Proudhon - A Biography

EPILOGUE
nounced political activity and joined Proudhon in rejecting the
dictatorship of the proletariat— an idea borrowed by the Marxists
from Blanqui— and in welcoming the peasantry as a potentially
revolutionary group.
This heretical disciple was the man who most effectively
transmitted Proudhon’s seminal ideas to the main stream o f nine­
teenth-century radicalism, for the struggle between him and Marx
split the International into the irreconcilable factions of authori­
tarian and libertarian socialists and thus completed the breach
that began in the exchange of letters between Marx and Proudhon
in 1846. The power o f the anarchists in this conflict should not
be minimised, for, though the First International has often been
remembered as a Marxist organisation, there was in fact no time
when the combined forces of the mutualists and the Bakuninists
was not as powerful as that 'of the Marxists; often it was more
powerful.
If the Marxists have often claimed the International for their
own, there has never been any disputing the fact that in the Paris
Commune o f 1871 the influence o f Proudhon was immeasurably
greater than that o f Marx; the men of the International, Courbet
and Beslay, Longuet and Camelinat, Theisz and Debock and
Duchene, devoted themselves to its public administration, and
the very title o f Federals by which the Communards are often
known is a tribute to the influence o f Proudhon’s decentralist
doctrines. In Federation and Unity in Italy he had raised the cry of
‘Paris for the Parisians!’ and the implications of that slogan stirred
the imaginations o f the Communards, who found themselves,
like their fathers in 1848, members of a revolutionary city
threatened by the domination o f a reactionary country. Federalism
seemed a solution made to fit their predicament, and, among all
the divergences o f their opinions, the one point on which they
seemed to agree was in wishing to replace the unitary State that
had been the dream of the Jacobins by the loose union of free
communes and regions preached by the mutualists. There are
demands in the Commune’s Manifesto to the French People of
the 19th April, 1871, that might have been written by Proudhon
himself:
‘The absolute autonomy o f the Commune extended to all the
localities of France, assuring to each its integral rights and to
every Frenchman the full exercise o f his aptitudes, as a man, a