Proudhon - A Biography

THE CRITIC OF PROPERTY
our despair, for, even if your soldiers and policemen succeed in
suppressing us, you will not be able to stand up before our last
recourse. It is neither regicide, nor assassination, nor poisoning,
nor arson, nor refusal to work, nor emigration, nor insurrection,
nor suicide, it is something more terrible than all that, and more
efficacious, something which is seen but cannot be spoken of.’
By this final mysterious threat, Proudhon assured Ackermann
some months later, he meant a revival o f something like the
German Fehmgericht, the secret popular tribunals which dealt
summarily with the petty tyrants of the Middle Ages. Just how he
thought such institutions might operate in nineteenth-century
France it is difficult to imagine, and the idea has that flavour of a
boy’s game which characterises so many of the more romantic
schemes of early-nineteenth-century revolutionists. He does not
appear to have spoken of this intention except in private, and for
his readers the threat remained all the more sensational because
of its vagueness. More than anything else he had written, it
seemed to convey a direct defiance of existing law and order, an
undefined but potent incitement to the disinherited, and what he
had meant as a warning was immediately regarded by the authori­
ties as a threat, to be dealt with rigorously and swiftly.
Proudhon had returned to Paris on the ioth January, the same
day as the Warning to Proprietors appeared. On the 18th, the public
prosecutor of Besangon seized the book and instituted proceed­
ings with a precipitation that precluded any chance of interven­
tion by highly-placed well-wishers. From this haste, Proudhon
concluded that the order had not emanated from Paris, but had
been given by the officials of the Doubs, inflamed against him, he
suspected, by his enemies in the Academy. He claimed to Berg-
mann on the 23 rd January, immediately after hearing of the
seizure, that it was unexpected by him. But he seems to have
anticipated trouble of some kind, for on the 20th January, two
days before learning of the events in Besangon, he had sent a copy
o f the Warning to Proprietors to the Minister o f the Interior in
Paris. It was accompanied by a long explanatory letter that
prejudiced rather than improved his situation by a series of
criticisms describing the existing government as hypocritical,
devouring, perverted and anti-national, and recommending it to
overthrow its own legal system so as to prevent a more general
debacle. The ineffectuality of this appeal was demonstrated when,