THE VOICE OF THE PEOPLE
leader of radical thought was recognised from the beginning.
He frequented several o f the hundred political clubs which had
taken the place o f the old secret societies, and although he often
came home appalled by the follies he had heard spoken in the
Club o f Clubs or the Club o f the Revolution (‘It is laughable, it
is mortifying, it is terrifying,’ he noted one evening in his diary),
he was popular among their members. When the clubs held a
great demonstration on the 17th March to demand the with
drawal o f the army from Paris, his name appeared, without his
consent or knowledge, on the lists of a proposed new government
which were passed from hand to hand by the leaders of the
manifestation. And in the dispute between the two revolutionary
paladins, Blanqui and Barbas, over the obscure Taschereau
affair1, it was he who was chosen to act as a kind of revolutionary
arbitrator and try to bring about a conciliation. Finally, when the
elections for the Constituent Assembly took place in April, he
was nominated in five districts, including Lyons, Besangon, the
Pas de Calais and two Parisian constituencies, and it was to the
electors o f the Franche-Comt£ that, on the 3rd o f April, he
issued a manifesto that for the first time set forth publicly his
attitude towards the Revolution. ‘The Fatherland is in danger,’ he
warned. ‘It can only be saved by the integral reform o f our
economic institutions.’ Like most o f the socialist candidates, he
was defeated by the swing against extremist policies which set in
after the first heady enthusiasms o f the Revolution.
While he was engaged in these varied activities he found time
to write three pamphlets dealing with the issues o f the Revolution,
which appeared in quick succession on the 22nd, 26th and 31st
March, as the first titles in a weekly series that was abandoned
when he started regular journalistic writing. The first two,
entitled respectively Solution of the Social Problem and Democracy,
dealt with the immediate problems o f the time, and the main
conclusions Proudhon reached were that the provisional govern1 Early in 1848 Taschereau, editor of La Revue Retrospective, printed a docu
ment which he claimed had been taken from Guizot’s office during the
insurrection; entitled ‘Declaration made by X XX before the Minister of the
Interior,’ it contained information about the Conspiracy of the Seasons
which Barbis claimed was known only to Blanqui and him. The suggestion
that Blanqui was an informer did him great harm in 1848 , but it is difficult
to believe—and Proudhon seems to have shared this view—that such a
dedicated revolutionist would have betrayed his associates in this way.