particularly concerned with the fermenting discontent among the
unemployed Parisian workers. ‘Their revolutionary exaltation
seems to me bordering on despair,’ he told Perennes in December.
‘They know that the plan of Paris is drawn by the government in
such a way that it can suddenly occupy all the points of the town
on the first rising; they know that they cannot rise today without
being massacred in thousands. It is that powerlessness which
makes them more terrible... It is indubitable that if they were
the masters, their reign would not last a fortnight; they would
disperse of their own accord, by the effect of their disorganisation,
but they would have had the time to give a terrible lesson to the
public men.’ A few months later the rising known as the Con
spiracy of the Seasons was to collapse for the very reasons which
Proudhon had hinted— the lack of strategical power and the
failure of cohesion among the insurrectionaries.
Meanwhile his own material condition was growing steadily
worse. ‘I write to you in the bitterness o f my soul,’ he told his new
friend, Frdderic-Guillaume Bergmann, the Alsatian scholar, in
February, 1840. ‘You believed me poor last year; this year, if you
come to Paris, you will see me penniless... I shall have 250
francs to five from the 20th March next to the 20th September. I
have much to read, to write, to study, but I am oppressed, dis
mayed, and exhausted. Sometimes I stare at the Seine as I cross
over the bridges; at other times I think o f becoming a thief. The
feeling of my poverty is so great that if I came into a fortune
tomorrow, the nightmare that haunts me would not depart for
two years.’
His anxiety was all the greater, since he did not know whether
he would find a publisher for the new book he was preparing.
He had been working on it assiduously for the past month, and
his personal misery made it all the more challenging in tone and
intention. ‘This time I will not sing any gloria patri,’ he told
Bergmann. ‘It will be a veritable tocsin... This is the title of
my new book, which I would like you to keep secret: What is
Property? It is Theft, or A. Theory of Political, Civil and Industrial
Equality. I will dedicate it to the Academy of Besangon. The title
is frightening, but it will not be a reason to censure me; I am a
demonstrator, I expose facts... Pray God that I find a pub
lisher; it is perhaps the salvation of the nation.’ Then, perhaps
realising that his enthusiasm was rather far-flown, he added:
THE CRITIC OF PROPERTY