Page:What is Property?.pdf/43

From Wikisource
Jump to navigation Jump to search
This page has been proofread, but needs to be validated.
xxxi
HIS LIFE AND WORKS.

girl- whose hand he had requested in 1847. Madame Proudhon bore him four daughters, of whom but two, Catherine and Stéphanie, survived their father. Stéphanie died in 1873.

In October, 1849, "Le Peuple" was replaced by a new journal, "La Voix du Peuple," which Proudhon edited from his prison cell. In it were published his discussions with Pierre Leroux and Bastiat. The political articles which he sent to "La Voix du Peuple" so displeased the government finally, that it transferred him to Doullens, where he was secretly confined for some time. Afterwards taken back to Paris, to appear before the assizes of the Seine in reference to an article in "La Voix du Peuple," he was defended by M. Cremieux and acquitted. From the Conciergerie he went again to Sainte-Pélagie, where he ended his three years in prison on the 6th of June, 1852.

"La Voix du Peuple," suppressed before the promulgation of the law of the 31st of May, had been replaced by a weekly sheet, "Le Peuple" of 1850. Established by the aid of the principal members of the Mountain, this journal soon met with the fate of its predecessors.

In 1851, several months before the coup d’Etat, Proudhon published the “General Idea of the Revolution of the Nineteenth Century,” in which, after having shown the logical series of unitary governments,—from monarchy, which is the first term, to the direct government of the people, which is the last,—he opposes the ideal of an-archy or self-government to the communistic or governmental ideal.

At this period, the Socialist party, discouraged by the elections of 1849, which resulted in a greater conservative triumph than those of 1848, and justly angry with the national representative body which had just passed the law of the