bed, his house, his gold, there you have, whatever others may say,
the first and only motive of these great reformers.” Y ou see the
tone of it. The rest is in the same vein. It is a mixture o f insults
and platitudes, a series o f interpretations as stupid as they are
spiteful.’
As we have seen, Proudhon was already in a greatly embittered
state of mind towards the hierarchy, which he regarded as largely
responsible for the present condition o f France and also for his
own publishing difficulties. De Mirecourt’s attack was the last
provocation needed to propel him into a full-scale attack on
Catholicism. His anger was directed against the Church even more
than against de Mirecourt himself, and he had at least one good
reason for this attitude. De Mirecourt had requested information
concerning him from the Archbishop o f Besangon, Cardinal
Mathieu. Without troubling to check the antecedents o f his cor
respondent, Mathieu had replied by a personal letter which
expatiated on the lack o f piety in Proudhon’s upbringing and
which de Mirecourt printed at the beginning of his ‘biography.’
As Mathieu never repudiated de Mirecourt, Proudhon naturally
assumed that he supported him, and saw the hand o f the Church
in the whole affair; since he could not let the attack go unanswered,
it was to Catholicism, represented in the person o f the Cardinal,
that he decided to reply.
He proposed to write quickly a short book of a hundred and
fifty pages which would ‘pose clearly the question of the Church.’
It eventually grew into his most massive work, and as it expanded,
the date o f its completion was constantly postponed. Nearly
three years were in fact to elapse before this manifesto o f defence
and defiance, transfigured into one o f the noblest works o f social
thought o f the nineteenth century, finally emerged in the three
great volumes of D e Da Justice dans la Revolution et dans I’Eglise.
But replying nobly to an ignoble adversary did not wholly
satisfy Proudhon’s appetite for activity during 1855. He was still
responsive to any opportunity— or imagined opportunity— of
putting into practice his economic theories, and in the summer
this propensity took a somewhat fantastic turn.
In May the Universal Exhibition opened in Paris, and the idea
came to Proudhon that here might be an institution that could be
adapted to the purposes o f the economic revolution. The exhibi
tion should be continued in perpetuity, with the Palace of In
THE PALADIN OF JUSTICE*97