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then he was accused of callousness and even of having invited disaster. They say the Chinese Emperor pulls the Court stargazer's pigtail every year when the latter announces that the days are beginning to draw in.
The genius of Proudhon is actually antipathetic to the rhetorical French; his language is offensive to them. The Revolution developed its own special puritanism, narrow and intolerant, its own obligatory jargon; and patriots reject everything that is not written in the official form, just as the Russian judges do. Thei_r criticism stops short a t their symbolic books, such as the Contrat Social and Declaration of the Rights of Man. Being men of faith, they hate analysis and doubt; being men of conspiracy, they do everything in common and turn everything into a party question. An independent mind is hateful to them as a disturber of discipline and they dislike original ideas even in the past. Louis Blanc is almost vexed by the eccentric genius of Montaigne. It i s upon this Gallic feeling, which seeks to subject individuality to the herd, that their partiality for equalising, for the uniformity of military formation, for centralisation-that is, for despotismis based.
The blasphemy of the French and their sweeping judgments, are more due to naughtiness, love of mischief, the pleasure of teasing, than the need for analysis, than the scepticism that sucks the soul. The Frenchman has an endless number of little prejudices, minute religions, and these he will defend with the fire of a Don Quixote and the obduracy of a raskolnik.s That is why they cannot forgive Montaigne or Proudhon for their freethinking ami lack of reverence for generally accepted idols. Like the Petersburg censorship, they permit a jest at a titular councillor, but you must not touch a privy councillor. In 1 850
Girardin printed in the Presse a bold, new idea, that the bases of right are not eternal but vary )Vith the development of history.
What an uproar this article excited ! The campaign of abuse, of cries of horror, of charges of immorality, promoted by the Gazette de France was kept up for months.
To assist in re-establishing such an organ as the Peuple was worth a sacrifice; I wrote to Sazonov and Chojecki that I was ready to supply the guarantee fund.
Until then I had seen very little of Proudhon ; I had met him twice at the lodgings of Bakunin, with whom he was very intimate. Bakunin was living at that time with Adolf Reichel in an extremely modest lodging at the other side of the Seine in the 8 Schismatic. ( R.)
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Rue de Bourgogne. Proudhon often went there to listen to Reichel's Beethoven and Bakunin's Hegeclass="underline" the philosophical discussions lasted longer than the symphonies. They reminded me of the famous all-night vigils of Bakunin with Khomyakov at Chaadayev's and a t Madame Yelagin's, also over Hegel. In 1 847
Karl Vogt, who also lived in the Rue de Bourgogne, and often visited Reichel and Bakunin, was bored one evening with listening to the endless discussions on phenomenology, and went home to bed. Next morning he went round for Reichel, for they were to go to the Jardin des Plantes together; he \vas surprist!d to hear conversation in Bakunin's study at that early hour. He opened the door-Proudhon and Bakunin were sitting in the same places before the burnt-out embers in the fireplace, finishing in a brief summing-up the argument begun overnight.
At first, afraid of the humble role of our fellow-countrymen, and of being patronised by great men, I did not try to become intimate even with Proudhon himself, and I believe I was not altogether wrong. Proudhon's letter in answer to mine was courteous, but cold and somewhat reserved.
I wanted to show him from the very first that he was not dealing with a mad prince russe who was giving the money from revolutionary dilettantism, and still more from ostentation, nor with an orthodox admirer of French journalists, deeply grateful for their accepting twenty-four thousand francs from him, nor, finally, with a dull-witted bailleur de fonds who imagined that providing the guarantee funds for such a paper as the Voix du Peuple was a serious business investment. I wanted to show him that I knew very well what I was doing, that I had my own definite object, and so wanted to have a definite influence on the paper. ·while I accepted unconditionally all that he wrote about money, I demanded in the first place the right to insert articles, my own and other people's; secondly, the right to superintend all the foreign section, to recommend editors, correspondents, and so on for it, and to require payment for these for articles published.
This last may seem strange, but I can confidently assert that the National and the Rcforme would have opened their eyes wide if any foreigner had ventured to ask to be paid for an article. They would take it for impudence or madness.
Proudhon agreed to my requirements, but still they made him wince. This is what he wrote to me at Geneva on the 29th of August, 1 849: 'And so the thing is settled: under my general direction you have a share in the editorship of the paper; your articles must be accepted with no restriction, except that to which the editors are bound by respect for their own opinions and fear of legal responsibility. Agreed in ideas, we can only
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differ in conclusions; as for commenting on events abroad, we leave them entirely to you. You and we are missionaries of one idea. You will see our line in general controversy, and you will have to support it: I am sure I shall never have to correct your views; I should regard that as the greatest calamity. I tell you frankly, the \vhole success of the paper depends on our agreement. The democratic and social question must be raised to the level of the undertaking of a European League. To suppose that we shall not agree means to suppose that we have not the essential conditions for publishing the paper, and that we had better be silent.'
To this severe missive I replied by the despatch of twenty-four thousand francs and a long letter, perfectly friendly, but firm. I told him how completely I agreed with him theoretically, adding that, like a true Scythian, I saw with joy that the old world was falling into ruins, and believed that it was our mission to a nnounce to it its imminent demise. 'Your fellowcountrymen are far from sharing these ideas. I know one liberal Frenchman-that is you. Your revolutionaries are conservatives.
They are Christians without knowing it, and monarchists fighting for a republic. You alone have raised the question of negation and revolution to a scientific level, and you have been the first to tell France that there is no salvation for an edifice that is crumbling from within, and that there is nothing worth saving from it; that its very conceptions of freedom and revolution are saturated \vith conservatism and reaction. As a matter of fact the political republicans are but one of the variations on the same constitutional tune on which Guizot, Odilon Barrot and others are playing their own variations. This is the view that should be pursued in the analysis of the latest European events, in attacking reaction, Catholicism and monarchism, not in the ranks of our enemies-that is extremely easy-but in our own camp. We must reveal the mutual guarantees existing between the democrats and the authorities. If we are not afraid to touch the victors, let us not from false sentimentality be afraid to touch the vanquished also.