manifest, it did not corrode his ideals. He found individual men
faulty and erring, he saw the flaws in corporate institutions, but
he never lost his faith in humanity, or in the ideals o f justice,
equality and freedom which in his mind assumed such concrete
forms, nor did he abandon that pure patriotism which, for all his
internationalism and his Franc-Comtois provincialism, still made
him acutely conscious of the glories of France. When Ackermann,
who was now collaborating with Alexander Humboldt in Berlin,
ventured to blame his country for the neglect he himself had
experienced, Proudhon took him to task. ‘You are always
accusing France, as if France, as if a whole nation, the most
intelligent and generous o f nations, could be the same, in the eyes
of its children, as the governments who dishonour it, the coteries
who abuse it, the charlatans and rascals who exploit it.’
Proudhon never lost this pride in his country and his people,
but it was a patriotism that did not decline into uncritical
chauvinism, and when the rulers of France, or the French people,
did anything that was unworthy, Proudhon was the first to call
them to order in the name of that revolutionary tradition which
he regarded as the true tradition of France.
5
In September, 1844, Proudhon made another visit to Paris,
and this sojourn o f several months is of particular interest, since
it was now that he made the acquaintance o f the German Left-
Hegelians and of the Russian revolutionary, Michael Bakunin. To
Micaud he wrote in December, ‘I know more than twenty
Germans, all o f them Doctors o f Philosophy.’ These included
some of the most important German revolutionary figures o f the
century— Marx, then twenty-five, Heine, Arnold Ruge, editor of
the Annales Franco-Allemandes, the younger Fichte, Karl Gruen
and his friend Ewerbeck. Two o f these men, Ruge and Gruen,
together with Bakunin, were later to assist in spreading Proud
hon’s ideas, while Marx became his most celebrated enemy. As it
is from the three-cornered encounter of Proudhon, Bakunin and
the German Left-Hegelians that one can date the beginning o f the
great nineteenth-century split between the libertarian and author
itarian socialists, I shall discuss in some detail the events of this
time.THE MAN OF AFFAIRS