THE VOICE OF THE PEOPLE
sharply. ‘My dear fellow, I cannot accept compliments. A
crushing task has just been imposed on me, and I am very much
afraid of sinking under the burden.’
On the whole, he found no reason to change his attitude; in
1854 he recollected his period in the Assembly as ‘a life o f hell,’
and in Confessions of a Revolutionary he described in detail the
mental effect of parliamentary life.
‘I entered the National Assembly with the timidity o f a child,
with the ardour o f a neophyte. Assiduous, from nine o’clock in
the morning, at the meetings of bureaux and committees, I did
not quit the Assembly until the evening, and then I was exhausted
with fatigue and disgust. As soon as I set foot in the parliamentary
Sinai, I ceased to be in touch with the masses; because I was
absorbed by my legislative work, I entirely lost sight of the
current of events. I knew nothing, either o f the situation of the
national workshops, or the policy o f the government, or of the
intrigues that were growing up in the heart o f the Assembly.
One must have lived in that isolator which is called a National
Assembly to realise how the men who are most completely
ignorant of the state o f a country are almost always those who
represent i t... Most o f my colleagues o f the left and the extreme
left were in the same perplexity of mind, the same ignorance of
daily facts. One spoke o f the national workshops only with a kind
o f terror, for fear o f the people is the sickness of all those who
belong to authority; the people, for those in power, are the
enemy.’
Proudhon, in fact, put himself in a totally false position by
joining the Assembly, and when, a very few days after his entry
into that body, the differences between the workers and the
government burst out in the civil war o f the June days, this fact
was brought home to him with terrible emphasis.
5
On the 15 th June the banker Goudchaux, who had been
elected to the Assembly on the same day as Proudhon, demanded
that the national workshops, which had been established after the
Revolution to provide work, should be abolished. There was much
to be said in criticism of these establishments, which for the most
part applied the classically futile remedy of employing men to