intelligence which accepted nothing without examination, but
was not excessively scrupulous about appropriating suggestions
it could use effectively.
2
The implications of the opinions on property and equality in
corporated into Proudhon’s discourse on Sunday did not escape
the Besangon academicians, and the judge, the Abbe Doney,
found danger in the ‘digressions, the ill-sounding, audacious,
temerarious, inadmissible propositions... the theories of
politics and speculative philosophy, and systems o f equality.’
But he also praised the remarkable literary qualities which the
essay displayed: ‘A style always clear, natural, flowing, rapid, full
of originality and distinguished by that warmth which is born of
an ardent love of goodness and truth.’
Such a report was clearly meant as a warning to Proudhon that
he had not been made a pensioner of the Academy in order to
dabble in the perilous territory o f radical thought, and its inten
tion was endorsed by the rest o f the academicians, who, instead of
awarding him the crown o f honour, merely gave him a bronze
medal. The winner of the award was Tissot, professor o f philos
ophy at Dijon, translator o f Kant, and later a close friend of
Proudhon.
Proudhon, who had returned to Besangon, in order to be
present at the judgment, accepted the award with defiant equanim
ity. ‘I much prefer the bronze medal which I have been awarded,’
he told Ackermann. ‘My memoir had been classed as apart and
out of line; that is worth more, you will agree, than an ex aequo.’
He remained in Besangon long enough to print De la ClUbration
du Dimanche on his own press; in November he returned to
Paris, took up lodgings in the Rue Jacob, and in a few weeks was
announcing that he had suspended his philological studies so as
to devote himself to Kant, ‘whom I count, in the intoxication of
my pride, on reforming once for all.’
But his thoughts were by no means entirely in the realm of
philosophy. Away from the isolation o f Besangon, which was
very marked in the days before the railway had penetrated into
the Jura, he began to observe the disturbed social conditions of
the time, and to relate them to his own speculations. He was
THE CRITIC OF PROPERTY