the Republic and the burden o f the calumnies that were going to
strike socialism.
‘On the evening o f the 21st February I again exhorted my
friends not to fight. On the 22nd I breathed with relief on learning
o f the retreat o f the opposition. I thought myself at the end o f my
martyrdom. The 23rd dissipated my illusions. But this time the
die was cast,jacta erat aka, as M. de Lamartine said. The volley in
the Capucines changed my attitude in an instant.’
Looking back over a chaotic year, Proudhon had smoothed and
simplified the course of his actual thoughts during those formid
able days, when the Revolution was breaking out in the streets,
and the opposition, having decided to withdraw strategically, dis
covered, like the sorcerer’s apprentice, that something had been
released which it could not control. As event piled upon event,
as the government o f Guizot fell, as the workers built their
barricades with skill and experience in the little mediaeval streets
o f pre-Haussmann Paris, as the bourgeois National Guard threw
in its support for the Revolution, his feelings were not quite so
sharply defined, nor did they change with such abruptness, as he
has suggested. For, while it is true that when the soldiers fired on
the people in the Rue des Capucines he instinctively turned to the
support o f the class from which he sprang, and while he welcomed
the fall o f Louis-Philippe he did not accept everything that
happened without criticism; he made a distinction between the
Revolution and the latter-day Jacobins who became its leaders.
On the very day the Republic was established, the 24th February,
he noted angrily in his diary: ‘The mess is going to be inextric
able... I have no place in it... They have made a revolution
without ideas.’ And the following day he added contemptuously:
‘There is nothing in their heads.’
Nevertheless, during the days o f insurrection he could not keep
away from the scenes of action. On the 22nd he went to the
Chamber o f Deputies and found all Paris afoot and expectant.
On the 23 rd he saw the barricades rising in the Marais. On the
24th he was present at the storming of the Tuileries and described
it as ‘a devastation’ rather than ‘a capture,’ the people having
entered without firing a shot. He walked in the streets and
squares which, with their innumerable barricades, he likened to
‘a labyrinth o f five hundred Thermopylaes.’ By midday, like
many other socialists who had no other prearranged rendezvous
THE VOICE OF THE PEOPLE