Blanc, Louis
BLANC, LOUIS
BLANC, LOUIS (1811–1882), French socialist.
Louis Blanc was the first socialist in any country to hold a government post. The son of a legitimist official dispossessed of his pension by the 1830 revolution, Blanc was a scholarship student at the collège in Rodez. His direct, simple style and useful connections (he started life as tutor to the children of Frédéric Desgeorges, a liberal notable and newspaper editor in the Pas-de-Calais) quickly made him a leading radical journalist. Writing first in 1834 for the Bon Sens, a weekly paper directed at workers, in 1839 he helped found La Revue du Progrès politique, social et littéraire. In 1840 a selection of his articles became L'Organisation du Travail. Within two weeks, three thousand copies had been sold and the next printing disappeared equally fast, probably helped by a government confiscation order. Quoting statistical evidence of poverty published by Ange Guépin, L. R. Villermé, and E. Buret, Blanc argued that free competition, much vaunted by liberal economists, was enslaving workers—especially women—and would ultimately leave the economy in the hands of a tiny minority of the most ruthless employers. His solution was a blend of worker cooperatives, not unlike those set up by Philippe Buchez (1796–1865) and Pierre Leroux (1797–1871), but financed, in a somewhat Fourierist style, by the state as the "banker of the poor." Such worker associations would be kick-started with repayable government loans, after which they would be autonomous. By 1848, Blanc's first book had gone through five editions, each growing fatter as he refuted his critics, who pointed out that social workshops would compete with each other and might also become oppressive to workmen.
By 1848 Blanc had also helped launch the powerful radical daily La Réforme, which promoted both social and suffrage reform. He had written a five-volume influential critique of the Orleanist regime, Histoire de dix ans (1841–1844), and published two of his fifteen volumes of the history of the 1789 revolution in which he revealed considerable sympathy for the ideas of Maximilien Robespierre (1758–1794). Unlike Etienne Cabet (1788–1856) and the Fourierists, he did not attempt to create a socialist movement around himself, nor did he try to set up worker associations as did Leroux and Buchez. Up to this stage, Blanc's contribution was essentially that of a popularizer and synthesizer.
The February revolution of 1848 seemed to offer an opportunity to radicals and socialists to find solutions to the social question. Blanc joined the republican provisional government along with other journalists from La Réforme and Le National. As secretary of the Workers' and Employers' Luxembourg Commission, appointed by the government to advise on the economic crisis, Blanc persistently but vainly urged the ministers to adopt his notion of social workshops. They preferred traditional national workshops, which provided little more than a tiny dole. Blanc's commission managed to arbitrate industrial disputes in the capital and organize a couple of workshops, one of which made the embroidery for national guard uniforms, but his radicalism worried his fellow republican ministers.
Like other radicals, Blanc was alarmed at the lack of a republican majority in the new Constituent Assembly, despite its being elected by direct universal male suffrage for the first time ever. Blanc participated in the workers' march against the Assembly on 15 May 1848, with the ostensible motive of encouraging government support for revolutions abroad, notably in Poland. The big issue, however, was the fate of the government's workshops, which by May had more than a hundred thousand members and seemed both a physical threat as well as a financial burden to the Assembly. After some delay, the conservative majority in the Assembly decreed their closure. The resulting worker rebellion in June was somewhat unjustifiably blamed on Blanc, who had fled to London after the May fiasco. The divisions among radicals about the form of the new republic, plus the lack of majority support for a republic among voters, contributed to the election of Napoleon I's nephew as president and the subsequent reinvention of an empire. Although Blanc had fused a number of socialist strands into his own pet projects, his intransigence and self-conceit in the spring of 1848 helped to isolate him and divide radical reformers.
In enforced residence in London until 1870, Blanc might have been a uniting focus, but he spent his time constantly reiterating his own solutions and arguing with fellow socialists and republicans. Although more of his writing was translated into English than that of other French socialists, he does not seem to have established as much contact with English radicals and Owenites as did the Fourierists. He opposed the Commune of 1871 and was elected to the new National Assembly where he sat as an elder statesman. He was regarded as an inspiration for the radical socialist movement that emerged at the turn of the century. Probably the best-known socialist in his day, he has been the least-remembered in recent years.
bibliography
Loube're, Leo A. Louis Blanc: His Life and His Contribution to the Rise of French Jacobin-Socialism. Evanston, Ill., 1961.
Pilbeam, Pamela M. French Socialists before Marx: Workers, Women, and the Social Question in France. Teddington, U.K., 2000.
Sewell, William. "Beyond 1793: Babeuf, Louis Blanc and the Genealogy of 'Social Revolution."' In The French Revolution and the Creation of Modern Political Culture. Vol. 3: The Transformation of Political Culture, 1789–1848. Edited by François Furet and Mona Ozouf. Oxford, U.K., 1989.
Pamela Pilbeam