THE EXILEindependence with the bitter remark: ‘Napoleon is the counter
revolution. What can he do? Nothing, nothing, nothing.’
He was quick to observe the connection between the war and
the progressive diminution o f freedom, demonstrated in the
arrest of Blanqui, which had immediately preceded hostilities, and
in the suspension of civil liberties in Piedmont. He also realised,
as so many have done since his day, the futility of war in a modern
society, the certainty o f loss to victor as well as vanquished.
‘Whatever comes in the chances of battle,’ he told Gouvernet
when the war was barely a month old, ‘it is clear that in three
months, even if we are victorious, we shall have had three
hundred thousand casualties, five hundred millions eaten up, as
much borrowed, and for what result?... The Austrians, we are
told, are worse off. But their dead will not bring ours back to
life; their lost money does not enter our coffers, and that is what
is so disastrous in this war which leaves the victor without any
compensation.’
The course of the war, though it was favourable to France,
did not change his views. ‘We go from victory to victory, he
said in July, ‘but far from that making me withdraw what I have
said, I hold my opinion all the more strongly, and I ask continually
for what purpose is this abominable mowing down of men.’ It
was in this way, stirred by the example of a futile conflict, rather
than in an academic spirit of cold enquiry, that Proudhon turne
from the idea of a pamphlet on nationalities, which he had been
contemplating at this time, and began instead to prepare a major
work on the problem of war and peace which was to occupy
him for many months to come.
4
The news of the treaty of Villafranca was attended by rumours
of an amnesty in France to celebrate the ‘victory,’ and this led
Proudhon to consider seriously the possibility of returning home
more quickly than he had expected. His attitude was motivated
largely by the fact that continuing exile had produced a tension
within the family that must have been disturbing to his ideas of
patriarchal dignity. After her first favourable reaction to life in
Brussels, Euphrasie had begun to pine for Paris and the Piegards;
she had told Pierre-Joseph emphatically that, unlike him, she