He then joined the Amis du Peuple ("Friends of the People") society, where he made acquaintances with Philippe Buonarroti, Raspail, and Armand Barbès.

Implicated in the armed outbreak of the Société des Saisons, of which he was a leading member, Blanqui was condemned to death on 14 January 1840, a sentence later commuted to life imprisonment.

The violence of the Société républicaine centrale, which was founded by Blanqui to demand a change of government, brought him into conflict with the more moderate Republicans, and in 1849 he was sentenced to ten years' imprisonment.

[4] In 1865, while serving a further term of imprisonment under the Empire, he escaped, and continued his propaganda campaign against the government from abroad, until the general amnesty of 1869 enabled him to return to France.

Blanqui's predilection for violence was illustrated in 1870 by two unsuccessful armed demonstrations: one on 12 January at the funeral of Victor Noir, the journalist shot by Pierre Bonaparte; the other on 14 August, when he led an attempt to seize some guns from a barracks.

On 17 March, Adolphe Thiers, aware of the threat represented by Blanqui, took advantage of his resting at a friend physician's place, in Bretenoux in Lot, and had him arrested.

Blanqui's uncompromising radicalism, and his determination to enforce it by violence, brought him into conflict with every French government during his lifetime, and as a consequence, he spent half of his life in prison.

Besides his innumerable contributions to journalism, he published a work entitled, L'Eternité par les astres (1872), where he espoused his views concerning eternal return.

[5] Blanqui's political activism and his book L'Eternité par les astres were commented on by Walter Benjamin in his Arcades Project and are referred to in the novel The Secret Knowledge by Andrew Crumey.