Albert Laponneraye

Albert Laponneraye (8 May 1808 – 1 September 1849) was a French republican socialist and a journalist, popular historian, educator and editor of Robespierre's writings. He was a representative of the Neo-Babouvist tendency in the 1840s, along with Richard Lahautière, Jean-Jacques Pillot and others. He combined Jacobin republicanism with egalitarian communism and anti-clericalism. He was influenced by the doctrines of Philippe Buonarroti and Étienne Cabet. In the 1830s and 40s Laponneraye was one of the best known advocates of republican communism. He is viewed as a forerunner of Karl Marx.

Albert Dulin de la Ponneraye was born in Tours. His father was Albert Philippe Dulin de la Ponneraye, an aristocrat and legimimist officer who had emigrated from 1791 to 1801. His mother, Geneviève Delomais, was an unwed peasant girl. Albert was abandoned at the gates of the Tours orphanage by his parents. In 1816, after they had another child, a sister named Zoé, they retrieved eight-year-old Albert from the orphanage and acknowledged him as their son.

Nothing is known about Albert's education. In 1828, however, he moved to Paris and became a schoolteacher, precariously supporting himself, his mother and his sister after the death of his father. In sharp contrast to the Bourbon loyalties of his father, Albert Laponneraye, as he preferred to call himself, was by this time an ardent republican, an admirer of Maximilien Robespierre. Through the writings of Philippe Buonarroti, Laponneraye was introduced to the utopian Jacobin communism of François-Noël 'Gracchus' Babeuf and his 'Society of the Equals', who had tried to overthrow the Directory at the end of the French Revolution. In 1830, Laponneraye took an active part in the July Revolution, which overthrew the Restauration Bourbon king Charles X and replaced him with Louis Philippe, the duke of Orléans. Laponneraye and his republican associates were disappointed by this outcome and continued their revolutionary activities. Before long, Laponneraye was arrested; in 1831 he was imprisoned at Sainte-Pélagie, where his fellow inmates included François-Vincent Raspail and Armand Marrast (both late prominent republicans who participated in the Revolution of 1848).

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