admiration) of Karl Marx but his ideas were also able to secure a powerful sway over
105 Le Socialisme devant le vieux monde, 21–2, 31–2, 33–4, 59–61, 87–91.
106 In English the standard text is George Woodcock, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon: A Biography
(London, 1956). See also Alan Irving Ritter, The Political Thought of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon
(Princeton, NJ, 1969); Edward Hyams, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon: His Revolutionary Life, Mind and
Works (London, 1979); and K. Steven Vincent, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon and the Rise of French
Republican Socialism (Oxford, 1984).
107 Quoted in Woodcock, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, 277.
Insurrection, Utopianism, and Socialism
415
the French labour movement. This was an influence that was to endure up to the
First World War, if not beyond.
Lurking beneath all of Proudhon’s writings was a fierce and unbending moral-
ism. This was disclosed in a variety of ways: a hatred of plutocracy, a belief in the
nobility of manual work, an opposition to divorce, distaste for bohemian life, and
undisguised contempt for the materialistic civilization of America. Proudhon also
believed that France had entered a period of decline and decay. Above all, it was
revealed through his abiding preoccupation with the nature of justice and the
manner in which it was expressed in the different aspects of our lives. Proudhon’s
views on this subject changed over time but were to come to fruition in the three
weighty volumes he published in 1858 entitled De la Justice dans la Révolution et
dans l’Église.108
This, as summarized by Proudhon himself, was the core of the argument.
Among primitive peoples, justice took the form of a supernatural commandment
supported by religion. In this form it became aristocratic and, with the arrival of
Christianity, led to the ‘degradation of humanity’. In short, justice was seen by the
Church to be transcendental, to have its origins outside man, and to be known only
through revelation. According to Proudhon, true justice was immanent to man and
was innate to human consciousness, constituting his very essence. ‘Justice’, Proud-
hon wrote, ‘is human, completely human, and nothing but human.’109 This being
the case, what was the substance of justice? The point of departure, Proudhon
argued, was our ‘sentiment of personal dignity’ which, when generalized through
our exchanges with others, produced an affirmation of ‘the respect, spontaneously
felt and reciprocally guaranteed, for human dignity, in whatever person and in
whatever circumstances it finds itself compromised and at whatever risk its defence
exposes us to’.110 From this flowed the principles of right and duty. ‘Right’,
Proudhon stated, ‘is for each individual the faculty of requiring in others respect
for the human dignity of his person; duty, the obligation to respect this dignity in
another.’111
The remainder of Proudhon’s text explored the various dimensions of this
argument as they applied to the activity of work, education, love, marriage, and
so on, but the central idea informing this discussion was that the very purpose of
what he termed the Revolution was to be the realization of such a concept of justice.
It was with the Revolution that a new age for humanity would be opened up where
justice, previously only vaguely understood and perceived, appeared in all its ‘purity
and plenitude’.
The key issue was how this bore upon the social and political organization of
society. No clearer statement of Proudhon’s views on this matter can be found than
in the final paragraphs of his Idée générale de la Révolution au XIXe siècle, published
in 1851. ‘To be governed’, he there proclaimed, was ‘to be watched over, inspected,
spied upon, directed, legislated for, regulated, confined, indoctrinated, preached at,
controlled, numbered, valued, censured, and commanded, by people who have
108 Proudhon, De la Justice dans la Révolution et dans l’Église, 3 vols. (1858).
109 Ibid. i. 85.
110 Ibid. 182–3.
111 Ibid. 183.
416
Insurrection, Utopianism, and Socialism
neither the right nor the wisdom nor the virtue to do so.’112 Proudhon continued
this list of repressive activities for the best part of a page, adding inter alia being
shot, deported, robbed, taxed, and imprisoned, but his overall point was that this
was the nature of government, this its conception of justice, and this its morality.
On this view, government performed no functions that could not be better under-
taken by individuals; it created not order but disorder; it neither defended liberty
nor protected the weak but fostered privilege and safeguarded the rich; it
impoverished and indebted the people; it perpetuated antagonism and inequality
in society. Faced then with the question of what form of government was required,
Proudhon’s answer was unequivocal: ‘No authority, no government, not even
popular’.113 The solution lay in anarchy. ‘Liberty, always liberty, and nothing
but liberty’, Proudhon wrote, ‘there is the revolutionary catechism in its entire-
ty.’114 The problem was that we had become so infatuated with power and so liked
being governed, that we could no longer imagine what it would be to live freely.
It was this that explained why the Revolution of 1789 had only done half its
work. The Revolution had succeeded in destroying the feudal order but it had not
created a new form of economic organization and this was so because the revolu-
tionaries had not been able to free themselves of the prejudice in favour of
government. All that had occurred was a change in ‘governmental metaphysics’.
One might say, Proudhon argued, that ‘the nobility, clergy, and monarchy dis-
appeared only so as to make way for another governing faction composed of
Anglomaniac constitutionalists, classical republicans, and authoritarian democrats,
all infatuated with the Romans and the Spartans and, above all, with them-
selves’.115 An attempt had been made to solve an abuse by an abuse and it was
thus no surprise that ‘the bloody struggles and failures’ of 1793 had ended in the re-
establishment of tyranny. ‘To sum up’, Proudhon wrote, ‘the society which the
Revolution of 89 should have created does not as yet exist. What we have had for
sixty years is but a superficial, factitious order, barely concealing the most frightful
chaos and demoralization.’116
It was Proudhon’s view, therefore, that since 1789 France had been subjected
to a series of attempted constitutional fixes, all of which had been doomed to
failure and all of which had been built upon a series of myths or fictions.117
Despite changes in the external form, in each case the ambition had been to
centralize power and to govern the people as if they were a conquered nation.
If this was true of the Napoleonic Empire—Napoleon, Proudhon acknowledged,
‘was the centralizer par excellence’—so also it was true of the government that
emerged under the Second Republic. Here Proudhon spoke from bitter personal
experience. In June 1848 he had been elected to the National Assembly and
112 Idée générale de la Révolution au XIXe siècle (1
923), 344.
113 Ibid. 199.
114 Les Confessions d’un Révolutionnaire, pour servir à l’Histoire de la Révolution de Fevrier (1929),
251.
115 Idée générale de la Révolution, 126–7.
116 Ibid. 127.
117 Contradictions politiques: Théorie du mouvement constitutionnel au XIXe siècle (1952).
Insurrection, Utopianism, and Socialism
417
quickly found himself condemned to what he was later to describe as ‘a life of
hell’. When retold in his Confessions d’un Révolutionnaire, the experience was
taken to provide clinching evidence of the futility of attempting a ‘revolution
from above’ and of endeavouring to reform society through the instruments of the
State. This, he declared, was nothing less than revolution through dictatorship
and despotism and no one was subjected to more severe criticism in this regard
than Louis Blanc and his neo-Jacobin version of ‘governmental socialism’.
For his part, Proudhon wanted a ‘revolution from below’, a revolution made not
in the name of the masses but by the masses themselves, a revolution whose
intention was not to strengthen the authority of government but to secure the
abolition of all authority, a revolution that prioritized not the seizure of political
power by either insurrection or the ballot box but the transformation of the
economic organization of society through the direct action of the workers, a
revolution characterized by popular spontaneity and not rigid utopian dogma.
Between this ‘democratic’ socialism and the hierarchical and centralizing socialism
of Louis Blanc, Proudhon insisted, there existed a veritable abyss and one that could
never be bridged.
The alternative presented by Proudhon was that of mutualism. ‘Whoever says
mutuality’, Proudhon wrote, ‘envisions the sharing of the land, the division of
property, the independence of work, the separation of industries, the specialism of
functions, and individual and collective responsibility.’118 Under such a system, the
worker would no longer be a slave to the State or be ‘swallowed up by a communi-
tarian ocean’ but would be a free and truly sovereign individual. Society would be
conceived in terms of equilibrium and balance rather than hierarchy and compul-
sion. The evils of unrestricted competition would be countered by the benefits of
association and of equitable exchange. If private property would be retained, it
would be purged of its abuses, thus, in Proudhon’s view, putting an end to the
economic exploitation of man by man and providing a bulwark against the
unwarranted intrusions of the State. In political terms, mutualism entailed federal-
ism, localism, and an end to the dominance of Paris and the unitary state. The
individual would govern himself and the principle of the sovereignty of the people
would be ‘applied to the letter’. ‘In contrast to the demands made by Rousseau for
the government of his republic’, Proudhon wrote, ‘in the mutualist confederation
the citizen would give up nothing of his liberty.’119
The manner in which the process of ‘social liquidation’ would be undertaken was
sketched out on numerous occasions by Proudhon. One frequently voiced proposal
was for the creation of a Bank of Exchange, later called the People’s Bank. The plan
was to set up a bank on mutualist principles with the intention of supplying cheap
credit and thereby undermining the capitalist financial system. For a few months in
1849 such a bank actually existed, attracting as many as 27,000 subscribers. In the
years of government repression that were to follow there was little possibility for
further initiatives of this kind; but, from the early 1860s onwards, the workers’
118 De la Capacité politique des classes ouvrières (1924).
119 Ibid. 219.
418
Insurrection, Utopianism, and Socialism
movement gradually came back to life. Strikes became more frequent and associa-
tions of various kinds—mutual aid societies, co-operatives, and so on—sprang into
existence. Of equal significance was the publication of the Manifesto of the Sixty in
February 1864.120 Written by Henri Tolain and signed, as its name suggests, by
sixty workers from the Seine region, it argued not only that equal political rights
entailed equal social rights but also that ‘we who have no other property but our
hands’ had need of ‘direct representation’ and therefore that ‘working-class candi-
dates’ should be prepared to stand for election. It was these developments that led
Proudhon to write his last and most influential book: De la Capacité politique des
classes ouvrières.
Proudhon advanced three propositions. First, if the working class were to possess
‘political capacity’, it needed to acquire consciousness of itself and of its distinc-
tiveness from the bourgeoisie. This it had accomplished with the Revolution of
1848. Second, the working class needed to affirm an ‘idea’ of the conditions of its
own existence and of its destiny and goals. This it had done but only partially.
Third, and most importantly, the working class had to arrive at conclusions about
how to put this ‘idea’ into practice. This it had not yet done.121 But the lesson to be
drawn was clear enough: the interests of the workers would not be advanced by
members of any other social class but their own.
This idea was subsequently to have an enormous impact upon the French labour
movement. After Proudhon’s death in 1865, his friends and disciples took up the
message of working-class autonomy and did so in an increasingly receptive envi-
ronment. Certainly, the failure of the Second Republic to deliver on its promises of
radical reform encouraged a growing scepticism about the effectiveness of political
action on the part of the working class. When combined with what amounted to
their banishment from the political realm during the Second Empire, the result was
a growing distance between what was more and more recognizable as an industrial
proletariat and the world of bourgeois republicanism. In these circumstances, the
language of emancipation through politics, the Republic and the State carried less
and less conviction. As the Manifesto of the Sixty had announced: ‘It has been
repeated time and time again: there are no more classes and since 1789 all French-
men are equal before the law. Yet for us . . . it is not easy to believe such an
assertion.’ The universalistic rhetoric of republicanism, in other words, had scant
purchase when placed alongside the sociological realities of a French society where
the working class found itself marginalized and from which, as citizens, it was
excluded.
To what extent the Paris Commune of 1871 was an expression of such senti-
ments has been an open question ever since the moment of its brief existence
and bloody repression.122 No sooner was it crushed by the forces of the French
120 A tr. can be found in Eugene Schulkind, The Paris Commune of 1871: The View from the Left
(London, 1972), 61–2. In French see De la Capacité politique des classes ouvrières, 409–17.
121 Ibid. 91–2.
122 See Jacques Rougerie, ‘La Commune et la gauche’, in Becker and Candar,
Histoire des gauches,
i. 95–112.
Insurrection, Utopianism, and Socialism
419
government sitting comfortably in Versailles than its inheritance was claimed by
virtually all sections of radical opinion. If Karl Marx led the way, others were quick
to follow, not least former Communards who rapidly succeeded in creating a myth
around what many were prepared to see as the first example of an authentic
workers’ state. The truth of the matter is that no one—neither Marxists, nor
Proudhonians nor neo-Jacobins—could rightly claim the Commune as being
exclusively their own. For all its proclamation of the abolition of the standing
army and the separation of Church and State, its prevailing mood was one of
moderate and patriotic republicanism combined with what was undoubtedly a
genuine desire to reverse what its official programme denounced as ‘the despotic,
ignorant, or arbitrary centralization’ of the French state. It also saw itself as
heralding ‘the end of the old government and clerical world; of militarism, bureau-
cracy, exploitation, speculation, monopolies and privilege’.123
If anything it was the conclusions drawn in the aftermath of the Commune that
were of most significance. The deaths of an estimated 20,000 Parisians during the
so-called semaine sanglante provided convincing proof for many that class war was a
reality and that there could be no possibility of a political alliance with the
bourgeoisie. This was only confirmed by the subsequent execution and imprison-
ment of Communards and the repression of the labour movement that continued
through the next decade. Second, the overwhelming military superiority of the
forces at the disposal of the government indicated that the hallowed tradition of
revolutionary street fighting might well be over.
It was in this context that a sterner, and altogether more uncompromising,
strategy was developed by the French trade union movement in the shape of
revolutionary syndicalism. If the roots of this wholesale rejection of the political
process go back to the writings of Proudhon, it also received intellectual sustenance
from an increasingly vibrant anarchist movement in France. Once the futility of the
tactic of propaganda by the deed became self-evident, there was many a former
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