call upon my black angel and defy him; I long either to be over
come or to destroy him!’
In this condition of acute depression, he returned to Besangon
and began to seek new employment. It was offered immediately
by Just Muiron, the disciple of Fourier, who invited him to
direct the Bisontin paper Ulmpartial. It was a flattering offer,
but Proudhon was still too unsure of himself to accept light
heartedly.
‘ For two years,’ he told Muiron, ‘I have run up and down the
world, studying, questioning the little people with whom I find
myself most related by my social condition; having hardly the
time to read, even less to write, hastily arranging the ideas that
occur to me through the observation and comparison of so many
subjects; I completely lack the talent to write and talk imagina
tively on all kinds o f subjects, a quality essential to a journalist.’
Muiron persisted, and in reasoning with Proudhon seems to
have suggested that the latter might be willing to disguise his own
personal opinions while editing Ulmpartial. This drew from
Proudhon a characteristic defence of bold writing. ‘ Why should
Ulm partial not be a republican journal— in its own manner, of
course?... Why should we not profess publicly an absolute
Pyrrhonism towards all ministers, past, present and future? Why
should we not invite the population to make themselves capable
of managing their own affairs and of preparing the way for a
confederation o f peoples? Let them see, through instruction,
science, moral health and patriotism, how to dispense with all
ministerial and constitutional hierarchy, while in the meantime
profiting from the little good it will do them.’
This letter is the first document in which Proudhon shows an
emphatic political attitude that, in its general outlines, anticipates
remarkably closely what he developed in later years. Eight years
before his first polemical essay, one recognises the Proudhonian
distrust of centralised authority and the desire to see the working
people learning to manage their affairs without the intervention
o f governments. These, indeed, are the seeds of those theories of
anarchism, federalism and mutualism which were Proudhon’s
contributions to the social thought of his time. It would be inter
esting to trace the filiation o f such ideas, but there are few records
of his reading at this early period, and it is therefore impossible to
decide how far they were actually evolved out of his own observa-
THE HILLS OF THE JURA