The lifetime of Auguste Blanqui (1805–81) coincides with the rise and fall of the secret society as an effective harbinger of socialism. Auguste Blanqui was the son of a low rank imperial official; his first recorded political involvement was in 1827 when he was wounded on the barricades; he subsequently spent more than 30 years of his life in various prisons. ‘Blanquism’ represented the point of merger between revolutionary Jacobinism and the rising working-class movement. Blanqui served his political apprenticeship under the Restoration and the Orleanist monarchy. His most formative political influence was that of Buonarotti, the veteran of Babeuf’s Conspiracy of Equals in 1795. Blanqui’s disciples were the closest allies of Marx in the First International after the Commune, and became instrumental in the introduction of Marxism in France.

Fundamentally, Blanqui’s outlook was that of an 18th century materialist. As Piatnitsky notes in his initial chapter of Armed Insurrection,footnote1 what separates Blanquist Communism from Marxism is its absence of a dialectic. This absence of dialectic was crucial in shaping Blanqui’s attitude towards the proletariat and hence towards the tactics of an uprising. Blanqui conceived the bourgeois state as ‘a gendarmerie of the rich against the poor’; its power rested upon the twin pillars of the military and the ‘black army’ (priests). While the former could suppress revolt by virtue of its superior mode of organization, the latter sustained reaction and passivity by the systematic inculcation of superstition and unreason. Thus while Blanqui took over from the Babouvistes the conception of history as class struggle, it was evident that from this pre-dialectical rationalist standpoint, insurrectionary initiative could not in the first instance come from the masses themselves. In Blanqui’s view, the working class was deprived of education, overworked by the employing class and finally perverted and blinded by the domination of superstition. Insurrection, therefore, was perforce an art only effectively practised by the revolutionary minority of the enlightened.