APPENDIX 199
the reason why I did not at a later period raise my voice with those who cried out about his “betrayal” of the revolution. It was not his fault if, at first ill-understood by others as well as by himself, he has not fulfilled the hopes which nothing had ever justified.
The “Philosophie de la Misére,” as compared with “Qu’est-ce que la Propriété?” displays very unfavorably all the defects of Proudhon’s manner of exposition. The style is often what the French call bombastic. A pre- tentious and “specultative” piece of fustian, which, represented as German philosophy, presents itself every- where where Gallic perspicacity is at fault. That which he trumpets in your ears, with the voice of a blustering buffoon, is his own glorification, wearisome nonsense and eternal rodomontade about his pretended “science.” In- stead of the true and natural warmth which illumines his first book, in this Proudhon declaims systematically and fails to excite any feeling. Add to this the awkward and disagreeable didactic pedantry, which serves for erudi- tion, of the man who has lost his former pride of being an independent and original thinker, and who now, as a parvenu of science, thinks he should swagger and boast of what he is not and of what he does not possess. After that his sentiments of a tallow chandler, which lead hin to attack in a most unseemly and brutal manner—but which is neither discerning, nor profound, nor even just —a man like Cabet, who was always worthy of respect because of his political réle in the midst of the proletariat, while he does the amiable towards a Dunnoyer (a Councillor of State, it is true) who has no importance beyond that of having preached, with a comical serious- ness, throughout the whole of three great volumes, in- supportably tiresome, a hypercriticism thus described by
