Proudhon - A Biography

THE PRISONER
apartment in the Rue de la Fontaine. Back in Sainte-Pelagie,
Proudhon also began work on a treatise on ‘the philosophy of
progress/ and dabbled with ‘a crowd o f projects, ideas and
systems’ that haunted his fertile brain. But the latter part o f his
imprisonment was not wholly dominated by these literary
schemes, for a growing number o f interesting visitors, and a
voluminous correspondence, kept him closely in touch with
current events and ideas.
Some of the visitors travelled from his native Franche-Comte,
and they ranged from Gustave Courbet to that unnamed but
distinguished ecclesiastic of whom he remarked to Euphrasie:
‘I do not know why all these priests seek me out; I still do them
all the harm I can.’
A much more disconcerting visitor was George Sand, who, in
February, 1852, embarrassed Proudhon by calling on him and
Marc Dufraisse. He was surprised to realise that this detested
personification of feminist romanticism was not lacking in good
qualities, and there is a certain compassion in the way he described
her in his diary: ‘A long, cold, tired face; a woman of great good
sense, great good heart and little passion, her speech curt, clear,
positive and simple. G. Sand has burnt the candle at both ends,
rather, I believe, from fancy than from sensuality or passion....
She is too mannish, too poised, too sedate.... Nothing in her,
nothing, nothing o f the feminine!’ Yet these impressions seem
to have been too fleeting to soften Proudhon’s hostile estimate
o f George Sand’s performance and influence, and in De la Justice
a few years later he was to judge her work with extreme harshness.
For George Sand, on the other hand, it must be said that, like
her fellow bluestocking, Madame d’Agoult, she did not allow
Proudhon’s severe judgments regarding herself to cloud her
perception o f his good qualities. In 1849 she had seen a hope in
the People’s Bank and had praised Proudhon as ‘a useful and
vigorous champion o f democracy.’ Later, in 1852, when Mazzini
was vilifying him, she wrote in protest to the Italian nationalist.
Proudhon, she declared, was not only ‘very militant, passionate
and incisive,’ but he was also a ‘learned and clever economist.’
The most welcome of all the visitors who came during the
latter days o f 1851, and the most prized o f Proudhon’s new
friends, was Jules Michelet. If Proudhon never revised his views
on George Sand, he profoundly changed his attitude towards