THE VOICE OF THE PEOPLE2
On the morrow o f the Revolution, Proudhon decided that he
would remain in his solitude until he found a positive direction
for his activity. ‘Perhaps I shall be employed by the new order of
things; who knows? Perhaps I shall go into opposition; again,
who knows?’ He did not wait long in doubt. On the 25 th
February he was sitting in the room he now occupied at the
Hotel de la Cote d’Or. It was, Darimon tells us, ‘the mean hotel
o f the penniless student and the petty clerk.’ The stairs were
steep and ill-lit, and Proudhon’s room, on the fourth floor, was
‘not in the proper sense a room at all, but rather a closet.’
As he worked at his table, one o f his admirers, George
Duchene, ushered in a deputation o f four workers, who entered
carrying the muskets with which they had guarded the barricades.
They were all compositors— Vasbenter, Debock, and the brothers
Nicholas and Joseph Mairet— and they came to raise the question
o f immediately publishing Le Representant du Peuple, so that there
might be an adequate forum for the social ideas to which the
Revolution had so far given little expression. Duchene offered to
bear managerial responsibility, while the compositors undertook
to assemble the necessary workers, and it only remained for
Proudhon to accept editorship. Characteristically, now that the
newspaper he had longed for was at last realisable, he asked for
time to think. ‘The title o f the paper did not suit him,’ Joseph
Mairet recollected. ‘The people, he said, should not have a
representative; they should affirm themselves; the title should be
replaced by a shorter and more expressive phrase— The People.’
However, by the time his visitors departed, Proudhon had
tacitly agreed to meet their requests, and a month later, when
the paper began to appear as a regular daily, his name was at the
head o f the editorial board. Vasbenter was manager, and the
editors included not only Viard and Fauvety, founders o f the
original Representant du Peuple, but also Darimon, Amad£e
Langlois, a former ship’s officer who became one o f Proudhon’s
most faithful disciples, and Jules le Chevalier, a dissident
Phalansterian.
But although duringthe first month o f the Revolution Proudhon
did not begin the career o f independent journalist that made him
such a celebrated figure in the Paris o f 1848-9, his position as a