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Louis-Auguste Blanqui (1805-1881) was one of the most important and
controversial figures in nineteenth-century French revolutionary
politics, and he played a major role in all of the great upheavals
that punctuated his life - the insurrections of 1830, 1848 and
1870-71. Adamant that a just and egalitarian society can only be
established by revolutionary means, he recognised that no
revolution can succeed if it fails to overcome the coercive
resources of the state, and no revolutionary government can endure
if it betrays the principles that alone earn and deserve mass
support. At odds with followers of Proudhon on the one hand and of
Marx on the other, while Blanqui commanded unrivalled authority in
French revolutionary circles during parts of his own lifetime he
was quickly forgotten (if not derided) after his death. This is the
first collection of Blanqui's political writings ever published in
English, and it includes new and complete translations of his best
known texts: Instructions for an Armed Uprising, and Eternity by
the Stars. With material drawn from all his main publications and
speeches, as well as from the full sweep of his voluminous
manuscripts and correspondence, this wide-ranging anthology will
enable anglophone readers and political activists to arrive at
their own critical assessment of Blanqui's thought and legacy for
the first time.
In a century replete with radical politics, final liberations,
historical codas, and dreams of eternity, the shadowy figure of
Louis-Auguste Blanqui, the constant revolutionary, wrote Eternity
by the Stars in the last months of 1871 while incarcerated in Fort
du Taureau, a marine cell of the English Channel. In the midst of
contemplating his confinement, Blanqui devises a simple calculation
in which the infinity of time is confronted with the finite number
of possible events to suggest a most radical conclusion: every
chain of events is bound to repeat itself eternally in space and
time. Our lives are being lived an infinity of times across the
confines of the universe, and death, defeat, success and glory are
never final. For the world is nothing but the play of probabilities
on the great stage of time and space. By straddling the boundaries
of hyperrealism and hallucinatory thinking, Blanqui's hypothesis
offers a deep, tragic, and heartfelt reflection on the place of the
human in the universe, the value of action, and the aching that
lies at the heart of every modern soul. This first critical edition
of Blanqui's incantatory text in English features an extended
introduction by Frank Chouraqui. Exploring sources of Blanqui's
thinking in his intellectual context, Chouraqui traces the legacy
of the text in critiques of modernity devoting particular attention
to the figures of Nietzsche, Walter Benjamin, and Borges. It
features copious illuminating annotations that bring out the web of
connections which interlace the great marginal figure of Blanqui
with more than two millennia of European culture.
Louis Auguste Blanqui (1805 - 1881) was a French political
activist, notable for the revolutionary theory of Blanquism,
attributed to him.
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