Brogans Seed: Like a Brother

What It’s Like to Be an Urban Farmer: a Working Podcast Transcript

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Thus they could make their living without changing their way of life, keeping faithfully, in the shadow of the town, to their rural customs and their rural speech. Not only did Proudhon know the peasant life; he lived it.

Until he was twelve, he was constantly engaged in farm-work, especially in herding cattle, and late in life, he declared that there, in the grass, looking at the sky, he learned un-Christian lessons of trust in nature, and distrust of 'that absurd spiritualism which is at the basis of Christian life and education'. When he had become a famous antagonist or the Church, both he and his enemies were inclined to exaggerate the heresies of his childhood; and one pious antagonist declared that prayer found no echo in the Proudhon household. It was never safe to assume anything about Proudhon, and he was indignant at this charge, for he was, in fact, brought up in matter-of-fact orthodoxy by his parents.

They were good Catholics of the old French peasant school and so was their son. He believed in God and the saints; he also believed in nymphs and fairies. Proudhon owed his chance of formal education to the Abbe Sirebon, the parish priest, next, to his father's employer, but, above all, to his mother, Catherine, who was the mainstay of the poor household.

The Proudhons were going down in the world.

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Claude-Francois was no longer his own master, the future was dark but the boy was to be given his chance. The entry to the local college high school was the greatest event of Proudhon's youth; more important than the siege of Besancon, than his father failure, than the birth of a younger brother. He now learned of delights as keen as any he had known as a herd-boy; he displayed the prodigious industry that was to remain with him all his life and an appetite for learning that startled his teachers.

But he studied under great difficulties; his family was desperately poor, and he had to borrow school books from more fortunate boys, he had no hat; he wore wooden shoes; and he learned the truth of the local proverb, 'Poverty is no crime; it is worse. The studies were almost entirely mathematics and Latin. He was a poor mathematician and that is worth remembering , but he was an excellent Latinist.

He mastered the language and shone in it and, until his death, language fascinated him. He won prizes and one of them was Fenelon's Demonstration of the Existence of God.

He read it, and it shook his faith. Daniel Halevy notes, was an illusion. His school life was difficult, and its difficulties nourished his sombre pride; be was religious, but be saw, or thought he saw, that his zeal was ill-rewarded, that the Church was a respecter of persons.

When he was sixteen he abandoned the practice of his religion, although be was to return to it again. The family fortunes grew worse and worse. On the day he was to receive a prize, there was no one of his family present, and the presiding official had to take the place of the missing kinsfolk. He went home to find his father in consternation, his mother in tears; a lawsuit had ended in a decision against his father.

If he could have got access to the land, he might have become a farmer, but the want of capital barred that road. The trade chosen was printing, and he never forgot the lessons he learned in his apprenticeship. He was proud to have a trade and believed that it was a sure shield against want, that he was now independent of everybody.

He also became convinced that the competent artisan received a more fruitful training than the bookworm; and he was always irritated by the claims of an intellectual elite to lead the workers for their own good. His conviction of the necessity, and the possibility, of equality was given a secure basis in his mind by his memories of the printer's chapel. He learned the force of trade practice, of the way in which a customary code can keep the sluggards up to the mark and prevent the strong from racing ahead too fast.

He learned a trade morality, and the need for and the possibility of mutual loyalty. He never lost the conviction that he knew the minds, the needs, the natures of the workers, and of the peasants, as no academics, fortified with formal doctrine, could know them. The workers never became for him a homogeneous class of which any thousand were worth any other thousand; their salvation must come from within. Any leadership from the outside, no matter what were its claims to superior knowledge or disinterestedness, was simply another form of tyranny.

There were more modes of exploitation than those created by formal property relations. Besides learning his trade he fell in love, violently, as he was never to fall in love again, and he returned to his religion with a passionate enthusiasm. The work of the printing-shop was largely concerned with theology; Proudhou read widely in the fathers of the Church as well as more in modern writers. He thought of himself as an apologist for the faith, for if he was already suspicious of the political side of Catholicism, his faith in the theory, if not in the practice, of the Church was still warm.

Already he was perplexed by the problem of inequality, of worldly injustice. Was the Church right, was there no remedy for these evils in this world, or was it possible to organise society on new lines, to harmonise the desires and passions of men? Was man the maimed creature, marked by original sin as the Church described him, or was the escape from his prison house in his own hands once he found the key? He was tempted by the heresy of Socinianism, by the denial of original sin. He was unwittingly on his way out of the Church and on to another faith. He was now a proof-reader and, through his corrections of a Latin Lives of the Saints , he made the acquaintance and won the friendship of its young editor, Gustave Fallot, destined to be the first great personal influence in Proudhon's life.

Fallot was, or hoped to be, a philologist; he infected Proudhon with his enthusiasm, an enthusiasm which, with Proudhon, took the form of learning Hebrew. This study left permanent marks on his mind. He retained to his death what was, for a Frenchman, an astonishing familiarity with the Bible. It was a weapon of fact, of argument, of rhetorical appeal, and he ranked it with Adam Smith and Hegel among the three sources of his ideas. Not only the Bible, but philology attracted him.

It is hard to realize now the prestige of philological studies in that age; new vistas were opened up by it, vistas not only in the history of language, but in the general history of mankind. It was a clue to the nature of things which, if strenuously held to, would lead its owner into the heart of the labyrinth where lay the secret of human misery to be remedied by the application of the true laws of man's nature, laws which language could illuminate.

This illusion, that linguistic knowledge was the key to all or to most problems, never wholly left Proudhon. It, as much as any borrowed dialectic, was his method of research and of argument. On the whole, this belief did him harm.

It is worth saying once that the Hebrew text of the commandment does not say 'Thou shalt not steal', but 'Thou shalt not put aside', but Lo thignob recurs too often, not as an illustration, but as an argument. Again and again arguments are interrupted or eloquence is allowed to cool off, while the etymology of a word is pursued through bold and often erroneous guesses.

It is not of first-class importance to know or to think you know that all the world is wrong in believing that religio at bottom means binding , when it really means bending. In any case, even if philology had been as powerful and adequate a weapon as Proudhon thought, he was unfitted to use it. He knew a good deal of Latin, Greek, Hebrew, but be knew nothing of language , or nothing to the point. He pained friends, who knew better, by his bold guesses. He had neither the scholar's equipment nor temperament. Words had the meanings Proudhon wanted them to have, and if modern philology gave him no support, so much the worse for it!

It is in vain that his patient friend, Professor Bergmann, tries to tame him; the bee keeps buzzing in the bonnet. He had valid reasons for disliking Renan's methods, but, in any case, the professional superiority of Renan in philological equipment would have made Proudhon suspicious of his rival author of a Life of Jesus.

Another key to knowledge of society was now put into his hands, for a fellow-citizen of Franche-Comte, just becoming famous, had his book printed at Besancon. The book was The New Industrial World of Charles Fourier, and it helped to open the world of economic speculation to the young proof-corrector. Later in life Proudhon, as was his wont, was less and less willing to admit his debt to Fourier, especially as he got to be on worse and worse terms with Fourier's disciples, but the influence was great.

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It is most obvious in the first edition of the Creation of Order in Humanity , where the system of series is made to do all sorts of wonders, but this was chiefly a matter of words. But Fourier's scepticism of the state his view that the social revolution could be brought about within the existing society by setting an example of a more efficient economy the Phalanstery has point of affinity with the later anarchical doctrines of Proudhon, although the effect of the example given in Proudbon's system is moral, not economic.

Proudhon admitted six weeks of infatuation with Fourier, but the influence lasted longer than that. Proudhon came to scorn all 'Utopias' as Marx did; the optimism of Saint-Simon, of Cabet, and of the Foutierists infuriated him; all these promises of increased wealth to be generally distributed by ingenious manipulations, by improved productive methods, were deceit in his eyes, for the best that could be hoped for was decent poverty for everyone, instead of wealth for some and wretchedness for the rest.

It is a source of his strength that the satisfactions he promises his disciples are moral rather than material, but if he abandoned the path opened by Fourier, he was for long enough in the debt of his fellow-countryman, and in his own later years he thought more kindly of the speculator whom he had been used to attack. While this interior revolution was under way, an exterior revolution broke out.

The 'three glorious days of July' overthrew the restored Bourbons and made it evident to the world that the revolutionary spirit was again on the march. That revolutionary spirit filled the mind and still more the heart of Proudhon. He never wavered in his belief that the French Revolution was a turning point in human history. That Revolution might be, for Marx, merely a triumph of the new capitalist over the old feudal order, but for Proudhon it was the beginning of the reign of Justice, or, at any rate, it made possible the institution of the reign of Justice.

What the content of Justice was, in Proudbon's system, will be described later, but Proudhon never regretted for a moment the Revolution. He could be bitter about its betrayal by leaders who were heroes of the revolutionary legend, but whom he condemned for misunderstanding the great moment of deliverance, but none of his sneers at democracy and, still more, at democrats, can make of him despite the ingenious special pleading of M.

Louis Dimier a 'master of the counter-revolution'. Nowhere more clearly than in Proudhon, can one feel the unshakable devotion of the French peasant and worker to the memory of those days 'when Death was on thy drums, Democracy, and, with one rush of slaves, the world was free'.

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Is a man, a book, a project, counter-revolutionary? It is thereby condemned.

Does a law or an idea seem to attempt to damn up the revolutionary flood; it is futile. The future is, must be with the Revolution: Any society based on these ideas is bleeding to death; it may be bandaged up for a time, but the bleeding cannot be stopped, As much as Marx, Proudhon believed and preached the inevitable victory of his cause, the making of the world safe for the idea of Justice brought into it by the French Revolution.

It is the theme of his greatest book, Justice in the Revolution and the Church. His rehabilitation from severe head trauma and acute physical injuries has proved costly and the 'Nicky Cleere Trust' has been set up to aid his recovery, which to date, has been remarkable. A long run in the championship for the hurlers and footballers will benefit the charity but the first indicator on whether Gilroy's side can reproduce last year's form will come this weekend.

Will we have that same hunger to get back into a match when it looks like it is gone?

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Management have a job to put that hunger back into the team and the players have a job to get back to that place too. Martin Breheny Counties are urged to be brave and imaginative by backing the extensive suite of proposed football rule changes at Saturday's Central Council meeting.

Tadhg Beirne on his Munster journey, Scarlets experience and goals. Click here to subscribe on iTunes.

Wimbledon: Anna Brogan and Maia Lumsden defeat top seeds

Blues brother at perfect pitch After finally cracking the code for Sam last year, Alan Brogan is eager to show the hunger is still there Donnchadh Boyle Twitter Email June 2 5: Blues brother at perfect pitch. Tadhg Beirne on his Munster journey, Scarlets experience and goals Click here to subscribe on iTunes.

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