THE PRISONER6
This fortunate escape did not hold him long in check. In the
spring of 1850 a series o f bye-elections were held, and, despite
some misgivings about such a ‘phalansterian romancer,’ Proud
hon supported the candidature of the novelist Eugene Sue,
publishing on the 19th April a militant appeal on his behalf to
the middle class o f Paris. ‘Burgesses of Paris,’ he declaimed,
‘... do not disdain the alliance of the people now that it is offered
to you; tomorrow it is you who will ask for it and then you will
get the same answer as Louis-Philippe and Charles X: “ Too
late!” Vote with the people, vote with the workers, for I tell
you— and I knew it twenty-two months ago when I alone took
up their defence— the proletarians are our strength.’
Sue and several other left republicans were returned to the
Assembly, and this unexpected increase in the radical minority
caused the right-wing factions to pass the iniquitous law of the
31st May, 1850, which deprived three million members of the
working class of their franchise.
But the government did not wait for the elections before it
punished Proudhon. On the day after the publication o f his
article supporting Sue, he was sent to the fortress of Doullens,
where long-term political detainees were confined. Just before
his departure he wrote a hurried note to Euphrasie, telling her,
with Panglossian calmness: ‘A ll things considered, what has
happened to me now is still for the best; I suffer for the most
honourable o f motives, for the most just o f causes.’
A t the fortress he was immediately put into a solitary confine
ment even more rigorous than he had endured in the Conciergerie.
He was allowed no communications, no books or papers, and
there was a warder perpetually at his door. Escape, he observed,
would be impossible. ‘It is just like being in Icaria,’ he noted
jestingly in his diary.
On the 26th April his wife and brother, who had been waiting
for days to see him, were finally allowed into the prison. It was a
disastrous visit, for Proudhon surreptitiously handed Charles a
letter to the editors of La V oix du Peuple which was discovered
by the guards. The next day the Governor made a violent scene
with Proudhon in Euphrasie’s presence, and forbade her to make
any visits while the solitary confinement lasted. Accordingly, she