On the following day, in his Toast to the Revolution, a toast which was filled with allusions to the exciting scene of the night before, Proudhon commenced his struggle against the Mountain. His duel with Félix Pyat was one of the episodes of this struggle, which became less bitter on Proudhon’s side after the Mountain finally decided to publicly proclaim the Democratic and Social Republic. The campaign for the election of a President of the Republic had just begun. Proudhon made a very sharp attack on the candidacy of Louis Bonaparte in a pamphlet which is regarded as one of his literary chefs-d’oeuvre: the Pamphlet on the Presidency. An opponent of this institution, against which he had voted in the Constituent Assembly, he at first decided to take no part in the campaign. But soon seeing that he was thus increasing the chances of Louis Bonaparte, and that if, as was not at all probable, the latter should not obtain an absolute majority of the votes, the Assembly would not fail to elect General Cavaignac, he espoused, for the sake of form, the candidacy of Raspail, who was supported by his friends in the Socialist Committee. Charles Delescluze, the editor-in-chief of La Révolution Démocratique et Sociale, who could not forgive him for having preferred Raspail to Ledru-Rollin, the candidate of the Mountain, attacked him on the day after the election with a violence which overstepped all bounds. At first, Proudhon had the wisdom to refrain from answering him. At length, driven to an extremity, he became aggressive himself, and Delescluze sent him his seconds. This time, Proudhon positively refused to fight; he would not have fought with Félix Pyat, had not his courage been called in question.
On the 25th of January, 1849, Proudhon, rising from a sick bed, saw that the existence of the Constituent Assembly was endangered by the coalition of the monarchical parties with Louis Bonaparte, who was already planning his coup d’état. He did not hesitate to openly attack the man who had just received five millions of votes. He wanted to break the idol; he succeeded only in getting prosecuted and condemned himself. The prosecution demanded against him was authorized by a majority of the Constituent Assembly, in spite of the speech which he delivered on that occasion. Declared guilty by the jury, he was sentenced, in March, 1849, to three years’ imprisonment and the payment of a fine of ten thousand francs.
Proudhon had not abandoned for a single moment his project of a Bank of Exchange, which was to operate without capital with a sufficient number of merchants and manufacturers for adherents. This bank, which he then called the Bank of the People, and around which he wished to gather the numerous working-people’s associations which had been formed since the 24th of February, 1848, had already obtained a certain number of subscribers and adherents, the latter to the number of thirty-seven thousand. It was about to commence operations, when Proudhon’s sentence forced him to choose between imprisonment and exile. He did not hesitate to abandon his project and return the money to the subscribers. He explained the motives which led him to this decision in an article in Le Peuple.
Having fled to Belgium, he remained there but a few days, going thence to Paris, under an assumed name, to conceal himself in a house in the Rue de Chabrol. From his hiding-place he sent articles almost every day, signed and unsigned, to Le Peuple. In the evening, dressed in a blouse, he went to some secluded spot to take the air. Soon, emboldened by habit, he risked an evening promenade upon the Boulevards, and afterwards carried his imprudence so far as to take a stroll by daylight in the neighborhood of the Gare du Nord. It was not long before he was recognized by the police, who arrested him on the 6th of June, 1849, in the Rue du Faubourg-Poissonnière.
Taken to the office of the prefect of police, then to Sainte-Pélagie, he was in the Conciergerie on the day of the 13th of June, 1849, which ended with the violent suppression of Le Peuple. He then began to write the Confessions of a Revolutionist, published towards the end of the year. He had been again transferred to Sainte-Pélagie, when he married, in December, 1849, Mlle. Euphrasie Piégard, a young 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.
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