Louis Blanc

French political theorist

• Born: October 29, 1811
• Birthplace: Madrid, Spain
• Died: December 6, 1882
• Place of death: Cannes, France

Now regarded as the founder of humanitarian socialism, Blanc converted his dissatisfaction with the misery of the French people into an imperative to transform the basic governmental and economic system to end forever the capitalist exploitation of the working class.

Early Life

A Frenchman, Louis Blanc was born in Spain during the closing, turbulent days of the Napoleonic Empire. His father served King Joseph Bonaparte as an inspector general of Spanish finances. The French hold over Spain, however, was never secure. Joseph, already forced out of his capital several times by the successes of the British army under Sir Arthur Wellesley, finally left the country in 1813. The French bureaucrats, officials, and advisers departed with him. This exodus split the Blanc family. The father abandoned his wife after the birth of a second son, and Louis, the elder, was sent to live with his maternal grandmother in Corsica. Only after 1815, with the establishment of the Restoration Monarchy, did life become more settled. The father returned, managing to secure a royal pension, and Louis was reunited with his family.

In 1821, Blanc and his younger brother, Charles, were enrolled in the Royal College at Rodez, which they attended on scholarship. The school was run by the Catholic clergy, who instructed their pupils in the truth of Bourbon Legitimism and Scholastic theology. The Enlightenment and the revolution were denigrated, if mentioned at all. Louis was a dedicated student. He won prizes in philosophy and rhetoric and excelled at biblical study, from which he derived a sense of obligation to work for the betterment of society. He completed his formal education in 1830 when he was nineteen years of age.

Blanc left Rodez to find work in Paris and arrived there in August, soon after the revolution which had replaced the Bourbon Dynasty with the Orleanist monarchy of Louis-Philippe. Trained as a gentleman, Blanc had difficulty finding work, especially with the new government, which looked with suspicion on all of those associated with the previous regime. To support himself, therefore, Blanc took a variety of part-time jobs such as tutoring, house cleaning, and clerking. He received some money from an uncle but spent much time visiting museums, palaces, and public monuments. In 1832, the prospect of more steady employment led him to leave the capital to accept a post as a tutor with a family in Arras.

While he was in Arras, Blanc met Frédéric Degeorge, a newspaper editor and champion of democratic republicanism, who introduced him to political journalism and prompted his admiration of one of Arras’s most famous native sons, Robespierre. The association with Degeorge heightened Blanc’s desire to return to Paris and to begin a real career as a writer. He returned in 1834, armed with a letter of introduction, and began work on Bon Sense (common sense), a paper founded two years earlier by a group of men who feared the growing power of Louis-Philippe. In 1836, Blanc became the journal’s editor in chief. He was only twenty-four years of age.

Journalism had become Blanc’s way to right wrongs and to pave the way for the establishment of a more just society. He wanted to inspire men of goodwill to cooperate in a common program to safeguard individual freedom and to exact reform through evolutionary, but decisive, change. He became involved in election politics and, in 1837, was instrumental in forming a committee to present qualified voters with a slate of progressive candidates in the forthcoming elections.

This group failed to form an effective coalition out of the various opposition groups, however, and had little practical effect on the results. The government list was returned with a large majority. The failure did not shake Blanc’s faith that government power could be made responsive to the general need. Therefore, he believed it should not be limited but used as the instrument of progress. Such active étatism put Blanc at odds with his newspaper’s conservative ownership. He insisted, however, that a man should follow his convictions rather than his position and, in 1838, resigned. His entire editorial staff quit with him.

Blanc wanted to create a new kind of newspaper, one committed to the transformation of society, and one that would become a rallying point for all of those who were dedicated to democratic change and who believed in the need for the reorganization of work. This newspaper, Revue de progrès politique, social et litéraire (review of political, social, and literary progress), began publication in January, 1839. In the following year, its pages contained a series of Blanc’s articles that formed the key to his own thought and the basis on which his subsequent political and intellectual career rested.

Life’s Work

Blanc believed that society was divided into two classes, the bourgeois and the people, or the oppressors and the oppressed, and that only through political action could the oppressed achieve liberation and the ability to develop their true nature. Blanc asserted that exploitation was endemic to the system of his time where not only the rich exploit the poor but also the poor exploit one another and the father exploits his family. Daughters, to earn money for survival, are often driven to prostitution. Thus, capitalist society leads to the breakdown of the family, to the enslavement of women, to the increase of crime, and to moral decay. Only if the forces of the people succeed in capturing the state can the state be used to liberate humankind from the horrors of poverty.

This new government must be popularly elected and run by energetic deputies who will serve the interests of the mass of the voters, not the special interests of the capitalists whose oppression will end only after they are absorbed fraternally into a classless society. Blanc hoped that this process of fraternalization could be accomplished peacefully. He suggested that this could be done through the manipulation of the credit system, controlled by the state, which would force the capitalists to transfer money into state banks to be directed toward investments in public enterprises.

In Blanc’s process, the capitalists would be induced to participate in their own destruction. The economic sector would then be organized into ateliers, or social workshops, a production unit of men of the same craft or profession working together at the local level. The bosses would be elected by the workers and would oversee the distribution of earnings. Each man would produce according to his aptitude and strength and would be awarded wages according to his need. The production from the local ateliers would be adjusted to overall production through central organizations that would establish general principles and policies.

The heart of Blanc’s concern for human welfare lay in his early religious training that taught him the value of charity. Blanc’s God, however, was hardly Roman Catholic. Blanc believed in a pantheistic deity that existed in all beings and bound them together in a sacred spirit of fraternity. The perfect society was one with collective ownership of property and complete unity of objective. People would live communally with competition being replaced by cooperation. Blanc envisaged this transformation as being accomplished peacefully through proper education.

Blanc’s utopian vision, however, stood in stark contrast to the society in which he lived. The July Monarchy preserved the Napoleonic laws forbidding workers to engage in common action to establish wages and conditions of work. The government, dominated by a strict laissez-faire ideology, made no attempt to improve the standard of living of the working class; nor did many individual employers concern themselves with bettering the lot of their workers. Indeed, many capitalists believed that, because poverty was inevitable, it would not help to call attention to it. Strikes almost never succeeded because the authorities called out the soldiers and the police to suppress the malcontents and jail their leaders.

Thus, the revolutions of 1848 , which overthrew the regime of Louis-Philippe, became an opportunity for deliverance. Blanc and other social reformers viewed the advent of the Second Republic as the beginning of the economic transformation of society. Blanc, however, had developed no clear idea of how to put his concepts into practice, nor did there exist any organized political party to support him. The moderate republicans viewed the revolution as essentially political and were not interested in an economic agenda. Nevertheless, some deference had to be made to the demands of the workers, whose power had formed the backbone of the rebellion. Consequently, the provisional government recognized the socialist principle that the workers could demand government intervention in the industrial life of the nation, and it proclaimed the principle of the right to work. It also established a system of national workshops to guarantee each citizen a job.

Blanc was made president of a special commission to study the improvement of the status of workers. He intended to use his power to enact legislation in accord with his socialist principles. He wanted the people to produce according to their ability and to consume according to their need. Competition would be replaced with workers’ associations. Workers would unite like brothers and receive comparable wages. He wanted the state to provide medical insurance and old-age pensions. His commission, he hoped, would assume an active role in the settling of wage disputes. Finally, he wanted to pave the way for the nationalization of the railroads, the factories, the insurance companies, and the banks. His success, however, was limited.

The Luxembourg Commission managed to push the government into passing a law that reduced the workday from eleven hours to ten hours in Paris, and from twelve hours to eleven hours in the provinces. It also had some success in wage disputes. Blanc’s schemes, however, for the most part, received a cool reception by the provisional government, whose leadership viewed them as a threat to society. While these social reforms antagonized the middle class, they raised the hopes of the workers and added to the growing class tension. The national workshops scheme ended badly. Blanc had hoped for a plan to help workers become established in a particular profession, but the scheme had never been more than a program of unemployment relief—workers being thrown together without any distinction for their trade and receiving the wages of indigents. Blanc disavowed all connection with it.

The workshops had been established only as a temporary expedient to stall the dangerous masses, and, when the situation in Paris was deemed less volatile, the government began disbanding the groups. In June, a decree was issued that drafted all unwed workers into the army and sent all others connected with the program into the provinces, where they would become less threatening. This outrage sparked six days of street fighting, which left Paris in ruins and the army in control. Blanc’s dream of a new France lay in the smoldering wreckage.

Blanc fled to England, where he remained until 1871. During the early days of the Third Republic, he served as a representative to the Chamber of Deputies from Marseilles, but his years of exile had put him out of touch with the new generation of leftist leaders. The Marxists scorned his nonrevolutionary approach. His last days were lonely. He had outlived most of his friends. His wife had died in 1876, and his younger brother, Charles, died in January, 1882. Blanc himself died in December, 1882. France gave him a state funeral, and the city of Paris named a street after him. One hundred and fifty thousand people were present for his interment at Père Lachaise cemetery. Suddenly in death, he received the recognition that he had once enjoyed in his days of power.

Significance

Like many of his countrymen, Louis Blanc tried to give definition to the revolutionary slogans of Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity. He began his attempt with two main assumptions, both of them drawn from Jean-Jacques Rousseau—that humankind is basically good, and that this goodness can emerge in a proper society. The conclusion was, therefore, inescapable: Injustice exists because of a bad environment, and the fault lies in institutions, not in human nature. Upon such Cartesian assumptions, Blanc built his entire system. His basic dedication to social justice, however, flowed more naturally from a belief that human concern was a logical extension of the teachings of Christ.

Though Blanc’s ideas formed the basis of modern French humanitarian socialism (as well as influencing the writings of Karl Marx), their application during his lifetime was nonexistent. The Luxembourg Commission was a practical failure. Nevertheless, it furnished an important precedent for state involvement in regulating conditions of work and in collective bargaining mediation. Blanc’s system was hopelessly utopian, but he had made it clear that political liberty is closely related to a society’s standard of living and that without significant popular enjoyment of the nation’s wealth, real democracy is impossible.

Bibliography

Berenson, Edward. Populist Religion and Left-Wing Politics in France, 1830-1852. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1984. The first detailed study of the coalition of democrats and republicans who tried to build social reform on political democracy. Focuses on the interaction of politics and ideology at the national and local levels. Particularly valuable discussion of the diversity of the Montagnard coalition of the Second Republic, of which Blanc was one of the main leaders.

Blanc, Louis. The History of Ten Years, 1830-1840. London: Chapman and Hall, 1845. A survey of the first crucial decade of the reign of Louis-Philippe, focusing largely on political events. Valuable for Blanc’s partisan descriptions, complete with appropriate moralizing.

Duveau, Georges. 1848: The Making of a Revolution. Translated by Anne Carter. New York: Pantheon Books, 1966. Disdains formal analysis in favor of a narrative re-creating events through vivid episodes and colorful portraits of the main participants. Contains a lengthy portrait of Blanc, as well as other leaders, in the book’s concluding chapters. Blanc’s role as head of the Luxembourg Commission is presented side by side with the deliberations of the provisional government. Limited almost exclusively to Paris.

Loubère, Leo A. Louis Blanc: His Life and His Contribution to the Rise of French Jacobin-Socialism. Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1961. A descriptive approach to the thought of Blanc, relating it to the circumstances of the times. Main thrust is on Blanc’s intellectual development as fashioned by public experience. Shows how principal events were responsible for the change and growth of Blanc’s socialist philosophy.

Price, Roger. The French Second Republic: A Social History. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1972. A graphic re-creation of the wretched working-class conditions and the structure of French society that led to the collapse of the July Monarchy.

Soltau, Roger Henry. French Political Thought in the Nineteenth Century. Reprint. New York: Russell & Russell, 1959. A competent survey of the leading political thinkers of the age. Blanc’s social ideas are all the more extraordinary when placed in the context of his more conservative contemporaries.