and also for an early sketch of his theory of the position of
women in society. As this passage gives a further hint o f his own
sexual experiences, I will quote it at length.
‘George Sand has never appeared to me other than a kind of
Mme de Stael who retains plenty of admirers among people
enamoured o f bombast and big words. The herd mistakes her
exaggerated expression and violent epithets for energy of style, her
generalisations and abstractions for depth, her balloons blown
out with wind for sublimity, her bold denials of accepted maxims
for novelty or fine observation. I could give you proofs of all that
even in the fragment which you cite... “ It is women who
preserve for us across the centuries the sublime traditions of
Christian philosophy.” That means absolutely nothing, because
it says infinitely too much. “ It is they who today save the relics of
spirituality.” The contrary is rigorously true: women in general
plunge themselves into the depths of sensualism and drag us with
them. Look at the Saint-Simonian and Fourierist women. All
that George Sand says on the equality of women is a trivial
truth, if it means nothing more than what Rousseau developed
in the last part of Emile with a marked superiority of reasoning
and eloquence; if it does mean anything more, George Sand falls
into falsehood. If one compares rights, men and women are
equal; if one compares duties, they are still equal; if one compares
sex with sex, women are inferior.’
From a literary viewpoint Proudhon’s strictures on George
Sand showed the emergence at this period of a rigorous sense of
critical values. But biographically more interesting is the bitter
ness with which he talks of the constitutional sensuality of women,
a bitterness like that of the Fathers of the Church, which one
feels can only have arisen from personal experience, from temp
tation imperfectly resisted, and, ultimately, from a desire to lay
elsewhere the responsibility for his own weakness.
From a conflict between sexual fear and republican principles
arises the general opinion on women which Proudhon expresses
at the end of the passage I have quoted. An egalitarian cannot
deny equality of rights, even to people of whom he disapproves,
and equality o f rights implies equality of duties. But neither
necessarily implies equality of intellectual or moral qualities.
Proudhon wrote so much on the comparative functions o f the
sexes that we shall often return to this abundant field of contro
THE HILLS OF THE JURA