When I say I see, it is necessary to understand one another. I do
not draw back from any interview, that is all... When it happens,
which is very rarely, that I meet my former colleague,1 it is
because he himself has asked me to go and see him or because I
have need o f an audience. And if you wish to know more about
this, I will tell you that the object o f these visits, when it is not the
desire o f the Prince, who sometimes likes to listen to me, is a
request for a liberation or something similar... Need I tell you
that I have yet to solicit anything for myself?...
‘Those who know me understand well that, in my opinion,
Empire, Legitimacy, quasi-Legitimacy, Jacobinism, moderate Re
public, Church, University, magistrates and military, are all the
same thing. They are always the negation o f freedom and justice,
they are always the enemy... I regard myself as the most com
plete expression of the Revolution, crushed, betrayed, sold, not
only by the 2nd December, but by all its rivals and competitors.
In order to uphold this revolution, I have sacrificed everything,
sometimes even my self-respect; I have accepted calumny itself.’
There is a dignity in these last words which disposes o f the
possibility that Proudhon was trying to offer a specious justifica
tion for equivocal conduct. However mistaken he may have been
in imagining that he could use the Bonapartes, Emperor or Prince,
to further his radical ideals, it is certain that he calculated to gain
no personal advantage. His refusal o f Pereire’s inderruvtty is alone
proof o f this. But, if we cannot question the integrity underlying
his conduct towards the members o f the ruling dynasty, we are
not committed to admitting the wisdom o f his relations with
them, which sometimes lessened his effectiveness as a writer by
making him unnecessarily suspect.
8
1855 had begun, from a financial point o f view, so promisingly
that Proudhon even imagined the possibility o f liquidating
his debts before it ended. But as the year continued, his earnings
were considerably less than he had hoped, while he was obliged
to accept the responsibility for a loan o f 2,000 francs which he
raised to save his improvident brother Charles from bankruptcy.
He complained bitterly to Maurice o f the ‘double fetters’ he had
1 Jerome Bonaparte sat with Proudhon in the Constituent Assembly of 1848.
THE PALADIN OF JUSTICE