Louis Auguste Blanqui (1805–1881)

French early workers’ movement activist and revolutionist; a utopian communist.

Blanqui was born in February 1805, in Puget-Théniers, near Nice, France. In 1824, he secretly joined the revolutionary group, the Carbonari (“Charcoal Burners”), and in 1825, enrolled at the University of Paris. In 1827, he was injured while participating in a student campaign. Between 1828 and 1829, Blanqui traveled to the south of France, Italy and Spain and returned to Paris in August 1829. Blanqui successively participated in the July Revolution of 1830 and the February Revolution of 1848, and was the leader of the secret Société des Saisons. During the revolution of 1848–1849, he was the leader of the French proletarian revolutionary movement and the leader of the Paris uprising on October 31, 1870. Imprisoned by the reactionaries in Versailles during the Paris Commune, he served in absentia as a member and honorary president of the Paris Commune. He spent 36 years of his life in prison and died in Paris in 1881. Blanqui’s works mainly include Selected Works of Louis-Auguste Blanqui, La Patrie en danger (Fatherland in Danger), etc.

With a strong revolutionary will and a lofty spirit of heroic sacrifice to the cause of revolution, he advocated violent revolution and practical revolutionary action, and advocated the overthrow of the old system of exploitation through the uprising of a few revolutionaries. However, Blanqui advocated the establishment of a dictatorship of a few revolutionaries instead of the dictatorship of the whole proletariat, which is tinged with individual heroism and adventurism. Marx and Engels highly praised Blanqui’s revolutionary activities and spirit of heroic sacrifice, while giving a principled criticism of Blanqui’s revolutionary adventurism.