Louis Blanc

Critiques and Caricatures

The Feuding Brothers (1850)

February 22, 2012 Shawn P. Wilbur
I ran across this one-act parody of French socialism in the January 5, 1850 issue of La Mode, a popular magazine, and was nearly finished with this (rough) translation before I realized that most of the dialogue was lifted straight from the debates between Proudhon, Blanc and Leroux. Indeed, most of the details may have come from a single source, a pamphlet, Actes de la Révolution: Résistance, which reprinted Proudhon’s essays “What is Government? What is God?” and “Resistance to the Revolution.” The second installment of the latter essay is, of course, the source of two partial translations, by William […]
Contr'un

Two Socialist Catechisms

March 28, 2011 Shawn P. Wilbur
[ezcol_2third] I’ve been reading around Proudhon quite a bit lately, trying to establish contexts as a step towards further clarifying his ideas. And I have been in search of 19th century English translations of the French socialists, as a step towards establishing the contexts for people like William B. Greene and William Henry Channing. There are large chunks of the writings of Charles Fourier, Victor Considerant, and a number of the important French socialist-feminists tucked away in the pages of American papers. The translations are often partial, and occasionally untrustworthy, but I’ve been setting aside time each week for searching, […]
Contr'un

Louis Blanc’s “Socialist’s Catechism”

February 28, 2011 Shawn P. Wilbur
[ezcol_2third] From The Spirit of the Age, another early translation from the French socialist movement, the “Socialist’s Catechism,” by Louis Blanc. Like the excerpts from Proudhon’s Confessions of a Revolutionist, this originally appeared in the London Weekly Tribune. This is unabashed state socialism, but it’s an important example of it, from one of the most active socialist spokespeople of the 1848 era. [/ezcol_2third] [ezcol_1third_end] [/ezcol_1third_end]