Louis Auguste Blanqui

Blanquism is the revolutionary strategy holding that a small, disciplined secret society of professional revolutionaries should seize power through armed insurrection, establish a revolutionary dictatorship, and then transition to communist society through mass education. For Blanqui, the engine of revolution was not economic necessity but political will. He rejected historical determinism outright, insisting that 'revolutions must take place in the mind before they can be carried out in the streets.' Since he believed the proletariat was kept in ignorance by the ruling class, spontaneous self-emancipation was impossible; hence the central paradox of Blanquism: an enlightened minority vanguard must first take power in order to enlighten the masses.

After seizing power, Blanqui envisioned a transitional 'Parisian dictatorship' that would disarm the bourgeoisie, arm the proletariat, and implement a nationwide programme of public education. For him, social conflict was 'a war to the death between the classes that compose the nation,' and neutrality or compromise was the greatest political failing. Marx hailed Blanqui in 1848 as 'the true leader of the French proletariat,' but Engels later distanced Marxism from Blanquism, calling Blanqui a 'man of action' without socialist theory. Rosa Luxemburg charged that Lenin's vanguard-party concept was essentially Blanquist in character, while Lenin himself rebutted the charge in The State and Revolution, insisting 'We are not Blanquists.' Nevertheless, Blanquism left a deep imprint on the Bolshevik theory of the professional-revolutionary vanguard party and the strategy of armed insurrection.

On 17 March 1871, Blanqui was arrested for his role in the previous October uprising and imprisoned at the Château de Taureau in Brittany. The very next day, 18 March, the Paris Commune was proclaimed, and he was elected in absentia to its council. Blanqui's followers, the Blanquists, were widely regarded as the Commune's most disciplined fighting force. Roughly one thousand strong, they were organised into independent cells of ten, and many of Blanqui's disciples filled the Commune's key military and security posts: Émile Eudes served as War Delegate, Raoul Rigault as head of police, and Théophile Ferré as public prosecutor.

The Commune repeatedly offered to exchange all of its hostages, including the Archbishop of Paris, Georges Darboy, and some seventy others, for Blanqui alone. The Versailles government of Adolphe Thiers, well aware that freeing Blanqui would hand the Commune its one genuine leader, refused every time. Archbishop Darboy was executed during the Semaine sanglante ('Bloody Week'), while Blanqui remained imprisoned throughout the Commune's entire lifespan, ignorant of the massacres unfolding in Paris. He would not be released until the general amnesty of 1879, eight years after the Commune's suppression. Dubbed the 'great absentee' of the Commune, the irony of his arrest on its very eve, and Versailles's refusal to trade one man for the Archbishop's life, remains one of the most dramatic episodes in 19th-century revolutionary history.