Louis Blanc (1811 - 1882)

Tue Oct 29, 1811

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Louis Blanc, born on this day in 1811, was a socialist French politician, historian, and advocate of worker co-operatives. A socialist who favored reforms, he called for the creation of cooperatives in order to guarantee employment for the urban poor. Although Blanc’s ideas of the workers’ cooperatives were never realized, his political and social ideas greatly contributed to the development of socialism in France.

Blanc was a government official in the French Second Republic and key in the formation of its National Workshops, which used land taxes to fund employment services for unemployed workers.

Blanc is sometimes credited as being the first person to use the word capitalism in its modern form, defining the term in 1851 as “the appropriation of capital by some to the exclusion of others”.