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Title: Freedom, Individualism, Revolution Author: Allan Antliff Date: 1997 Language: en Topics: anarchist aesthetics, art, critical idealism, Émile Zola, Fifth Estate, Gustave Courbet, Paris Commune, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, Realism Source: Retrieved on 2021-11-03 from https://www.fifthestate.org/archive/350-fall-1997/freedom-individualism-revolution/ Notes: Fifth Estate # 350, Fall, 1997
Artistic anarchism has a long and complex history. Certainly one of its
most interesting chapters in France is the development of two competing
anarchist discourses about art’s libertarian possibilities during the
years leading up to the ill-fated Paris Commune of 1871. Then the
paintings of the anarchist artist Gustave Courbet served as a foil for a
debate in which Pierre-Joseph Proudhon’s praise for Courbet’s “Realist”
aesthetic was pitted against the young novelist Emile Zola’s enthusiasm
for the stylistic qualities of Courbet’s art. Proudhon encapsulated his
views in his last book, Du principe de l’art et de sa destination social
(The principle of art and its social goal), published in 1865.[1] Here
he situated art production socially so as to affirm the artist’s freedom
to transform history. Proudhon argued art was inescapably social, and
that the artist was free only to the degree to which he or she sought to
transform society. He admired Courbet’s Realism because it pushed
history forward through critique, extending the dialectical interplay
between anarchist criticism and social transformation into the artistic
realm.
[Gustave Courbet, Proudhon and His Family, 1865]
Zola, on the other hand, argued art was a vehicle of freedom solely to
the degree that it was in accord with the artist’s own tastes and
aesthetic sensibility.[2] With this end in mind he decoupled the issue
of artistic freedom from the artist’s role in history, encouraging the
artist to depict society from a position of disinterestedness rather
than engagement. As we shall see, his dismissal of Proudhon’s emphasis
on art’s critical content led him to praise Courbet for the stylistic
innovations in his art, which Zola held up as a new anarchist index of
artistic freedom.
So the debate stood in the late 1860s. Courbet went on to participate in
the Paris Commune, where he formed an artists’ federation bent on
implementing a radical art program for the new revolutionary era. Then,
as theory gave way to the test of practice, he and his comrades
proclaimed total freedom in the arts. In effect, the Commune had broken
the chains binding anarchist art theory to the problem of how to achieve
artistic freedom in an oppressive social order. Thus, for a fleeting
moment, the Proudhon-Zola debate was resolved by new, uncharted
possibilities for artistic creation, possibilities the Commune would
guarantee, support, and extend indefinitely.
The story begins in the early 1840s, when Paris became a haven for a
number of political refugees known as the “radical Hegelians.” These
refugees were part of a small group of activists who had transformed a
philosophy of historical development first formulated by the
conservative German philosopher Wilhelm Hegel (1770–1831) into a radical
theory of social change which challenged the sanctity of the church, the
system of monarchical rule, and capitalist property relations. Principal
among the group were the Russian Mikhail Bakunin, who arrived in France
to avoid forcible extradition to Russia, and the Germans Karl Marx and
Karl Grun, who had been forced out of Germany for their journalistic
activities.
In Paris they all sought out and befriended Proudhon, who had recently
gained fame for his stinging critique of capitalism and the state
entitled, What is Property? An Inquiry into the Principle of Right and
of Government (1840). In this book Proudhon declared “property is theft”
and denounced “the government of man by man” in favor of a society based
on “equality, law, independence, and proportionality”—principles which
he argued found their highest perfection in the social union of “order
and anarchy.”[3] In one simple and compelling statement the anarchist
movement was born: and the message rang as a clarion call throughout
leftist Europe.
Proudhon and his new friends met in the humble apartments, ale houses,
and coffee-houses of working-class Paris, where they engaged in excited
discussions that turned on two issues: the critique of idealism mounted
by the radical Hegelian philosopher Ludwig Feuerbach and the related
concept of dialectics, which was central to the Hegelian theory of
historical change.[4] Briefly, Hegel posited that world history was
driven by an unfolding process of alienation in which a divine “World
Spirit” manifested itself in partial and incomplete forms of
self-knowledge which were objectified in human consciousness as Reason
and Freedom. This Spirit was gradually emerging to complete
self-consciousness and self-definition through a dialectical process in
which incomplete forms of self-consciousness manifest in human history
were formulated, negated and then reconciled in successively higher and
more inclusive syntheses—syntheses that in turn were destined to
themselves be negated and subsumed. History progressed along this
dialectical path until the World Spirit achieved total self-knowledge,
at which time its own objectification and self-alienation would cease
and its objecthood and knowledge of itself would coincide in unity.[5]
Hegel argued that the dialectical manifestation of the World Spirit’s
self-consciousness could only be recognized in retrospect, and that the
future forms of Reason and Freedom could not be predicted. In other
words, this was a philosophy of the status quo in which the current
social state of affairs was justified as the latest manifestation of the
World Spirit’s unfolding self-consciousness.
The radical Hegelians questioned this notion by utilizing the principles
of Reason and Freedom to critically distinguish “the actual and rational
features of the universe from the illusionary, irrational ones.”[6] In
Germany, for example, they rejected the prevailing monarchist political
order and argued for the adoption of the bourgeois-democratic and
republican principles of the French Revolution. They also introduced
human agency into the dialectical process, equating their social
critiques with the dialectic of negation in Hegel’s progressive
triad.[7]
Ludwig Feuerbach’s attack on Hegel completed the radicals’ revision of
the philosopher’s grand scheme. Feuerbach argued that the divine World
Spirit was a fiction, and that the real dialectic driving history
hitherto had been a process of human estrangement from our essence in
which ideals born of human experience were continuously objectified in
the form of metaphysical concepts attributed to otherworldly deities,
such as goodness, justice, and love.[8] Humanity’s self-negation through
objectification could only be overcome by recognizing that no ideals
existed apart from humanity. “The species,” wrote Feuerbach, “is the
last measure of truth…what is true is what is in agreement with the
essence of the species, what is false is what disagrees with it.”[9]
Freedom, therefore, resided in our ability to realize our humanized
ideals in the world. Feuerbach characterized his philosophy as
“anthropological” to signal that, finally, the metaphysical ideals which
had dominated human thought since time immemorial had been brought down
to earth and subsumed into humanity’s sensuous, historical essence)[10]
Proudhon was introduced to Feuerbach’s critique of Hegel by Grun in the
fall of 1844.[11] In his book On the Socialist Movement in France and
Belgium (1845), Grun described his meetings with Proudhon and the French
anarchist’s eagerness to discuss German philosophy. Proudhon had already
gained a cursory grasp of Hegel through French commentaries on the
German philosopher. “He was greatly relieved,” wrote Grun, “when I told
him how Feuerbach’s criticism dissolved the Hegelian bombast.”[12] Grun
outlined Feuerbach’s revision of Hegel for Proudhon and ended the
conversation declaring his “anthropology” was “metaphysics in action” to
which Proudhon excitedly replied, “I am going to show that political
economy is metaphysics in action.”[13]
In fact, Feuerbach provided Proudhon with the philosophical foundation
for sweeping the metaphysical moralities of religion and philosophy
aside in favour of moral principles logically “synthesized” from
experience. Proudhon described his method of arriving at moral judgments
as human-centered and anti-metaphysical, writing: “With man
consciousness/conscience is the dominant faculty, the sovereign
power….it is not from any metaphysics, poetry or theodicy that I deduce
the rules of my life or my sociability. On the contrary, it is from the
dictates of my consciousness/conscience that I deduce the laws of my
understanding.”[14]
Feuerbach’s dialectical and anthropological idealism, which underpinned
Proudhon’s anti-metaphysical concept of the critical synthesis, led the
French anarchist to justify revolutions as the supreme attempt to
realize moral goals through social change. In The General Idea of the
Revolution in the Nineteenth Century (1851), Proudhon called revolution
“an act of sovereign justice, in the order of moral facts, springing out
of the necessity of things, and in consequence carrying with it its own
justification.”[15] “Springing out of the necessity of things,” moral
imperatives changed as society changed: in Proudhon’s critical method,
“justice” took on a radically contingent, historical and social
character.
Proudhon’s idea of a critical “synthesis” was derived from the theory of
dialectics espoused by the German philosopher Emanuel Kant.[16] In his
famous essay, Critique of Pure Reason (1781), Kant claimed he had
exposed the inability of human reason to know the world as it is,
meaning the world conceived apart from the perspective of the
knower.[17] Reason, he argued, could not transcend the boundaries of the
sensible and the dialectical nature of human reason was proof of this
fact. Kant held that from any premise we could derive both a proposition
and its negation. This dialectical opposition exposed the false truth of
the premise which gave birth to it, leading him to conclude that we
could never attain the transcendental knowledge necessary for knowing
the world in its totality.[18]
In Proudhon’s anti-metaphysical reformulation of the Kantian dialectic,
the social critic, guided by the imperatives of reason and morality,
deduced moral syntheses from dialectical contradictions found in
society. The means by which a synthesis was transformed from a
moral-based deduction of social contradictions to a resolution of those
contradictions was through social transformation. Whereas for Marx
history was driven by a Hegelian dialectic in which conflicting social
forces moved through ever-higher syntheses toward their final
resolution, Proudhon argued social contradictions, and the moral
solutions the social critic deduced from these contradictions, were
historically contingent and ever-changing.[19] In Proudhon’s system the
free exercise of human reason in every social sphere came to the fore as
the progressive force in history, a position which led him to argue
freedom from all coercion was the necessary prerequisite for realizing a
just society. In James Rubin’s words, “Proudhon held that anarchy (that
is an-archy, the absence of authority) was the only possible condition
for social progress.”[20]
Proudhon’s anarchist philosophy of art was deeply inscribed with the
Feuerbachian critique of metaphysical idealism which I have outlined
above. He codified this philosophy in Du principe de l’art which was
published in the year of his death in 1865. In the opening chapter
Proudhon informed his readers that the book was inspired by the French
government’s refusal to exhibit Courbet’s painting, entitled Return from
the conference, at the official state art exhibition of 1863.[21]
Gustave Courbet was an old friend of Proudhon and a long-standing
participant in the anarchist political culture of Paris (he honoured
Proudhon in 1865 with a portrait, Proudhon and His Family). Courbet’s
artistic notoriety stemmed from the years 1848 through 1851, when the
French monarchy was overthrown and a Republican government was briefly
instituted. In 1851 Courbet created a scandal at the state’s annual art
exhibition, where he exhibited two immense paintings depicting banal
scenes from the life of the French peasantry, painted in a style akin to
popular woodblock prints. The upper-class public were accustomed to
works such as Jean-Leon Jerome’s Greek Interior of 1850 which offered
slickly-painted “classical” titillations far removed from the social
realities of the day. Courbet’s Stonebreakers and Burial at Ornans (both
painted in 1849 through 1850 and exhibited in 1851), therefore, came as
a shock. Courbet’s paintings shattered the artistic boundaries between
rich and poor, cultured and uncultured, and as a result they were
roundly condemned for their rude subject-matter, rough, “unfinished”
brush-work, shallow perspectives, and overall lack of painterly decorum.
But artistic “crudity” was not the sole reason for the heated objections
to Courbet’s work. During the short-lived Republic of 1848 through 1851
the workers of Paris and Lyon engaged in violent agitation for the state
to adopt Proudhon’s call for “national workshops” that would guarantee
them employment, and the impoverished French peasantry were in a
perpetual state of unrest against landlords in the countryside. Beset by
growing working-class radicalism, the Parisian upper classes saw
Courbet’s paintings as an affront to establishment values in art and a
political provocation against their power. Eventually they solved the
problem of social unrest by throwing their lot in with the dictatorship
of Louis-Napoleon III, nephew of Napoleon Bonaparte, who proclaimed
himself emperor after a coup d’etat in 1851.[22]
However throughout Napoleon III’s reign, from 1851 to 1870, Courbet
continued to paint in the same uncompromising manner. He called his new
style “Realism,” and paid tribute to himself and his accomplishment in a
huge retrospective painting of 1855 entitled The Painter’s Studio: A
Real Allegory. Courbet depicted himself painting a landscape, observed
by an admiring nude model. The model is “real” but also an allegorical
figure of the painter’s muse (nature). Behind the artists are the
patrons, comrades, writers, and philosophers who inspired him—notably
Charles Baudelaire and Proudhon, who surveys the scene from the back of
the room. Facing the painter are the products of the corrupt and
degenerate society he critiqued, including destitute workers, a
businessman, and Louis-Napoleon himself with his hunting dog and gun.
Courbet’s Return from the Conference, which depicted drunken clerics on
their way home from a religious gathering, was another Realist
tour-de-force; in this instance, directed against the degenerate
institution of the church. Refused a showing in the 1863 state
exhibition and maligned by establishment art critics, the painting
provoked a tremendous storm of indignation, leading Courbet, who
regarded the work as the artistic equivalent to Proudhon’s own critical
“synthesis” of society’s wrongs, to ask the anarchist philosopher to
defend it.[23]
In Du principe de l’art Proudhon recounted Courbet’s rebuke of the
establishment critics who villified Return from the Conference. The
artist condemned them “for misrepresenting… the high mission of art, for
moral depravity, and for prostituting [art] with their idealism.” “Who
is wrong,” Proudhon asked; “the so-called Realist Courbet, or his
detractors, the champions of the ideal?”[24] Proudhon set out to resolve
this opposition.
First he turned his attention to the issue of idealism. As we have seen,
Proudhon, following Feuerbach, viewed metaphysical knowledge as an
impossibility, and this informed his critique of artistic idealism, in
which he attacked the idea that metaphysical ideas could spring,
fully-formed, from the imagination of the artist. Art, Proudhon argued,
was made up of specific forms, subjects, and images. The idealized
subject in art, therefore, was inseparable from the real objects it
represented. Thus there was no metaphysical “separation of the real and
the ideal” as Courbet’s “idealist” critics maintained.[25]
Proudhon then took up the question of realism. By the early 1860s other
artists were also painting in a “realist” style, however they tended to
temper the aesthetic crudeness associated with Courbet and chose
subject-matter from everyday life that, though “real,” would not offend.
Proudhon criticized the artists of this lesser “realist” camp, accusing
them of maintaining that art should slavishly imitate reality.[26] This,
he argued, was a falsification of what art was. A photograph, for
example, could capture an image, but it could not replicate the power of
the artist to magnify the qualities of character residing in a subject
or imbue an inanimate object with meaning. A “realist” aesthetic that
imitated the photograph, therefore, entailed “the death of art.”[27]
As we have seen, in his earlier writings Proudhon condemned social
criticism based on metaphysical idealism and valorized an
anti-metaphysical, moral synthesis as the basis for social advancement.
In Du principe de l’art he argued that art contained the potential to
become a vehicle for such a critique. Art was a product of idealism, but
idealism in a Proudhonian sense, because the creative imagination of the
artist, like art’s subject-matter, was inseparable from the real world.
Courbet not only recognized this fact; his brand of Realism turned art
to critical ends in the interest of social advancement, bringing art in
line with Proudhon’s prognosis for the reform of society through a
critique deduced from the actual conditions of contemporary society. As
such Courbet’s painting stood in stark contrast to both “photographic
realism” and the “metaphysical” art of Gérôme and his ilk, whose
irrational and self-indulgent pursuit of otherworldly “chimeras” such as
“beauty” elevated artistic contemplation to an ideal in-and-of-itself,
rendering the critical power of human abstraction and reason
“useless.”[28] “Our idealism,” wrote Proudhon, “consists of improving
humanity… not according to types deduced a priori… but according to the
givens supplied continuously from experience.” And this critical
idealism, he proclaimed, was the heart of Courbet’s Realist
aesthetic.[29]
Recognition of art’s relationship to society, therefore, was the
prerequisite for the free exercise of the artist’s critical reason. In
Feuerbachian terms the artist gained freedom from the condition of
self-alienation engendered by a metaphysical world-view by taking up the
cause of improving society through art. It followed that art would
progress “as reason and humanity progress.”[30] Such art, concluded
Proudhon; “Will at last show us man, the citizen, and scientist, the
producer, in his true dignity, which has too long been ignored; from now
on art will work for the physical and moral improvement of the species,
and it will do this, not by means of obscure hieroglyphics, erotic
figures, or useless images of spirituality, but by means of vivid,
intelligent representations of ourselves.”[31]
This was Proudhon’s view. That same year Emile Zola, who championed
radical politics and artistic independence with equal tenacity,
encapsulated his position in a polemical review of Proudhon’s book
entitled “Proudhon and Courbet.” He too supported “the free
manifestation of individual thoughts—what Proudhon calls anarchy.”[32]
However his anarchism led him to a position markedly different from
Proudhon’s.
Zola couched his criticism of Proudhon in terms of a polarity that pit
his own affirmation of individualism against the alleged repudiation of
individual freedom in Proudhon’s theory of art.[33] Proudhon, Zola
argued, was trapped by his method, which preceded from a desire for the
reign of equality and liberty in society to a logical deduction of the
type of art that would bring about such a society.[34] The rigors of
this “logic” determined that Proudhon could only imagine one kind of
artist: an artist who contributed to the anarchist struggle through the
exercise of critical reason in the service of the social good.[35] This
single-mindedness, Zola wrote, had led Proudhon to his impoverished
definition of art. The author of Du principe de l’art defined art as “an
idealization of nature and ourselves, whose goal is the physical and
moral perfection of our species.” But this definition was an oppressive
tautology.[36] It could broach no unruly deviation on the part of the
artist from art’s stated goal. “In a word,” Zola wrote, “individual
feeling, the free expression of a personality, are forbidden.”[37]
Here Zola’s support for “the free expression of the personality” came
head-to-head with the Feuerbachian underpinnings of Proudhon’s notion of
artistic anarchism. As I have demonstrated, in Du principe de l’art
Proudhon moved, step by step, from a repudiation of photographic realism
and metaphysical idealism in art to a reformulation which tied art
inextricably to the improvement of society. Individual freedom only
entered the realm of art to the degree that the artist mounted a moral
critique. Zola quite rightly pointed out that Proudhon’s concept of
artistic liberty was tied to a historical mission, and thus found its
sole libertarian legitimation in relation to society.
For Zola, on the other hand, the locus of freedom was the individual,
not society. In his words, “My art is a negation of society, an
affirmation of the individual, independent of all rules and all social
obligations.”[38] As we have seen, Proudhon argued moral imperatives
derived from the study of society should shape art. Zola, however, drew
an absolute division between the artist and the world the artist
represents by marshalling a radical subjectivism in which the
imagination of the artist stood in for the old metaphysical realm of the
Ideal. “I will have Proudhon note,” Zola wrote, “That our ideas are
absolute…. we achieve perfection in a single bound; in our imagination,
we arrive at the ideal state. Consequently it can be understood that we
have little care for the world. We are fully in heaven and we are not
coming down.”[39]
Real freedom for artists lay in self-expression unfettered by social
strictures and moral dictates. Consequently Zola placed a premium on
formalist originality and dismissed the significance of subject-matter
in painting. Content in a work of art was always derived from something
else—either the external world or traditional subject-matter. The true
measure of artistic freedom, therefore, was style, since the artist’s
manipulation of formal elements such as colour, texture, light, etc. was
the only aspect of a painting that was unique, original, in a word,
individual.
Zola’s discussion of Courbet’s art centered on this argument. “My
Courbet is an individual,” he wrote, and he praised the artist’s
youthful decision to cease to imitate “Flemish and Renaissance masters”
as the mark of his “rebellious nature.”[40] Even Courbet’s Realism was
transformed into an extension of the artist’s individualism. Zola
claimed that Courbet had become a Realist because he “felt drawn through
his physical being…toward the material world surrounding him.”[41] But
the artist’s real greatness lay in the singularity of his style. Zola
recounted his own “confrontation” with the anarchist artist’s paintings
during a visit to Courbet’s studio: “I was confronted with a tightly
constructed manner of painting, broad, extremely polished and honest.
The figures were true without being vulgar; the fleshy parts, firm and
supple, were powerfully alive; the backgrounds were airy and endowed the
figures with astounding vigour. The slightly muted coloration has an
almost sweet harmony, while the exactness of tones, the breath of
technique, establish the planes and help set off each detail in a
surprising way. I see again these energy-filled canvases, unified,
solidly constructed, true to life and as beautiful as truth.”[42]
Having established the libertarian primacy of style, Zola ridiculed
Proudhon for emphasizing the exact opposite, namely Courbet’s subject
matter. Proudhon, he wrote, saw Courbet “from the point of view of pure
thought, outside of all painterly qualities. For him a canvas is a
subject; paint it red or green, he could not care less….He [always]
obliges the painting to mean something; about the form, not a word.”[43]
The anarchist philosopher’s problem, Zola concluded, was that he did not
understand that “Courbet exists through himself, and not through the
subjects he has chosen.” “As for me,” he wrote, “it is not the tree, the
face, the scene I have shown that moves me: it is the man revealed
through the work, it is the forceful, unique individual who has
discovered how to create, alongside God’s world, a personal world.”[44]
In the most telling passage from this essay Zola defined a work of art
as “a fragment of creation seen through a temperament.”[45] For Zola the
“fragment” was secondary to “temperament,” and the index of temperament
was style. Equating the exercise of temperament with the anarchist goal
of individual freedom, therefore, Zola turned stylistic originality into
a political act. Here the anarchist politics of art imploded into the
art object as the artist strove to assert personal freedom through
stylistic innovation, rather than social critique. The contrast with
Proudhon’s artist, who could not approach a condition of freedom except
through social critique, was unequivocal.
In the mid-1860s, therefore, anarchism’s relation to art had become
hotly contested and divisive terrain. But in retrospect the differences
dividing Proudhon and Zola were not unbridgeable. Both critics agreed
that a libertarian aesthetic could not be achieved apart from human
subjectivity, albeit two conflicting subjectivities—one social and
historical, the other individual and ahistorical. Underlying their
differences was a shared consensus that individual freedom lay at the
heart of any artistic anarchism worthy of the name.
As it turned out, this consensus proved to be the starting point for the
implementation of a revolutionary art program in the spring of 1871. In
July, 1870 Louis-Napoleon III declared war on the German state of
Prussia over the issue of that state’s growing power and influence in
European affairs. An ignominious rout of the French army followed in
September, 1870 and Louis-Napoleon was captured by the Germans. In
response conservative French politicians deposed the monarchy,
proclaiming a National Government of Defence and a new “Third Republic.”
But the conservatives were insincere in their efforts to resist the
German invasion of France. Instead of prosecuting the war they entered
into negotiations with the Prussians while a restive Parisian populace,
unaware of the government’s intentions, prepared itself for the defence
of the capital. A German-French armistice was signed in January, 1871.
With the Prussians encamped just outside the gates of the French capital
the French army then moved on Paris to seize the cannon held by the
city’s militias. However the city resisted. Driving the troops of the
so-called Government of Defence out of the city, they founded the Paris
Commune on the 28^(th) of March, 1871.[46]
The Commune established a form of government akin to Proudhon’s model of
federalist anarchism in which a municipal government subject to direct
recall shaped its programs around the desires of various political clubs
and working-class organizations. Courbet was witness to this social
revolution during the Commune’s short existence (March 28 to May 28,
1871). On April 30^(th), at the Commune’s height, he wrote, “Paris is a
true paradise! No police, no nonsense, no exaction of any kind, no
arguments! Everything in Paris rolls along like clockwork. If only it
could stay like this forever. In short, it is a beautiful dream. All
government bodies are organized federally and run themselves.”[47]
Courbet organized a Federation of Artists which abolished official state
exhibitions, declared complete freedom of expression in the arts, and
proposed the establishment of Commune-sponsored artist’s schools
throughout Paris. “Complete freedom of expression:” for Courbet there
was no longer a conflict between Zola’s advocacy of freedom through
style and Proudhon’s advocacy of freedom through critique—an anarchist
future could accommodate both. However this future was not to be. On the
21^(st) of May the French army, which had been laying siege to the free
city, broke through its defences and began subduing the Communards by
force. Fighting was fierce as the city’s inhabitants retreated behind
barricades and fought the invaders house by house. The final stand
against the army took place in the cemetery of Pere-Lachaise. After the
Commune’s defeat the army set up firing squads at this cemetery, which
was later to become a rallying point for anarchists and socialists in
the 1880s and ’90s. In all the army killed 20,000 Parisians during the
fighting and 30,000 more were jailed, executed, or deported. Among them
was Courbet, who had organized one of the Commune’s most spectacular
events—the pulling down, on the 16^(th) of May, of the hated Vendome
column, symbol of Napoleonic tyranny under the First and Second Empires.
Driven into Swiss exile for his part in the column’s destruction, he
continued to paint until his death in 1877.[48]
[1] Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, Du principe de l’art et de sa destination
social, (Paris: 1865).
[2] Emile Zola, “Proudhon and Courbet,” in My Hatreds, trans. by Paloma
Pves-Yashinsky and Jack Yashinsky, (Lewiston: Edwin Mellen Press, 1992),
9–21. The original article appeared in two installments in the July 26,
1865 and August 31, 1865 editions of Le Salut Public.
[3] Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, What is Property? An Inquiry into the
Principle of Right and of Government, (New York: Dover Press, 1970),
286.
[4] Proudhon’s meetings with Bakunin, Marx, and Grun are discussed in
Brian Morris, Bakunin: The Philosophy of Freedom, (Montreal: Black Rose
Press, 1993), 12–13; and James H. Billington, Fire in the Minds of Men,
(New York: Basic Books, 1980), 289–290.
[5] Lesek Kolakowski, Main Currents in Marxism: The Founders, trans. by
P.S. Falla, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978), 72–73.
[6] Ibid., 82.
[7] Ibid., 83–85.
[8] David McLellan, The Young Hegelians and Karl Marx, (New York:
Frederick A. Praeger, 1969), 89.
[9] Feuerbach quoted in ibid., 92.
[10] Ludwig Feuerbach, “Provisional Theses for the Reformation of
Philosophy,” The Young Hegelians: An Anthology, ed. by Lawrence S.
Stepelevich, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983); 164.
[11] George Woodcock, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon: A Biography, (Montreal:
Black Rose Press, 1987), 87–88.
[12] Grun quoted in Henri de Lubac, The Un-Marxian Socialist: A Study of
Proudhon, trans. by R.E. Scantlebury, (New York: Sheed and Ward, 1948),
134, note 33.
[13] Grun quoted in Woodcock, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, 88.
[14] Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, De la justice dans la révolution et dans
l’église, (Paris, 1858), 492–93.
[15] Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, General Idea of the Revolution in the
Twentieth-Century, trans. by John Beverley Robinson, (London: Pluto
Press, 1989), 40.
[16] Steven Vincent, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon and the Rise of French
Republican Socialism, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), 62; 72.
[17] Roger Scruton, Kant, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982), 46.
[18] Ibid., 48–49.
[19] Bakunin also rejected the higher subsuming synthesis in the
Hegelian triad. See Robert M. Cutler, “Introduction,” The Basic Bakunin:
Selected Writings, trans. and ed. by Robert M. Cutler, (New York:
Prometheus Books, 1992).
[20] James Henry Rubin, Realism and Social Vision in Courbet and
Proudhon, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980), 34.
[21] Proudhon, Du principe de l’art, 1.
[22] Roger Magraw, The Age of the Artisan Revolution, 1815–1871,
(London: Blackwell, 1992), 140–169; 180–181.
[23] Rubin, Realism and Social Vision, 164.
[24] Proudhon, Du principe de l’art, 3.
[25] Ibid., 31.
[26] Ibid, 38.
[27] Ibid., 39; 40–42.
[28] Ibid, 199.
[29] Ibid.
[30] Ibid., 84.
[31] Ibid.
[32] Zola, “Proudhon and Courbet,” in My Hatreds, 14.
[33] Ibid.
[34] Ibid., 9.
[35] Ibid., 11.
[36] Ibid.
[37] Ibid.
[38] Ibid., 20.
[39] Ibid., 21.
[40] Ibid.
[41] Ibid.
[42] Ibid, 18.
[43] Ibid, 19.
[44] Ibid.
[45] Ibid, 12.
[46] For a standard history of the Commune see Roger L. Williams, The
French Revolution of 1870–71, (New York: W.W. Norton and Co., 1969).
[47] Letters of Gustave Courbet, ed. by Ten-Doesschate Chu, (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1992), 416.
[48] Donald Drew Egbert, Social Radicalism and the Arts, (New York:
Alfred A. Knopf’, 1970), 203–205.