illness,1 Proudhon was not diverted from his personal schemes
for spreading the social revolution by direct economic means, and
at the end o f January he brought to maturity his long-considered
plan for the People’s Bank.
His failure to arouse the interest o f the Provisional Govern
ment in the original scheme for the Bank o f Exchange had not
discouraged him, and as early as April, 1848, he began to seek
support among independent men o f public standing. The first he
approached was Emile de Girardin, editor o f La Presse; Girardin
was an intellectual dandy with a certain mental daring which
appealed to the like quality in Proudhon, and they maintained a
lifelong relationship in which antagonism and reluctant admira
tion mingled. Girardin promised to support the Bank and
to publish Proudhon’s project in full. By much persuasion
Proudhon eventually gained the adherence o f a heterogeneous
collection o f public figures and periodicals. Besides Girardin,
who asked to be vice-president of the provisional committee, the
sponsors included Considerant and the economist Frederic Bastiat
(the nearest thing France produced to a Manchester liberal), and
a number o f papers, including Le National, La France Libre,
UOrganisation du Travail, La Commune de Paris and Baudelaire’s
La Tribune Nationale.
This appeared to represent a fairly broad support for Proud
hon’s plans, but he had hardly published his project before wide
cleavages o f opinion emerged. La Tribune Nationale published a
statement, presumably written by Baudelaire, which showed that
its approval was at best conditional; it approved the idea of
augmenting credit, but dissociated itself from the wider implica
tions o f the scheme as Proudhon saw them; it did not wish to be
thought an enemy o f property, any more than an enemy o f labour.
More important, in an immediate sense, was the defection of
Girardin, who, after having expressed enthusiastic interest, sud
denly announced that he would not co-operate actively in found-
1 There is no record of the nature of this illness, but Proudhon mentioned it
in his letter to the Emperor on the 29 th July, 1852 , and said that it had forced
him to be absent from the assembly. He attributed it to his heart being
‘pierced’ by the people’s choice of Napoleon. Darimon, in constant touch
with him at the time, declared that he was ‘within two fingers of death.’
There is a gap in Proudhon’s correspondence between 26 th December and
2 nd February, while he resumed writing articles in the last week of January,
so that it seems as though he was seriously ill during the last few days of 1848
and the first three weeks of 1849.
THE VOICE OF THE PEOPLE