Louis Auguste Blanqui

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Louis Auguste Blanqui (February 8, 1805 - January 1, 1881) was a French political activist. The theory of Blanquism is attributed to him.

He was born in Puget-Théniers, Alpes-Maritimes, where his father, Jean Dominique Blanqui, was subprefect. He studied both law and medicine, but found his real vocation in politics, and quickly became a champion of the most advanced opinions. A member of the Carbonari society since 1824, he took an active part in most republican conspiracies during this period. Under Charles X (1824-1830), he participated in 1827 in a street fight rue Saint-Denis, during which he was seriously injured. In 1829, he entered Pierre Leroux's Globe newspaper before taking part to the July Revolution of 1830. He then took membership to the Amis du Peuple ("The People's Friends") society, where he made acquaintainces with Buonarrotti, Raspail, and Armand Barbès. He was condemned to repeated terms of imprisonment for maintaining the doctrine of republicanism during the reign of Louis Philippe (1830-1848). Implicated in the armed outbreak of the Société des Saisons, of which he was a leading spirit, he was condemned to death on January 14, 1840, a sentence later commuted to life imprisonment.

He was released during the revolution of 1848, only to resume his attacks on existing institutions. The revolution did not satisfy him. The violence of the Société républicaine centrale, which was founded by Blanqui to demand a modification of the government, brought him into conflict with the more moderate Republicans, and in 1849 he was sentenced to ten years' imprisonment. While in prison, he sent a brief address (written in the Prison of Belle-Ile-en-Mer, February 10, 1851) to a committee of social democrats in London. The text of the address was noted and introduced by Marx [1].

In 1865, while serving a further term of imprisonment under the Empire, he escaped, and continued his propaganda campaign against the government from abroad, until the general amnesty of 1869 enabled him to return to France. Blanqui's leaning towards violence was illustrated in 1870 by two unsuccessful armed demonstrations: one on January 12 at the funeral of Victor Noir, the journalist shot by Pierre Bonaparte; the other on August 14, when he led an attempt to seize some guns at a barrack. Upon the fall of the Empire, through the revolution of September 4, Blanqui established the club and journal La patrie en danger.

He was one of the group that briefly seized the reins of power on October 31, and for his share in that outbreak he was again condemned to death per absentia on March 9 of the following year. On March 17, Adolphe Thiers, aware of the threat represented by Blanqui, took advantage of his resting at a friend physician's place, in Bretenoux in the Lot. A few days afterwards the insurrection which established the Paris Commune broke out, and Blanqui was elected a member of the insurgent government, but his detention in prison prevented him from taking an active part. Karl Marx would later be convinced that Blanqui was the leader that would have been missing to the Commune. Nevertheless he was in 1872 condemned along with the other members of the Commune to transportation; on account of his broken health this sentence was commuted to one of imprisonment. On April 20, 1879 he was elected a deputy for Bordeaux; although the election was pronounced invalid, Blanqui was freed, and immediately resumed his work of agitation.

After a speech at a revolutionary meeting in Paris, he was struck down by apoplexy. He died on January 1, 1881 and was interred in the Père Lachaise Cemetery.

His uncompromising communism, and his determination to enforce it by violence, had brought him into conflict with every French government, and half his life had been spent in prison. Besides his innumerable contributions to journalism, he published an astronomical work entitled L'Eternité par les astres (1872), where he exposed a theory of eternal return, and after his death his writings on economic and social questions were collected under the title of Critique sociale (1885).

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• This article incorporates text from the Encyclopædia Britannica Eleventh Edition, a publication now in the public domain.