sorbed into the urban middle class. Already in this assimilative
process, the family had divided into two branches, ‘right’ and
‘left.’ The leading Proudhon of the respectable ‘right’ was
Fran9ois-Victor, Professor of Law at Dijon, and another o f the
same line, Jean-Baptiste, served after the fall of Robespierre as a
member of the Directory for the Doubs. The ‘left’ branch re
mained for the most part peasants, artisans and small traders, with
a tendency to rebellion and obstinacy, and Frangois-Victor once
remarked o f them: ‘There was a touch of bad blood among the
Proudhons and it has passed to that side.’ It was a judgment made
without ill will and, as Pierre-Joseph later remarked, ‘out o f pure
impatience,’ nor was it resented by the ‘left’ Proudhons, in whose
everlasting litigation their distinguished cousin ‘never refused
service or advice.’
Most prominent among the ‘left’ Proudhons was Melchior, a
cousin o f Pierre-Joseph, ‘remarkable... for the great firmness of
his character’, who abandoned holy orders in 1789 to become a
leader of the Revolution in Besanson. He presided over the local
Jacobin Club, was imprisoned after the Terror, and figured as a
leading Freemason at a time when that movement was still
equated in the popular mind with revolutionary and secularist
ideas.
Pierre-Joseph often boasted of the courage, pride and rebel
liousness of his father’s family, but it was in his maternal ancestors
that he took the greater pride. His grandfather, Jean-Claude
Simonin, who bore the nickname of ‘Tournesi’ for his service
during the Hanoverian war in the regiment of Tournay, was cele
brated among his neighbours ‘for his audacity in resisting the pre
tensions of the landlords... and for his struggles with their
foresters.’ Tournesi mortally wounded one o f these foresters in a
quarrel over firewood; the victim expired repentant of his op
pressions o f the poor, recognising ‘the instrument of celestial
vengeance in the hand of Tournesi.’ Tournesi himself died, no
less abruptly, through a fall on an icy road during the winter of
1789, when he was going around preaching rebellion to his neigh
bours. ‘I place him on a level with the men o f Plutarch,’ said
Proudhon in a flight o f romantic zeal.
A distant cousin o f Pierre-Joseph assured Gustave Courbet
that the Proudhons laboured under a papal curse that made all
their affairs end in failure; whenever this old man was in Besan$on,
THE HILLS OF THE JURA