(Jean Joseph Charles) Louis Blanc - Selected works
French statesman and historian, born in Madrid, Spain. His chief work on socialism, the Organisation du travail (1840, The Organisation of Labour), denounces the principle of competitive industry and proposes the establishment of co-operative workshops, subsidized by the state. After the revolution of 1848, he was appointed a member of the provisional government, but was forced to flee to England. On the fall of the empire, he returned to France, and was elected in 1871 to the National Assembly, and in 1876 to the Chamber of Deputies.
Louis Jean Joseph Charles Blanc (October 29, 1811 - December 6, 1882), was a French politician and historian.
Early Years
He was born in Madrid, where his father held the post of inspector-general of finance under Joseph Bonaparte. Failing to receive aid from Pozzo di Borgo, his mother's uncle, Louis Blanc studied law in Paris, living in poverty, and became a contributor to various journals. In the Revue du progres, which he founded, he published in 1839 his study on L'Organisation du travail. He demanded the equalization of wages, and the merging of personal interests in the common good--"à chacun selon ses besoins, de chacun selon ses facultés," which is often translated as "from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs." In 1841 he published his Histoire de dix ans 1830-1840, an attack upon the monarchy of July.
The Revolution of 1848
In 1847 he published the two first volumes of his Histoire de la Revolution Française. Its publication was interrupted by the Revolution of 1848, when Louis Blanc became a member of the provisional government. and though his demand for the establishment of a ministry of labour was refused--as beyond the competence of a provisional government--he was appointed to preside over the government labour commission (Commission du Gouvernement pour les travailleurs) established at the Luxembourg to inquire into and report on the labour question.
On May 10, in the National Assembly, he again proposed a ministry of labour, but the majority was hostile to socialism, and the proposal was again rejected. His responsibility for the disastrous experiment of the national workshops he himself denied in his Appel aux hommes gens (Paris, 1849), written in London after his flight, but by the insurgent mob of May 15 and by the victorious Moderates alike, he was regarded as responsible. Against trial and sentence he alike protested, developing his protest in a series of articles in the Nouveau Monde, a review published in Paris under his direction. These he afterwards collected and published as Pages de l'histoire de la révolution de 1848 (Brussels, 1850).
Exile
During his stay in Britain he made use of the unique collection of materials for the revolutionary period preserved at the British Museum to complete his Histoire de la Revolution Française 12 vols. In 1858 he published a reply to Lord Normanby's A Year of Revolution in Paris (1858), which he developed later into his Histoire de la révolution de 1848 (2 vols., 1870-1880).
As far back as 1839 Louis Blanc had vehemently opposed the idea of a Napoleonic restoration, predicting that it would be "despotism without glory," "the Empire without the Emperor." On February 8, 1871 he was elected a member of the National Assembly, in which he maintained that the republic was "the necessary form of national sovereignty," and voted for the continuation of the war;
His political legacy
Louis Blanc possessed a picturesque and vivid style, and considerable power of research; his most important works, besides those already mentioned, are Lettres sur l'Angleterre (1866-1867), Dix années de l'Histoire de l'Angleterre (1879-1881), and Questions d'aujourd'hui et de demain (1873-1884).
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