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Blanqui’S Note Nov Biliana Kassabova History of Political Thought Workshop December 4, 2017 Blanqui’s note Nov. 23, 1848 Blanqui between Myth and Archives: Revolution, Dictatorship, and Education This piece, very much a work in progress, aims to make sense of the revolutionary ideas and actions of Louis-Auguste Blanqui. It complicates our ideas of political thought regarding revolution in the nineteenth century, by arguing that the binary of centralized versus popular revolution needs to be revised. It is part of a larger project on concepts of revolutionary leadership in France from the French Revolution of 1789 until the Paris Commune of 1871. Within this historical trajectory, Blanqui is an interpreter of 18th century ideas into 19th century contexts, a political thinker and actor who plays a key role in the various reformulations of the revolutionary tradition. 1848 does not enjoy a stellar reputation among historians of France. The revolution of February that year saw the overthrow of the last king of France, followed by the establishment of a new French republic. This republic, however, lasted for only three years, brought little and short-lived social change, remained rather conservative, though was also laden with bitter parliamentary strife, and ended through a coup d’état that inaugurated a new authoritarian régime, a Second Empire with Napoleon III at its head. To add insult to injury, even the attempts at establishing a viable parliamentary republican system were famously seen by political observers and participants from 2 almost all parts of the political spectrum as derivative, incompetent, and worse yet – laughable. “There have been more mischievous revolutionaries than those of 1848, but I doubt if there have been any stupider,”1 quipped Alexis de Tocqueville in his posthumously published Recollections. Father of modern anarchism Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, for entirely different reasons, had anticipated this mockery in his 1849 Confessions of a Revolutionary: “notre histoire, depuis février, ressemble à un conte de fées. Quand cesserons-nous de jouer au trône et à la révolution ? Quand serons-nous véritablement hommes et citoyens ?”2 (“since February, our history resembles a fairy tale. When shall we stop playing games of thrones and revolutions? When shall we truly be men and citizens?”) Most memorably, in reference to both the February 1848 revolution and the December 2, 1851 coup d’état, Karl Marx began his Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte with “Hegel remarks somewhere that all great, world-historical facts and personages occur, as it were, twice. He has forgotten to add: the first time as tragedy, the second as farce.”3 1848 is early on accepted to be a failure of historical imagination and a failure of political thought. And yet, concurrently with the farcical imitation of the Revolution of 1789, 1848 revealed for the same Marx the true beginnings of a new type of revolutionary consciousness. With the workers’ insurrection of June 1848 and especially with its brutal suppression by the armed forces of the elected government, “[t]he veil that shrouded the republic was torn asunder.”4 In Marx’s analysis, the insurrection of June, born out of the contradictions of the promises and politics of the Second Republic, finally brought to light the struggle “between the two classes that split modern society.”5 Beyond laying the groundwork for his theory of historical progression, Marx thus urges his readers to 1 Alexis de Tocqueville, Recollections (New Brunswick: Transactions books, 1987), 96. 2 Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, Les Confessions d’un révolutionnaire (Paris: Garnier Frères, 1851), 113. All translations from French are mine. 3 From “The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte” in Robert C. Tucker, Ed. The Marx-Engels Reader, (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1978), 594. 4 From “The Class Struggles in France” in Tucker, Marx-Engels Reader, 589. 5 Tucker, Marx-Engels Reader, 589. 3 see with him something new where everyone else finds only a repetition of the old, and to discover with him the germs of future victory in the debris of past defeat. Historiography sometimes suffers from a problem similar to that of the revolutionaries of 1848 – it takes upon itself to repeat the formulae of the past and use them as a shorthand, thereby failing to notice nuances and innovations. Case in point – Louis-Auguste Blanqui, the symbol of revolutionary activity in 19th century France, and even 19th century Europe, and, more particularly, a key, albeit also somewhat tangential, actor in the events of 1848. Within his lifetime, and to this day, Blanqui’s name has been synonymous with insurrectionary conspiracy, putschism, and revolutionary authoritarianism. There are good reasons for this. However, the very weight of this reputation has contributed to the occlusion of a different Blanqui, the one who can be found in the archives. The oversimplification of Blanqui’s ideas of revolution and his consequent relegation to the backburners of history are all the more striking when we remember that he was the towering figure of revolution in the 19th century, beginning his (known) political activity at the age of 22 during an armed protest in Paris in 1827, ending it with his death in 1881, having spent an estimated total of 33 years in the prisons of the monarchist, republican, and imperial regimes during which he lived and against which he fought. Revered in France and elsewhere in Europe (his contemporary admirers include French anarchist Communard Jules Vallès and Italian revolutionary nationalist Giuseppe Garibaldi, among others), he was seen by various French regimes as a living threat to their existence. Marx, too, despite his many differences with Blanqui, saw him as the symbol of socialist revolution and the source of terror of conservatives, claiming that “the proletariat rallies more and more round revolutionary socialism, round communism, for which the bourgeoisie has itself invented the name of Blanqui.”6 Nowadays, Blanqui barely figures on the pages of history and, whenever he is mentioned, it is as a 6 Tucker, Marx-Engels Reader, 592. 4 caricature of a rouser of masses that do not want to be roused and as a failed revolutionary would-be dictator. With this paper, I hope to shed some light on this forgotten Blanqui, complicate our understanding of his revolutionary ideas, and, by extension, reveal yet another aspect of the political thought emerging from the failures of 1848. The first part of this piece will provide a brief overview of the early revolutionary activity of Blanqui, which contributed to the creation of his myth and to the late 19th and early 20th century repurposing of his ideas by European thinkers of socialism and revolution. I will then continue by dispelling some of those inherited commonplaces about Blanqui’s thought through an overview and analysis of archival material, largely consisting of unpublished letters and drafts. Using the failure of the revolution of February 1848 as a mirror through which to view the revolution of 1789-1794, Blanqui condemned old models of centralized revolution, most prominently through the figure of Robespierre. Blanquist revolutionary strategy instead shifted toward spreading knowledge among the people in order to transform it into an active and essential participant in the revolution to come. The revolutionary mimicry of 1848 thus serves to reassess the models of the past and re-imagine revolutionary ideology as a whole. The paper will conclude with some thoughts on the larger implications of this new direction of analysis of Blanqui’s ideas for the study of the history of revolutionary thought. The Myth of Blanqui On February 19, 1872, the right-wing paper Le Figaro published a short commentary on Auguste Blanqui. The old revolutionary conspirator had stood trial, and on February 17 been convicted to life in prison, for his involvement in the events leading up to the Paris Commune of 1871, more specifically for his two attempted armed insurrections in August and in October 1870. Le Figaro’s assessment read: 5 C’est que Blanqui est de l’école de De Maistre et de Bonald sous ce rapport. C’est un absolutiste comme eux. […] Ce démagogue n’est pas démocrate : il ne croit pas au peuple, il ne croit pas à l’opinion publique ; il ne croit qu’en lui et dans les quelques hommes que, patiemment, il a groupés autour de lui, élevés, pétris, façonnés de ses mains. […] Il dit avec De Maistre : Ce n’est point le peuple qui fait les révolutions : quatre ou cinq personnes suffisent. […] Il s’occupe alors de réunir ses acolytes ; il fait un plan d’insurrection ; et puis, un beau matin, il fixe le jour. Il n’y a rien dans l’air que sa volonté. Alors, lui et ses amis descendent dans la rue ; le peuple les regarde avec étonnement : il ne comprend pas.7 (That’s because Blanqui belongs to the school of De Maistre and of Bonald on this point. He’s an absolutist like them. […] This demagogue is not a democrat: he does not believe in the people, he does not believe in public opinion; he does not believe in anyone but himself and his several men that he has patiently assembled around himself, that he has brought up, moulded, fashioned with his own hands. […] Like De Maistre, he says : It is not the people that makes revolutions: four or five men are enough. […] He then takes charge of gathering his acolytes ; he makes a plan of insurrection ; and then, one beautiful morning, he chooses the day. The air is full with nothing but his will. Then, he and his friends descend onto the street the people look at them with stupefaction: they do not understand.) The accusation levelled against Blanqui – that though paying lip service to a republican and socialist revolution with equality as its ideal, he was, in fact, a centralizing authoritarian even in his revolutionary politics – is neither entirely baseless, nor the vitriol of a lone political antagonist.
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