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THE BIRTH OF MODERN SOCIALISM 129
thority, launched in the hope that, if the working class
should once install itself in power, it would reorganize
society on socialist lines. He was a man of the street,
who had only to appear to find an army of thousands
ready to follow him. Blanqui used to say — according
to Kropotkin — that there were in Paris fifty thousand
men ready at any moment for an insurrection. Again
and again he arose like an apparition among them, and on
one occasion, at the head of two hundred thousand people,
he offered the dictatorship of France to Louis Blanc.
The latter was an altogether different person. His stage
was the parliamentary one. He was a powerful orator,
who, throughout the forties, was preaching his practical
program of social reform — the right to work, the organization
of labor, and the final extinction of capitalism by
the growth of cooperative production fostered by the
State. In 1848 he played a great role, and all Europe
listened with astonishment to the revolutionary proposals
of this man who, for a few months, occupied the most
powerful position in France. At the same time Proudhon
was developing the principles of anarchism and
earning everlasting fame as the father of that philosophy.
In truth, the whole gamut of socialist ideas and
the entire range of socialist methods had been agitated
and debated in peace and in war for half a century in
France.
In England the same questions had disturbed all classes
for nearly fifty years. There had been no great revolutionary
period, but from the beginning of the nineteenth
century to the extinction of Chartism in 1848 every doctrine
of trade unionism, syndicalism, anarchism, and socialism
had been debated passionately by groups of
workingmen and their friends. The principles and
methods of trade unionism were being worked out on the