of leaving them masters o f the commercial side. I have found
more help among these business men than in the devotion o f the
patriots.’
2
Meanwhile, with at least the material success o f his most recent
book assured, Proudhon started on the tour to the Franche-
Comte towards which he had looked with much anticipatory
pleasure during his last months o f confinement. It was not
merely his own inclination that led him to leave Paris. He was
also anxious about the health of his children, and particularly
Catherine, who had a tendency towards rickets, which the doctors
thought might be cured by a stay in the country.
In his childhood haunts beside the Ognon, Proudhon could at
last relax. He talked for hours with the peasants, learnt all the
news o f the district since his last visit before the Revolution, saw
his surviving relatives, received the calls o f old friends, and
resumed the pleasures of his youth, gathering nuts on the hill
sides and catching gudgeon and crayfish ‘as big as small lobsters.’
Late in August he visited Besangon, where he found rural con
servatism more rampant than ever, and early in September he
went to stay for a short time with his former employers in Lyons.
He observed with deep interest the rapid development o f the
city during his absence, and detected the emergence of a form of
capitalist organisation which he defined by the term: Industrial
Feudalism. ‘France,’ he noted, ‘will be given up to the monopoly
o f the companies. That is the feudal regime— textiles, metals,
grains, drink, sugar, silks, all are on the way towards monopoly.’
October brought his holiday to an unhappy close, for Marcelle
fell sick with chicken pox, and Proudhon himself suffered a
severe attack o f quinsy, which weakened him so much that, even
in November, after he had returned to the capital, he found it
hard to resume work. He attributed the severity o f the illness to
the delayed effects o f prison life.
Meanwhile, his removal from Paris did not mean any lessening
of his interest in current events. He watched with disgust the in
creasingly reactionary progress o f the Bonapartist regime. ‘L. N.
goes to the bourgeoisie,’ he wrote in his diary on the 8th October.
It was steadily becoming clear to him that there was no real likeli
hood o f Bonaparte realising the revolutionary potentialities o f the
THE PALADIN OF JUSTICE