THE CRITIC OF PROPERTYIO
Acquittal was not the sole benefit Proudhon gained from his
trial. As he observed at the time, it also conferred a celebrity
greater than any of his works themselves had brought him. The
government had considered him dangerous enough to prosecute,
and, for once, had burnt its fingers, with the result that, despite
his differences with the majority o f his fellow socialists, he was
suddenly a hero of the radicals, a man who had defied the dragon
and escaped, a writer to be watched and taken seriously. His
fame spread even into Germany, for it was in 1842 that Marx
discovered and praised his essays on property.
Among the conservatives his name, and the disturbing doc
trines he preached, began to gain notoriety. lik e Lamennais, he
became a bogy among the propertied classes and, realising that
unpopular celebrity is better than a tolerated obscurity, he
accepted his role and resolved to make the best of it.
But this increased fame did not bring an immediate change in
his daily life. He still worked at his press, which limped along by
producing catechisms at four sous apiece, and he began a philo
sophical treatise which would form a background to the theories
he had sketched in his earlier writings. ‘This time,’ he explained
to Bergmann, ‘I am going to expose the economic and universal
laws of all social organisations.’ He had still a long task of study
ahead before he could complete this work o f ‘transcendant
human economy,’ as he called it, and in his letters of 1842 we can
trace the flow o f influences in which it was being produced. He
takes up and rejects philosophers, Kant and Hegel and Comte,
and then, when he has cast aside all the material he has found
inessential in their systems, he is as likely as not to reclaim the
residue and integrate it into his own viewpoint. A t the same time,
he views his personal contribution to philosophy with a charac
teristic lack of undue modesty. ‘If I do not deceive myself,’ he
tells Fleury, ‘it should bring about a revolution in all the moral
and philosophical sciences.’
But even when he was engaged in the vast amount o f reading
and preparation necessary for this ambitious work, Proudhon’s
mind was restlessly active in many other directions. The elections
o f 1842 prompted him to print a leaflet called Avis motive-, no
copy o f it seems to have survived, but he told Tissot that he