It would be hard to imagine an artist more sympathetic to
Proudhon than Courbet. Both were of Comtois peasant stock,
and their friendship was of long standing. From 1848 onwards,
Courbet was a constant companion of Proudhon, and painted
portraits o f him, alone and en famille, as well as a frank, coarse
portrait of Euphrasie which she is said to have regarded with
displeasure. Courbet delighted in Proudhon’s conversation and
writings, shared his love for the common people, and accepted
his theories. In his painting, in so far as he chose to transmit a
message, it was the Proudhonian one o f the dignity o f labour
and the degeneracy of those who prey upon it, while his style,
breaking with the conventions of the academicians as well as
those o f the romantics and the classicists, had a robust and direct
quality not unlike that of Proudhon’s own prose. Proudhon saw
his friend as a true representative in art o f the best aspects of the
age, and defined him as a ‘critical, analytical, synthetic and
humanitarian painter’ whose work displayed other aspects of
what he himself had expressed in his theory o f ‘immanent
justice;’ as an artist who belonged to the movement that
would bring ‘the end o f capitalism and the sovereignty of the
producers.’
Courbet’s painting, La Retour de la Conference, which represented
the clergy very unfavourably, had been refused by the Salon for
this reason, and the artist, who was intending to hold an ex
hibition in London, asked Proudhon to write a brief essay to
expound the theoretical basis o f this picture. The original
suggestion was for a mere note o f four pages but, as usual, the
essay grew vastly as the process of writing stimulated in Proudhon
a whole flow o f new ideas on the general function o f art. By
August all thought of anything brief had vanished as, egged on
by the painter (‘Courbet is in anguish,’ he told Bergmann. ‘He
assassinates me with letters o f eight pages— you know how he
writes, how he wrangles!’), Proudhon enlarged his essay by rapid
stages from a leaflet to a book.
Courbet continued to bombard the writer with his wordy, ill-
spelt and ill-written letters, and in June Proudhon complained
to Chaudey: ‘I have received an enormous letter from Courbet.
I believe he went looking in the oldest grocer’s shop in Ornans
for the dirtiest, yellowest, coarsest schoolboy’s exercise book in
order to write to me. One would believe that letter belonged to
THE STRICKEN YEARS