BLANC, LOUIS (1811–82)

Louis Blanc was the only early socialist to enter government. He was regarded as a Jacobin socialist, partly because he looked to the state to facilitate social reform, but mainly because he admired the Jacobins, and praised Robespierre’s Declaration of the Rights of Man at a time when few could separate them from the Terror.

The son of a legitimist who lost his pension in 1830, Louis was a scholarship boy at the collège in Rodez. After a brief spell as a tutor, he embarked on a career as a radical journalist, first in 1834 for the Bon sens, a weekly paper directed at workers; in 1839 he helped found La Revue du progrès politique, socialet littéraire. In 1840 a selection of these articles became L’Organisation du travail. Within two weeks 3,000 copies had been sold and the next printing disappeared equally fast, probably helped by a government confiscation order. By 1847 it was in its fifth edition. It was Blanc’s solution to poverty, buttressed by evidence from social commentators such as Guépin, Villermé and Buret. He argued that poverty was the consequence of capitalist exploitation, itself a product of the bourgeois revolutions of 1789 and 1830, a phenomenon ultimately as damaging to the bourgeoisie as to the proletariat. The government had to act as banker to the poor to compensate for the fact that capitalism had robbed the poor of the means of production. Governments should lend capital to artisans to create co-operative social workshops. After the first year the workers would pay back the state, which would then adopt a more distant, supervisory role. Blanc was confident that through education people would lose their selfishness and develop a sense of common purpose. He then wrote Histoire de dix ans, a damning account of the mistakes of the Orleanist monarchy, and helped found and run the most socially radical paper of the day La Réforme. In 1847 came the first two of his fifteen-volume history of the 1789 Revolution.

Encyclopedia of nineteenth-century thought 68 After the February Revolution, 1848, the provisional government made Blanc its

secretary and president of the innovative Commission of Workers. Elected representatives of Parisian workers and employers met to debate solutions to the economic crisis and endured repetitive orations from Blanc. They arbitrated between masters and men, prevented strikes in a number of key trades including baking, and got the roofers on the new Constituent Assembly building back to work. Although it had no budget it helped create co-operative workshops, a 2,000 strong tailors’ group to make National Guard uniforms, an embroiderers’ workshop to make the insignia and a saddlers’ workshop. Blanc felt side-lined. He was excluded from the national workshops set up by the Provisional government. They were merely short-term dole schemes like those introduced after earlier revolutions. Blanc’s call for a Ministry of Labour was rejected by the Constituent Assembly and his Commission was disbanded. Blanc was unjustly blamed when he made a speech to the crowd during the occupation of the Assembly on 15 May and, second, for the outbreak of the June Days. He was sentenced to deportation, but had already fled to Britain, where he continued his prolific historical writing—and his arguments with other radicals. He returned to France in 1870, opposed the Paris Commune and was a member of the Chamber of Deputies until his death in 1882. He is usually considered as one of the main founders of radical socialism, the centrist federation that was developed into the fulcrum of Third Republic politics.

BLANC, LOUIS (1811–82)