Proudhon - A Biography

A PERSONAL PREFACE TO THE THIRD EDITION
sought neither profit nor position except as an independent voice
presenting a radical view of society that was really more consistent
than he would usually admit. Right to the end he retained the
lifestyle in which he had grown up, that of the peasant who becomes
an artisan (a printer in his case) and who finds himself acclaimed
by the intellectual world— or a large section of it— yet does not
cut the links to his origins. The most famous of Courbet’s paintings
of him, which shows Proudhon in the garden of his Paris house,
dressed in his worker’s blouse and plain heavy shoes, his low-crowned
hat beside him among papers and books, and his sturdy daughters
playing beside him, is a marvellously faithful image of the man,
down to the brooding gentleness that emanates from his broad,
pugnacious face. He had such a talent for friendship that he earned
the affection and respect of men of all classes, from the great figures
of his time like Michelet and Sainte-Beuve, Courbet and Baudelaire,
Hdrzen and Tolstoy, to the comrades of his youth in the printing
shop at Besanqon with whom he remained on good terms until the
month of his death. The workers of Paris recognized this when he
died. For most of the years of the Second Empire, whether in prison
or exile or at home, he had been a solitary figure, as much apart
from the centralizing Jacobin left of the time as he was from the
imperialists; he had no party and for the last decade and more of
his life he did not even have a journal, like the great Represmtant
du peuple of 1848 , through which to project his ideas. Yet these
ideas found their way to the workers, who visited him in increasing
numbers during his later years, and on the day of his funeral choked
the Grande Rue of Passy outside his house: six thousand anonymous
people acknowledging him, not as their leader, which he had never
sought to become, but as the spokesman for their needs and their
aspirations.
That man, with his prides and his prejudices and his self-conscious
paradoxolatry as well as his admirable qualities, I tried to portray
faithfully in my book, and when I re-read it I think I succeeded
moderately well. But the books remain, as solid and commanding
as the books of Bergotte which— in Remembrance of Things Past—
Marcel saw after the novelist’s death and realized were his true
monument. Since Godwin was not rediscovered by the anarchists
until the end of the nineteenth century, Proudhon’s books represent
the foundation layer of anarchist thought so far as the historic
movement is concerned. All the fundamental anarchist ideas are
XVll