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'My ancestors on both sides were free peasants, exempt from feudal servitude from time immemorial'; there remained to Proudhon all his life a family pride as great as that of a Guerinantes; be was born of no proletarian or servile stock. Had not his maternal grandfather, the old soldier, withstood before the revolution die local tyrannical squire, and was not his mother 'noted for her virtues and for her republican ideas'? 'This is real nobility of race. I myself am a noble.' His father's family, the Proudhons, was noted for obstinacy; one branch had risen in the world, had entered the middle classes and produced an eminent lawyer, but the poorer connections were far from playing the role of poor relations; they had their share of the pride, that was to be so marked in their most famous kinsman. Proudhon's father was a cooper and, for a time, a brewer. He was, doubtless, an honest and industrious man, but unsuccessful in his business. Later, Proudhon attributed his father's financial disasters to his incorrigible habit of selling his beer at the 'just price', that is, at the cost of production, instead of imitating the rest of the brewers who sold at a profit. Not only that, the elder Proudhon was careful about the character of his customers, and so lost money by refusing to let women enter his shop. Others were not so scrupulous, and 'having grown rich by prostitution ... married their children off to the best people, while my father's children have found nobody'. The lesson learned here was never forgotten; there was a morally right way of doing business; there was a morally wrong way of doing business; but in modern society the right way led straight to bankruptcy, the wrong way to wealth and honour. Society must be made safe for honesty and a world be created in which the children of an honest man like Claude-Francois Proudhon should not be embittered by having their father's honesty in hunger and humiliation.
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PIERRE-JOSEPH PROUDHON
CHAPTER I: THE EDUCATION OF PROUDHON
CHAPTER II: THE PAMPHLETEER
CHAPTER III: THE REVOLUTIONARY LEADER
CHAPTER IV: PROUDHON AND JUSTICE
CHAPTER V: THE INFLUENCE OF PROUDHON
CHAPTER I THE EDUCATION OF PROUDHON
PIERRE-JOSEPH PROUDHON was born on the 15th of January, 1809, and thus grew up in the shadow of two great events, the French and the industrial revolutions; both of these he felt profoundly; the first of them he understood. He was born in Battant, a suburb of Besancon, the capital of the Free County of Burgundy, and his intense local patriotism remained a living force in his life and thought to the day of his death. His 'little country', Franche-Comte', had only been part of France for one hundred and fifty years when Proudhon was born; Besancon was a real local capital, and some of the seeds of Proudhon's federalism, of his dislike of Paris, and of centralisation, were sown in those early years. He was a citizen of no mean city, a child of no mere department; and, whether he was defending the intellectual independence of the County of Burgundy against the pretensions of the Duchy of Burgundy, or looking forward with delight to the reconstitution of the thirty submerged nationalities which he believed existed in France, he was fighting, not merely for a general principle,but for the memories and loyalties of his youth.
More important still was his parentage. 'My ancestors on both sides were free peasants, exempt from feudal servitude from time immemorial'; there remained to Proudhon all his life a family pride as great as that of a Guerinantes; be was born of no proletarian or servile stock. Had not his maternal grandfather, the old soldier, withstood before the revolution die local tyrannical squire, and was not his mother 'noted for her virtues and for her republican ideas'? 'This is real nobility of race. I myself am a noble.' His father's family, the Proudhons, was noted for obstinacy; one branch had risen in the world, had entered the middle classes and produced an eminent lawyer, but the poorer connections were far from playing the role of poor relations; they had their share of the pride, that was to be so marked in their most famous kinsman. Proudhon's father was a cooper and, for a time, a brewer. He was, doubtless, an honest and industrious man, but unsuccessful in his business. Later, Proudhon attributed his father's financial disasters to his incorrigible habit of selling his beer at the 'just price', that is, at the cost of production, instead of imitating the rest of the brewers who sold at a profit. Not only that, the elder Proudhon was careful about the character of his customers, and so lost money by refusing to let women enter his shop. Others were not so scrupulous, and 'having grown rich by prostitution ... married their children off to the best people, while my father's children have found nobody'. The lesson learned here was never forgotten; there was a morally right way of doing business; there was a morally wrong way of doing business; but in modern society the right way led straight to bankruptcy, the wrong way to wealth and honour. Society must be made safe for honesty and a world be created in which the children of an honest man like Claude-Francois Proudhon should not be embittered by having their father's honesty in hunger and humiliation.
Although Proudhon considered himself a nativeof Besancon, the suburb where he was born, preserved, as M. Daniel Halevy tells us, a rural character. 'Many market-gardeners, peasants, wine-growers, found it convenient to lodge there, not far from the city-folk. Thus they could make their living without changing their way of life, keeping faithfully, in the shadow of the town, to their rural customs and their rural speech.' This, again, was of great importance to Proudhon, for he learned to know and sympathise with the peasants, to feel with the peasants in his heart, to share their land-hunger; their rigid views of right-living; their deep conservatism; all combined with their passion for equality; their class-consciousness; and their savage resolution to be each master of his own fields and his own household.
Not only did Proudhon know the peasant life; he lived it. Until he was twelve, he was constantly engaged in farm-work, especially in herding cattle, and late in life, he declared that there, in the grass, looking at the sky, he learned un-Christian lessons of trust in nature, and distrust of 'that absurd spiritualism which is at the basis of Christian life and education'. When he had become a famous antagonist or the Church, both he and his enemies were inclined to exaggerate the heresies of his childhood; and one pious antagonist declared that prayer found no echo in the Proudhon household. It was never safe to assume anything about Proudhon, and he was indignant at this charge, for he was, in fact, brought up in matter-of-fact orthodoxy by his parents. They were good Catholics of the old French peasant school and so was their son. He believed in God and the saints; he also believed in nymphs and fairies.
Proudhon owed his chance of formal education to the Abbe Sirebon, the parish priest, next, to his father's employer, but, above all, to his mother, Catherine, who was the mainstay of the poor household. The Proudhons were going down in the world. Claude-Francois was no longer his own master, the future was dark but the boy was to be given his chance. The entry to the local college (high school) was the greatest event of Proudhon's youth; more important than the siege of Besancon, than his father failure, than the birth of a younger brother. He now learned of delights as keen as any he had known as a herd-boy; he displayed the prodigious industry that was to remain with him all his life and an appetite for learning that startled his teachers. But he studied under great difficulties; his family was desperately poor, and he had to borrow school books from more fortunate boys, he had no hat; he wore wooden shoes; and he learned the truth of the local proverb, 'Poverty is no crime; it is worse.'
The studies were almost entirely mathematics and Latin. He was a poor mathematician (and that is worth remembering), but he was an excellent Latinist. He mastered the language and shone in it and, until his death, language fascinated him. He won prizes and one of them was Fenelon's Demonstration of the Existence of God. He read it, and it shook his faith. 'After that,' he said, 'I was a metaphysician' -a belief which M. Daniel Halevy notes, was an illusion.
His school life was difficult, and its difficulties nourished his sombre pride; be was religious, but be saw, or thought he saw, that his zeal was ill-rewarded, that the Church was a respecter of persons. When he was sixteen he abandoned the practice of his religion, although be was to return to it again. The family fortunes grew worse and worse. On the day he was to receive a prize, there was no one of his family present, and the presiding official had to take the place of the missing kinsfolk. He went home to find his father in consternation, his mother in tears; a lawsuit had ended in a decision against his father. 'That evening we supped on bread and water.' The strain on the family resources of keeping Pierre Joseph at school was unbearable. "At eighteen," said his father, "I earned my keep and I hadn't had so long an apprenticeship"-"I thought he was right."' What trade to adopt was now the question? If he could have got access to the land, he might have become a farmer, but the want of capital barred that road. 'Perhaps it was only the want of a good organisation of rural credit that kept me from remaining all my life a peasant and a conservative.' Another lesson, the exclusion of the poor from property and independence, was now learned.
The trade chosen was printing, and he never forgot the lessons he learned in his apprenticeship. He was proud to have a trade and believed that it was a sure shield against want, that he was now independent of everybody. He also became convinced that the competent artisan received a more fruitful training than the bookworm; and he was always irritated by the claims of an intellectual elite to lead the workers for their own good. His conviction of the necessity, and the possibility, of equality was given a secure basis in his mind by his memories of the printer's chapel. He learned the force of trade practice, of the way in which a customary code can keep the sluggards up to the mark and prevent the strong from racing ahead too fast. He learned a trade morality, and the need for and the possibility of mutual loyalty. He never lost the conviction that he knew the minds, the needs, the natures of the workers, and of the peasants, as no academics, fortified with formal doctrine, could know them. The workers never became for him a homogeneous class of which any thousand were worth any other thousand; their salvation must come from within. Any leadership from the outside, no matter what were its claims to superior knowledge or disinterestedness, was simply another form of tyranny. There were more modes of exploitation than those created by formal property relations.
Besides learning his trade he fell in love, violently, as he was never to fall in love again, and he returned to his religion with a passionate enthusiasm. The work of the printing-shop was largely concerned with theology; Proudhou read widely in the fathers of the Church as well as more in modern writers. He thought of himself as an apologist for the faith, for if he was already suspicious of the political side of Catholicism, his faith in the theory, if not in the practice, of the Church was still warm. Already he was perplexed by the problem of inequality, of worldly injustice. Was the Church right, was there no remedy for these evils in this world, or was it possible to organise society on new lines, to harmonise the desires and passions of men? Was man the maimed creature, marked by original sin as the Church described him, or was the escape from his prison house in his own hands once he found the key? He was tempted by the heresy of Socinianism, by the denial of original sin. He was unwittingly on his way out of the Church and on to another faith.
He was now a proof-reader and, through his corrections of a Latin Lives of the Saints, he made the acquaintance and won the friendship of its young editor, Gustave Fallot, destined to be the first great personal influence in Proudhon's life. Fallot was, or hoped to be, a philologist; he infected Proudhon with his enthusiasm, an enthusiasm which, with Proudhon, took the form of learning Hebrew. This study left permanent marks on his mind. He retained to his death what was, for a Frenchman, an astonishing familiarity with the Bible. It was a weapon of fact, of argument, of rhetorical appeal, and he ranked it with Adam Smith and Hegel among the three sources of his ideas. Not only the Bible, but philology attracted him. It is hard to realize now the prestige of philological studies in that age; new vistas were opened up by it, vistas not only in the history of language, but in the general history of mankind. It was a clue to the nature of things which, if strenuously held to, would lead its owner into the heart of the labyrinth where lay the secret of human misery to be remedied by the application of the true laws of man's nature, laws which language could illuminate. This illusion, that linguistic knowledge was the key to all or to most problems, never wholly left Proudhon. It, as much as any borrowed dialectic, was his method of research and of argument. On the whole, this belief did him harm. It is worth saying once that the Hebrew text of the commandment does not say 'Thou shalt not steal', but 'Thou shalt not put aside', but Lo thignob recurs too often, not as an illustration, but as an argument. Again and again arguments are interrupted or eloquence is allowed to cool off, while the etymology of a word is pursued through bold and often erroneous guesses. It is not of first-class importance to know (or to think you know) that all the world is wrong in believing that religio at bottom means binding , when it really means bending. In any case, even if philology had been as powerful and adequate a weapon as Proudhon thought, he was unfitted to use it. He knew a good deal of Latin, Greek, Hebrew, but be knew nothing of language, or nothing to the point. He pained friends, who knew better, by his bold guesses. He had neither the scholar's equipment nor temperament. Words had the meanings Proudhon wanted them to have, and if modern philology gave him no support, so much the worse for it! It is in vain that his patient friend, Professor Bergmann, tries to tame him; the bee keeps buzzing in the bonnet. He had valid reasons for disliking Renan's methods, but, in any case, the professional superiority of Renan in philological equipment would have made Proudhon suspicious of his rival author of a Life of Jesus.
Another key to knowledge of society was now put into his hands, for a fellow-citizen of Franche-Comte, just becoming famous, had his book printed at Besancon. The book was The New Industrial World of Charles Fourier, and it helped to open the world of economic speculation to the young proof-corrector. Later in life Proudhon, as was his wont, was less and less willing to admit his debt to Fourier, especially as he got to be on worse and worse terms with Fourier's disciples, but the influence was great. It is most obvious in the first edition of the Creation of Order in Humanity, where the system of series is made to do all sorts of wonders, but this was chiefly a matter of words. But Fourier's scepticism of the state his view that the social revolution could be brought about within
