PIERRE-JOSEPH PROUDHON was born on the 15th of January, 1809, and thus grew up in the shadow of two great events, the French and the industrial revolutions;both of these he felt profoundly; the first of them he understood. He was born in Battant,a suburb of Besancon, the capital of the Free County of Burgundy,and his intense local patriotism remained a living force in his life and thought to the day of his death. His 'little country', Franche-Comte', had only been part of France for one hundred and fifty years when Proudhon was born; Besancon was a real local capital, and some of the seeds of Proudhon's federalism, of his dislike of Paris, and of centralisation, were sown in those early years. He was a citizen of no mean city,a child of no mere department; and, whether he was defending the intellectual independence of the County of Burgundy against the
pretensions of the Duchy of Burgundy,or looking forward with delight to the reconstitution of the thirty submerged nationalities which he believed existed in France, he was fighting, not merely for a general principle, but for the memories and loyalties of his youth.
More important still was his parentage.'My ancestors on both sides were free peasants, exempt from feudal servitude from time immemorial'; there remained to Proudhon all his life a family pride as great as that of a Guerinantes;be was born of no proletarian or servile stock. Had not his maternal grandfather, the old soldier, withstood before the revolution die local tyrannical squire, and was not his mother 'noted for her virtues and for her republican ideas'?'This is real nobility of race. I myself am a noble.'His father's family,the Proudhons,was noted for obstinacy;one branch had risen in the world,had entered the middle classes and produced an eminent lawyer, but the poorer connections were far from playing the role of poor relations; they had their share of the pride, that was to be so marked in their most famous kinsman. Proudhon's father was a cooper and, for a time, a brewer. He was, doubtless, an honest and industrious man,but unsuccessful in his
business. Later, Proudhon attributed his father's financial disasters to his incorrigible habit of selling his beer at the 'just price',that is,at the cost of production, instead of imitating the rest of the brewers who sold at a profit.Not only that,the elder Proudhon was careful about the character of his customers,and so lost money by refusing to let women enter his shop. Others were not so scrupulous,and 'having grown rich by prostitution ...married their children off to the best people, while my father's children have found nobody'.The lesson learned here was never forgotten; there was a morally right way of doing business; there was a morally wrong way of doing business; but in modern society the right way led straight to bankruptcy,the wrong way to wealth and honour.
Society must be made safe for honesty and a world be created in which the children of an honest man like Claude-Francois Proudhon should not be embittered by having their father's honesty in hunger and humiliation.

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