demand the suppression of marriage as a remedy for adultery,
but at the same time, when approached by the Minister o f Justice
for his opinion o f the seditious nature of the book, he declared
that it was a philosophical treatise which appealed only to ‘high
intelligences and cultivated minds.’ Vivien accepted his recom
mendation, and did not prosecute. Proudhon was fortunate; only
two months later Lamennais was imprisoned for a year and fined
2,000 francs for his Le Pays et le Gouvemement, a work which in
volved no more formidable attack on the basis o f monarchist
society than the anarchist exhortations of What is Property? Yet
from this time onwards the authorities remained suspicious of
Proudhon, and when a few months later a worker named Darmes
made an attempt on the life of Louis-Philippe, there was an
ominous note in the remark of the investigator, Girod: ‘How can
one be astonished that there should be regicides, when there are
writers who take for their thesis: Property is Theft.’
Proudhon was, and remained, grateful to Blanqui for his inter
vention. Nevertheless, he did not intend to let even this friendly
critic’s strictures pass unanswered, and he now decided that,
instead of, as he had originally intended, addressing his second
memoir to the Besangon Academicians, he would write it as a
‘letter to Monsieur Blanqui.’
5
It was not entirely without misgivings that he began work on
this essay. ‘On the one hand,’ he told Bergmann, ‘the love of
knowledge beguiles me and commands me to pass on to some
thing else, making me believe that I have done enough on the
question of property; on the other hand, the feeling o f injustice
and the ardour o f my temperament draw me towards a new war.’
The polemical urge was the stronger, and he gave only a brief
thought to abandoning his further attacks upon the orthodox
theories o f property.
This time, he set to work with every intention o f persuading his
readers by sympathetic argument rather than by violent denuncia
tion. ‘Henceforward, instead of dipping my arrows in vinegar, I
will dip them in oil,’ he told Ackermann. ‘The wound will smart
less, but it will be as surely mortal.’ Yet the personal discontent
which had nurtured his rage in What is Property? had not abated,
THE CRITIC OF PROPERTY