Proudhon - A Biography

THE MAN OF AFFAIRS
the clergy seemed all powerful, and he remarked with icono­
clastic sarcasm: ‘I have seen the finest processions in the world;
long lines of little boys and girls crowned with roses; one might
liken them to crowds of cherubim.’
Yet he soon found that even in Lyons reaction was not so
powerful as it had first appeared. The poverty of the factory
workers was already producing mass discontent, and Proudhon’s
arrival in 1843 coincided with a considerable resurgence of
radical feeling. Flora Tristan, the half-Peruvian feminist-socialist
who claimed descent from Montezuma, was there; the Icarian
Communist, Etienne Cabet, visited the city and gained many
adherents; both the Phalansterians and the Saint-Simonians were
active. But the largest group, with which Proudhon soon made
contact, was the secret society o f the Mutualists, led by working
men who had taken active parts in the risings of 1831 and 1834,
such as the weavers Joseph Benoit and Greppo. The members of
this society seem in some degree to have shared Proudhon’s ideas
of the primacy of economic and social change, in contradiction
to the Jacobinical exaltation of the political revolution, and he
saw in them a vindication of his idea that out of the people could
arise the movement that would reform society.
Through these new friends Proudhon became aware of the
tendency towards revolt that was now arising among the French
people, a tendency accompanied by none of the violent manifesta­
tions frequent in the preceding decades, but perhaps for that
reason more widely sptead. There is a very illuminating passage
in a letter written to Maurice in the summer of 1844, which not
merely describes with considerable accuracy the situation in the
French industrial cities, but also reveals the extent to which
Proudhon himself entered into the new working-class movement.
‘While the head of society is going one way, the people go
another.. .T h ey begin to doubt everything that is traditional,
which means that they are turning their backs on monarchical
and religious ideas. One might say that it is only now that the
spirit o f ’93 begins to infiltrate the people...
‘When a thing has to happen, everything that is done to hinder
it merely helps it. Associations have been forbidden by law;
what is the result? Propaganda is carried out in broad daylight,
and the members of secret societies have become the travelling
salesmen of a reform which hopes to embrace the world...