Proudhon - A Biography

THE CRITIC OF PROPERTY
missioned, and by the end of the summer Proudhon was writing
to ask Maurice for a loan of thirty francs; it was his last recourse.
Yet he did not allow poverty to interfere with his writing, and
found time to prepare his first published article, on the letters of
the alphabet, which was published in U Instruction Publique. ‘I
have just crossed the Rubicon,’ he announced when it appeared.
Later in 1839 a new opportunity to show the development of
his ideas occurred when the Besangon Academy announced a
competition for an essay on ‘the utility o f the celebration of
Sunday in regard to hygiene, morality, and the relationship of
the family and the city.’ For a month he worked on his disserta­
tion, until he was ill with exhaustion, but the completion o f the
essay gave him new confidence, and he saw it as the beginning of
a literary career. ‘If my first work gains some success,’ he re­
marked, ‘I shall soon be in the position o f publishing something
every six months. It is necessary to strike hard and quickly.’
D e la Celebration du Dimanche, as his essay was called, presented
an argument in which, as Sainte-Beuve justly observed, the sub­
ject was ‘hardly more than a pretext for introducing his system
o f ideas, still obscure and half-concealed.’ Proudhon approved of
the institution o f a day of rest, and much of his essay was devoted
to an idyllic description of the peaceful rural life in which such a
custom found its appropriate place. It was the nostalgic dream of
a paysan manque, of the man who had already the exile’s eye for
the beauties o f the pastoral existence from which he was becom­
ing irrevocably detached.
But in Moses, the institutor of such a beneficial custom,
Proudhon saw not merely the religious leader, but also the father
of social reform. He examined the patriarch’s teachings, and from
his own philological speculations drew the explosive contention
that the meaning of the commandment, Lo thignob, is not ‘Thou
shalt not steal,’ but ‘Thou shalt not lay anything aside for thyself.’
He added to this a declaration o f the absolute character o f moral
law, and a categorical assertion that ‘equality of conditions is...
the aim o f society.’ Finally, he declared that ‘Property is the last of
the false gods.’ He talked against ‘cumulative proprietors,’ he
attacked the ‘exploiters of the proletariat,’ and he ended on the
challenging note o f an imaginary dialogue in which the poor cry
out in defiance: ‘Proprietors, defend yourselves!’
In this essay we find already formed much of the essential