contained a detailed description o f Proudhon’s ideas on finance,
government, the family, etc. He insisted once again on the need
to turn the Bank of France into a Bank of Exchange, and talked of
the State, in a well organised society, being reduced to ‘nothing.’
But there were also some notions that sorted oddly with his
avowed anarchism. Thus, while he asked for a simplification of
the legal system, he opposed abolishing the death penalty, and,
in calling for an end to the old forms o f conscription, he retained
enough Jacobinical militarism to demand that each citizen should
do one or two years’ militia service.
Baudelaire, who edited La Tribune Nationale, was among those
who supported Proudhon’s candidature, and the electors were
sufficiently impressed by his personality and his journalism to
elect him with more than 77,000 votes. The ten companions who
accompanied him into the Assembly were an oddly mixed group
of, for the most part, distinguished names— Victor Hugo and
Thiers, Pierre Leroux and the sinister and corsetted General
Changarnier, who represented the most unrelieved reaction.
Finally, most significant o f the confusion into which the Revolu
tion had entered in its fourth month, there was Louis-Napoleon
Bonaparte, posing as a reformed adherent o f the Republic.
Proudhon was suspicious from the start o f the intentions o f this
last colleague. ‘The people have just got rid of one princely
fantasy,’ he remarked. ‘God grant it be the last!’
Recollecting his election a year afterwards, Proudhon remarked
with some justification: ‘When I think o f all I have written and
published for ten years on the role o f the state in society, on the
subordination o f power and the revolutionary incapacity of
government, I am tempted to believe that my election was the
effect of a misunderstanding on the part of the people.’ One might
add that it seems to have been the effect o f a misunderstanding on
his own part as well. But, at the time, he accepted it, and the
responsibilities it conferred, with the utmost conscientiousness,
though not without misgiving.
Just after the election, Darimon called at the Hotel du Cote
d’Or. He found Proudhon moved to a fine room on the first floor.
‘It is my landlady who has made me come down here,’ Proudhon
jested. ‘She pretends that it is not proper for a representative of
the people to keep on living in a garret.’ But when Darimon
started to congratulate him on his election, Proudhon interrupted
iz8
THE VOICE OF THE PEOPLE