The Blanqui Reader

by Louis Auguste Blanqui, Peter Hallward (Editor), Philippe Le Goff (Editor)

Overview

First English-language collection of writings by the legendary nineteenth-century insurrectionist

Louis Auguste Blanqui (1805–1881) was one of the most important and controversial figures in nineteenth-century French revolutionary politics, and he played a major role in all of the great upheavals that punctuated his life—the insurrections of 1830, 1848 and 1870–71. Adamant that a just and egalitarian society can only be established by revolutionary means, he recognised that no insurrection can succeed if it fails to overcome the coercive resources of the state, and no revolutionary government can endure if it betrays the principles that alone earn and deserve mass support.

At odds with followers of Proudhon on the one hand and of Marx on the other, Blanqui commanded unrivalled authority in French revolutionary circles during parts of his own lifetime but was quickly forgotten (if not derided) after his death. This is the first collection of Blanqui’s writings ever published in English, and it includes new and complete translations of his best-known texts: Instructions for an Armed Uprising and Eternity by the Stars. With material drawn from all his most important publications and speeches, as well as from the full sweep of his voluminous manuscripts and correspondence, this wide-ranging anthology will enable anglophone readers and political activists to arrive at their own critical assessment of Blanqui’s thought and legacy for the first time.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781786635037
Publisher:	Verso Books
Publication date:	06/19/2018
Sold by:	Penguin Random House Publisher Services
Format:	eBook
Pages:	384
File size:	754 KB

About the Author

Peter Hallward teaches Philosophy at Kingston University and has written books on Alain Badiou, Gilles Deleuze, postcolonial literature, and contemporary Haitian politics. His books The Will of the People and Blanqui and Political Will are forthcoming from Verso.

Philippe Le Goff teaches at the School of Modern Languages and Cultures, University of Warwick, where he completed a PhD on Auguste Blanqui.

Table of Contents

Abbreviations ix

Chronology xi

Editors' Note and Acknowledgements xv

Preface: Blanqui Our Contemporary? Peter Hallward xvii

Introduction Philippe Le Goff xxv

Part I 1830-1834: The July Revolution and its Aftermath

First Proclamation 3

Declaration of the Provisional Committee for Schools 5

Auguste Blanqui's Defence Speech at the 'Trial of the Fifteen' 8

Report to the Society of the Friends of the People 20

Equality is Our Flag 36

Why There Are No More Riots 42

Social Wealth Must Belong to Those Who Created It 48

Part II 1835-1847: Secret Societies

Democratic Propaganda 59

Blanqui's Notes for his Defence at the 'Gunpowder Trial' 62

Initiation Ceremony of the Society of the Seasons 66

Part III 1848: Year of Revolution

Speech at the Prado 73

For the Red Flag 74

Second Petition for the Postponing of Elections 75

To the Democratic Clubs of Paris 77

Address to the Provisional Government 78

The Massacre in Rouen: The Central Republican Society to the Provisional Government 80

The Union of True Democrats 83

Response to the Request for a Toast for a Workers' Banquet 85

To the Mountain of 1793! To the Pure Socialists, its True Heirs! 87

Part IV 1849-1852: Learning from Defeat

On Revolution 97

Warning to the People 98

Concerning the Clamour Against the 'Warning to the People' 101

Work, Suffer and Die 104

Letter from Maillard to Blanqui 107

Letter to Maillard 110

Letter to Tessy 121

Part V 1830-1880: Philosophical and Political Fragments

Thought, Ideas, Morality 129

Commitment, Volition and Free Will 135

Science and Materialism 137

Spiritualism and Religion 138

Education and Freedom of the Press 141

Paris 145

Social Conflict 148

Capital and Labour 150

Revolution and Popular Power 154

The French Revolution and the Terror of 1793 157

Political Violence 161

The Army 163

Socialism and Equality 164

The Revolutionary Party 167

Part VI 1866-1869: Writings from Exile

Letter to Blanqui's Supporters in Paris 171

The Sects and the Revolution 176

Fatal, Fatalism, Fatality 179

Instructions for an Armed Uprising 202

Notes on Positivism 231

Communism, the Future of Society 243

Part VII 1870-1872: From the Siege of Paris to the Astronomical Hypothesis

One Last Word 271

Eternity by the Stars 281

Selected Bibliography 331

Index 335

Editorial Reviews

Although his name is no longer mentioned, Blanqui’s particular brand of communism is the one that modern-day royalists still fear, that modern-day liberals still distance themselves from.”
—The Quietus

“Auguste Blanqui believed that a well-organized and secretive revolutionary elite could succeed in taking power in nineteenth-century France and bring about a regime of social justice. Yet it did not work out that way. Spending much of his life in prison, he had lots of time to reflect and to write. This volume presents the best of the political writing of Blanqui, accompanied by the editors’ introduction. We see why Blanqui’s determined optimism and faith in education and ordinary people anticipated subsequent revolutionaries, including Lenin and Gramsci. And why what Blanqui has to say may be particularly relevant in our time.”
—John Merriman, Charles Seymour Professor of History, Yale University, and author of Ballad of the Anarchist Bandits

“Blanqui was one of the most important of the revolutionary leaders who helped to shape French politics from the Bourbon Restoration to the Third Republic. He was famous as an organizer, a conspirator and a would-be maker of insurrections. He was also a prolific writer, many of whose texts are practically unknown. Philippe Le Goff and Peter Hallward have now made a good selection of them available in English—a service to all interested in this dramatic period of history, in this strange and unyielding individual, and in the wider history of revolutionary ideologies.”
—Robert Tombs, Professor of French History, St John’s College, Cambridge, and author of The English and Their History

“The editors Peter Hallward and Philippe Le Goff have done a great service for scholars and activists. The Blanqui Reader is an essential work in rescuing L’Enfermé from obscurity and rediscovering his relevance for today.”
—Doug Enaa Greene, Socialism and Democracy

“This valuable anthology of Blanqui’s writings … It contains a mass of Blanqui’s published and unpublished writings, many of them unavailable even in French.”
—Ian Birchall, London Socialist Historians Group

From the Publisher