The History of Ten Years, 1830–1840

Blanc argues that the July Monarchy was a regime in which the bourgeoisie replaced the feudal aristocracy as the dominant exploiting class, and that the political conflicts of 1830–1840 were fundamentally expressions of class struggle between the possessing bourgeoisie and the working people. His history is designed not merely to narrate events but to expose the social antagonisms beneath political surface, preaching socialist doctrine while assailing Louis Philippe's government.

The introductory portion, spanning roughly 250 pages, traces French affairs from Napoleon's downfall to 1830 as a series of class-based reflections rather than neutral history. Blanc's account of the 1830 Revolution and its aftermath consistently frames political actors by their economic interests. The book was designed, in the words of a contemporary reviewer, 'to preach socialistic doctrines and assail the government of Louis Philippe,' making it 'a political pamphlet rather than a history.'

Engels assessed Histoire de dix ans very highly, and Plekhanov noted that its introduction alone was enough to give Blanc a place among the first teachers of economic materialism. However, Plekhanov also drew a sharp distinction between Blanc's conception of class struggle and Marx's, arguing that Blanc, like Guizot, could not explain where property relations themselves came from, and thus reverted to idealism despite his attention to economics.

The original French title was Révolution française: histoire de dix ans, first published in Paris in five volumes from 1841 to 1844. It was later reissued under the simpler title Histoire de dix ans, 1830–1840. The first English translation appeared in London in 1844–1845 under Chapman and Hall, and an American edition was published in Philadelphia in 1848 by Lea & Blanchard.

Blanc was a member of the provisional government after the February 1848 Revolution and chaired the Luxembourg Commission on labor. His history of the preceding decade was written from the perspective of a leading participant who had been preparing the ground for that revolution. Contemporary readers turned to it not as detached scholarship but as the account of a revolutionary who had helped shape the events he described, and its influence was explicitly political.