Proudhon - A Biography

EPILOGUE
spired his hostility to political centralisation. His consciousness
of tradition, which was combined with a desire to establish justice
by radical social changes, reflects the oscillation between conser­
vative living patterns and the anarchic passions of Jacquerie
which is a recurrent phenomenon o f peasant societies. His wit
was earthy and vigorous, resembling that o f another countryman
o f paradoxically mingled conservatism and radicalism, William
Cobbett, and he never wrote more eloquently than in describing
his childhood as a mountain herdboy or celebrating his rural
forebears. Even his domestic pattern was that of a peasant. His
sense o f family solidarity was immense, embracing not merely
his wife and children, but also his parents and his brothers. He
liked to rule the household in the manner o f a Judaic patriarch,
and few French farmers would disagree with his view o f the
functions of women. Lastly, he had that sense of the importance
of the earth in the moral as well as the material life o f society
which is rarely experienced intensely except by those whose con­
tact with the land has been deep and endearing.
Yet not every aspect o f Proudhon’s personality is explicable
in these terms of a rural background. It was his individual quali­
ties that brought him out o f the peasant mass, and they were not
always admirable. His arrogance and his exaggerated amourpropre,
however we may explain them by the misfortunes o f his early
life, remain unpleasing But they are counterbalanced by more
positive traits. He had both moral and physical courage, and he
was tenacious in enduring the most adverse circumstances. His
friendship was boundless, and his generosity went to and some­
times beyond the limit o f his scanty and badly managed means.
The heat o f polemical battle might lead him into verbal injustice
towards his opponents, but it was moral indignation, not personal
hatred, that inspired his wildest denunciations. In private he was
as mild and jovial as he appeared ferocious in print, and towards
rivals he respected, like Blanqui and Leroux, he knew how to be
generous. On fundamental points o f conduct he was scrupulous;
even in his greatest need he declined to earn money in ways that
he thought dishonourable, and he was always ready to defend
an unpopular cause if justice seemed to demand it.
In some moods, indeed, Proudhon presented the aspect o f a
stern puritan; he proclaimed— and practised— the virtues o f an
austere poverty, he extolled the discipline o f work, he preached