THE MAN OF AFFAIRS
his close associates, he did not discourage the attentions o f Tol
stoy, and in later years he did not refuse to visit Prince Jerome
Bonaparte. As for the Bohemia to which Madame d’Agoult be
longed by habit, it would be difficult to find a more startling
citizen o f that world than Courbet.
It seems likely then that his emphatic desire to avoid personal
contact with the Countess was due to her largely unjustified moral
reputation. Proudhon was generally over-eager to see support
even where it was not offered, and one cannot help regarding it as
significant that, on the single occasion when a distinguished
woman showed a marked inclination to accept his beliefs, he
should so pointedly have stopped any further contact. The panic
o f an exaggerated sexual puritanism seems, indeed, the sole likely
explanation o f the strange abruptness with which he repulsed
this fine and talented woman.9
In publishing his Economic Contradictions, Proudhon had pro
mised his readers a sequel that would give his positive ideas on
social reconstruction but, while he worked out the plans o f this
work during the ensuing year, his desire to give a more popular
expression to his ideas led him once again to consider the possi
bility o f a journalistic enterprise.
After his failure to reach agreement with Cabet and the editors
of La Reforme, it became evident that the only way o f obtaining
the platform he desired would be through a newspaper over which
he had virtual control, and he began to shape his plans in that
direction. A t first he thought o f producing a weekly, which, by
certain adjustments of time, he might be able to fit in with his
business obligations, and by June 1847 his project had become
more detailed. The journal would be called Le Peuple (The People)
and it would appear in November, or at the latest in December.
Earlier papers called Le Peuple had appeared, each for a few
issues, in 1836 and 1846. The editor o f the latter, and probably of
the former as well, was a journalist called Ribeyrolles who, like
Proudhon, frequented socialist circles without being linked ex
clusively with any sect, and it is possible that there may have been
a connection between the two men. This conjecture is given a
certain plausibility by a remark to Bergmann later in the year,