possessed, and eventually, on the ioth January, 1854, there came
through various intermediaries at the Tuileries ‘the great, in
credible news’ that the review had been authorised. In a more
than usually grandiose moment, Proudhon declared to the
Italian federalist, Joseph Ferrari, that the appearance o f the Revue
du Peuple would be ‘a still more considerable event than the 2nd
December.’ But his premature confidence went unjustified. The
review was still forbidden.
Yet there is at least a possibility that some serious intention of
authorising it may have existed; by the beginning of 1854 the
Bonapartist regime had struck a period of crisis and, had not the
Crimean War intervened, Louis Napoleon might well have been
forced to mitigate the dictatorship. But the war came, and was
accepted gratefully by the Emperor, both as an opportunity to
revive the military glory o f the Bonapartes and as a means of
muffling discontent at home. The thought of concessions to
democracy was abandoned, for some years at least, and La Revue
du Peuple went with the rest.
3
This tale o f misplaced hopes gives the keynote to Proudhon’s
whole life during the years following his release from Sainte-
Pelagie. From the end o f 1852 the political climate of France
became steadily more oppressive and fear entered deeply into
public life; an increasing ostracism o f writers like Proudhon was
the result. The atmosphere was not unlike that which pervaded
Italy during the earlier and milder years o f the Fascist regime, and
it was unsafe, above all it was bad for careers and for business,
to associate too openly with a man who, in the absence of so many
radicals in exile or prison, was one o f the few leading men of the
Revolution still speaking with an irrepressibly independent voice.
It was during the autumn o f 1852 that Proudhon began to
realise fully the situation confronting him. On the 18th October
he exclaimed bitterly to Edmond: ‘For a moment I hoped to find
a refuge in some honourably commercial employment; that hope
is now destroyed. I am repulsed everywhere as if I had the plague;
they would think themselves accursed if they had anything in
common with me. I am almost convinced that I would not find
a post at 1,200 francs in a commercial house in Paris, Lyons or
anywhere else. I am therefore thrown back violently into the
THE PALADIN OF JUSTICE