THE PRISONER
‘a man on his knees is as ridiculous as a man who cuts a
caper.’
He set great store, however, by his civil marriage, telling Tissot
in 1851 that it was ‘the beginning o f a serious war against the
clergy.’ A t the time of the ceremony he contented himself with
noting: ‘I have only one regret, and that is not to have made this
marriage four years ago.’ What Euphrasie thought has not been
recorded or remembered.
Later Proudhon was to insist that in his marriage he had not
been guided in the least by romantic feelings. ‘I made this marriage
with premeditation, without passion,’ he told Tissot, ‘so as to be
the father o f a family, to live a whole life, and to keep near me in
the whirlwind into which I am thrown an image o f simplicity
and maternal modesty.’ And the passion without which he began
does not seem to have found its way in with the domestic com
forts he enjoyed so sparingly in the first period of his marriage;
indeed, he was held back by his ideas of chastity— and perhaps
also by a certain fear— from establishing any too demanding
physical contact with his wife and, though he was allowed to go
out o f the prison once every week, he noted early in February:
‘In all, during six weeks o f marriage, I have slept three times with
my wife, a fact I am far from lamenting. It is not good, in my
view, always to be together.’ Ten days later, when he heard
from Euphrasie that she was pregnant and expected a child in
October, he was delighted. ‘I am captive,’ he noted, ‘but I am
very happy.’ And, for all its lack o f sentimental motivation, his
marriage was destined to be as fruitful as he had hoped.5
When Proudhon referred to himself in February, 1850, as
‘captive,’ he meant something more than his ordinary confine
ment. For in that month, as a result o f events which had taken
place since his marriage, he found himself again in serious
difficulties with the authorities, and the restrictions o f his im
prisonment were temporarily increased.
The whole winter he had been in a state of mental excitability,
and he soon grew impatient with the policy of caution on which
he had started La V oix du Peuple. The old Proudhon o f violent
words and gestures was always struggling up for air, and a remark
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