SOURCE: “The Life and Historical Role of Blanqui,” in The Revolutionary Theories of Louis Auguste Blanqui, Columbia University Press, 1957, pp. 3-27.

In the following essay, Spitzer describes the life and evaluates the influence of the martyred anarchist and precursor of modern revolutionary socialism, Louis Auguste Blanqui.

The fact and idea of revolution have been crucial to French political history ever since 1789. Throughout the nineteenth century an articulate minority advocated the revolutionary solutions of political problems and actively fostered the resolution of ideological conflicts by physical violence. However, the great French theorists of fundamental social change, St. Simon, Fourier, Proudhon, Cabet, and their disciples, contributed a body of “socialist” ideology which repudiated the political revolutionism so eagerly espoused by the radical wing of the contemporary republican movement. The combination of revolutionism and socialist theory was a minority tendency among French radicals before 1870, and one to which few memorable figures...