Proudhon - A Biography

THE CRITIC OF PROPERTY
on the 25 th January, the Paris police searched his rooms in the
Rue Jacob and made domiciliary visits to a number o f his friends.
The Besangon court, meeting on the 22nd January, remanded
the case until the 3rd February, and Proudhon prepared to leave
Paris in time to appear on that date. The prosecutors had origin­
ally brought nine charges o f crimes against public security, under
which he would have been liable to five years’ imprisonment and
a fine o f 10,000 francs. ‘I will do a month in prison and pay 100
francs fine,’ he decided. ‘But I prefer five years of exile in Laus­
anne, Neufchatel or Geneva to a year o f captivity.’ The court,
however, was more lenient, and when he eventually appeared
only four charges were allowed to stand: 1, Attacking Property;
2, Troubling the public peace by exciting mistrust or hatred of
the citizens against one or more persons; 3, Exciting hatred and
mistrust against the King’s Government; 4, Outrage to the
Catholic religion. All these charges were based on laws which no
longer operate in France. A condemnation might still involve
five years’ imprisonment and a fine of 6,000 francs, while the
chance of leniency by the judges was lessened owing to a message
from the Ministry of the Interior, which arrived as a kind of back­
handed answer to Proudhon’s letter and asked for the severest
possible punishment in the event of the defendant being found
guilty by the jury. Unexpectedly, however, he gained an acquittal
because the jury found his ideas hard to follow and refused to risk
a condemnation on what they did not understand.
He was singularly fortunate in this escape. The courts of that
period, when the recurrent insurrections of the 1830’s were still
fresh in men’s minds, acted with severity in political cases, and
juries in towns under clerical influence, like Besangon, were
always liable, when in doubt, to throw their support on the side
of the government. Even Proudhon’s defence, which, to judge
from the account he printed immediately afterwards, certainly
seems sufficiently technical to befog the average Comtois mer­
chant, might have annoyed the jurors just as easily as it impressed
them. He appears to have encountered one of those rare juries
who had a sufficiently strong sense of justice to take literally their
duty to indicate guilt only when it was proved, in the ancient
phrase, beyond the peradventure o f a doubt.