Part One

THE HILLS OF THE JURA

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H E old city o f Besanfon, whose streets o f grey stone houses
have changed little since the early days of the last century, lies
snugly held within a large U-shaped bend of the River Doubs.
Over the bridge at the base of the U is the seventeenth-century
suburb of Battant. It has always been a quarter o f working people.
N ow its grimy, scaling houses are inhabited mostly by workers in
the watch and artificial silk factories, but in the early nineteenth
century it was peopled, according to the local historian Lucien
Febvre, ‘by vine-growers, workmen and industrious, honest and
caustic petty landowners.’ In this half-rural faubourg, at 37 Rue
du Petit Battant, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon was born on the 15 th
February, 1809.
His parents, who had married early in the preceding year, were
both of Franc-Comtois peasant stock. Claude-Franpois Proudhon
came from the mountain village o f Chasnans, close to the Swiss
frontier, and his wife, Catherine Simonin, from Cordiron, a hamlet
on the Ognon, whose valley runs parallel with that o f the Doubs.
Thus, in after years, Pierre Joseph was able to boast of his ‘rustic
blood’; ‘I am pure Jurassic limestone,’ he declared.
The Proudhons, in fact, were peasants gradually becoming ab-