Proudhon - A Biography

THE PRISONER
departed to Paris where, after several days o f persistent effort,
she obtained an interview with Baroche, the Minister of the
Interior, and persuaded him to put an end to her husband’s
sequestration. This was done on the jth May, and she returned
to Doullens on the same day. She stayed there throughout his
remaining sojourn in the fortress, visiting him daily and assidu­
ously ministering to his needs. ‘She knows how to love— she
knows nothing but that,’ he told Langlois. ‘It is enough.’
On the 6th May Proudhon was moved into the section of the
prison inhabited by the more distinguished political prisoners.
Concerned with his own affairs during the early part of 1848, he
had made little contact with these men in the heyday o f their
celebrity. He belonged to the same club as Barbes, and a tenuous
friendliness had existed between him and Blanqui since the
Taschereau affair. But with none had he been on anything
approaching intimate terms, and the closeness imposed by
prison life enabled him to observe them with an interest that
was sharpened by unfamiliarity.
He saw, with surprise, that they seemed to detest each other,
‘living... in isolation’; Raspail carried this tendency to an
extreme, remaining ‘in retirement like a hermit.’ Barbfes seemed
‘a republican o f the other world.’ Blanqui, ‘the man of black
destiny,’ he acknowledged to be ‘endowed with a rare penetra­
tion,’ but he added that ‘his cold disposition will always betray
his great plans.’ ‘Truly,’ Proudhon remarked to Mathey, ‘I do
not know why I am among these citizens, whom I esteem
infinitely but with none of whom, except for Huber, do I find
myself in the least sympathy.’
But life at Doullens was by no means confined to observing
the habits and characters of professional revolutionaries, for
Proudhon had to devote a great deal o f anxious thought to the
future of La V oix du Peuple. 26,000 francs o f its funds had been
consumed in fines, and he now regarded the paper’s career as
virtually ended, while his own situation disgusted him so much
that he exclaimed in his diary: ‘Decidedly, I must quit political
life and day-to-day polemics.’ But the devotion of his friends
kept La V oix du People alive even when he had given up hope
for it. His pleasure at this fact was mingled with anxiety, and at
the end of April, when another issue was seized, he told Euphrasie
that the paper should be liquidated. ‘Our friends should let things