THE CRITIC OF PROPERTYwhen Proudhon hoped that the leaders o f his own and other
countries might be beguiled into supporting his plans o f social
reform. But the equivocal touch it gives to the final pages of the
Lettre a M. Blanqui does not detract from the fact that, on the
whole, this essay is a capable defence of the position outlined in
What is Property? and a successful justification o f its author as a
serious scholar.
7
Proudhon had braced himself for a hostile reception o f his
Lettre a M. Blanqui, and a few days after its publication he was
already describing with relish to his old school friend, Antoine
Gauthier, the animosity that seemed to threaten him. ‘On all sides
I am told that I shall not be spared; the wind blows and the sky
darkens; there will be heavy weather.’ He shook himself with a
defiant gesture against the ‘clamours of the coteries... the con
spiracy of scribbling journalists... the great beast that is called
the public’; he declared that he had his compensation in the esteem
o f ‘honest, independent men.’
But his apprehensive preparations for self-defence were patheti
cally inappropriate, for the Lettre a M. Blanqui was received with
a scantiness o f praise or blame that probably distressed its author
more than any mass attack by hostile reviewers could have done.
Apart from Blanqui himself, and some o f the Utopian socialists
(the Phalansterians in particular), few writers noticed the book,
and it was neither sold nor read so widely as its predecessor.
Even the few influential people whom Proudhon had hoped to
convert remained unmoved. Early in 1841 he had met Pierre
Leroux, the former Saint-Simonian who had now become a lead
ing Christian Socialist. Like Proudhon, Leroux had been a com
positor, and the similarity of their plebeian backgrounds, as well
as their common distaste for the extravagance o f the Phalanster
ians and of Enfantin’s Saint-Simonian hierarchy, formed a basis
for mutual esteem. But the enthusiastic Proudhon mistook friend
liness for partisanship. ‘One o f those for whom I can attest the full
and perfect adhesion to my doctrines,’ he told Tissot in April, ‘is
M. Pierre Leroux.’ But a month later, when he mentioned Leroux
to Ackermann and described him as ‘amiable and witty,’ he no
longer talked of the identity o f their views. Already had begun
that realisation o f divergent opinions which was later to make