and your name will have its place in the annals of the nineteenth
century.... Such will be your fate! Act as you like, compose
lines in a printing house, teach brats, vegetate in some deep
retreat, seek out obscure and isolated villages— it is all the same
to me; you will not be able to escape your destiny.... I await
you in Paris, philosophising, platonising; you will come here
whether you like it or not.’
These were high promises indeed, but that there was no insin
cerity in the zeal that provoked them is shown by the fact that
Fallot immediately set out to find means of providing his protege
with the facilities for studying and writing. The Academy of
Besan9on administered a fund, left by the critic Jean-Baptiste
Suard, for a bursary to be given every three years to some young
man of outstanding promise from the Franche-Comte. A t first
Fallot thought o f Proudhon as a candidate, but it seemed un
likely that a manual worker lacking in scholastic background
would gain the suffrage of the academicians; Fallot therefore hit
on the idea of applying for the pension himself, calculating that,
with a hundred francs a month already assured him, he would
have enough to share with Proudhon, if only the latter could be
persuaded to come to Paris.
Fallot had no trouble in securing the Suard Pension, and his
main difficulty lay in persuading Proudhon to accept his offer of
help. M. Daniel Halevy has suggested that Proudhon, having
learnt a trade o f which he was still proud, was reluctant to aban
don it and take a step which would isolate him from the people
among whom he had been born and reared. However, it seems
likely that, while these considerations doubtless existed, they
were not the sole or even the principal reasons for Proudhon’s
attitude. It must be remembered that the field o f learning in which
Fallot moved with familiarity and confidence was still to him a
new and relatively unexplored terrain, and, at this time, he prob
ably found it difficult to believe that he, a simple and self-educated
worker, could be successful in philosophy. Failure would mean a
fruitless interruption in his chosen occupation; worse than that,
it might make him unable to help his family.
Fallot, however, was extremely persistent in propelling Proud
hon towards a decision. He recruited the persuasive powers of
their common friends, Micaud and Weiss, and continued his tire
less epistolary bombardment. ‘The will, the will, Proudhon! it is
THE HILLS OF THE JURA