situation produced by the coup d’ltat, and in disillusionment
Proudhon’s attitude returned rapidly to the bitterness of 1849
and 1850.
At the same time, his distrust of the existing democratic groups
was demonstrated in his complicated hesitations over the elections
to the legislative assembly during the autumn of 1852. When he
was asked by Beslay to stand in the democratic-socialist interest,
he first put forward the objection that, now deputies were no
longer paid, he could not afford to reduce his remunerative work
in order to attend to parliamentary duties. Eventually he agreed
to accept nomination only on the condition that he should not
stand in the way of a candidate who ‘might gather more votes,
excite less opposition and give fewer pretexts to the reaction,’
and when the banker Goudchaux offered to stand in support of
a relatively radical programme, Proudhon withdrew with alacrity.
His evident disinclination to become a deputy was undoubtedly
connected with his reinforced distrust o f universal suffrage after
it had been used with such resounding emphasis to assist the
triumph of reaction in the plebiscite confirming Louis Napoleon
in power; to be chosen by the voters who had elevated this
third-rate Caesar would have been a dubious honour indeed.
Proudhon’s faith in the people, in fact, fell at this time to its
lowest level. ‘The vile multitude,’ ‘the rabble,’ no epithet was
too severe for the classes in whom he had seen the great hope of
humanity. ‘Whenever the masses have done anything tolerably
good,’ he complained, ‘they have always been driven or pulled,
openly or secretly, by master minds formed from among them
selves, and every time the people have been left to themselves
they have only been able to make society take a backward step.’
Yet even now he had not entirely lost hope that they might be
brought back to positive action. ‘We affirm the possibility of
educating the people,’ he noted during October. ‘The revolution
always advances, making use of each individual, o f each interest,
o f each tongue.’
It was to carry on this education o f the people that Proudhon
became anxious at this time to re-enter the field o f polemical
journalism, as the editor o f a bi-monthly devoted to a spontaneous
and genuinely revolutionary way of thought, and liberated from
the narrowness o f the socialist sects who, ‘excessively jealous of
their dogmas and formulae, will only admit, like the theologians,
THE PALADIN OF JUSTICE