THE EXILEinstances o f Italy and Poland, whose unification into large states
was one o f the cherished hopes o f the Jacobins in France and
their counterparts in other countries. These questions had been
touched on in War and Peace; now Proudhon was anxious to deal
with them intensively, and he began an epistolary campaign
against the nationalists which immediately involved a series of
disputes with some of his most valued friends, and brought an
estrangement from his old colleague, Charles Edmond, who was
offended by his attitude on the Polish question, and from Herzen,
whom he reproached for lending himself ‘to all these intrigues,
which represent neither political liberty nor economic right nor
social reform.’
During the late summer o f 1861 his interest in the nationalist
question led him to make extensive journeys in Belgium and the
German Rhineland, a region which seemed to provide excellent
material for his researches into one aspect of his problem, i.e.,
the existence or otherwise of so-called ‘natural frontiers.’ Early in
June he went to Ostend, Ghent and Antwerp, and later to Namur,
and in August he travelled along the Rhine to study the sig
nificance o f that disputed river in the general context of the
national question. Accompanied by Delhasse, he journeyed through
Aachen to Cologne, and thence by way o f Bonn, Coblenz and
Mainz to Frankfurt, from which he returned by steamboat down
the Rhine. As a result o f these travels he reached the conclusion
that the real culture o f the area was largely homogenous, that ‘all
the towns are alike, all the shops offer the same goods, all the men
have the same features, and all the women wear crinolines,’ and
that the celebrated ‘natural frontier’ o f the Rhine formed no
barrier to the interpenetration o f social influences.
Like most Frenchmen, he did not take well to travel; had it
not been for the gathering of facts useful to his future writing,
he would greatly have preferred to remain among ‘the shades, the
restfulness, the fresh milk o f Spa,’ rather than ‘tiring myself out
on the railways, and sleeping in great hotels, which make me
regret the old inns o f my country.’ In his discomfort and vexation,
however, he did not forget his family, and exhorted Euphrasie to
‘see that the children work, that they are occupied, that they some
times indulge in recreation, but that they are never idle. Idleness is
an abominable vice.’
It was a vice from which he himself did not suffer, for as soon