Proudhon - A Biography

THE PRISONER
no sympathy with the government, or the interests it represented,
but he felt that the insurgents, who based their stand against Louis
Bonaparte on the defence of the constitution, were inconsistent,
since their appeal to force was itself a violation of the Constitution.
Their action had been ‘inopportune, impolitic, ill-conducted.’
But though, thanks to ‘my star and M. Carlier,’ Proudhon was
out o f reach o f direct reprisals, he nonetheless suffered from
the events o f the 13 th June. Tw o o f the friends he had left in
charge o f Le Peuple, Langlois and Pilhes, were led away by the
enthusiasm of the hour to join the insurgents and were sentenced
to long terms o f imprisonment, while Le Peuple was suspended
and the National Guards sent to close its offices vented their spite
by sacking the establishment, which made it impossible to con­
template an early resumption of publication. Finally, owing to the
influx o f prisoners, he himself was turned out of his room in
Sainte-P 61 agie and consigned to the dank mediaeval prison of
the Conciergerie.
It was a dismal exchange. A couple of months later— he re­
mained in the Conciergerie until the end of September— he told
his brother Charles: ‘The room I occupy is like a cathedral in
miniature; it receives the daylight only by means o f a window
placed high and protected by an iron grill. It bears a fair resem­
blance to a tomb.’
Yet even these conditions did not prevent him from writing, and
by the middle of July he had started on a new book. It was to be
an analysis o f the previous year’s revolution and an apology for
the part he himself had played.
The regimen o f steady work gave his life a calmness and placi­
dity which he had not known since his days as a printer in Besan-
9on, and he remarked to his brother that he felt hardly any
privation ‘but that o f not being able to walk two leagues every
evening after dinner.’ And, indeed, despite the ‘softening’ and
‘idleness’ o f which he complained, his speculations and his interest
in what was passing in the world beyond the walls remained
undiminished.
2
Proudhon’s most urgent preoccupation during the summer of
1849 remained the problem o f founding a new paper to replace
Le Peuple. A little money had been retrieved from the latter’s