Proudhon - A Biography

THE PRISONER
to whom I owe everything.’ By the time Catherine was six
months old and beginning to cut her teeth, he wrote to Edmond,
whose exile had now led him to Egypt, that she was ‘an ideal
child.’ ‘You must see this little slip who has already taken her
place in the family under the diminutive of Kathe.’
But, while Proudhon found his family life even more satisfying
than he had hoped, its material basis was being steadily under­
mined by the conditions of his imprisonment, and in the spring
of 1851 he complained to Maurice of the evident deterioration
of his situation. ‘As you know, I have neither revenue nor
patrimony. My present means o f existence consists solely of the
product o f my publications.... Two years o f prison, the need
to help my brother, the whole or partial liquidation of various
debts, fifteen years of marriage, and a child— you will realise
how all that has reduced my fund, without counting that the
successive suppressions of Le Peuple and La V oix du Peuple have
cost me 3,000 francs of my own.’ The sole relieving circumstance
was that even his old books were still selling, and he had been
offered 3,000 francs for a work in progress which, despite a
number o f delays in completion, he expected to publish in June
or July.
8
This new work, Idee Generate de la Revolution au X IX ’ Slide,
appeared in the middle of July, 1851. More than any other of
Proudhon’s books, it represented that positive examination of
society which he had long promised as the constructive supple­
ment to Les Contradictions Economiques, and it was this aspect that
he stressed when he sent a copy to Michelet. ‘I dare to believe
that you will find in this work an attempt to realise your dearest
wishes; the ultimate freedom of man, popular initiative organised
in perpetuity, property in land assured to the peasant and freed
o f all the causes which, by fragmentation, agglomeration, rent,
share-cropping, mortgage, abuse, make it an institution which
is equivocal to begin with and in time becomes definitely anti­
republican and immoral.’
The General Idea of the Revolution begins with an appeal to the
bourgeoisie; Proudhon seeks, by recalling to this class its past
role as a revolutionary force, to bring a reconciliation between
it and the workers, and so to precipitate a revolution that would