Louis Blanc was one of the most prominent French publicists of the 30s of the XIX century. Being a nobleman by birth, Blanc won public recognition for his work, in which he expressed his views on the ideal structure of society and proposed ways to solve the problem of social inequality.
Louis Jean-Joseph Blanc: facts from a biography
The future historian, journalist, socialist and revolutionary was born in Madrid on October 29, 1811 in a French family. Two years after the birth of the child, his parents moved to France. In 1830, Blanc went to Paris. But before that, he managed to unlearn in college.
Subsequently, Blanc became a professional journalist. At first he published the magazine Bon Sens, then he founded the newspaper Revue du Progres. In these publications, Blanc developed his original economic ideas. Blanc's work was popular among the masses.
The Socialist Ideas of Louis Blanc
Blanc is also known as a writer. He outlined his thoughts on the structure of society in the book "Labor Organization". At the center of Blanc's socialism was the idea of creating public workshops. This is a kind of production cooperatives with equal pay for equal work and with elected leadership. However, Blanc subsequently rejected the principle of equal pay, replacing it with the principle of proportional equality.
Blanc defended mechanized production. He believed that competition in economic activity should be eliminated. Instead, the "principle of brotherhood" should be affirmed.
Another important idea of the French socialist was to provide funding for public workshops from the future democratic state.
Blanc ignored the fact that any bourgeois state is inherently an instrument of oppression of the working people. He naively believed that it was only necessary to carry out the simplest democratic transformations - and then conditions would immediately arise for the creation of an economic system arranged according to socialist principles.
The publicist was convinced that the production associations of workers would eventually supplant private enterprises, and that the social reforms introduced by the state would be approved by the bourgeoisie.
