THE VOICE OF THE PEOPLEthousand francs. George Duchene received a year’s imprisonment
as manager of Le Peuple, the first of a series o f sentences which
became so habitual that, according to Herzen, Duchene on one
occasion turned to the judge after being found guilty and re
marked: ‘The bill, please!’
Proudhon appealed against the verdict and was left temporarily at
liberty. He decided to use the opportunity to seek refuge abroad,
and, having written to the President o f the Assembly asking a
month’s leave to prepare his appeal, he boarded a night train for
the Belgian frontier. In true conspiratorial style, he replaced his
plain spectacles by blue glasses and enveloped the bottom o f his
face in a voluminous muffler. Otherwise, he wore his usual
clothes, and though one of his friends had rigged him out in a
wig, he hid it in his pocket, so that, according to Darimon who
accompanied him to Lille, ‘the least practised eye could have
recognised him.’ He worried throughout the journey about how
foolish he would appear if he were arrested in flight, but the fugi
tives went unmolested.
In Belgium Proudhon assumed the name of Dupuis, and passed
himself off as a magistrate. He went to Brussels and later to Liege,
Namur and Mons, ‘seeking everywhere an assured retreat.’ A few
weeks later he^described his experiences to Maguet: ‘I wandered
over the whole of Belgium; I did not know where to stay, realising
that everywhere the police had secret instructions and every day
hearing myself spoken of in no very flattering way.’
Eventually, having spent between five and six hundred francs
of his scanty funds on this fruitless wandering and having gained
the impression that the Belgians were hostile to French journal
ists, he decided to return clandestinely to Paris. He came back on
the 9th April, and stayed for three days with Guillemin and
Mathey, his assistants at the People’s Bank, with whom he ar
ranged the dissolution of that institution. His announcement of
the termination o f the experiment appeared in Le Peuple on the
12th April. The main reason, he said, was that the trend of events
had convinced him that the Bank was too slow a means to save
the situation, and that it was necessary for those who desired a
rapid social improvement to turn their energies immediately
towards active propaganda through the Press— ‘no insurrections,
no clubs, no banquets.’ He took upon himself the burden o f the
Bank’s liquidation. ‘I asked the people for what was necessary to