Proudhon - A Biography

THE STRICKEN YEARS
o f the Sixty and which was to constitute a historic document in
the development o f the French socialist movement.
As we have seen already, the early sixties was a time of rising
activity among the French workers, who had been relatively
quiescent since the June days of 1848, and the influence of
Proudhon’s mutualist and federalist ideas penetrated so widely
into the nascent movement that French historians are agreed that
he, even more than Blanqui, and certainly far more than Marx,
was the most influential socialist theoretician of the decade.
During 1863 the revival began to assume concrete forms; pro­
ductive co-operatives appeared in considerable numbers, and
parallel with them emerged Societies o f Credit which acted as
savings banks and, in a modified way, utilised some o f the
Proudhonian theories o f mutual banking.
Apart from these manifestations of social mutualism, the new
movement also began to express itself in a political direction,
through the desire of the workers to be represented in the legis­
lature, not by the old bourgeois parties, but by spokesmen who
would enter parliament from the bench or the factory and return
to labour among their fellows when their term was done.
This recognition o f differing class interests, o f the ‘two nations’
within an industrial world which Disraeli had observed many
years before in England, was an extension of the distinction
between bourgeois and proletarian approaches which Proudhon
himself had made in his speech to the National Assembly in
July, 1848, and the fraction o f the workers who put forward
these claims were in many ways influenced by his ideas. They
were federalist and mutualist, they looked to a reconciliation of
social differences in a final classless anarchy, but they differed
from Proudhon in rejecting abstention from parliamentary action,
and in the elections of x 863 three candidates stood in the working-
class interest and gained minuscule votes.
They were not deterred by this slight success, and it was before
the supplementary elections of 1864 that this small group prepared
and circulated The Manifesto o f the Sixty. With the exception of
a schoolmaster named Bibal, they were all working men; some
had taken part in the commission of workers’ delegates sent to
the Universal Exhibition in London two years before, and others
became members o f the International Workingmen’s Association
— The First International— which arose as a long-term product