by Louis-Auguste Blanqui (1832)

On January 12, 1832, Louis-Auguste Blanqui (1805–1881) stood trial before a jury of property owners in Paris. He was twenty-six years old. He had been arrested for his role in organizing republican secret societies against the July Monarchy of Louis-Philippe — the regime that had hijacked the July Revolution of 1830, in which workers had fought and died on the barricades only to see their victory confiscated by the bourgeoisie.

Instead of defending himself, Blanqui attacked. He told the jury they were not judges but enemies. He laid out a systematic analysis of how the tax system, the grain laws, and the political monopoly of the propertied classes constituted a permanent war of the rich against the poor. He invoked the workers who had died in July and asked whether their sacrifices had been made merely "to change the face on the banknotes they so seldom see."

The speech is one of the founding documents of French revolutionary socialism. Blanqui would spend over thirty-three of his seventy-six years in prison — more than any other political prisoner in French history. His influence on the revolutionary tradition was immense: Marx called him the head and heart of the proletarian party in France.

Translated by Mitchell Abidor and Philippe Le Goff for marxists.org. Source: Auguste Blanqui, Textes Choisis, Editions Social, Paris, 1971. GNU Free Documentation License.

Members of the jury, I am accused of having told thirty million French people, proletarians like me, that they had the right to live. If that is a crime, then it seems to me at least that I should only respond to those who are not parties to the very question they are judging.

Indeed, gentlemen, be sure to note that the public prosecutor did not appeal to your sense of equity and your reason, but to your passions and your interests. He is not calling for severity in response to a breach of morals and the laws; he seeks only to unleash vengeance against what he presents to you as a threat to your existence and your property.

I am thus not standing before judges, but am in the presence of enemies. As a result, there would be no point in defending myself. I have resigned myself to every possible sentence you might pass upon me, while nevertheless vigorously protesting against this substitution of violence for justice by trusting in the future to restore force to right.

However, if it is my duty as a proletarian deprived of all the rights of the city, to reject the competence of a court where only the privileged, who are not my peers, can sit, I am convinced that your hearts are noble enough to honourably appreciate the role that honour imposes on you in a situation where disarmed adversaries are, in a sense, handed over to you to be sacrificed.

As for our role, it is written in advance; the role of accuser is the only one appropriate for the oppressed. For one could not imagine how men who have been invested with a momentary power through stealth and fraud can, at their will, drag patriots before their courts and force us to beg mercy for our patriotism by showing us the sword.

Do not think that we came here to justify the offences for which we are charged! Far from it. We are honoured by this accusation, and it is from this very criminal's bench, where we have the honour of sitting today, that we will launch our own accusations against the scoundrels who have ruined and dishonoured France, while waiting for the natural order of roles — for which the opposing benches of this courtroom are designed — to be restored, and for accusers and accused to take their rightful places.

What I want to say will explain why we wrote the lines for which we stand accused by the Crown, and why we will continue to write more still. The public prosecutor has, so to speak, conjured up in your minds a slave revolt in order to stir up your hatred through fear: "You see," he says, "this is the war of the poor against the rich; all those who have property have an interest in repelling the invasion. We bring your enemies before you. Strike them now, before they become any more fearsome!"

Yes, gentlemen, this is the war between rich and poor: the rich wanted it so, for they are the aggressors. But they find it wrong that the poor fight back; they would readily say, in speaking of the people: "This animal is so ferocious that it defends itself when attacked."

The prosecuting lawyer's entire philippic can be summed up in this one sentence.

Proletarians are constantly denounced as thieves prepared to launch themselves on property: why? Because they complain of being crushed by taxes that are for the benefit of the privileged few. As for the privileged few, who live off the backs of the proletariat, they are the legal owners who are threatened with pillaging from a greedy rabble.

This is not the first time that the executioners act as if they are the victims.

So who are these thieves worthy of such anathemas and torment? Thirty million French people who pay a billion and half to the tax department and about an equal amount to the privileged few. Meanwhile the owning class, whose power must be protected by the whole of society, comprise two or three hundred thousand idlers who calmly devour the billions paid to them by the "thieves."

It seems to me that it is here, in a new form and between different adversaries, that we discover the war of the feudal barons against the merchants they robbed on the highways.

Indeed, the present government has no base other than this iniquitous distribution of benefits and burdens. It was established in 1814 by the Restoration and by grace of the foreign powers with the aim of enriching an imperceptible minority from the nation's spoils. One hundred thousand bourgeois form what is called, by a bitter irony, its "democratic element." What, good God, will happen to the other elements?

Paul Courier has already immortalised the parliamentary stewpot; that suction and relief pump that treads upon the matter called the people in order to suck the billions out of them that are continuously paid into the coffers of a few idlers; this pitiless machine that grinds down twenty-five million peasants and five million workers one by one in order to extract their purest blood and transfuse it into the veins of the privileged few.

The strongest proof that this order of things has been established to serve only the exploitation of the poor by the rich, that no other foundation has been sought than an ignoble and brutal materialism, is that intelligence has been made abject. Indeed, this is a guarantee of morality, and the morality inadvertently introduced into such a system could only enter as an infallible element of destruction.

I ask, gentlemen, how men of heart and intelligence, rejected as pariahs by an insipid aristocracy of wealth, could not be profoundly affected by such a cruel affront? How could they remain indifferent to the shame of their country, to the suffering of the proletariat, their brothers in misfortune? Their duty is to call on the masses to smash the yoke of misery and ignominy. I have carried out this duty and, regardless of imprisonment, we will carry it out until the bitter end by defying our enemies.

When you have behind you a great mass of people marching towards the triumph of its well-being and freedom, you must know how to throw yourself into the ditch in order to act as a fascine and fill it in and build a road for them.

What do we mean by the republic, and only this: The proletarian remains on the outside. The Chambers, elected by the monopolisers of power, continue unperturbed, manufacturing tax, penal and administrative laws, all with the same aim of exploitation.

We call for the thirty million French people to choose the form of their government and elect through universal suffrage, the representatives whose mission will be that of making laws. Once this reform is accomplished, the taxes that strip the poor for the benefit of the rich will be promptly abolished and replaced by others established on the contrary basis. Instead of taking from the proletarian workers to give to the rich, taxes must seize the superfluity from the idlers to distribute it among this mass of destitute men, condemned to inactivity by the lack of money.

The spectre of '93 is a scarecrow meant for porters and domino players.

Gentlemen, is there not some imprudence in these insults cast at men who have tried their strength, and who find themselves in worse conditions than those that pushed them into battle? Is it wise to so teach the people so bitterly that it was the dupe of its own moderation in victory? Can you be sure that the proletarians' clemency will no longer be needed, that you can safely risk finding them merciless?

Magnanimous shades! Glorious workers, whose dying hand I grasped in a final farewell on the battlefield, whose dying faces I covered with rags, you died happy in the midst of a victory which should have redeemed your race. And yet, six months later, I found your children in the deepest dungeons, and each evening I fell asleep on my pallet to the sound of their moaning, to the imprecations of their torturers, and to the whistle of the whip that silenced their cries.

You confiscated the rifles of July. Yes, but the bullets have been fired. Every bullet of the Parisian workers is making its way around the world. They strike without cease, and they will continue to strike until not a single enemy of freedom and the happiness of the people is left standing.

Colophon

Defence Speech at the Trial of the Fifteen (Discours de defense au proces des Quinze), by Louis-Auguste Blanqui, delivered January 12, 1832, Paris.

Translated from French by Mitchell Abidor and Philippe Le Goff for the Marxists Internet Archive (marxists.org). Source: Auguste Blanqui, Textes Choisis, with foreword and notes by V.P. Volguine, Editions Social, Paris, 1971. Subject to GNU Free Documentation License.

This is an abridged archival edition — two passages marked [...] in the source translation have been omitted (sections on Carlist alliances and detailed political analysis of the July Monarchy). The full text is available at marxists.org.

Compiled and formatted for the Good Work Library by the New Tianmu Anglican Church, 2026.

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