Auguste Blanqui and the Politics of Popular Empowerment

273 Pages·2020·3.228 MB·English

by  Philippe Le Goff

Auguste Blanqui and the Politics of

Popular Empowerment
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Auguste Blanqui and the Politics of

Popular Empowerment
Philippe Le Goff
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Contents

Acknowledgements vi
List of Abbreviations vii
Introduction 1
1 Intelligence 23
2 Conflict 55
3 Actors 83
4 Volition 113
5 History 147
Conclusion 183
Notes 193
Bibliography 241
Index 251
Acknowledgements

This book is based on a doctoral thesis submitted at Warwick University in
2015. During the subsequent process of revising, correcting and refining my
initial arguments and conclusions, I have benefited enormously from the help
and support of many people.
I am grateful to Liza Thompson, Lucy Russell and Lisa Goodrum at
Bloomsbury for their immediate enthusiasm for the book, for their help in
bringing it to fruition and for their patience along the way. An earlier and
shorter version of Sections I–III of the Introduction was published in the
‘Introduction’ to The Blanqui Reader (London: Verso, 2018). Thanks to Verso
for their kind permission to use both this material and the quotes that serve as
epigraphs in Chapters 1–5.
I would like to thank Alex Corcos, Peter Hallward, Victoria Hirst, Jussi
Palmusaari and Stefano Pippa for their incisive comments on various chapters
and sections, and the anonymous readers for their useful responses to the book
proposal and the final draft. I owe special thanks to Nick Hewlett, who not
only carefully read the entire manuscript but whose support and friendship
have meant a great deal these past few years. Needless to say, I alone am
responsible for any remaining errors and misunderstandings contained in the
following pages.
As this project has slowly taken shape, the sound advice and steady
encouragement of colleagues and students at Warwick’s School of Modern
Languages and Cultures and Kingston’s Centre for Research in Modern
European Philosophy have been extremely valuable. Many conversations
about many things with Robert Lines have shaped my thinking in more ways
than both he and I probably realise.
My thanks, finally, to Victoria, for her understanding, for her love.
Abbreviations

BR The Blanqui Reader, eds. Peter Hallward and Philippe Le
Goff (London: Verso, 2018).
CS1, CS2 Critique Sociale (Paris: Félix Alcan, 1885), 2 volumes.
MF Maintenant, il faut des armes, ed. Dominique Le Nuz
(Paris: La Fabrique, 2007).
MSS Manuscript volume, catalogued as NAF 9578 to 9598
(Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale, manuscript collections).
ND Ni Dieu Ni Maître (Brussels: Éditions Aden, 2009).
OI Œuvres I: Des origines à la Révolution de 1848, ed.
Dominique Le Nuz (Nancy: Presses Universitaires de
Nancy, 1993).

Introduction

Few individuals in the history of revolutionary politics have proved so
controversial as Louis-Auguste Blanqui (1805–1881). Remembered, when
remembered at all, for the ill-fated coups of May 1839 and August 1870, today
Blanqui’s name is generally synonymous with conspiratorial organizing and
putchist action, with authoritarian elitism and impatient adventurism – with
the ‘Blanquism’, in other words, that led him to emphatic failure during his
lifetime, and that has brought him enduring infamy well beyond it.
The damning judgement of posterity was by no means inevitable, however.
A leading figure of the radical left in nineteenth-century France, Blanqui’s
political prestige grew across the major popular uprisings that spanned the
course of his long and remarkable life. The insurgent in the anti-government
riots of November 1827 and the ‘Three Glorious Days’ of July 1830, who suffered
a near-fatal bullet wound to the neck during the former and was awarded the
‘Decoration of July’ by the new Orléanist regime in recognition of his role in
the latter, once again took to the streets in the insurrection of 31 October 1870,
when Parisians attempted to establish a new government capable of salvaging
the war effort against Prussia. The orator of the early 1830s, whose passionate
speeches were reproduced and circulated among the republican opposition,
once again became a powerful voice in the fierce debates between the French
exile community in the early 1850s, when his declarations and letters, penned
from the island prison of Belle-Île, made their way across Europe. The leader
of perhaps the most important radical club in 1848, who insisted on the mass
mobilization and organization of the people as the means by which to pressure
the Provisional Government into undertaking revolutionary measures, once
again called for a similar strategy during the Prussian siege of Paris in the
winter of 1870–1, when he briefly served as head of the 169th battalion of the