THE EXILE8
On the 28th October, Proudhon’s manuscript of La Guerre et
la Paix was completed and sent to Garniers. A month afterwards
he still had no news from them, and began to fear that they had
submitted his book to the police. When Garniers eventually
replied, it was with a blank rejection. Their lawyers had warned
them that War and Peace was a dangerous book, and not even
Proudhon’s offer to make alterations would induce them to risk
a repetition o f the trouble they had experienced through printing
Justice.
There followed several exasperating months o f hunting for a
new publisher. One firm agreed to produce the book, but refused
to use its name. A ‘man o f straw’ was found, and then with
drew. ‘What a bitch o f an existence!’ Proudhon wailed despair
ingly. ‘I definitely no longer wish to write anything but A.B.C.s
and schoolbooks.’ Finally, Dentu accepted War and Peace, and it
appeared on the 21st May, 1861.
The basic argument o f this book is that war has in the past
played its part as a factor in social evolution, but that the more
society advances, the farther war recedes from its original pur
pose and the more abuses enter its conduct. War has in fact
become unreformable; the time has come for it to be superseded,
and for the urges that underlie it to be transformed in a positive
direction. ‘ The end of militarism is the mission o f the nineteenth
century, under pain of indefinite decadence.’
This simplified account gives only a meagre view o f the com
plex and at times almost perverse arguments o f this large and
passionate book. There are elements in the phenomenon of war
which could not fail to appeal to Proudhon, with his conception
o f life based on an unending process of change and conflict, and
much o f the earlier part of War and Peace reads like a panegyric
in Homeric vein on the glorious past o f battles. War, he claims,
can bring out the virtues of men; it is an expression of that ‘right
o f strength’ which cannot be disregarded among the elements of
human progress; in the past it produced the conception of right
and engendered society itself out of the need for mutual protec
tion. A t times the passion for stating both sides of an argument
leads Proudhon into talking like a frenzied devotee of militarism,
but even here, as he states the affirmative side o f war, there are