Auguste Blanqui and the Politics of Popular Empowerment

Philippe Le Goff

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN:
  9781350076808
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9781350076822
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

Few individuals made such an impact on nineteenth-century French politics as Louis-Auguste Blanqui (1805-1881). Political organiser, leader, propagandist and prisoner, Blanqui was arguably the foremost proponent of popular power to emerge after the French Revolution. Practical engagement in all the major uprisings that spanned the course of his life – 1830, 1848, 1870-71 – was accompanied by theoretical reflections on a broad range of issues, from free will and fatalism to public education and individual development. Since his death, however, Blanqui has not been simply overlooked or neglected; his name has widely become synonymous with theoretical misconception and practical misadventure.

Auguste Blanqui and the Politics of Popular Empowerment offers a major re-evaluation of one the most controversial figures in the history of revolutionary politics. The book draws extensively on Blanqui's manuscripts and published works, as well as writings only recently translated into English for the first time. Through a detailed reconstruction and critical analysis of Blanqui's political thought, it challenges the prevailing image of an unthinking insurrectionist and rediscovers a forceful and compelling theory of collective political action and radical social change. It suggests that some of Blanqui's fundamental assumptions – from the insistence on the primacy of subjective determination to the rejection of historical necessity – are still relevant to politics today.

1

Intelligence

Revolutions must take place in the mind before they can be carried out in the streets.¹

Across his writings, Blanqui consistently affirms intelligence as the central source of emancipation and education as the decisive site of sociopolitical struggle. From his very first texts in the early 1830s he declares that education is ‘most holy and sacred’, for it ‘makes the man and the citizen’.² Around twenty years later he repeats that, since ‘man is an intelligence’,³ ‘education is a force, a power, the power that governs the world’.⁴ A further twenty years after that he is no less insistent that ‘the instrument that frees us is not our arm but our brain, and the brain lives only through education. An attack on this guardian mother of thought is an attack on the thinking being itself; it is a social crime’.⁵

Human thought and consciousness, for Blanqui, are ultimately determinant of sociopolitical arrangements. Enlightened instruction and the – politically decisive – intelligence and reason it alone confers are thus crucial components of his project. Blanqui’s voluntarism is, to be sure, conceived in the strictest terms as conscious volition. Political subjectivity presupposes intellectual consciousness. Individual enlightenment is the essential precondition of both collective voluntary action and collective political power. The implications this has for Blanqui’s wider enterprise, and for its reconsideration today, necessarily demands our attention and careful consideration.

In this first chapter, then, we must go right to the heart of Blanqui’s theory, establishing the foundational role of intelligence and the manner in which it underpins his conception of politics. Through reconstructing this core element of Blanqui’s thinking, a task that will require a certain amount of descriptive exposition and extensive quotation, my aim is to provide a basis from which to analyse in greater depth his project as a whole in subsequent chapters.

Revolution of the intellect

Blanqui’s dualism

Blanqui’s project is broadly underpinned by a dualism according to which nature and its governing laws are separate from human thought, activity and volition. ‘The word “law” only means something in the domain of nature’, he writes, in direct opposition to the ‘utopian’ socialism of Saint-Simon and Fourier and its conflation of natural and human laws. ‘Whoever speaks of “law” speaks of an invariable, immanent and fatal rule – something that is incompatible with intelligence and will.’ There is no such thing as political, social or economic laws, for in the human realm there is only ‘caprice and arbitrariness … phenomena that vary according to human whims and passions’.⁶ Unlike the natural or cosmological realm, the human realm is not defined by cumulative progress and perpetual evolution. Unlike the natural or cosmological realm, the human realm is contingent; it is open to movement and change, to chance and possibility, to reason and volition. So crucial is this dualism – it would underpin Eternity by the Stars, most notably – that elsewhere it finds expression in a characteristically economical aphorism:

The supposed inevitability of the economic laws that govern society. Pure impertinence. Nothing could be as arbitrary and irregular as the march of human things, which varies according to the whims of billions of caprices. Nothing could be more different from the immutable and inevitable order of natural things.⁷

Appeals to historical necessity, economic imperative or divine authority are thus rejected as a matter of course. Blanqui indeed opposes any philosophy that might ‘reduce man to a puppet whose strings are pulled by God’, to ‘a marionette manipulated in the wings’⁸ by a supposedly objective force, be it Providence or the market. That is not to say, however, that humans and human activity are strictly independent from and completely undetermined by the material world. Humanity is certainly constrained by impersonal natural forces but not absolutely. As Blanqui explains,

People are in no sense the same as plants, whose development is the exclusive work of matter’s blind and indifferent forces. To be sure, human beings also depend a great deal on these forces, but not exclusively. Part of what they do depends on personal action, by means of intelligence and will. To fail to make use of this part would be to fail the organism that they are by nature, and that pushes them – though by their own means – towards their progressive improvement.⁹

How, then, are we to understand the open and contingent realm of humankind, with its constituent battle of wills, interests and ideas, as distinct from the immutable realm of nature and natural laws? How can humans work towards their own ‘progressive improvement’ and development? How does this inform Blanqui’s conception of political action and social change?

Mankind is thought

‘Mankind is thought,’ Blanqui states; ‘without thought mankind is nothing.’¹⁰ Humans and animals, to be sure, share the physical capacity and manual dexterity to build and craft. Blanqui notes how the masterly skill, geometric precision and exacting calculations of birds’ nests, bees’ honeycomb and spiders’ webs emulate if not surpass humans’ ability to manipulate material. Hence, what define humanity first and foremost are its cerebral, not manual, capacities. Thought and ideas alone are what make mankind.¹¹

At a social level Blanqui takes this assumption to its logical conclusion. ‘It is philosophy that governs the world,’ he writes. ‘All other sciences only affect how a society is run by modifying or reforming its philosophy.’ Since ‘every society that has existed on earth has been governed by a philosophy’, it follows that ‘it is the difference in philosophies that determines the difference in social organisations’.¹² In direct contrast to the basic tenets of Marxism, which maintains that ‘neither legal relations nor political forms could be comprehended whether by themselves or on the basis of a so-called general development of the human mind, but that on the contrary they originate in the material conditions of life’,¹³ Blanqui believes that the ‘life of a people is not in the works of its hands, but in what it thinks. Material life is nothing but a reflection of this thinking’.¹⁴ Here lies the foundational gesture of Blanqui’s project, the implications of which are felt across all his actions and writings. Let us therefore reflect on this point a little further before moving on.

Comparison with Marx is indeed particularly instructive here.¹⁵ Consider the well-known passages from the ‘Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy’ (1859), which outline the fundamental assumptions behind the historical materialist view of history:

In the social production of their existence, men inevitably enter into definite relations, which are independent of their will, namely relations of production appropriate to a given stage in the development of their material forces of production. The totality of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation, on which arises a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness. The mode of production of material life conditions the general process of social, political and intellectual life. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness.¹⁶

It is this last sentence above all that establishes a clear divide between Marx’s materialism and Blanqui’s idealism. Where for Marx ‘the anatomy of civil society has to be sought in political economy’,¹⁷ for Blanqui it is ‘ideas alone that make man what he is’,¹⁸ both individually and collectively. Ideas and consciousness condition material life, not vice versa. Ideas and consciousness, Blanqui argues, determine political institutions, economic relations and the overall social existence of humankind. It follows that sociopolitical change occurs through philosophical change, for ‘the political manifestation of a people will always be the reflection of the ideas it has been showered with’,¹⁹ and ‘since 1789 the idea alone has been proletarians’ strength and salvation’.²⁰

With these claims, we already begin to uncover some of the fundamental limitations of Blanqui’s thinking. Insofar as humanity and society are defined principally by their cognitive capacities and collective consciousness, the failure therein to understand and explain the productive forces and social relations that underpin the established order will prevent Blanqui from fully comprehending the objective realities that, while not ultimately determinant, certainly shape the circumstances and processes of political action and social transformation. It will leave Blanqui unable to explain historical change outside the realm of ideas, unable to formulate a militant political project that is properly grounded in the specific, material conditions of its exercise.

‘Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please,’ Marx once famously wrote; ‘they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances existing already.’²¹ Although, as we shall see in the following...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-title Page
• Also Available at Bloomsbury
• Title Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1 Intelligence
• 2 Conflict
• 3 Actors
• 4 Volition
• 5 History
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Copyright Page