Workmen thought that the first duty of the Provisional Government was to give effect to this formula. On February 25 a small group of Parisian workmen came to the Hôtel de Ville to urge their claims, and the Government hastened to recognise them. The decree drawn up by Louis Blanc was as follows: “The Provisional Government of the French Republic undertakes to guarantee the existence of every worker by means of his labour. It further undertakes to give work to all its citizens.” The following day another decree announced the immediate establishment of national workshops with a view to putting the new principle into practice. All that was necessary to gain admission was to have one’s name inscribed in one of the Parisian municipal offices. Louis Blanc in his book of 1841 had demanded the establishment of “social” workshops. Public opinion, misled by the similarity of names, and encouraged to persist in its error by the enemies of socialism, thought that the national workshops were the creation of Louis Blanc. Nothing could be more incorrect. The “social” workshops, as we know, were to engage in co-operative production, whereas the national workshops were to provide employment for idlers. Similar institutions had been established during every crisis between 1790 and 1830, generally under the name of “charity works.” Moreover, it was Marie, the Minister of Public Works, and not Louis Blanc, who organised them. Far from providing work as the socialists had hoped, the Government soon realised that the workshops afforded an admirable opportunity for binding the workmen together into brigades which might act as a check upon the socialistic tendencies of the Luxembourg Commission, then presided over by Louis Blanc. The workshops were placed under the management of Émile Thomas, the engineer, who was an avowed opponent of the scheme. In his _Histoire des Ateliers nationaux_, written in 1849, he tells us how they were controlled by him in accordance with the wishes of the anti-socialist majority of the Provisional Government.[655]