farm near Burgille, barely twenty kilometres from Besangon, and
there they retired to live off the land.
A t Burgille, Pierre-Joseph began his working life, herding the
cows, doing chores in the house and around the holding. It was
often an arduous life for a young child, yet in later times Proudhon
looked back on those years of roaming the limestone crags and
deep valleys of the Jura with a haunting nostalgia.
‘What pleasure in those days to roll in the high grass, which I
would have liked to browse like my cattle!’ he rhapsodised fifty
years later. ‘To run with naked feet on the smooth paths and along
the hedgerowsl To sink into the fresh, deep soil as I hoed the
green maize! And often, in the hot June mornings, I would throw
off my clothes and bathe in the dew that drenched the turf.... I
could hardly distinguish “ me” from the “ non-me.” “ Me” — it was
all I could touch with my hand, all I could embrace in my vision,
all that seemed good for some purpose; “ non-me” was all that
could hurt or resist me. The idea of my personality was con
founded in my mind with that o f my well-being, and I had no
anxiety to search above for unextended and immaterial substance.’
Perhaps there is an idyllic exaggeration in these thoughts on a
childhood seen through the prism o f twenty years o f urban frus
trations. Yet the fact remains that Proudhon never ceased to gain
pleasure from returning to the fields and mountains o f the Jura,
and there is a moving simplicity in the way he talks o f the frugality
in which his family lived:
‘In my father’s house, we breakfasted on maize porridge; at
mid-day we ate potatoes; in the evening bacon soup, and that
every day o f the week. And despite the economists who praise the
English diet, we, with that vegetarian feeding, were fat and
strong. D o you know why? Because we breathed the air o f our
fields and lived from the produce o f our own cultivation.’2
During these years Proudhon had little education except what
he learnt through this pagan contact with nature— an existence
which, he confessed, led him to believe in nymphs and fairies until
be was already a grown youth.
His mother was his earliest teacher, and he remembered learn
ing to spell at the age o f three when he was still in petticoats. But,
THE HILLS OF THE JURA