theological subtleties of which, in the more direct faith of his
youth, he had been unaware. ‘Soon I believed myself called upon
to become an apologist for Christianity, and I set myself to read
the books of its enemies and its defenders. Need I tell you the
result? In the ardent furnace o f controversy, often exciting
myself with fancies, and hearing only my private thoughts, I saw
my cherished beliefs gradually fade away; I professed successively
all the heresies condemned by the Church... until in the end,
from sheer exhaustion, I halted at the last and most irrational
of all; I became a socinian.’
Ironically, it was still the defenders o f the faith who drove him
away from it, and a work by the radical Abbe Lamennais (De
l yIndifference en Matiere de Religion), loaned to him by a well-
meaning cleric who did not suspect what furies o f doubt he was
feeding, brought the final collapse of Pierre-Joseph’s religious
fervour. ‘As happens always in a desperate case, that apology was
the last blow that overthrew the edifice already so strongly shaken
by the controversies... which at that time formed my habitual
reading.’
Nevertheless, despite this breach with orthodox Christianity,
Proudhon’s interest in religion did not disappear. He never
under-estimated the part belief plays in human lives, its import
ance in the evolution o f society, or the enduring value of many
o f its insights into moral truth, and it remained an important
subject o f his study and thought even in his most bitter periods
of anti-Catholicism.
4
By 1829 social questions were beginning to rival religion for a
place in Proudhon’s thoughts, and the chance encounters o f his
trade served to strengthen these interests. He had been con
sciously a republican since 1827, but, though he never disputed
the necessity o f the July Revolution o f 1830 (and even idealised
the half-starving workers who fought that month at the Parisian
barricades), he looked with bitter cynicism on those citizens of
Besan^on who before had been violently Royalist and now
hurried to overthrow Charles X.
There is no evidence that he himself took any part in the July
rising, and the outstanding radical influence that can be de-
THE HILLS OF THE JURA