He was the younger brother of the French socialist politician and historian Louis Blanc. After the February Revolution of 1848, he was director of the Department for the Visual Arts at the Ministry of the Interior. As director of the École des Beaux-Arts he reinstituted a program of copying from casts after the antique and commissioned a series of copies of Old Masters for a projected "Musée des copies" that was objected to by the school's overseers, who cashiered Blanc.