Proudhon - A Biography

THE VOICE OF THE PEOPLE
desire and to the second he was relatively indifferent), they
certainly had an enormous effect in stimulating public opinion,
and in making the more acute among his fellow socialists realise,
if events had not already taught it to them, that it was not enough
to expect the mere founding o f a republic and the expression of a
few radical sentiments to bring about a genuine social revolution
or even an appreciable amelioration in conditions.
Right from the beginning, his articles took on the tone o f a
direct challenge to the government and the Old Guard of the
Mountain, and from the first he raised the anarchist cry o f direct
action— ‘the proletariat must emancipate itself without the help
of the government.’ After the elections of April had confirmed
the temporary decline of the left republicans, he published a long
essay, entitled The Reaction, in which he analysed the deterioration
o f the revolutionary situation and demonstrated that it sprang
more than anything else from an unrealistic reliance on political
means and, in particular, on what seemed to him the most
egregious o f political illusions, universal suffrage. This article
displays Proudhon’s incisive form of criticism at its best, and it
shows him making at the time and on the spot the kind of
perceptive analysis of the situation which other people were to
make after the events had long been past.
‘The social question is adjourned,’ he declared. ‘The 16th
April has nullified the socialist candidates. The cause o f the
proletariat, proclaimed with spirit on the barricades of February,
has just been lost in the elections o f April. The enthusiasm of the
people has been succeeded by consternation. It is the bourgeoisie
which, as in the past, will regulate the condition o f the
workers...
‘One of the first acts of the provisional government, that on
which it has been most applauded, was the application o f universal
suffrage. The very day on which the decree was promulgated, we
wrote these words, which then might have passed for a paradox:
“ Universal suffrage is the counter-revolution.” One can judge,
after the event, whether we were wrong. The elections of 1848
have been made, in the great majority of cases, by the priests, by
the Legitimists, by the dynasties, by all that France contains of
the most backward and conservative. It could not have been
otherwise!
‘Is it so hard, then, to understand that in man there exist two