by Louis-Auguste Blanqui (1849)

Read aloud at the Socialist Workers' Banquet on December 3, 1848, while Blanqui was imprisoned in the dungeon of Vincennes. One thousand workers and four hundred women listened as Blanqui's words were read by a fellow conspirator. The speech is a systematic demolition of the neo-Montagnard deputies who had betrayed the 1848 revolution — how they recalled the troops against the workers, led the National Guard against the barricades, voted draconian laws against public gatherings, and then stole the name "socialist" while covering themselves in the costume of 1793. Blanqui compares them to actors playing Robespierre in provincial theaters, wearing the right costumes but missing the meaning entirely. The speech ends with a declaration that would define the next century of revolutionary politics: "The Mountain is dead! To socialism, its sole heir!"

Translated by Mitchell Abidor for marxists.org. Source: Banquet des Travailleurs Socialistes, Chez Pages, Paris, 1849. Creative Commons (Attribute & ShareAlike).

Citizens, the Mountain had sublime inspirations, daughters of the gospels and philosophy. But it never possessed those positive theories that only grow slowly from a close analysis of the social body, just as the art of healing is born of the revelations of anatomy. Nevertheless, if it was lacking in the organizing force of science, the impulses of the heart sufficed to dictate to it the immortal slogan of the future: Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, and that admirable symbol, the Declaration of Rights, which broadly interpreted contains the seed of all that will come in the future society.

Unfortunately, it's the fate of the works of genius that have shaken the world to perish asphyxiated under the clouds of incense under which superstitious admirers drown them. The vivifying spirit of the master dies suffocated by the narrow observance of the text. The Law of Moses succumbed to the desperate embrace of the Pharisees. The Koran will be extinguished, turned into stone by the immobility of its imbecilic sectarians. And the Gospels themselves would have been sealed in their tomb by the idolatrous hands of its disciples — who had become its gravediggers — if their immortal ideas, escaping from the icy corpse around which they knelt, had not reappeared ever more shining in the new incarnation that will perpetuate them among humanity.

Like Jesus, the consoler of the poor, the enemy of the powerful, the Mountain loved those who suffer and hated those who caused suffering.

Citizens, the Mountain is dead! To socialism, its sole heir!

Colophon

To the Mountain of 1793! To the Pure Socialists, its True Heirs!, by Louis-Auguste Blanqui, December 1848. Read at the Socialist Workers' Banquet, December 3, 1848.

Note: This is an abridged archival edition preserving the opening, the key theological argument, and the closing declaration. The full text, including the detailed account of Ledru-Rollin's betrayals and the satirical treatment of the neo-Montagnards' costume-drama politics, is available at marxists.org.

Translated from French by Mitchell Abidor for the Marxists Internet Archive (marxists.org). Source: Banquet des Travailleurs Socialistes, Chez Pages, Paris, 1849. Creative Commons (Attribute & ShareAlike).

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

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