.

Importantly, Blanqui argued for the necessity of a post-revolutionary dictatorship, but not that of a

small core, but of Paris.

1848 once again serves the thinker of revolution as a point of reference: “Un an de dictature

parisienne en 48 aurait épargné à la France et à l'histoire le quart de siècle qui touche à son terme. S’il

en faut dix ans cette fois, qu’on n’hésite pas.”47 (“One year of Parisian dictatorship in 48 would have

spared France and history the quarter century that has passed since then. If ten years are necessary

this time, let us not hesitate.”) In the Parisians of his time, Blanqui sees true revolutionary conscience

already achieved, and with it the possibility of a government for the people by the people (“le

gouvernement du pays par le pays”). In other words, a tightly centralized revolutionary government is

not necessary or can be bypassed if a sizeable and concentrated segment of the people is already

capable of self-organization. It is they who should be leading the transitional period that is to see the

establishment of a social republic.

The move from the idea of a dictatorship of the revolutionary core to a dictatorship of the

capital is not just a shift in terminology. Within it we can also find the same focus on education that

permeates Blanqui’s prison-time notes. If Paris is ready for self-government, it is because Parisians

have arrived at a level of enlightenment other parts of the country have been deprived of. Though this

“enlightenment” in Blanqui’s writings is of a rather abstract (not to speak of naïve) nature, it, once

again, harkens back to an 18th century vocabulary of light dispersing darkness. Even more, Blanqui is

adamant that the work of illumination that ought to be performed is neither the work of a few days,

nor the result of legislation, but that of gradual and patient instruction that is to be performed in the

schools of a France free of dogmas both religious and political.

Loin de s’imposer par décret, le communisme doit attendre son avènement des libres résolutions du pays, et ces résolutions ne peuvent sortir que de la diffusion générale des

47 Critique sociale, t. 1, 208

25

lumières. Les ténèbres ne se dissipent pas en vingt-quatre heures. De tous nos ennemis, c’est le plus tenace. […] Voilà justement aussi pourquoi [le communisme] ne saurait être la forme de la société présente. II n’est compatible qu’avec l’universalité des lumières, et nous n'en sommes pas là. Les tentatives prématurées pour l’implanter dans un milieu réfractaire n’enfanteraient que désastres. En 1848, la majorité des ouvriers a mal accueilli l’égalité des salaires, peu conciliable en effet avec une instruction bornée.48 (Far from being enforced by decree, communism should await its arrival with the free decisions of the country, and those decision can only come with collective enlightenment. Darkness is not dispersed in twenty-four hours. Of all our enemies, it is the most persistent. […] That is exactly why [communism] cannot be the organization of our current society. It is only compatible with universal enlightenment, and we are not there yet. Premature attempts at instilling it in a resistant enivornment would only bring about disaster. In 1848, most workers did not accept wage equality, which is indeed incompatible given a limited education.)

A potential contradiction emerges here: is instruction requisite before the revolution, or ought it to be

brought about after it, during a transitional period? Blanqui is not clear on the point and, not a

philosophical theoretician of revolt, he lingers little on details. The implication, however, is that a

certain level of education ought to be reached for any radical transformation of society to take hold

in any enduring way; the absence of this basic prerequisite was the great and lasting failure of 1848. If

a revolution in the future is to succeed, it needs to prepare the grounds of its victory through

instruction.

In Blanqui’s post-1848 estimation, it is only in this way that the end goal of the revolution can

be achieved. This goal, for the 19th century symbol of dictatorial revolution, is anarchy properly

understood: “L’Anarchie régulière est l’avenir de l’humanité,”49 (“Regular Anarchy is the future of

humankind.”) Blanqui very explicitly and bluntly notes, before elaborating on both this aspiration and

the methods for its realization:

Le Gouvernement par excellence, fin dernière des Sociétés, c’est l’absence de gouvernement. […] Mais à quand la réalisation de cette utopie? Pas avant l’avènement général des masses aux lumières, il n’y a de vrais révolutionnaires que les instituteurs. Ce sont eux qui font la besogne sérieuse et durable, ils tiennent dans leurs mains l’avenir de la société.50

48 Blanqui, Critique Sociale, t. 1, 209-209, 213. 49 Blanqui, MSS 9581, 23. 50 Blanqui, MSS 9581, p. 24.

26

(The best government, the final goal of Society, is the absence of government. […] But when will this utopia be accomplished ? Not before the general enlightenment of the masses; teachers are the only real revolutionaries. It is they who perform the serious and lasting labour ; they hold in their hands the future of society.)

The “utopia” of this complete lack of government and of governed can be only the product of a

population fully aware of its duties and its rights. This is the significance of the Blanquist rejection of

(the myth of) Robespierre, the concomitant embrace of (the myth of) Hébert, and the repeated

espousal of education. A people that is to participate in Blanqui’s imagined veritable manifestation of

“le self-government,” must readily be the agent of its own liberation.

The analysis here, then, should not be seen as a first step in the process of defanging of the

arch-revolutionary of the nineteenth century, as turning the period’s symbol of armed insurrection

into a meek social-democrat devoted solely to education, and thus making him more palatable to

“modern” “liberal” sensibilities. To the contrary, the educator does not undermine the revolutionary;

the two are complementary. Blanqui who has lived through the failures of his attempted coups d’êtat

and the February revolution views an enlightened people as the essential ingredient for a revolutionary

transformation of society into one without government and without governed. Though Blanqui had

also been a firm supporter of popular education before 1848 and though he would continue thinking

and writing about armed insurrection, eventually making another attempt at a coup de main on the

Hôtel de Ville on October 31, 1870, the events of 1848 mark a watershed moment in the

transformation of Blanqui’s ideas of revolutionary leadership.

This is important, firstly, from a purely historical perspective, as it gives a towering figure of

the French 19th century his proper place within the intellectual context of his time. It transforms a

revolutionary figure almost caricaturally exaggerated by both the right and the left into a more

nuanced, complicated thinker, whose ideas, though never fully developed in writing, nor in action,

show an evolution of political thinking based on observations of contemporaneous politics and

revolutionary history.

27

Some, however, might counter by saying that while this may be interesting from a purely

archival point of view, what matters above all is how Blanqui’s thought was inherited, appropriated,

and critiqued by future generations: Engels-Bernstein-Plekhanov-Trotsky-Lenin. Blanqui’s notes have

remained largely unpublished in any systematic way to this day and most of the English and French

speaking study of his thought has been done through a Marxist prism. This is, for most intents and

purposes, Blanqui as he existed for generations of thinkers of revolution. I do not deny the importance

of the myth of Blanqui – after all, it may well be that this myth had a stronger impact on history than

the reality of the letters which Blanqui wrote to his friends and followers while in prison, or the content

of his unfinished projects of future political organization. However, in addition to uncovering

forgotten bits of history, research like this one argues also implicitly for a larger trend of cross-

fertilization of socialist and revolutionary thought that does away with schematizing and mimetic

analysis. If one can find an almost anarchist element even in the ideas of purported supporters of

authoritarian revolution, such as Blanqui, perhaps one also gives a signal that the place of popular,

non-centralized ideas of revolutionary social change has for a long time been underestimated.