THE CRITIC OF PROPERTY
successful outcome of this dispute made him look upon the future
with a renewed confidence.
He even confided to Bergmann his hopes that the second essay
on property would have the ‘happiest effect,’ not only on the
people, but also on the authorities. ‘I have such confidence in the
certitude o f my principles and the rightness o f my intentions that
I do not despair of obtaining one day some mission or other from
those in power, servatis servandus, of course.’ The thought of gain
ing official patronage certainly seems strange in a newly declared
anarchist. But there was a curious vein o f Machiavellianism in
Proudhon’s character which often made him think of using people
of influence for furthering his own theories. Since his diplomacy
was o f a rather obvious kind, carried on with the bravado and
whispered asides o f a stage villain, and since he always regarded
himself as having a monopoly of cunning, it was not surprising
that in such manoeuvres he was almost invariably and often comi
cally unsuccessful.6
The Lettre a M. Blanqui, which appeared in April, 1841, did in
fact moderate the bitterness that had characterised What is Pro
perty? yet there was little diminution in the actual vigour of
Proudhon’s style, and, though the men with whom he disputed have
mostly dwindled into the obscurity of the past, his polemics still
make excellent reading. For if he shows less rankling anger than
before, he does not cease to ridicule his opponents— the phalan-
sterians, whose system he stigmatises as ‘stupid and infamous,’
the orthodox economists (‘insipid commentators’ who are ‘de
prived o f reason and common sense’), and above all, Lamennais,
who comes in for the strongest attack o f all, as an ‘anti-philo
sophical’ mediocrity, the ‘tool o f a quasi-radical party.’ Finally,
property itself is ‘devouring and cannibalistic,’ and in order to live,
the proprietor ‘must ravish the work of others, must kill the
worker’; ‘ruse, violence and usury’ are the means employed for
this despoilment.
Apart from these attacks, the Lettre a M. Blanqui is mostly an
extended gloss on Proudhon’s first essay, and there is little in it
really new, except for an historical survey which the author himself
has best summarised in a letter to Ackermann. ‘I have developed