Part Three
THE MAN OF AFFAIRS
iD
URING the 1840’s, Lyons, more than any other city, was
the centre of the French industrial revolution. Under the
July monarchy, the financial and industrial magnates replaced the
landed nobility of the Old Regime and the military lords o f the
Napoleonic interlude, and the manufacturing cities on which they
depended began to expand and change in character. In none did
this process go on more rapidly than in Lyons, and when Proud
hon went there in 1843, ** had all the pullulating life and emergent
ugliness of the heedless, unplanned transition from a centre of
hand-weaving to a complex of large-scale mechanical industry.
The firm of Gauthier Freres was one of the many new enter
prises that flourished under these conditions. It carried goods
and provided a tug-boat service on the inland waterways between
Strasbourg, Bale and Lyons, and traded in coal from the Ruhr
and Lorraine. Its head office was on the Quai Sainte-Marie-des-
Chaines, in the old St. Paul’s district of Lyons, and there Proud
hon lived and worked at his secretarial and book-keeping tasks,
except when he travelled on business to Chalon or Besangon,
Mulhouse or Colmar. His employers soon learnt that their
confidence in his capabilities had been justified, and they en