Louis Blanc, 1811-1882

French journalist, historian, statesman, and founder of the socialist movement.

Jean-Joseph Louis Blanc was born in Madrid, Spain.  His father was a old French royalist, who had opposed the French Revolution suffered greatly through the Terror. His mother, Estelle de Pozzo Borgo, was Corsican, and had a role in reconciling  her husband with Napoleon's empire.  Blanc's father was stationed in Spain as Inspector-General of Finances under Joseph Bonaparte, when Louis was born.  The family returned to France during the Bourbon restoration.  While his parents were in Paris living on a small state pension, Louis was educated at a royal college in Rodez. Blanc's father mis-stepped politically again during the July Revolution of 1830,  opposing the rise of Louis-Philippe and adhering to the legitimist cause of the senior branch of the house of Bourbon.  Their pension was promptly severed, and the family fell into financial desperation.  Louis, who had begun studying law, had to make his own way, earning a pittance as minor clerk in a law office and giving private lessons on the side.

In 1832, he accepted a position as private tutor to the Halette family, a manufacturer in Arras. His close-up observations and interaction with workmen in his Halette's factory sowed the seeds of his interest in conditions of labor, then being thrown into disarray with the arrival of the industrial revolution into France.

In 1834, Louis Blanc returned to Paris, intent on a journalistic career.  He worked for various newspapers, eventually making his way to editor of the Bon Sens in 1837. Blanc increasingly wrote about labor conditions, and complained of the impact of capitalist competition.  His increasingly radical tone brought him into conflict with the paper's proprietors.  He was finally fired from the Bon Sens for advocating state-owned railways (instead of private). In 1839, Blanc launched his own journal, the Revue du Progrès (initially fortnightly, later monthly) Blanc let his pen flow unconstrained, with pleas for improvement of the plight of laborers, denunciations of the privileges of the French nobility, the corruption of the Orleanist government and the indifference of the capitalist bourgeoisie. Around this time, Blanc wrote his Histoire de dix ans, a condemnation of the Orleanist regime in the form of a narrative history.

A series of articles in the Revue in August 1840 were compiled and re-printed as a separate pamphlet, L'Organisation du travail in September 1840, sometimes considered the founding blueprint of the socialist movement.  In it, Blanc denounced the harshness of market competition and called for stricter labor regulations,  state-ownership of the larger industries, and organization of national workshops as steps towards the eventual wholesale elimination of private capitalism and the market wage system, and its substitution by a "universal association" geared towards the needs of workers.  Blanc would later distill this collectivist socialist ideal into the famous epigrammatic phrase  "from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs" ("à chacun selon ses besoins, de chacun selon ses facultés", 1851, p.92).  Blanc's tract was a sensation - and ground-breaking.  It had little in common with prior utopian socialist ideas of Sismondi, Fourier or Cabet. Louis Blanc was more clearly observant of the large-scale and deep social and economic changes wrought by the industrial revolution and ferocious in his conclusions..

Blanc almost single-handedly converted the republican leaders and the rebellious Parisian masses to the socialist cause.  Blanc's repeated calls for state-fostered industrial employment via producer cooperatives that would eventually replace private industry, echoed with the unemployed during the economic slump of the late 1840s..  Blanc criticized prior schemes for worker cooperatives, that urged workers to set these up themselves  (as concurrently promoted by, e.g. L'Atelier). Blanc believed that worker associations should not compete but have a monopoly in each trade, and looked to the State to provide the means to implement it . These socialist schemes caught the imagination of the republican movement in France during the 1840s. Radical republicans of La Réforme (Ledru-Rollin, Flocon etc.) shared Blanc's comprehensive vision, while moderates of Le National preferred the piecemeal version of the L'Atelier. But by 1846, there was general agreement to merge political republicanism and economic socialism in some form.   

The chance to put it into practice suddenly appeared during the February, 1848 revolution.  Rots in Paris led to collapse of the July Monarchy and the abdication of Louis-Philippe.  Two days later, on February 26, the Second French Republic was declared, and a provisional government established by the moderate Alphonse Lamartine.  That same day, Louis Blanc declared the creation of a provisional socialist government, but was ordered by the National Assembly to merge with Lamartine's government.  Although Lamartine famously rejected a red flag presented to him, he accepted a socialist petition enshrining the principles of  "guaranteed work for all male citizens", "assured minimum to any worker's family in case of disability or sickness" and a right to "organization of labor". Although the February Revolution would inspire a myriad of similar uprisings and revolutions across Europe that same year - the "Springtime of the Peoples"  - the French one went furthest in trying to implement economic transformation to accompany the political changes.   

On February 28, the provisional government proclaimed the establishment of a "national labor commission", under the presidency of Louis Blanc and his deputy "Albert the Worker" (Alexandre Martin) . It was supposed to implement a scheme for "national workshops" (ateliers nationaux) for each trade in France, to absorb the unemployed and fulfill the guaranteed work promise. Blanc's commission, consisting of delegates from the various trades, was set up in the old Chamber of Peers in the Luxembourg Palace.  It would serve effectively as a parallel industrial parliament for the next few months - where workers and artisans would debate the rapid economic changes in the country.  In some sense, Blanc lost control of the process, as the conclusions of the Luxembourg commission were not always in the socialist direction..  Tradesmen complained about high wages, price controls, work conditions, unionization, restrictions on machinery and competition from sub-contractors, unskilled workers and women.    The national workshops scheme were also having birthing problems - oversubscribed and suspected by many of the unemployed.  Blanc disagreed with their design, and eventually disowned the national workshops that were set up.

Although universal suffrage was introduced, the radical republicans and socialists fared poorly in the elections of April, 1848, much to their surprise. Nonetheless, the left-wing political "clubs" in Paris, which had sprouted earlier that year - most famously the radical communist club of Louis Auguste Blanqui, the  similarly revolutionary club of his rival Armand Barbès, and the more utopian Owenite socialist/Icarian communist club of Étienne Cabet - were not quite prepared to see the liberal bourgeoisie hijack and reverse "their" revolution. On May 15, the clubs banded together, stormed the National Assembly, and elected a new radical left government on the spot, including Louis Blanc among their ministers. The "red" coup attempt did not succeed - the National Guard surrounded the assembly building, and promptly arrested all the club leaders. Louis Blanc, who had not participated in these events, was not arrested, but was placed under severe pressure in the aftermath.  Blanc was indicted by a parliamentary commission and although he was acquitted, his Luxembourg commission was shut down, for 'spreading the poison" that led to the red surge.  A commission of inquiry was set up to investigate the National Workshops, and concluded they were over-expensive, a breeding ground for agitation and a "threat to the social order".  The National Assembly finally disbanded the workshops on June 20.  Demonstrations promptly followed, and barricades were up across the eastern half of Paris by June 23.  By all accounts, this was spontaneously organized by the working classes of Paris, many of them former employees of the National Workshops.  Most of the left wing leaders had already been arrested or cowed by the May crackdown.  Blanc's proposals to negotiate with the workers was shouted down in the National Assembly.  Louis Blanc personally pleaded with the insurgents to stand down, and not give the forces of reaction the opportunity to crush the remaining gains of the revolution, but to no avail. An inevitable but very bloody confrontation followed, as units of the police, army and National Guard assaulted the barricades one by one. The fighting continued for several days, and round-ups and suppression continued in the aftermath.  Estimates of the death toll range from 900 to Marx's estimate of 3,000.  Arrests ran up to 12,000.  However, unlike in 1871, there were no systematic executions in reprisal - half the prisoners were released within days, most of the rest over the next couple of years, and only a few hundred deported to penal colonies for long-term sentences.

In the aftermath of the June Days insurrection, Louis Blanc found his position decidedly uncomfortable. He was personally blamed by other delegates, including former supporters, for setting the Second Republic on the course to this collision.  At length finding the situation untenable, Blanc departed France and moved to England, where he would for the next two decades.  In exile in London, Blanc would write several memoirs of the 1848 revolution (notably his Revelations of 1858, which he expanded into his 1870 Histoire).   He also continued commenting on events in France, as well as collecting observations on industrial England.  Blanc also wrote tracts against the Second Empire of Louis Napoleon.  Blanc's works after 1852 were banned from entry into France.  In the 1850s, Blanc also composed a twelve-volume history of the 1789 French Revolution and finally got married, in 1865, to an Englishwoman.

Louis Blanc's ideas and schemes would be taken up by German socialists, like Ferdinand Lassalle and Karl Marx.  In his later years, Blanc gradually curbed his radicalism, calling only for State involvement in social programs and income redistribution.  After the fall of Napoleon III, Blanc returned to France in 1870 and was was elected to the National Assembly of the Third Republic. Blanc refused to endorse the Paris Commune of 1871, but pleaded for an amnesty for the communards in the aftermath.  He died in December 1882, and was buried with state honors at Pere Lachaise in Paris.

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