Proudhon - A Biography

THE EXILE
Conciergerie and five months o f exile in Belgium,’ he remarked
sardonically, ‘the condemnation pronounced against me by the
tribunal o f the Seine will have dealt its blow and attained its end.’
There was a more direct cry o f weariness in the letter he wrote
to Langlois at the same time. ‘It is now that I feel the weight o f
my poverty, for if I enjoyed only 3,000 francs o f clear income,
I vow to you that the public would hear hardly anything of me.
I would go to live peacefully in Zurich, Geneva, Turin or Nice,
and would not even dream o f returning to my country on the
expiration o f my sentence. But I must work, I must carry on!
And I have no other trade than that which has cost me so much
anger and so much hatred, five trials and two condemnations!’
In his continuing distress his French publishers were the only
people he could ask for assistance. ‘I do not despair o f re­
establishing myself,’ he told them in a letter of appeal. ‘For me it
is only a question of time. But time is money, say the English.’
And he asked modestly for an advance o f 250 francs. But this
covered only a fraction o f his expenses in that season o f distress,
and shortly he was forced to write to them again, asking in
desperate terms for a final loan o f a thousand francs. ‘I have
numerous doctors’ visits to pay for, I need a little wine; finally,
imagine a household attacked on all sides, and you will see that
with an extra thousand we shall not be in luxury. I am ashamed,
gentlemen, to express myself in such lamentable terms... but
I am tired; I begin to find that I have more than my share of
suffering.’
Garniers agreed to make the loan, and it was such acts of
fellowship that helped to support Proudhon through this un­
fortunate winter and to give him a surprising renewal o f confi­
dence in the future. ‘Though I do not hope to convert everybody
in the twinkling of an eye,’ he told Mathey shortly afterwards,
‘I feel more than ever hopeful of emerging from my difficulties
and o f seriously ameliorating my position.’
On the future o f mankind as well he looked at this time with
a long view horizoned by eventual optimism, for he told
Michelet that the world was entering a new phase o f the integral
revolution o f ideas and hearts which both o f them were striving
to achieve. The age, from Voltaire to 1848, when France had been
the initiator, was past; now the Revolution was becoming inter­
nationalised among its devotees in every land.