Proudhon - A Biography

THE STRICKEN YEARS
‘Frankly, you make me ashamed of myself,’ he protested, ‘and if
you wish us to understand one another, never lose sight, in writing
to me, of the fact that you are addressing an old countryman,
endowed with an ingenious mind, who has studied a little, who
has fairly well rid himself of silliness, but in whom study has only
increased the faults o f his nature and rendered his rusticity all
the more prominent.’
Such an admission o f his failings reminds one that Proudhon’s
apparent pride was largely due to a perpetual inner recognition
o f his deficiencies. The boy who had rebuffed Weiss in Besangon,
the mature man who had so rudely put aside the advances of
Madame d’Agoult and who in later life looked so sourly on the
elegances o f Paris and Spa, are all acknowledged in this letter
to Buzon; the only compromise he makes is to attribute entirely
to a rustic upbringing the blemishes which were as much the
result of privations that roughened his arrogance into a for­
bidding defence for an amiable, generous and even gentle nature.
For, though he felt his own misfortunes sharply, Proudhon
was not oblivious to the predicaments o f others, even outside his
family circle. Towards the end o f 1863, when he was burdened by
sickness and financial anxiety and harassed by a continuing
governmental hostility (the ministry had just intimated to the
scholastic profession that he was ‘a dangerous writer’) he still
found time to raise a subscription for his rival Pierre Leroux, to
provide for him in a helpless old age.
Nor was he oblivious to the moral difficulties of his friends,
and when Penet gave way to despair, Proudhon wrote him a
reproachful letter in which he revealed the philosophy that,
despite ill fortune, kept him working and fighting with the same
devotion, if not the same vigour, as had inspired him from the
day when, as a young man, he first began his struggle for Justice.
‘It is now, however little you may realise it,’ he exhorted Penet,
‘that you must begin to live the true life of a man and speak to
yourself in the language o f one who sums up his last wishes and
writes his testament. Would you be one o f those people for whom
the existence o f man has only one end: to produce, acquire and
enjoy? Neither one nor the other. We must work because that
is our law, because it is on that condition that we learn, that we
fortify and discipline ourselves and assure our existence and that
o f our dependants. But that is not our end; I do not refer to our