Part 5 — Chapter 41 P. J. Proudhon—Publication of the ‘Voix du Peuple’—Correspondence—The Significance of Proudhon

After the June barricades had fallen the printing-presses fell too. The panic-stricken journalists held their peace. Only old Lamennais rose up like the gloomy shadow of a judge, cursed Cavaignac—the Duc d’Alba of the June days—and his companions, and gloomily told the people: ‘And you be silent: you are too poor to have the right to speak!’

When the first alarm at this state of siege was over and the newspapers began coming to life again, they found themselves confronted, not with violence, but with a perfect arsenal of legal quibbles and judicial traps. The old baiting, par force, of editors, the process in which the ministers of Louis-Philippe so distinguished themselves, began again. Its method was to exhaust the guaranteed fund by a series of lawsuits invariably ending in prison and a money fine. The fine is paid out of the fund; until that is made up again, the paper cannot be published; as soon as it is made good, there is a new lawsuit. This game is always successful, for the legal authorities are always hand in glove with the government in all political prosecutions.

At first Ledru-Rollin, and afterwards Colonel Frappoli⁠[76] as the representative of Mazzini’s party, contributed large sums of money, but could not save La Réforme. All the more outspoken organs of socialism and republicanism were destroyed by this method. Among these, and at the very beginning, was Proudhon’s Le Représentant du Peuple, and later on Le Peuple. Before one prosecution was over, another began.

One of the editors—it was Duchesne, I remember—was three times brought out of prison into the law-courts on fresh charges; and every time was again sentenced to prison and a fine. When on the last occasion before the ruin of the paper the verdict was declared, he said to the prosecutor: ‘L’addition, s’il vous plaît!’ As a matter of fact, it amounted to ten years of prison and fifty thousand francs fine.

Proudhon was on his trial when his newspaper was suppressed on the 13th of June. The National Guards burst into his printing-office on that day, broke the printing-press, dispersed the type, as though to assert, in the name of the armed bourgeois, that the period of the utmost violence and police tyranny had come in France.

The irrepressible gladiator, the stubborn Besançon peasant, would not lay down his arms, but at once contrived to publish a new journal, La Voix du Peuple. It was necessary to obtain twenty-four thousand francs for the guarantee fund. E. Girardin would have been ready to give it, but Proudhon did not want to be dependent on him, and Sazonov suggested that I should contribute the money. I owed a great deal to Proudhon in my intellectual development, and, after a little consideration, I consented, though I knew that the fund would soon be gone.

Reading Proudhon, like reading Hegel, cultivates a special faculty, sharpens the weapon, and furnishes not results but methods. Proudhon is pre-eminently the dialectician, the controversialist of social questions. The French seek experimental solutions in him, and, finding no plans of the phalanstery nor of the Icarian community, shrug their shoulders and lay the book aside.

It is Proudhon’s own fault, of course, for having put as the motto on his Contradictions: ‘Destruo et ædificabo’; his strength lay not in construction but in criticism of the existing state of things. But this mistake has been made from time immemorial by all who have broken down what was old. Man dislikes mere destruction: when he sets to work to break things down, he is unconsciously haunted by some ideal of future construction, though sometimes this is like the song of a mason as he pulls down a wall.

In the greater number of sociological works the ideals advocated, which almost always are either unattainable at present or lead to some one-sided solution, are of little consequence; what is of importance is that, in working up to them, the problem is stated. Socialism has to deal not only with the solutions of the old empirically religious tradition, but also with the conclusions of one-sided science; not only with the juridical deductions resting on traditional legislation, but also with the deductions of political economy. It is confronted with the rational system of the epoch of guarantees and of the bourgeois economic regime, as its immediate predecessor, just as political economy is related to the theoretically feudal state.

It is in this denial, this destruction of the old social tradition, that the great power of Proudhon lies; he is as much the poet of dialectics as Hegel is, with the difference that the one rests on the calm heights of the philosophic movement, while the other is thrust into the turmoil of popular passions and the hand-to-hand struggle of parties.

Proudhon is the first of a new set of French thinkers. His works mark a transition period, not only in the history of socialism but also in the history of French logic. He has more strength and freedom in his argumentative tenacity than the most talented of his fellow-countrymen. Intelligent and single-minded men like Pierre Leroux⁠[77] and Considérant⁠[78] do not grasp either his point of departure or his method. They are accustomed to play with ideas as with marked cards, to walk in a certain attire along the beaten track to familiar spots. Proudhon often presses on without hesitating to crush anything on the way, without fearing to destroy or to go too far.

He has none of that sensitiveness, that rhetorical revolutionary chastity, which takes the place of Protestant pietism in the French ... that is why he remains a solitary figure among his own people, rather alarming than convincing them.

People say that Proudhon has a German mind. That is not true; on the contrary, his mind is absolutely French: he has that racial Gallo-Frankish genius which appears in Rabelais, in Montaigne, in Voltaire, and in Diderot ... even in Pascal. It is only that he has assimilated Hegel’s dialectical method, as he has assimilated all the methods of Catholic controversy. But neither the Hegelian philosophy nor the Catholic theology furnished the content nor the character of his writings; for him these were only weapons with which he tested his subject, and these weapons he mastered and adapted to his own purposes just as he adapted the French language to his powerful and vigorous thought. Such men stand much too firmly on their own feet to be dominated by anything or to allow themselves to be caught in any net.

‘I like your system very much,’ an English tourist said to Proudhon.

‘But I have no system,’ Proudhon answered with annoyance, and he was right.

It is just that that puzzles his fellow-countrymen, accustomed to a moral at the end of the fable, to systematic formulas, to classification, to abstract binding precepts.

Proudhon sits by a sick man’s bedside and tells him that he is in a very bad way for this reason and for that reason. You do not help a dying man by constructing an ideal theory of how he might be perfectly well if he were not ill, or by suggesting remedies, excellent in themselves, which he cannot take or which are not to be had.

The external signs and manifestations of the financial world serve him, just as the teeth of animals served Cuvier as a ladder by which he descends into the mysteries of social life; by means of them he studies the forces that are dragging the sick body on to decomposition. If after every such observation he proclaims a new victory for death, is that his fault? In this case there are no relatives whom one is afraid to alarm: we are ourselves dying this death. The crowd shouts with indignation: ‘Remedies! Remedies! Or don’t speak of the disease!’ But why not speak of it? It is only under despotic governments that we are forbidden to speak of crops failing, of epidemic diseases, of the numbers slain in war. The remedy, it seems, is not easily to be found; they have made plenty of experiments on France since the days of the copious blood-letting of 1793; they have tried victories and violent exercise with her. Setting her marching to Egypt and to Russia, they have tried parliamentarianism and agiotage, a little republic and a little Napoleon—and has anything done any good? Proudhon himself once tested his pathology and came to grief over the People’s Bank—though in itself his idea was good. Unluckily, he did not believe in magical formulas, or else he would have been singing out to everybody: ‘League of Nations! League of Nations! Universal Republic! Brotherhood of all the World! Grande Armée de la Démocratie!’ He did not use these phrases, he did not spare the Old Believers of the revolution, and for that reason the French look upon him as an egoist, as an individualist, almost as a renegade and a traitor.

I remember Proudhon’s works, from his reflections On Property to his Financial Guidance; many of his ideas have changed—a man could hardly live through a period like ours and whistle the same duet in A minor like Platon Mihailovitch in Woe from Wit. What is so startling in the midst of these changes is the inner unity that holds them all together, from the essays written as a school task in the Besançon Academy to the carmen horrendum of Stock Exchange depravity, which has lately appeared; the same order of thought developing, changing in form, reflecting events, runs through the Contradictions of Political Economy, and through his Confessions, and through his Journal.

Inertia of thought is characteristic of religion and doctrinarianism; they presuppose a persistent narrowness, a finished limitedness, living apart or in its own narrow circle, rejecting everything new that life offers ... or at any rate not troubling about it. The real truth must be found under the influence of events, must reflect them, while remaining true to itself, or it would not be the living truth, but an eternal truth, at rest from the agitations of this world in the deadly stillness of holy stagnation.⁠[79] Where, and in what case, I have sometimes asked, was Proudhon false to the fundamental principles of his philosophy? I have always been answered that he was so in his political mistakes, his blunders in revolutionary diplomacy. For his political mistakes he was, of course, responsible as a journalist; but even in that case he was not false to himself: on the contrary, some of his mistakes were due to his believing more in his principles than in the party to which he, against his own will, belonged, with which he had nothing in common, and with which he was only associated by hatred for a common foe.

It was not in political activity that his real strength lay; it was not there that he found the basis of the thought which he clad in all the armour of his arguments. On the contrary, it is everywhere clearly evident that politics in the sense of the old liberalism and constitutional republicanism were, in his eyes, of secondary importance, as something half over, passing. He was not greatly concerned over political questions, and was ready to make compromises because he did not attach special significance to the forms, which in his view were not essential. All who have abandoned the Christian point of view take up a similar attitude to religious questions. I may recognise that the constitutional religion of Protestantism is somewhat freer than the autocracy of Catholicism, but I cannot take to heart any questions in regard to church and denomination; probably I should make mistakes, and concessions in consequence, which the most ordinary graduate in divinity or parish priest would avoid.

Doubtless, there was no place for Proudhon in the National Assembly as it was constituted, and his individuality was lost in that den of petty-bourgeois. In the Confessions of a Revolutionary Proudhon tells us that he was completely at a loss in the Assembly. And indeed, what could be done there by a man who said of Marrast’s constitution, that sour fruit of seven months’ work of seven hundred heads: ‘I give my vote against your constitution, not only because it’s bad, but because it’s a constitution.’

The parliamentary dregs greeted one of his speeches: ‘The speech to the Moniteur, the orator to the madhouse!’ I do not think that in the memory of man there had ever been such parliamentary scenes from the days when the Archbishop of Alexandria brought to the Œcumenical Councils monks armed with clubs in the name of the Virgin, up to the days of the Washington senators who proved the benefits of slavery on each other with sticks.

But even there Proudhon succeeded in rising to his full height, and in the midst of the wrangling displayed a brilliance that will not be forgotten.

Thiers in rejecting Proudhon’s financial scheme made some insinuations as to the moral depravity of the men who advocated such theories. Proudhon mounted the tribune, and with his stooping figure and his menacing air of a sturdy field-worker said to the smiling old creature: ‘Speak of finance, but do not speak of morality: I may take that as personal, I have told you so in committee. If you will persist, I—I will not challenge you to a duel’ (Thiers smiled); ‘no, your death is not enough for me—that would prove nothing. I challenge you to another sort of contest. Here from this tribune I will tell the whole story of my life, fact by fact—any one can pull me up if I forget or omit anything; and then let my opponent tell the story of his!’ The eyes of all were turned upon Thiers; he sat scowling, with no trace of a smile on his face, and made no answer either.

A hostile Chamber sank into silence while Proudhon, looking contemptuously at the champions of religion and the family, came down from the platform. That was where his strength lay. In his words one hears clearly the language of the new world with its new standards and its new penalties.

From the revolution of February Proudhon foretold what France had come to; to a thousand different tunes he kept repeating, ‘Beware, do not trifle; “this is not Catiline at your gates, but death.”’ The French shrugged their shoulders. The skull, the scythe, the hour-glass—all the trappings of death—were not to be seen. How could it be death?—it ‘was a momentary defeat, the after-dinner nap of a great people!’ At last many people discerned that things were in a bad way. Proudhon was less downcast than others, less panic-stricken, because he had foreseen it; then he was accused of callousness and even of having invited disaster. They say the Chinese Emperor pulls the Court star-gazer’s hair every year when the latter announces that the days are beginning to draw in.

The genius of Proudhon is really antipathetic to the rhetorical French, his language is offensive to them. The revolution developed its own special puritanism, narrow and intolerant, its own obligatory jargon; and patriots resent everything not written in the official form, just as the Russian judges do. Their criticism stops short at their symbolic books, such as the Contrat Social and Declaration of the Rights of Man. Men of faith, they hate analysis and doubt; conspirators, they do everything in common and turn everything into a party question. An independent mind is hateful to them as a disturber of discipline, they dislike original ideas even in the past. Louis Blanc is almost vexed with the eccentric genius of Montaigne.⁠[80] It is upon this Gallic feeling, which seeks to subject individuality to the herd, that their partiality for equalising, for the dead level of military discipline, for centralisation—that is, for despotism—is based.

The blasphemy of the French, their sweeping judgments, are more due to mischief, caprice, the pleasure of mockery, than the craving for analysis, than the scepticism that frets the soul. The Frenchman has an endless number of little prejudices, minute religions, and these he will defend with the persistence of a Don Quixote, the pertinacity of a raskolnik. That is why they cannot forgive Montaigne or Proudhon for their free-thinking and lack of reverence for generally accepted idols. Like the Petersburg censorship, they permit a jest at a titular councillor, but you must not touch a privy councillor. In 1850 E. Girardin printed in the Presse a bold and new idea, that the principles of law are not eternal but go on evolving in different forms with the development of history. What an uproar this article excited! The campaign of abuse, of cries of horror, of charges of immorality begun by the Gazette of France was kept up for months.

To assist in restoring such an organ as the Peuple was worth a sacrifice; I wrote to Sazonov and Hoetsky that I was ready to supply the guarantee fund.

Until then I had not seen much of Proudhon; I had met him twice at the lodgings of Bakunin, with whom he was very intimate. Bakunin was living at that time with A. Reihel in an extremely modest lodging at the other side of the Seine in the Rue de Bourgogne. Proudhon often went there to listen to Reihel’s Beethoven and Bakunin’s Hegel—the philosophical discussions lasted longer than the symphonies. They reminded me of the famous all-night arguments of Bakunin with Homyakov at Tchaadayev’s and at Madame Yelagin’s, also over Hegel. In 1847, Karl Vogt, who also lived in the Rue de Bourgogne, and often visited Reihel and Bakunin, was bored one evening with listening to the endless discussions on phenomenology, and went home to bed. Next morning he went round for Reihel, as they were to go to the Jardin des Plantes together; he was surprised to hear conversation in Bakunin’s study at that early hour. He opened the door—Proudhon and Bakunin were sitting in the same places before the burnt-out embers in the fireplace, finishing their brief summing-up of the argument begun overnight.

At first, afraid of the humble rôle of our fellow-countrymen, of being patronised by great men, I did not try to become more intimate even with Proudhon himself, and I believe I was not altogether wrong there. Proudhon’s letter in answer to mine was courteous, but cold and somewhat reserved.

I wanted to show him from the very first that he was not dealing with a mad prince russe who was giving the money from revolutionary dilettantism, and still more from ostentation, nor with an orthodox admirer of French journalists, deeply grateful for their accepting twenty-four thousand francs from him, nor with a dull-witted bailleur de fonds who imagines that providing the guarantee funds for such a paper as the Voix du Peuple is a serious business investment. I wanted to show him that I knew very well what I was doing, that I had my own definite aim in it, and so wanted to have a definite influence on the paper. While I accepted unconditionally all that he wrote about money, I demanded in the first place the right to insert articles, my own and other people’s; secondly, the right to superintend all the foreign part, to recommend editors, correspondents, and so on for it, and to insist on payment for the latter for articles inserted. This last may seem strange, but I can confidently assert that the National and the Réforme would open their eyes with astonishment if any foreigner ventured to ask to be paid for an article. They would take it for impudence or madness, as though for a foreigner to see himself in print in a Parisian paper were not

Proudhon agreed to my conditions, but still they made him wince. This is what he wrote to me in Geneva on the 29th of August 1849: ‘And so the thing is settled: under my general direction you have a share in the editorship of the paper; your articles must be accepted with no restriction, except that to which the editors are bound by respect for their own opinions and fear of legal responsibility. Agreed in ideas, we can only differ in deductions; as regards the criticism of foreign events, we leave that entirely to you. You and we are missionaries of one idea. You will see our line in general discussion, and you will have to support it: I am sure I shall never have to correct your views; I should regard that as the greatest calamity. I tell you frankly, the whole success of the paper depends on our agreement. The democratic and social question must be raised to the level of an undertaking by a European League. To presuppose that we shall not agree means to assume that we have not the essential conditions for publishing the paper, and that we had better be silent.’

To this severe missive I replied by the despatch of twenty-four thousand francs and a long letter, quite friendly, but firm. I told him how completely I agreed with him theoretically, adding that, like a true Scythian, I saw with joy that the old world was falling into ruins, and believed that it was our mission to announce to it its speedy end. ‘Your fellow-countrymen are far from sharing these ideas. I know one free Frenchman—that is you. Your revolutionists are conservatives. They are Christians without recognising it, and monarchists fighting for a republic. You alone have raised the question of negation and revolution to a scientific level, and you have been the first to tell France that there is no salvation for the edifice that is crumbling from within, and that there is nothing worth saving from it; that its very conceptions of freedom and revolution are saturated with conservatism and reaction. As a matter of fact, the political republicans are but one of the variations on the constitutional tune of which Guizot, Odilon Barrot, and the rest play their several versions. This is the view that should be followed in the analysis of the latest European events, in attacking reaction, Catholicism, monarchism, not in the ranks of our enemies—that is extremely easy—but in our own camp. We must unmask the mutual guarantees existing between the democrats and the powers that be. Since we are not afraid to attack the victors, let us not from false sentimentality be afraid to attack the vanquished also.

‘I am thoroughly convinced that if the inquisition of the republic does not kill our newspaper, it will be the best newspaper in Europe.’

I think that even now. But how Proudhon and I could imagine that Napoleon’s government—they never stood on ceremony—would put up with a paper like that, it is difficult to explain.

Proudhon was pleased with my letter, and wrote to me on the 15th of December from the Conciergerie: ‘I am very glad to have been associated with you in the same work. I, too, wrote something in the nature of a philosophy⁠[81] under the title of the Confessions of a Revolutionary. You will not perhaps find in it the verve barbare to which you have been trained by German philosophy. Do not forget that I am writing for the French, who, for all their revolutionary ardour, are, it must be confessed, far inferior to their rôle. However limited my view may be, it is a hundred thousand times higher than the loftiest heights of our journalistic, academic, and literary world. I have enough in me to be a giant among them for another ten years.

‘I completely share your opinion of the so-called republicans; of course, they are only one species of the genus doctrinaires. As regards these questions there is no need to convince each other; you will find in me and my colleagues men who go hand in hand with you....

‘I too think a peaceful methodical advance by imperceptible transitions, as the political economists and philosophical historians would have it, is no longer possible for the revolution; we must make terrible leaps. But as journalists foreseeing the coming catastrophe, it is not for us to present it as something inevitable and just, or we shall be hated and kicked out; and we have got to live....’

The paper was a wonderful success. Proudhon from his prison cell conducted his orchestra in masterly fashion. His articles were full of originality, fire, and that irritability which prison inflames.

‘What are you, M. le Président?’ he writes in one article, speaking of Napoleon; ‘tell me—man, woman, hemaphrodite, beast, or fish?’ And we still imagined that such a paper might be kept going!

The subscribers were not numerous, but the street sales were large; thirty-five thousand to forty thousand were sold per day. The circulation of particularly attractive numbers—for instance, of those in which Proudhon’s articles appeared—was even larger; fifty thousand to sixty thousand were printed, and often on the following day copies were being sold for a franc instead of a sou.⁠[82]⁠

But for all that, by the 1st of March—that is, in six months’ time—not only was there no cash in hand, but already part of the guarantee fund had gone in payment of fines. Ruin was inevitable; Proudhon hastened it considerably. This was how it happened. On one occasion at his rooms in Ste. Pélagie I found D’Alton-Shee and two of the editors. D’Alton-Shee, that peer of France who scandalised Pacquier and frightened all the peers by answering from the platform the question, ‘Why, are you not a Catholic?’ ‘No! and what’s more, I am not a Christian at all, and I don’t know whether I am a deist.’ He was saying to Proudhon that the last numbers of the Voix du Peuple were feeble: Proudhon was looking through them and growing more and more morose; then, thoroughly incensed, he turned to the editors: ‘What is the meaning of it? You take advantage of my being in prison, and go to sleep there in the office. No, gentlemen: if you go on like this I will refuse to have anything to do with the paper, and will publish the grounds for my refusal. I don’t want my name to be dragged in the mud; you need some one to stand behind you and overlook every line. The public takes this for my newspaper: no, I must put a stop to this. To-morrow I will send an article to efface the ill effects of your scribbling, and I will show how I understand what ought to be the spirit of my paper.’

Seeing his irritation, it might well be anticipated that the article would not be the most moderate, but he surpassed our expectations: his Vive l’Empereur! was a rhapsody of irony—malignant, terrible irony.

In addition to a new action against the paper, the government revenged itself on Proudhon in its own way. He was transferred to a horrible room—that is, given a far worse one than before: the window was half boarded up so that nothing could be seen but the sky; no one was admitted to see him, and a special guard was put at the door. And these measures, unseemly for the correction of a naughty boy of sixteen, were taken seven years ago against one of the greatest thinkers of our age. Men have grown no wiser since the days of Socrates, no wiser since the days of Galileo; they have only become more petty. This disrespect for genius, however, is a new phenomenon that has reappeared during the last ten years. From the time of the Renaissance talent has to some extent become a protection; neither Spinoza nor Lessing was shut in a dark room or stood in a corner. Such men are sometimes persecuted and killed, but they are not humiliated in trivial ways; they are sent to the scaffold, but not to the workhouse.

Bourgeois imperial France is fond of equality.

Though persecuted, Proudhon still struggled in his chains; he still made an effort to bring out the Voix du Peuple in 1850; but that attempt was soon crushed. My guarantee money had been seized to the last farthing; the one man in France who still had something to say had no choice but to be silent.

The last time I saw Proudhon in Ste. Pélagie, I was being turned out of France, while he still had two years of prison. We parted gloomily; there was no trace of hope in the near future. Proudhon maintained a concentrated silence, whilst I was boiling with vexation; we both had many thoughts in our minds, but no desire to speak.

I had heard a great deal of his roughness, rudesse, and intolerance; I never had any experience of it in my own case. What soft people call his harshness was the tense muscle of the fighter; his scowling brow showed only the intense workings of his mind: in his anger he reminded me of a wrathful Luther or of Cromwell jeering at an opponent. He knew that I understood him, and, knowing, too, how few did understand him, appreciated it. He knew that he was considered an undemonstrative man; and hearing from Michelet of the unhappy death of my mother and Kolya, he wrote to me from Ste. Pélagie, among other things: ‘Is it possible that fate should attack us on that side too? I cannot get over the shock of this terrible accident. I love you, and carry your image deep here in this heart which so many think is of stone.’

After that I did not see him:⁠[83] in 1851, when, thanks to Léon Faucher, I visited Paris for a few days, he had been sent away to some central prison. A year later, when I was passing through Paris in secret, Proudhon was ill at Besançon.

Proudhon had his weak spot, and there he was incorrigible; there the limit of his character was reached, and, as is always the case, beyond it he was a conservative and a follower of tradition. I am speaking of his views of family life, and of the significance of woman in general. ‘How lucky is our friend N.!’ Proudhon would say jestingly; ‘his wife is not so stupid that she can’t make a good pot-au-feu, and not clever enough to discuss his articles. That’s all that is wanted for domestic bliss.’

In this jest Proudhon expressed, laughing, what was the serious basis of his views on woman. His conceptions of family relations were coarse and reactionary, but they betrayed, not the bourgeois element of the townsman, but rather the stubborn feeling of the rustic paterfamilias, haughtily regarding woman as an inferior, and a servant, and himself as the autocratic head of the family.

A year and a half after this was written, Proudhon published his great work on Justice in the Church and Revolution.

This book, for which France, sunk into barbarism, condemned him again to three years’ imprisonment, I read through attentively, and I closed the third volume weighed down by gloomy thoughts.

It is a terrible ... terrible time!... The atmosphere of decomposition stupefies the strongest....

This ‘brilliant fighter,’ too, could not resist it, and was broken: in his last work I see the same controversial power, the same mighty stroke; but it brings him now to preconceived results—it is no longer free in the very fullest sense. Towards the end of the book I watched over Proudhon as Kent watched over King Lear, expecting him to recover his reason, but he talked more and more wildly—there were the same fits of intolerance, of unbridled speech, as in Lear; and at the same time ‘every inch’ betrays talent, but ... a talent that is ‘touched’ ... and he runs with the corpse, not of a daughter but of a mother, whom he takes to be living.⁠[84]⁠

Latin thought, religious in its very negation, superstitious in doubt, rejecting one set of authorities in the name of another, has rarely gone further, rarely plunged more deeply in medias res of reality, rarely freed itself from all tangles, with such dialectic boldness and certainty as in this book. In it, not only the crude dualism of religion but the more subtle dualism of philosophy is cast off; the mind is set free not only from heavenly phantoms but from those of the earth, it passes beyond the sentimental apotheosis of humanity and the fatalism of progress, has none of the everlasting litanies of brotherhood, democracy, and progress, which are so pitifully wearisome in the midst of rancour and violence. Proudhon sacrificed the idols and the language of revolution to the true understanding of it, and put morality on its only real basis—the heart of man, recognising no idols, nothing but reason, ‘if it.’

And after all that, the great iconoclast was frightened of human nature being set free; for, having freed it abstractly, he fell back again into metaphysics, endowed it with incredible will, could not manage it, and led it to be immolated on the altar of the cold, inhuman God of justice—the God of equilibrium, of stillness and peace, the God of the Brahmins, who seek to lose all that is personal and to be dissolved, to come to rest in an infinite ocean of annihilation.

On the empty altar scales were set up. This would be a new Caudine Forks for humanity.

The ‘justice’ which is his goal is not even the artistic harmony of Plato’s Republic, the elegant equilibrium of passion and sacrifice; the Gallic tribune takes nothing from ‘anarchic and frivolous Greece’; he stoically tramples personal feelings under foot, and does not seek to harmonise them with the demands of the family and the commune. His ‘free man’ is a sentry on guard, and a workman who can never rise; he must serve and stand on guard until he is relieved by death; he must stifle in himself all personal passion, everything outside duty, because he is not himself: his meaning, his essence, lies outside himself; he is the instrument of justice; he is predestined, like the Virgin Mary, to bear the idea in suffering and to bring it into the world for the salvation of the state.

The family, the first embryo of society, the first cradle of justice, is doomed to everlasting, hopeless toil; it is to serve as the means of purification of the personal; in it the passions are to be stamped out. The austere Roman family in the workshop of to-day is Proudhon’s ideal. Christianity has softened family life too much for him: it preferred Mary to Martha, the dreamer to the housewife: it forgave the sinner and held out a hand to the penitent, because she loved much; but in Proudhon’s family, just what is essential is to love little. And that is not all: Christianity puts the individual far higher than his family relations. It says to the son: ‘Forsake father and mother and follow me’—to the son who in the name of Proudhon’s realisation of justice must be put back into the fetters of absolute paternal power, who in his father’s lifetime can have no freedom, least of all in the choice of a wife. He is to be inured to slavery, to become in his turn a tyrant over the children who are born without love through duty for the continuation of the family. In this family marriage will be indissoluble, but it will be cold as ice. Marriage is simply a victory over love; the less love there is between the cook-wife and the workman-husband the better. And to think that I should meet these old shabby bogeys from the Hegelianism of the right wing in the writings of Proudhon!

Feeling is banished, everything is frozen, the colours are gone, nothing is left but the dull, exhausting toil of the proletariat of to-day, the toil from which the aristocratic family of ancient Rome, based on slavery, was at least free: gone is the poetic beauty of the Church, the delirium of faith, the hopes of paradise; even poetry in those days ‘will be written no more,’ so Proudhon asserts. On the other hand, labour will become ‘more severe.’ For individual freedom, for the right of initiative, for independence, one may well sacrifice the lullabys of religion; but to sacrifice everything for the realisation of the idea of justice—what nonsense!

Man is doomed to toil, he must labour till his hand drops and the son takes from the cold fingers of the father the plane or the hammer and carries on the everlasting work. But what if among the sons there happens to be one with a little more sense who lays down the drill and asks: ‘But what are we wearing ourselves out for?’ ‘For the triumph of justice,’ Proudhon tells him. And the new Cain answers: ‘But who made me the keeper of the triumph of justice?’ ‘Who?—why, is not your whole vocation, your whole life, the realisation of justice?’ ‘Who has set up that object?’ Cain will answer. ‘It is too stale; there is no God, but the Commandments remain. Justice is not my vocation; work is not a duty but a necessity; the family is not for me the fetters of life but the setting for my life, for my development. You want to keep me in slavery, but I rebel against you. I revolt against you, against your steel-yard, just as you have been revolting all your life against bayonets, capital, and Church, just as all the French revolutionists rebelled against the feudal and Catholic tradition. Or do you imagine that after the taking of the Bastille, after the terror, after the war and the famine, after the bourgeois king and the bourgeois republic, I am going to believe you when you tell me that Romeo had no right to love Juliet because those old fools of Montagues and Capulets kept up an everlasting feud, and that, even at thirty or forty, I must not choose the companion of my life without my father’s permission, that a woman who has been unfaithful must be punished and disgraced? Why, what do you take me for with your justice?’

And in support of Cain we would add, from the dialectical side, that Proudhon’s whole conception of an aim is utterly inconsistent. This teleology is also theology; this is the republic of February—that is, the same as the monarchy of July, but without Louis-Philippe. What difference is there between predetermined teleology and providence?⁠[85]⁠

After emancipating human nature to the last limit, Proudhon took fright looking at his contemporaries, and, that these convicts, these ticket-of-leave men, might do no mischief, he catches them in the rat-trap of the Roman family.

The doors of the restored atrium, free from Lares and Penates, have been flung open; but not Anarchy, not the annihilation of authority and the state, is seen seated in the midst, but stern Order, with centralisation, with regulation of family relations, with inheritance and deprivation of it as a punishment; and with these things all the old Roman sins peep out of every crevice with the dead eyes of statues.

The family of antiquity naturally implies the ancient conception of the fatherland with its jealous patriotism, that ferocious virtue which has shed ten times more blood than all the vices put together.

Man bound in serfdom to the family becomes again the bondslave of the soil. His movements are restricted, he puts down roots into his land; only upon it he is what he is: ‘the Frenchman living in Russia,’ says Proudhon, ‘is a Russian, and not a Frenchman.’ No more colonies, no more settlements abroad; every man must live where he is....

‘Holland will not perish,’ said William of Orange in the years of terror; ‘it will go aboard ships and will sail off to Asia, and here we will lift up the sluices.’ It is people like that who are free.

The English are like that: as soon as they begin to be oppressed, they sail over the ocean and there found a younger, freer England. And yet nobody could say of the English that they do not love their country, or that they are lacking in national feeling. Emigrating in all directions, England has peopled half the world; while France, lacking in vitality, has lost one set of colonies and does not know what to do with the rest. She does not need them; France is pleased with herself and clings more and more to her centre, and the centre to its master. What independence can there be in such a country?

On the other hand, how can one abandon France, la belle France? ‘Is not she even now the freest country in the world, is not her language the finest language, her literature the finest literature, is not her syllabic line more musical than the Greek hexameter!’ Moreover, her universal genius absorbs the thought and the literature of all ages and all countries: ‘has not France made Shakespeare and Kant, Goethe and Hegel her own?’ And what is more: Proudhon forgot that they corrected them and dressed them up, as landowners dress up the peasants when they take them to Court.

Proudhon concludes his book with a Catholic prayer adapted to socialism; all he had to do was to secularise a few Church phrases and to put the Phrygian cap in the place of the mitre, for the prayer of the ‘Byzantine’ bishops to be the very thing for the bishop of socialism. What a chaos! Proudhon, emancipated from everything except reason, still wants to remain not only a husband after the style of Bluebeard, but also a French nationalist—with his literary chauvinism and his unlimited power of the father; and so behind the strong, vigorous words of a free thinker one seems to hear the voice of the savage old man, dictating his will, and trying now to preserve for his children the decrepit temple he has been undermining all his life.

The Latin world does not like freedom, it only likes to struggle for it; it sometimes finds the force for setting free, never for freedom. Is it not melancholy to see such men as Auguste Comte and Proudhon setting up as their last word, the one a sort of mandarin hierarchy, the other his domestic penal servitude and apotheosis of an inhuman pereat mundus, fiat justitia!