Louis Auguste Blanqui

Louis Auguste Blanqui was a French revolutionary socialist who spent more than thirty years of his life in prison. He held that a small, disciplined group of conspirators should seize power and set up a temporary dictatorship on behalf of the people, a doctrine known as Blanquism. Arrested just before the Paris Commune of 1871, he was elected to its council in his absence, and his followers formed one of its main factions.