disturb dirt in order to keep them occupied. They represented a
trend towards governmental regimentation without any of the
positive advantages that in other circumstances have sometimes
arisen from national public work projects. Unwillingly, the men
employed in them were forced into the position where they
actually earned the title of ‘loafers’ which de Falloux contemptu
ously fixed upon them, while their situation was so demoralising
that there was reason in Victor Hugo’s warning that this army of
paupers might become the nucleus of ‘a new dictator’s praetorian
guard.’
But, for all their faults, the national workshops still fulfilled a
temporary palliative function by keeping thousands o f men from
complete despair, and if they were to be abolished it should have
been in favour o f some scheme by which the energy of the
unemployed would be put to more constructive use. Instead, on
the 21 st June, the Assembly abolished the workshops, proposed
to conscript the workers between eighteen and twenty-five, and
declared that the rest would be sent out of Paris to work as
navvies. It was a decision bred of fear, and it produced the very
result which the more honest among its supporters had wished to
avoid, a wholesale uprising of the Paris slums. On the 23rd June
the barricades rose again, around the Bastille, in the militant St.
Antoine quarter, and on the Left Bank between the Rue St.
Jacques and the Jardin des Plantes.
Proudhon, like many other left-wing representatives, was com
pletely bewildered by the rising. ‘I thought it was a conspiracy of
pretenders leaning on the workers of the national workshops,’ he
wrote later. ‘Like others, I was wrong.’ As the days progressed,
his attitude changed rapidly. Showing a coolness remarkable in a
man who had never taken part in fighting, he took advantage of
his representative’s insignia to walk in the areas where the combat
was in progress. General Negrier was killed only a few paces from
him, and Proudhon, weeping at what he saw (he was normally a
man of few tears), helped to carry the body to the Hotel de Ville.
On the second day o f the rising he ceased to believe that it had
been provoked by political intriguers. ‘I became convinced that
the insurrection was socialist... Its first and determining cause
was the social question, the social crisis, work, ideas,’ he told the
commission that later investigated it. He was thus ahead o f most
of his contemporaries in recognising that a new element had
THE VOICE OF THE PEOPLE