Proudhon - A Biography

EPILOGUE
citizen and a labourer. The autonomy of the Commune will have
for its limits only the equal autonomy o f all other communes
adhering to the contract; their associations must assure the liberty
o f France.’
The movement which had grown under Proudhon’s influence
came to an end with the defeat of the Commune and the subse­
quent suppression o f the International, and in its pure form
mutualism rarely appears in subsequent social history. Proudhon-
ism, however, is almost by definition a fluid doctrine. Proudhon
himself constantly altered the expression of his ideas to suit
changing circumstances or to take into account what seemed to
him a more accurate view o f the truth. ‘I distrust an author who
pretends to be consistent with himself after an interval o f twenty-
five years,’ he declared, and, though he clung always to his main
general doctrines, he almost certainly would not have expected
his ideas to survive him unchanged. The rather static attitude
which his immediate followers adopted was perhaps less true to
his own progressive spirit than the tendency towards a developing
body o f thought shown by his later heirs.
After the Commune, his ideas emerged through the transform­
ing media o f Bakuninism and Kropotkinist anarchism. This is
not the place to tell the chequered story o f the anarchist move­
ment from Proudhon’s death down to our own day. It is a long
and complex history, sometimes almost incredibly fantastic, some­
times disturbing, sometimes pathetic, and often inspiring in the
idealism o f its thinkers and the dedication o f its saints. It is suffi­
cient perhaps to say that, though in many respects the anarchists
departed— often with tragic results— from Proudhon’s teachings,
they always preserved his essential doctrines and fought for the
destruction o f the State and the reunion o f humanity in a great
federation of federations in which the rights and freedom of every
region and every man would be guaranteed by mutual accord.
For many years they were the most active working-class movement
in France and Italy, while in Spain, through all the vicissitudes of
civil war and repression, they have remained the most tenacious
and most numerous o f the radical groups.
Through anarchism, the Proudhonian influence was transmitted
to the movement o f revolutionary syndicalism which dominated
French trade unionism well into the present century. Syndicalism
assumed its militant form through the extreme disillusionment of