Louis Blanc (1811–82) was a French historian and politician whose writings had a considerable influence on the development of French socialism. In his famous Organisation du travail (1839) he called for social reform by action of the State. As a member of the provisional government established after the 1848 Revolution, he campaigned for workers' rights, advocating the creation of cooperative workshops. His twelve-volume Histoire de la Révolution Française (1847–62), most of which he wrote while in exile in England, combines years of thorough research with Blanc's characteristic socialist and republican enthusiasm. Volume 1, first published in 1847, traces the intellectual origins of the French Revolution to the development of individualism, first in Protestantism, and then in the Enlightenment. It spans four centuries, from the origins of Protestantism with the Czech priest Jan Hus, to the reign of Louis XIV, to the political philosophies of Voltaire and Montesquieu.
