THE MAN OF AFFAIRSIt is a more enlightened and tenacious fanaticism than has ever
been seen before. In 1838 there was not a single socialist in
Lyons; I am assured that today there are more than 10,000...
‘All this, believe me, will end in something, and the movement
is not falling off; on the contrary, there is progress, frightening
progress. If you wish to know where you stand and how the
wind blows, do not ask the men of power... Find out the state
o f the whispered propaganda that occurs spontaneously among
the people, without leaders or catechisms or any yet established
system, and try to understand its direction and meaning; that is
the true political indicator.’
Proudhon’s association with the Mutualists not only gave him
insight into social undercurrents; it also provided his first
appreciable audience among the working class. Before this time
bis works seem to have been read mostly by people o f literary
pretensions, or by professional revolutionaries; now, through
personal contact, he was able to reach a broad and militantly
inclined section o f the new industrial proletariat. ‘I begin to get
a fair standing among the people, particularly in Lyons and the
neighbouring towns and villages for fifty miles around,’ he told
his Besangon friend Tourneux.
Years later Proudhon partly repaid the debt to his old comrades
o f Lyons by naming his own proposals for social organisation
‘Mutualism,’ and there seems little doubt that the outlines o f this
theory of economic co-operation were sketched in those inspiring
early days when he first saw the common action o f working men
on a large scale. It should be remembered that this was the only
period when Proudhon became involved— to what extent we can
only surmise— in an underground revolutionary organisation.
He did so only because the Lyons Mutualists did not share the
political romanticism which characterised the neo-Jacobin con
spirators, and it is certain that he regarded their society not as an
instrument for gaining political power, but as a means of giving
the proletariat a consciousness of the economic realities under
lying the social situation.
This attitude is reflected in his preoccupation at this period
with the idea o f an association of workers; if we can judge from
his diary, this idea almost completely superseded his old hope of
being able to effect the desirable social change by arousing the
benevolent intelligence o f the ruling class. Pierre Haubtmann has