Pierre-Joseph Proudhon

• 1. Introduction

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  Pierre-Joseph Proudhon was the first person known to call himself an anarchist, and many consider him the father of anarchism. He reached that title through the printing trade, having taught himself Latin so that he could print books in it. His best-known assertion fits in three words: "property is theft!" It made his name, and it drew the attention of the French authorities. Almost nobody who repeats it stops to ask what he meant. This documentary asks what he meant, and why a man who attacked property also defended it. It asks why Karl Marx turned from reader to rival. It also asks how one thinker came to be claimed by socialists and by anarchists, and to be linked by some to the extreme right.

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• 2. A Tavern Childhood

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  The house at 23 Rue du Petit Battant, in the Besançon suburb of Battant, is where Proudhon was born on the 15th of January 1809. His father, Claude-François, worked as a brewer and a cooper and came from the village of Chasnans, near the Swiss border. His mother, Catherine Simonin, came from Cordiron. The couple had five boys, and two of them died very young. The brothers Jean-Etienne, born in 1811, and Claude, born in 1816, remained very close to Pierre-Joseph.

  The family tavern was where the boy spent much of his time working, alongside basic farm chores and games in the countryside. He had no formal schooling. His mother taught him to read, and by the age of three he was spelling words. Until he was 10, the only books he met were the Gospels, a tale called the Four Aymon Brothers and some local almanacs.

  In 1820 his mother set about getting him into the city college in Besançon. The tuition was far beyond the family's means. With help from one of Claude-François's former employers, she won a bursary that took 120 francs a year off the cost. Even so, the boy could not afford books or shoes, and his wealthier classmates made him a target of scorn. He answered by living in the school library, where he piled up books on whatever subjects caught his curiosity outside lessons. Within a few years that appetite for reading would turn into a trade.

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• 3. Type and Doubt

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  In 1827 Proudhon began an apprenticeship at a printing press in the house of Bellevaux, in Battant. At Easter the following year he moved to a Besançon press owned by the family of his schoolmate Antoine Gauthier. Besançon was an important center of religious thought, and most of what Gauthier printed was ecclesiastical. Proudhon read Christian literature for hours every day, and it did not strengthen his faith. He began to question long-held beliefs and eventually rejected Christianity altogether. In What Is Property? he described a religious journey that began with Protestantism and ended with him as a Neo Christian.

  By 1829 Proudhon had risen to corrector, proofreading the press's publications, and social questions interested him more than religious theory. That year Charles Fourier came to Gauthier as a customer, hoping to publish Le Nouveau Monde Industriel et Sociétaire. Proudhon supervised the printing and used the chance to talk with Fourier about social and philosophical problems. Those conversations left a strong impression that shaped him for the rest of his life.

  Gustave Fallot, a scholar from Montbéliard whose family were wealthy French industrialists, became one of Proudhon's closest friends in these years. Fallot sought him out after being impressed by Proudhon's corrections to a Latin manuscript. Their evenings together ranged over Montaigne, Rabelais, Rousseau, Voltaire and Diderot, authors Proudhon had missed during his years of theological reading.

  In September 1830 Proudhon qualified as a journeyman compositor, but the years that followed brought unemployment and poverty. He travelled around France, and briefly to Neuchâtel in Switzerland, looking without luck for steady printing work or a teaching post. Then Fallot offered to support him if he came to Paris to study philosophy. Proudhon accepted despite worries about his printing career. He walked from Besançon to Paris and arrived in March at the Rue Mazarin in the Latin Quarter, where Fallot lived.

  Among the scholars around Fallot, who were richer and more used to debate, Proudhon felt out of place. He preferred to study alone, disliked city life and longed for Besançon. A cholera outbreak in Paris gave him his wish, because Fallot caught the disease and could no longer pay for his friend. Proudhon never saw Fallot again, and Fallot died in 1836. Even so, the friendship was what pushed Proudhon out of the printing trade and toward philosophy.

  A failed printing business in 1838 settled the matter, and he committed himself to scholarship. He applied for the Suard Pension, a bursary for study at the Academy of Besançon. The judges chose him from several candidates mainly because his income was the lowest. They were also impressed by his writing and by how much he had taught himself while working as an artisan. He arrived in Paris towards the end of autumn in 1838.

  In 1839 the Academy held an essay competition on the usefulness of celebrating Sunday for hygiene, morality and the bonds between family and city. Proudhon's entry, De la Célébration du dimanche, treated the topic as a pretext for wider political and philosophical argument. It already holds seeds of his later revolutionary ideas. His views on authority, morality and property disturbed the judges, who awarded only the bronze medal. Proudhon took pride in that result, reading it as proof that his writing made elite academics uncomfortable.

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• 4. Theft and Possession

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  In 1840 Proudhon published his first major work, Qu'est-ce que la propriété?, known in English as What Is Property? In 1842 he followed it with a letter to the Fourierist writer Considérant, titled Warning to Proprietors. He was tried over that letter at Besançon, yet the jury acquitted him. They found that they could not condemn him for a philosophy they themselves could not understand.

  Across What Is Property? and the posthumous Theory of Property, Proudhon declared in turn that property is theft, impossible, despotism and freedom. By theft he meant the landowner or capitalist who, in his view, stole the profits of laborers. In his General Idea of the Revolution, the capitalist's employee is "subordinated, exploited: his permanent condition is one of obedience."

  In What Is Property? he backed the charge with blunt lines. "Property is impossible, because it demands something for nothing." Another reads, "Property is impossible, because it is homicide." He closed the passage with a jab at lawmakers: "The people finally legalized property. God forgive them, for they knew not what they did!"

  The commentator David Hargreaves argued that Proudhon did not mean his words literally. By property, Hargreaves wrote, he wished to be understood what he later called "the sum of its abuses." The target was the owner who exploits the labour of others through interest and rent. Toward possession, meaning a person's control of the dwelling, land and tools needed to live, Proudhon had no hostility. Hargreaves says he saw it as the cornerstone of liberty.

  Proudhon borrowed his legal terms from the jurists Duranton and Toullier, whom he quoted. A tenant and a farmer, he noted, are possessors, while the owner who lets land for use is a proprietor. Possession he accepted when it rested on occupancy. What he rejected was entitlement backed by force, whether that force was a state's police or something else. He opposed concentrations of wealth and argued for small holdings of the kind peasants and artisans kept.

  In 1849-1850 he traded published letters with the French economist Frédéric Bastiat over whether interest was legitimate. Bastiat, according to Robert Leroux, saw Proudhon's anti-interest doctrine as "the complete antithesis of any serious approach." Proudhon lost his temper and wrote, "Your intelligence is asleep, or rather it has never been awake." He finished with a verdict: "Scientifically, Mr. Bastiat, you are a dead man."

  Yet Proudhon wrote that he never meant to forbid or suppress ground rent and interest on capital "by sovereign decree." He wanted such activities to stay free and voluntary, changed only by what followed from universal reciprocity. He also defended inheritance as "one of the foundations of the family and society." But he refused to extend it beyond personal possessions, and held that wealth in the instruments of labour should not pass down.

  In the Theory of Property, Proudhon looked back and wrote that in 1840 he had "categorically" rejected property for both the group and the individual. His new position was that "property is the only power that can act as a counterweight to the State." He added that it works that way only when spread widely and kept equal from generation to generation. He still called it "an absolutism within an absolutism." Peter Kropotkin, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels all accepted his distinction between possession and property, and none wanted to abolish personal property.

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• 5. Against Government

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  In What Is Property? of 1840, Proudhon defined anarchy as "the absence of a master, of a sovereign." He added that "as man seeks justice in equality, so society seeks order in anarchy." Peter Kropotkin and Benjamin Tucker later followed his lead, and both built their own definitions of anarchism on his. Proudhon himself put it plainly: "We do not admit the government of man by man any more than the exploitation of man by man."

  In 1849, in Confessions of a Revolutionary, he went further. "Whoever lays his hand on me to govern me is a usurper and tyrant, and I declare him my enemy." Even so, he supported freedom of religion, speech and assembly. In the same book he also wrote that capital, government and the Church are three ideas bound together. In his words, "What capital does to labour, and the State to liberty, the Church does to the spirit."

  The General Idea of the Revolution of 1851 urged a "society without authority." In a subchapter titled "What is Government?" he built a catalogue of indignities. The first items are "watched, inspected, spied upon, directed, law-driven, numbered, regulated, enrolled, indoctrinated, preached at, controlled." The list goes on through taxing, licensing and punishing. It ends with being "mocked, ridiculed, derided, outraged, dishonored." Then comes his verdict: "That is government; that is its justice; that is its morality."

  Near the end of his life, Proudhon softened this stance. In The Principle of Federation, published in 1863, he argued for "the balancing of authority by liberty" and a decentralized "theory of federal government." He now defined anarchy as "the government of each by himself." Political functions, he said, would shrink to industrial ones, and order would come from "nothing but transactions and exchanges." He named his economic system an "agro-industrial federation." Its purpose was to shield citizens from "capitalist and financial feudalism" and block the return of "wage labour." The reason, he said, was that "political right requires to be buttressed by economic right."

  Daniel Guérin saw a conservative drift in these later years. He observed that many masters of anarchism were not anarchists throughout their lives. In the second part of Proudhon's career, he said, the thinking took a conservative turn. Guérin pointed to De la Justice dans la Revolution et dans l'Eglise of 1858. It was verbose, monumental, mainly about religion, and its conclusion was far from libertarian.

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• 6. A Peaceful Revolution

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  In 1847 Proudhon left his job as a kind of manager with a commercial firm in Lyon and settled in Paris. He was becoming celebrated there as a leader of innovation, and in that year he also became a Freemason. After the Revolution of 1848 he became a member of the French Parliament, and afterward he described himself as a federalist.

  The revolution itself drew mixed judgments from him. He took a radical stance on the National Workshops, which he criticized as charity. He condemned the June Days Uprising for its violence. His complaint about the February Revolution was that it was "without an idea." Murray Bookchin credits him with a proposal in Le Représentant du peuple on the 28th of April 1848. It would have turned the mass democracy of the clubs into a forum for preparing the revolution's social agenda. Although Vladimir Lenin first used the term dual power, Proudhon outlined the concept earlier.

  Proudhon called himself a revolutionary, yet he did not imagine civil war or violent upheaval. For him the transformation was moral, and it demanded the highest ethics from those seeking change. His lever was monetary reform, joined to a credit bank and workers' associations. He tried to create a national bank, to be funded by an income tax on capitalists and shareholders. The tax attempt proved abortive and the bank never took shape. It resembled a credit union and would have offered interest-free loans.

  Mutualism was the name he gave to his brand of anarchism and socialism. In his vision, self-employed artisans, peasants and cooperatives would trade their products on the market. Factories and other large workplaces would be run by "labor associations" on directly democratic principles. The state would give way to a federation of "free communes," a commune being a local municipality in France. In 1863 he wrote: "All my economic ideas as developed over twenty-five years can be summed up in the words: agricultural-industrial federation." In his 1848 manifesto he wrote, "We want the mines, canals, railways handed over to democratically organised workers' associations."

  La Guerre et la Paix of 1861 argued that the "end of militarism is the mission of the nineteenth century, under pain of indefinite decadence." Robert L. Hoffman notes that the book "ends by condemning war without reservation." Proudhon believed workers alone could end war by creating economic equilibrium. He also wrote that under mutualism there would be "no longer nationality, no longer fatherland, in the political sense of the words."

  George Woodcock found that some of his positions "sorted oddly with his avowed anarchism." In the Programme Revolutionaire, an electoral manifesto, Proudhon proposed that every citizen serve one or two years in the militia. He had issued it after being asked to run for a position in the provisional government. The same document described his proposed government as "a centralization analogous with that of the State." He added that in it "no one obeys, no one is dependent, and everyone is free and sovereign."

  His ideas travelled across the Pyrenees. In 1845 Ramón de la Sagra founded the anarchist journal El Porvenir in La Coruña, inspired by Proudhon. The Catalan politician Francesc Pi i Margall became his principal translator into Spanish. Pi i Margall briefly became President of Spain in 1873, as leader of the Federal Democratic Republican Party. During the Spanish revolution of that year he attempted to set up a decentralized, cantonalist system on Proudhonian lines.

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• 7. The Marx Quarrel

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  In The Holy Family, one of his first works, Marx praised Proudhon. "Not only does Proudhon write in the interest of the proletarians, he is himself a proletarian, an ouvrier." He called the book "a scientific manifesto of the French proletariat." It was What Is Property? that convinced the young Marx that private property should be abolished. Marx started a correspondence with its author, the two influenced each other, and they met in Paris while Marx was in exile there.

  Their letters also exposed a gap. Proudhon told Marx he doubted that revolution was needed to succeed. Revolutionary action as a means of social reform, he argued, would simply be "an appeal to force, to arbitrariness, in brief, a contradiction." In 1846 he published The System of Economic Contradictions, or The Philosophy of Poverty. Marx answered with a book-length critique under a provocative title, The Poverty of Philosophy.

  Marx's objections went beyond anarchism. He took issue with what he saw as Proudhon's misunderstanding of how labor, value and price relate. He also argued that Proudhon framed his attack on bourgeois property in bourgeois ethics rather than moving past those ethics. Edmund Wilson has suggested a more personal source: Proudhon's defense of Karl Grün, whom Marx bitterly disliked. Grün had been preparing translations of Proudhon's work.

  Proudhon himself made no public criticism of Marx or Marxism, because Marx was relatively unknown in his lifetime. His targets were authoritarian socialists such as Louis Blanc. To Blanc he wrote, "I deny your God, your authority, your sovereignty, your judicial State, and all your representative mystifications."

  Later anarchists have argued that Marx and his followers distorted Proudhon. Iain McKay contends that Marx took concepts such as his criticism of private property, scientific socialism and surplus value from Proudhon. Rudolf Rocker made a similar claim about surplus value. Edward Hyams noted that since The Poverty of Philosophy no good Marxists have had to think about Proudhon, because they inherited a ready judgement.

  Proudhon died in Passy on the 19th of January 1865 and was buried at Montparnasse cemetery in Paris. On the 24th of January 1865, almost two decades after The Poverty of Philosophy, Marx wrote an obituary that called What Is Property? "epoch-making." Marx kept a certain respect for him despite their feud. That respect did not stop Marx from expelling Mikhail Bakunin, a follower of Proudhon, and his supporters from the First International.

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• 8. A Contested Inheritance

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  In France, Proudhon's influence on socialism, including the Paris Commune, was surpassed by Marxism only at the beginning of the 20th century. Proudhonists formed an important French faction in the First International. In the United States, individualist anarchists such as Joseph Labadie, Dyer Lum and Benjamin Tucker drew on him. He was also one of the main influences on workers' self-management, known in French as autogestion. His libertarian socialism later diverged into individualist anarchism, collectivist anarchism, anarcho-communism and anarcho-syndicalism, with figures such as Carlo Cafiero, Joseph Déjacque and Peter Kropotkin.

  The Cercle Proudhon, a right-wing association formed in 1911 by Georges Valois and Edouard Berth, used his name too. The syndicalist Georges Sorel had brought the two men together. They moved toward a synthesis of socialism and nationalism, mixing Proudhon's mutualism with Charles Maurras's integralist nationalism. In 1925 Valois founded the Faisceau, the first fascist league, named after Benito Mussolini's fasci. The historian Zeev Sternhell notes that Action Française gave Proudhon a place of honour in a section called "Our Masters."

  Scholars have pushed back hard. K. Steven Vincent wrote that arguing Proudhon was a proto-fascist "suggests that one has never looked seriously at Proudhon's writings." In 1945 J. Salwyn Schapiro published an article titled Pierre Joseph Proudhon, Harbinger of Fascism. The Italian anti-fascist Nicola Chiaromonte rebutted it in January 1946. In 2021 Iain McKay published a detailed critique of Schapiro's claims. The historian Frédéric Krier compared Proudhon's thought with the ideology of the Third Reich. He found that Proudhon's federalism and critique of nationalism put him clearly at odds with it. The anarchist Albert Meltzer took another line, arguing that Proudhon used the term anarchist without being one.

  The harshest evidence comes from Proudhon's private notebooks, the Carnets. Stewart Edwards, editor of his Selected Writings, says they reveal almost paranoid hatred of Jews. In 1847 Proudhon considered publishing an article against the Jewish race, which he said he "hated." It would have called for the expulsion of the Jews from France. He set his view apart from medieval prejudice. "What the peoples of the Middle Ages hated by instinct, I hate upon reflection and irrevocably." Robert Graham states that Proudhon was personally racist but that antisemitism formed no part of his revolutionary programme. Iain McKay calls his personal bigotries "disgusting" and says few modern anarchists would tolerate them.

  The same notebooks, unpublished until the 1960s, set out strongly patriarchal views. Proudhon maintained that a woman's choice was to be "courtesan or housekeeper." To a woman, he wrote, a man is "a father, a chief, a master: above all, a master." Gustave Courbet painted Proudhon and His Children in 1865. Writing about Courbet, the art historian Linda Nochlin points to La Pornocratie ou les femmes dans les temps modernes. She describes it as "the most consistent anti-feminist tract of its time, or perhaps, any other."

  Proudhon's defense of patriarchy was challenged in his own lifetime. The libertarian communist Joseph Déjacque told him to "speak out against man's exploitation of woman" or else "do not describe yourself as an anarchist."

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