The Blanqui Reader

Praise

“Although his name is no longer mentioned, Blanqui’s particular brand of communism is the one that modern-day royalists still fear, that modern-day liberals still distance themselves from.”
—The Quietus

“Auguste Blanqui believed that a well-organized and secretive revolutionary elite could succeed in taking power in nineteenth-century France and bring about a regime of social justice. Yet it did not work out that way. Spending much of his life in prison, he had lots of time to reflect and to write. This volume presents the best of the political writing of Blanqui, accompanied by the editors’ introduction. We see why Blanqui’s determined optimism and faith in education and ordinary people anticipated subsequent revolutionaries, including Lenin and Gramsci. And why what Blanqui has to say may be particularly relevant in our time.”
—John Merriman, Charles Seymour Professor of History, Yale University, and author of Ballad of the Anarchist Bandits

“Blanqui was one of the most important of the revolutionary leaders who helped to shape French politics from the Bourbon Restoration to the Third Republic. He was famous as an organizer, a conspirator and a would-be maker of insurrections. He was also a prolific writer, many of whose texts are practically unknown. Philippe Le Goff and Peter Hallward have now made a good selection of them available in English—a service to all interested in this dramatic period of history, in this strange and unyielding individual, and in the wider history of revolutionary ideologies.”
—Robert Tombs, Professor of French History, St John’s College, Cambridge, and author of The English and Their History

“The editors Peter Hallward and Philippe Le Goff have done a great service for scholars and activists. The Blanqui Reader is an essential work in rescuing L’Enfermé from obscurity and rediscovering his relevance for today.”
—Doug Enaa Greene, Socialism and Democracy

“This valuable anthology of Blanqui’s writings … It contains a mass of Blanqui’s published and unpublished writings, many of them unavailable even in French.”
—Ian Birchall, London Socialist Historians Group