THE VOICE OF THE PEOPLE
24th February, would be ‘stormy or amicable, according to the
passions and the good or bad faith o f the parties.’ He asked the
Assembly to aid the peaceful completion o f the transition by
agreeing, as a first step, to his proposition o f a levy on income.
The proprietors should be summoned ‘to contribute, for their
part, to the revolutionary work, proprietors being responsible
for the consequences o f their refusals.’
Proudhon’s colleagues shouted for an explanation, and he
replied: ‘It means that in the case o f refusal we ourselves shall
proceed to the liquidation without you.’
‘Whom do you mean byjw??’ came the shouts.
‘When I used these two pronouns,you and we,’ said Proudhon,
‘it is evident that I was identifying myself with the proletariat,
and you with the bourgeois class.’
There was an uproar. ‘It is the social war!’ the enraged con
servatives shouted. ‘It is the 23rd June at the tribune!’ Proudhon’s
proposition was rejected almost unanimously, but the upholders
o f order wanted more than that, and the session broke into a
bedlam as the representatives competed to find a suitably insulting
way o f expressing their hostility. Finally, it was resolved that
Proudhon’s proposition ‘is an odious attack on the principles of
public morality, that it violates property, that it encourages
scandal, that it makes appeal to the most odious passions,’ and,
finally, ‘that the orator has calumniated the revolution of February,
1848, by pretending to make it an accomplice of the theories
which he has developed.’
The majority was overwhelming: 691 voted to condemn
Proudhon and only 2 dissented. They were Proudhon himself
and his old friend from Lyons, the weaver Greppo. O f the remain
ing socialists, none was prepared to support him, even though
the issue was not one o f accepting his proposition, but merely of
defending him against insult. Sixty o f them abstained, but
Louis Blanc carried personal enmity so far as to join in the vote
o f censure. From afar another enemy, the exiled Marx, admitted
grudgingly that, in the circumstances, Proudhon’s motion had
been an act o f high courage.
This debate crowned Proudhon’s notoriety in respectable
society. ‘From the 31st July,’ he declared, ‘I became, according
to the expression o f one journalist, the terror-man... I was
preached upon, acted, sung, placarded, biographised, caricatured,
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