THE STRICKEN TEARS
context, as art for man’s sake. It ‘has for its object to lead us to
the knowledge o f ourselves, through the revelation o f all our
thoughts— even the most secret of them, o f all our tendencies,
all our virtues, vices and follies, and thence to contribute to the
development of our dignity, to the perfection of our being.’
Proudhon saw Courbet and his school as the painters who in
his time were most faithfully carrying out this aim, and in the
historical perspective he was right, for Courbet represented a
necessary revolution from the moribund art forms o f the past.
The Principle of A rt should therefore be regarded as a healthy
protest against the unrealities of the academicians, and a necessary
recalling of artists to the fecund and inspiring actualities o f the
life around them.
If Proudhon saw art drawing its inspiration from life, he also
saw life in its turn irradiated by art. In Les Majorats Litteraires he
had anticipated William Morris and modern industrial designers
by suggesting that industry and work could be ennobled by
their contact with art; in machinery, precision instruments,
textiles and books he saw the beginning o f a collective art in
which all people could share. He also envisaged this beneficent
influence spreading beyond industry into wide new domains
o f human living. ‘Our whole fife, our words, our actions, even
the most common o f them, all that we do, all that we are, call to
art and ask to be raised up by it.’ Proudhon saw the possibility of
art asserting a dominant influence in the rebuilding o f French
cities, and a new style emerging that would be adaptable to the age
and would respect the needs of each regional environment, for, in
art as in everything else, he was a great opponent o f centralisation,
uniformity and metropolitanism. In such a society the artist would
cease to be a man apart; reintegrated into the daily life o f his time,
he would enter the world o f labour as an equal, sharing its rights
and its common dignity.6
The projects that spawned in Proudhon’s mind and lay half
written on his desk were abruptly thrust aside in the beginning of
1864 by an event whose implications were to dominate his thought
and work for the remaining months o f his life. In UOpinion
Nationale on the 17th February there appeared a letter, signed by
a group o f working men, which became known as The Manifesto