Louis Blanc
(1811-1882)

[Blanc visited Silvy's studio on 11 April 1865, but the resulting portrait, a copy of which appears in the Silvy daybooks (Volume 12, page 269, sitting number 16,225), is quite different to this one. Given that he is not wearing the same jacket, the two were probably not taken on the same occasion.]

Louis Blanc was a French socialist writer and politician.  In his Organisation du Travail (1839), an important event in the development of socialist thought, he proposed a scheme whereby industries should be financed by the state. They would be run on communal lines, profits being divided into wages, the support of the sick and the aged, and payment for capital equipment or interest to outside bodies. 

Blanc became prominent in the Revolution of 1848, which occurred at a time of industrial unemployment in Paris. He was made head of an industrial commission, but his proposal for national workshops organized on the lines described above degenerated into inadequate doles for the unemployed. Blanc went into exile in England (1849-1870) on the rise of Louis Napoleon (Napoleon III). He then returned in triumph to Paris and was elected deputy (February 1871). He opposed the Paris Commune.