Proudhon - A Biography

THE MAN OF AFFAIRS
cerned for the welfare of his family— his parents, who were grow­
ing steadily more afflicted by age, and also his brother Charles,
whose ability to earn a living was reduced by recurrent sickness.
Throughout 1844 his letters to them contained, interspersed with
domestic requests for such things as cravats and flannel under­
garments, many anxious protestations of his desire to provide
more fully for their welfare. ‘Believe always, my dear father and
mother,’ he wrote from Mulhouse in February, ‘that my efforts will
ever turn towards making your life more agreeable.’
Later, he decided that his parents would be better off if they
returned to the country, and at the end of 1845, after a year of
persuasion, they finally left Battant for Cordiron, where Charles
was working as a blacksmith, and where Pierre-Joseph, once they
were established, wrote to them in solicitous enquiry: ‘Let me
know if your habitation is warm and not damp, if you have your
supply of wood, how you are provisioned, finally, how you are
living... I am afraid you may be bored. If that happens, you must
return to Besangon. I did not wish to tell you in advance that in
going to Cordiron you would only be making an experiment; the
idea of an experiment would have stopped you from trying any­
thing. But believe me, I do not intend to make you die in a soli­
tude, and if in the spring the air o f the fields does not suit you, I
repeat, you will be able to take up your lodging in town. Keep
warm in the meantime, and cover yourselves well. I hope that if
you can pass happily through the first quarter of 1846, your life
will then have more purpose.’
But the retirement to country tranquillity came too late to help
Claude-Franfois Proudhon; he did not even live through that first
quarter of 1846, and died at Cordiron on the 30th March, 1846.
His calm death seemed to Pierre-Joseph the model of a stoic’s end.
‘Friendship, a clear conscience, the hope of a better future for
those he left behind, united to give a perfect calm to his last
moments. The next day my brother wrote to me: “ Our father died
bravely.” The priests will not canonise him, but I who knew him
proclaim him in my turn a brave man, and hope for myself no better
funeral oration.’
This was written a decade afterwards; at the time Proudhon
felt that curious mingling of sorrow, self-reproach and relief which
young people often experience on the death of their parents.
Particularly he regretted his own failure to make his father’s hap­