THE STRICKEN TEARShis old symptoms came back with distressing intensity. ‘I am
frightfully exhausted,’ he told Darimon. ‘My head feels as big as
a barrel; I have reached such a state of debilitation that walking
gives me sea sickness and I can no longer direct my steps.’
It was the beginning of a final period o f physical decay that was
to continue in an alarming progression for the remaining two
years of his life. But, no matter how his body might decline, his
mind remained as acute, his will as strong as ever, and during these
final two years, despite interruptions through sickness, despite
those perpetual discouragements which are the lot o f any man
who sets himself apart from the current o f the time, his literary
production was considerable both in quantity and importance,
and he still played an important part in the shaping o f events
during these critical years in the disintegration of the Napoleonic
regime.
z
Proudhon’s study o f federalism was not merely an exercise in
social theory; he also saw it as a means o f presenting a practical
policy around which could be grouped the forces opposed to the
current democratic trend towards nationalism and centralisation.
When he introduced it to his publisher, he remarked: ‘Here is a
powerful, fertile idea which comes at the right time, which, rising
up against great errors... will carry with it a great part of the
masses and, in that way, operate a revolution in ideas.’
The book was not completed without a vast mental travail.
‘For three months,’ Proudhon told Buzon at the end of January,
‘I have been sweating blood and water to give birth to a wretched
pamphlet which I fear very much you will judge unworthy to see
the light o f day.’ As had happened so often in the composition of
his earlier books, his ideas proliferated alarmingly as soon as he
came to write them down, and he began to see that the brisk,
argumentative essay he had originally proposed represented a
wrong approach to the problem. Again, in the proofs, he totally
reconstructed his book, and then, when the printing had actually
started, he stopped production to alter and enlarge, until finally
a volume o f 300 pages emerged, of whose faults the author was
well aware ‘It is a book and not a book... I tell myself that the
contents will perhaps save the form... But my brain is on fire
and my head is like a ripe pear.’