THE CRITIC OF PROPERTYhon, and wished to prosecute both. The folly of the suggestion
was Proudhon’s salvation, for when Blanqui made representations
to the ministry on the absurdity of the conspiracy charge, the
whole affair was dropped without any independent proceedings
being initiated against the author of the book. Deprived even of
the publicity of persecution, the Lettre a M. Blanqui remained in
an obscurity from which it would hardly have emerged but for
Proudhon’s later celebrity.
8
‘I am trying to reply to you on the most beautiful May morning
one could hope to see,’ Proudhon wrote to Ackermann in the
spring of 1841. ‘Above my window the sun is magnificent; only
the nightingales and the roses are missing. Instead, I have curs and
sparrows, which are hardly suitable to refresh the mind and divert
the imagination.’ Paris had once again grown stale, and Proudhon
was suffering both from public indifference and from the drudging
hack work by which he contrived to live at this time (he was ghost
writing a work on criminal law for a Parisian magistrate). Yet even
out of his setbacks he drew an amazing confidence in his mission
as a necessary critic of social evils. ‘I cannot withdraw,’ he de
clared at this time. ‘I regard my task as too great and too glorious.
It only remains to make myself worthy of it.’
He was preparing to retrieve his position by yet another attack
on the question of property, and he first thought o f making his
new essay a blast against Lamennais, some of whose recent remarks
he interpreted as an attack upon himself. But this intention was
abandoned later in the summer when both of them were attacked
in an anonymous phalansterian pamphlet, bearing the grandilo
quent title: Defence of Fourierism. Reply to Messieurs Proudhon,
Lamennais, Reybaud, Louis Blanc, etc. First Memoir. Refutation of
Absolute Equality. Solution of the Problems of Pauperism, of General
Wealth and of Work by the Theory of Fourier.
Proudhon was not merely first on the list of writers singled out
for criticism; he was also the principal subject of attack, and we can
assume that he welcomed this distinction. Certainly he made the
most of the opportunity it presented by deciding to write his third
essay, not against Lamennais, but against the disciples o f Fourier.
The person he chose to address was Victor Considerant, the lead
ing heir o f Fourier’s ideas and editor o f La Phalange. The real