Albert Laponneraye (8 May 1808 – 1 September 1849) was a French republican socialist and journalist, popular historian, educator and an editor of Robespierre's writings.

His father was Albert Philippe Dulin de la Ponneraye, an aristocrat and legitimist officer who had emigrated from 1791 to 1801.

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.

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.

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).

He was convicted of exciting class hatred and sentenced to a year in prison and a fine of 1000 francs (a substantial sum in 1832).

He not only resumed teaching courses on French history and the revolutionary movement to workers, but assembled a crew of like-minded teachers to disseminate his message even more widely.

Laponneraye and his colleagues organised themselves in the 'Society of Young France', which was affiliated with other notable republican associations, such as the 'Society of the Rights of Man' and the 'Society of the Friends of the People'.

His editorial work made Robspierre's writings available to the French public for the first time; up to now, his ideas had only been known from hostile reports.

While in prison, Laponneraye also wrote a Cours d'Histoire and a Commentary on the Rights of Man, of which 200,000 copies were published and distributed.

In addition to his journalism, he wrote copiously on historical topics, mostly on the history of the French Revolution and the revolutionary movement since then.

Laponneraye's historical writings were not intended as exercises in scholarship but as efforts in popular education and republican propaganda.

Laponneraye's passionate declarations of hatred for tyranny and his history as a prisoner of conscience also attracted the attentions of the republican conspirators Louis Auguste Blanqui and Armand Barbès.

They had prepared a list of people they hoped to co-opt to a revolutionary Provisional Government, and Laponneraye's name was on it.

In 1841 he launched a new journal, Le Club, presented as a 'journal of political and philosophical discussion' and advocating the widest application of the 'democratic principle'.

In 1847, Laponneraye published the journal Revue Politique et Commerciale de la Méditerranée; the title suggests that he may have been trying for a broader, more middle-class audience.

He was suffering from a heart condition and was ill-equipped to withstand the cholera epidemic that broke out in the Basse-Durance region in the fall of 1849.