Louis Blanc

(click to enlarge)
Louis Blanc. (credit: H. Roger-Viollet)

(born Oct. 29, 1811, Madrid, Spain — died Dec. 6, 1882, Cannes, France) French utopian socialist and journalist. In 1839 he founded the socialist newspaper Revue du Progrès and serially published his The Organization of Labour, which described his theory of worker-controlled "social workshops" that would gradually take over production until a socialist society came into being. He was a member of the provisional government of the Second Republic (1848) but was forced to flee to England after workers unsuccessfully revolted. In exile (1848 – 70), he wrote a history of the French Revolution and other political works.

For more information on Jean-Joseph-Charles- Louis Blanc, visit Britannica.com.

(b Paris, 25 Jan 1846; d Paris, 5 July 1904). French painter. He was a pupil of Emile Bin (1825-97) and Alexandre Cabanel at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris and in 1867 won the Prix de Rome with the Murder of Laius by Oedipus (1867; Paris, Ecole N. Sup. B.-A.), which opened up an official career to him. He painted religious and mythological subjects (e.g. Perseus on Pegasus, 1869; N?mes, Mus. B.-A.) and also worked on numerous decorative projects in both Paris and the provinces. Between 1873 and 1883 he worked on the huge mural compositions the Vow of Clovis at the Battle of Tolbiac and the Baptism of Clovis for the Panth?on in Paris, executed in an academic style. He produced a series of 14 panels depicting the Passion of Christ for the church of St Peter at Douai. He executed four grisailles for the cupola of the church of Saint-Paul-Saint-Louis in Paris, which were commissioned in 1873 and finished in 1875 and depicted St Louis, Charlemagne, Robert the Pious and Clovis. He painted four panels for the corridor of the foyer of the Op?ra Comique in Paris, showing Music, Comedy, Song and Dance. In 1882 he was commissioned to decorate the staircase leading to the 'Comit? des Mar?chaux' room in the Minist?re de la Guerre [now Minist?re de la D?fense], Paris, with three panels depicting The Departure, The Charge and Salve Patria. His tapestry cartoons for the Gobelins included one for the Arms of the Town of Paris (1892) for the Tribunal de Commerce in Paris; he contributed a large decorative frieze for the Palais des Beaux-Arts at the Exposition Universelle in Paris in 1900. He also participated in the enormous enterprise of decorating the new H?tel de Ville in Paris, producing five compositions influenced by Luc Olivier Merson. Destined for the north landing of the Escalier des f?tes, they represent the Republican Months, Dawn, Day, Evening and Night and were finished in 1903.

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The French journalist, historian, and socialist politician Louis Blanc (1811-1882) greatly influenced the evolution of French socialism and modern social democracy.

Louis Blanc was born on Oct. 29, 1811, in Madrid, where his father was comptroller of finance for King Joseph, Napoleon's brother. Financially ruined by the fall of the French Empire, the Blanc family returned to Paris, and Louis managed to earn enough from his writings to study law.

In 1839 Blanc published his most famous essay, L'Organisation du travail ("The Organization of Labor"). He outlined his social thought, which was based on the principle, "From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs." His theories were based on solid research and expressed in vivid language. He argued that unequal distribution of wealth, unjust wages, and unemployment, all stemmed from competition. Unlike his predecessors, Blanc looked to the state to redress social injustice, but he believed that only a democratic republic could achieve an egalitarian commonwealth. Since every man has a "right to work," the state must provide employment and aid the aged and sick. It would accomplish these aims through establishing "social workshops" - producers' cooperatives, organized on a craft basis. The workers would manage these workshops, share in the profits, and repay the government loan. Eventually, the worker-owned factories, farms, and shops would replace those that were privately owned. Thus the whole process of production would become cooperative.

Though Marx criticized Blanc's ideas as utopian, French workers of the 1840s were intrigued by them. In 1846 there was a widespread demand for national workshops, and by 1848 "the organization of labor" had become a popular slogan. Articles in La Réforme, a radical newspaper, popularized Blanc's proposals among the workers, who adopted them as a practical reform program.

Blanc supported the cause of liberals throughout Europe. In 1841 in Histoire de dix ans, 1830-1840 (History of Ten Years, 1830-1840), he denounced King Louis Philippe's foreign policy as pusillanimous. France, he thought, had missed a golden opportunity in 1830 to give Europe liberal institutions.

A member of the provisional government formed on Feb. 24, 1848 (after the fall of the July Monarchy), Blanc persuaded his colleagues to guarantee the right to work, to create national workshops, and to establish the Luxembourg Commission to study and propose social experiments. But the national workshops became a makeshift relief program, a mockery of Blanc's ideas, and the government rejected his proposal for a ministry of labor.

By the middle of May, the coalition of right-and leftwing republicans, which had overthrown the Orleanist regime, collapsed. Though Blanc had been elected to the conservative National Assembly, that body expelled him from the government in May. It also abolished the Luxembourg Commission and on June 21 closed the workshops. These actions provoked a workers' revolt, which Gen. Cavaignac suppressed during the bloody June Days, and the ensuing reaction forced Blanc to seek asylum in England. While in exile he wrote a 12-volume history of the French Revolution to 1795 and a history of the Revolution of 1848. Blanc returned to France in 1871 and entered the Chamber of Deputies. There he led a futile fight for a radical constitution, opposing the one that was eventually adopted in 1875. In January 1879 he climaxed his long career by persuading the Assembly to grant amnesty to the Communards of 1871. Blanc died at Cannes on Dec. 6, 1882.

Further Reading

Most of Blanc's historical works and correspondence are available in English editions. The best critical study of the man and his work, in any language, is Leo A. Loubére, Louis Blanc: His Life and His Contribution to the Rise of French Jacobin-Socialism (1961). For an evaluation of the 1848 workshops see Donald Cope McKay, The National Workshops: A Study in the French Revolution of 1848 (1933). J. P. Plamenatz, The Revolutionary Movement in France, 1815-1871 (1952), traces the rise and fall of the alliance of moderate and radical republicans which established the short-lived Second Republic.

Additional Sources

Loubáere, Leo A., Louis Blanc, his life and his contribution to the rise of French Jacobin-socialism, Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1980, 1961.

Blanc, Louis (1811-82). Socialist historian, journalist, and political activist, who sums up the blend of socialism and nationalism which characterized many on the Left in 19th-c. France. He is best known today for his L'Organisation du travail (1839), which advocated a large role for the state in reorganizing industry and providing work. He played an active political role after the Revolution of 1848 [see Republics, 2] and his ideas inspired a number of attempted reforms. In the wake of the June Days he went into exile in England. His activism has tended to obscure his other achievements. He wrote a classic example of committed contemporary history, Histoire de dix ans, 1830-1840 (1841-4), which went through numerous editions and translations, fuelling public antipathy to the July Monarchy. In his Histoire de la Révolution (1847-62), Blanc opposed Michelet's critique of Jacobinism and remained steadfast in his admiration for Robespierre and his defence of the Convention.

[Ceri Crossley]

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Louis Blanc, ca. 1848.

Louis Jean Joseph Charles Blanc (29 October 1811 – 6 December 1882) was a French politician and historian. A socialist that favored reforms, he called for the creation of procedure cooperatives in order to guarantee employment for the city poor.

Contents 1 Early years 2 The Revolution of 1848 3 Exile 4 Return to France 4.1 His political legacy 5 Selected works 6 References

Early years

He was born in Madrid, his father held the post of inspector-general of finance under Joseph Bonaparte. Failing to receive aid from Pozzo di Borgo, his mother's uncle, Louis Blanc studied law in Paris, living in poverty, and became a contributor to various journals. In the Revue du progres, which he founded, he published in 1839 his study on L'Organisation du travail. The principles laid down in this famous essay form the key to Louis Blanc's whole political career. He attributes all the evils that afflict society to the pressure of competition, whereby the weaker are driven to the wall. He demanded the equalization of wages, and the merging of personal interests in the common good-- "à chacun selon ses besoins, de chacun selon ses facultés," which is often translated as "from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs." This was to be affected by the establishment of "social workshops," a sort of combined co-operative society and trade-union, where the workmen in each trade were to unite their efforts for their common benefit. In 1841 he published his Histoire de dix ans 1830-1840, an attack upon the monarchy of July. It ran through four editions in four years.

The Revolution of 1848

In 1847 he published the two first volumes of his Histoire de la Revolution Française. Its publication was interrupted by the Revolution of 1848, when Louis Blanc became a member of the provisional government. It was on his motion that, on 25 February, the government undertook "to guarantee the existence of the workmen by work"; and though his demand for the establishment of a ministry of labour was refused—as beyond the competence of a provisional government—he was appointed to preside over the government labour commission (Commission du Gouvernement pour les travailleurs) established at the Palace Luxembourg to inquire into and report on the labour question.

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 Emile 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. Emile 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. In his absence he was condemned by a special tribunal at Bourges, in contumaciam, to deportation. 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 irregular masonic organisation, the Conseil Supreme de l’Ordre Maconnique 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 till the fall of the Second Empire in September 1870, after which he returned to Paris and served as a private in the national guard. On 8 February 1871 he was elected a member of the National Assembly, in which he maintained that the republic was "the necessary form of national sovereignty," and voted for the continuation of the war; yet, though a leftist, he did not sympathize with the Paris Commune, and exerted his influence in vain on the side of moderation. In 1878 he advocated the abolition of the presidency and the Senate. In January 1879 he introduced into the chamber a proposal for the amnesty of the Communards, which was carried. This was his last important act. His declining years were darkened by ill-health and by the death, in 1876, of his wife Christina Groh, whom he had married in 1865. He died at Cannes, and on 12 December received a state funeral in the Père Lachaise.

His political legacy

Louis 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 socialism in France. His Discours politiques (1847-1881) was published in 1882. his most important works, besides those already mentioned, are Lettres sur l'Angleterre (1866-1867), Dix années de l'Histoire de l'Angleterre (1879-1881), and Questions d'aujourd'hui et de demain (1873-1884).

Selected works

1. Louis Blanc (1841). The History of Ten Years, 1830-1840 (Vol. 1). New York: Chapman and Hall. pp. 628. ASIN B0006BWS4Y. http://books.google.com/books?id=hH52mPMmlzcC&vid=OCLC19653369&dq=Grochow+1831&ie=UTF-8&jtp=1. 

References

This article includes a list of references or external links, but its sources remain unclear because it has insufficient inline citations. Please help to improve this article by introducing more precise citations where appropriate. (April 2009)

Wikisource has the text of the 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica article Blanc, Louis.

This article incorporates text from the Encyclopædia Britannica, Eleventh Edition, a publication now in the public domain. Please update as needed. The 1911 Encyclopaedia Britannica in turn cites, in addition to Blanc's own works, Louis Blanc (1883) by L. Fiaux.

• G.R.S. Taylor, "Leaders of Socialism" (1968)
• G.D.H Cole, "Socialist Thought, The Forerunners 1789-1850" (1959)
• Harry W. Laidler,Ph.D, " A History of Socialist Thought" (1927)

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