parents in their misfortune. ‘N ow you should know your trade,’
his father said to him. ‘A t eighteen I was earning my bread, and
I had not enjoyed such a long apprenticeship.’ Proudhon agreed
and forthwith abandoned his studies. As one reads between the
scanty lines o f his reminiscences, it seems to have been a reluctant
decision, for, despite the humiliations he had suffered at school,
he appears to have been devoted to his life there, with its glimpses
of a different, more spacious and more exciting world than the
grinding care in his father’s house.3
Pierre-Joseph had seen too much o f his father’s difficulties to
follow his example by becoming a farmer or a rural craftsman.
He liked agriculture, and, had Claude-Frangois been a substantial
proprietor, he would have preferred to work on his land and
succeed him in ownership. ‘Perhaps if there had been a good rural
credit institution I should have remained all my life a peasant
and a conservative,’ he remarked many years afterwards. But the
little land they had was now lost in the foreclosure o f mortgages,
and Proudhon became instead an urban artisan and a rebel.
The trade he chose was printing; towards the end o f 1827 he
became an apprentice in the house o f Bellevaux, in his own suburb
of Battant, and at Easter the following year he transferred to the
Besan^on press operated by the family of his school friend,
Antoine Gauthier. Here he was first a compositor and later a
proof reader. He learnt quickly and took a pride in the com
plexity of his work. ‘I still remember with delight,’ he wrote,
‘the great day when my composing stick became for me the
symbol and instrument o f my freedom.’
Besides, he enjoyed the comradely atmosphere o f the work
shop. A t school he had been made to feel an intruder in a middle-
class preserve; among the printers he found men of his own class,
who had undergone or at least understood the hardships he him
self had experienced, and who accepted him as an equal. From
some o f them, in whom their occupation had developed an in
tellectual curiosity uncommon among the artisan class, he gained
mental stimulation, and, with the talent for friendship which he
retained throughout his life, he was soon on the best o f terms
with most of his companions. A quarter of a century afterwards,
THE HILLS OF THE JURA