Lettre autographe signée de 4 pages rédigée depuis la prison de Sainte-Pélagie

Autograph letter signed on four pages, dated 12 November 1851. 124 lines in black ink.

This letter is presented in a chemise and slipcase with paper boards decorated with abstract motifs, green morocco spine, green suede doublure, slipcase with morocco spine and matching paper boards signed by Thomas Boichot.

Unpublished autograph letter on progress, signed by Pierre-Joseph-Marie Proudhon, major figure in French social thought, and  “the father of anarchy”. The philosopher, imprisoned since 1849, develops his socialist convictions in a virulent and combative style condemning the absolutisms of his time.

Extraordinary declaration of philosophical, political and social faith from a marginal thinker, who influenced Karl Marx, Emile Durkheim and Benjamin Tucker.

This unpublished and densely written letter is a passionate reflection close to an essay entitled De l’idée de progrès written around ten days later, that Proudhon published with another (“De la Certitude et de son criterium”) in the work Philosophie du progrès. This set of texts was composed only two weeks before the coup of Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte, which he immediately opposed. Once released from prison in 1852, Proudhon published the two letters at Lebègue in Brussels in order to escape censorship, which had prohibited the sale of the booklet on French territory.

Already having been detained for two years in the jails of the future French emperor, Proudhon writes to Romain-Cornut from Sainte-Pélagie prison. Journalist Romain-Cornut had just finished a series of articles on Auguste Comte’s positivism (Études critiques sur le socialisme, October-November 1851). This letter must be viewed as an admirable four-page plea, or more a confession of his socialist vision of progress, a “social positivism” which is based on the reconsideration of the ancient order: “we withdraw in the face of an intellectual negation, which is the sine qua non condition of further progress.” During the course of the letter he establishes a balance between his polemical soul and his desire for legitimacy, striving to be no longer viewed as a mere agitator, but as a true philosopher. We are indeed reminded of his famous saying ( “Property is theft!”), his sympathy for the 1848 uprisings as well as his acerbic pamphlets in Le Peuple that consecrated his radical reputation: “I have been, until this day, so foolishly judged, even by the socialists [...] Because I led the criticism of the old principles as far as it could go [...] I still appear to many people as only the pure and simple negation of what is.” Proudhon, however maintains his intention to leave the shields of criticism (“leaving the argument of circumstance for the moment in my new studies”) and thus implies the writing of a new, deeper work published under the title La Philosophie du progrès (1853) dedicated to the same Romain-Cornut.

Proudhon, an anarchist in favour of the abolition of the State and the government, violently criticizes the “system” which is by definition anti-progressive: “Yet, it is unquestionable, from this progressive point of view, that our society as a whole, monarchists, democrats, Catholics, philosophers, is still absolutist: what everyone wants, is a charter, a constitution, a system, a fixed and definitive legislation, finally.” In addition to political systems, Proudhon picks up this same idealism in the philosophical thinking of his elders and does not refrain from giving a violent condemnation: “Like Pascal, like the Germans, we want the absolute! [...] Spinoza, Malebranche, Leibnitz, etc., all of whom, operating on the categories of substance causality, eternity, unity, plurality, etc. have arrived at politically and intellectually immobile systems, at the absolute.” He noted the harmful effects of the political regimes and of the philosophies that were insensitive to the vicissitudes of history, shaken in spite of everything by the changes that the 1848 revolution had signalled. By taking into consideration the instability inherent in human society, he offers his own definition of an anarchist and non-interventionalist progress:

“The social system only exists in the series of ages: it is an historic ensemble, not a current one. This is why it is never given to a generation, let alone to a man, to perceive to predict the small portion of progress to be carried out in the following age: all that we can do, is propose an ideal aim, that is to say, to assert in general the direction of movement, and to note some laws, never to assert anything complete, definitive, absolute.”

Proudhon places himself as a prophet, at the same time as announcer and denouncer of the blindness of French scholars still caught up in their ideas of the absolute: “There is no man, in the entire universe, who perceives this revolution, which is on the brink of happening in philosophy by the recent introduction of the idea of progress in metaphysics.”

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Unpublished letter by one of the most important French philosophers of the 19th century to the journalist Romain-Cornut, to whom he later dedicated his Philosophie du progrès (1853). Proudhon featured some weeks later among the ranks of opponents exiled from the Empire of Napoleon III, alongside Victor Hugo and Louis Blanc.