“Besides,” he said, “at this epoch the chain which has enclosed man in a middle-class position during a century is expanding, and will soon break.”
My father was fond of their rather cabalistic formula. I used it on all occasions, and I also thought I heard the breaking of the chain of “middle-class positions,” and was glad.
When I returned to Chauny I spoke to grandmother of Fourier, of the phalanstery, and of L’Esprit des Bêtes, of the royalism of the ants and the bees, which was in sympathy with her ideas, but at the idea of the communism of work and of fortune, which we approved, she laughed merrily.
“Your father needed only that, poor fellow, to complete him! To receive inspiration from insects, to take lessons in social organisation from animals—it is really enough to make sensible people laugh,” said grandmother. And she related to my grandfather and to my friend Charles, with her mischievous wit, the news of Jean Louis Lambert’s new social theories, developing them and putting them into action in such a droll manner that, in spite of the effort I made to defend these theories, I could not help bursting out laughing with the others.
“You see, my darling,” said grandmother to me one day, “I like ‘middle-class positions,’ and find it very pleasant to occupy one, and do not wish at all that they should be broken, for I myself hold such a position. The best trick I could play your father would be to give him a ‘middle-class position’ as householder. The house in which he lives, and which he likes very much, belongs to me, and I’ll wager he would care for it a great deal more if I should give it to him. We should see, then, if he would ask his gardener to come and share it with him! I will make my son-in-law a householder before a week, and we shall soon know if through him I have tightened by a link in his chain the man of ‘middle-class position,’ the bourgeois.”
My grandmother did as she said, and my father declared that he was delighted with his mother-in-law’s gracious gift, but he did not change his ideas an iota on account of it.
My father, although a householder, proclaimed himself, as usual, and with even more authority, a Proudhonian. I knew who Proudhon was, because all French persons, even the youngest, had heard of his famous saying: “Property is theft.” My father said he shared Proudhon’s opinions concerning the principle of the rights of man and of government. The pamphlet addressed by Proudhon to Blanqui, Qu’est que la propriété, never left my father’s work-table. I had read it over, on the sly, without much understanding, but I pretended to have comprehended it, and I spoke of it, not in approval, but to say that, after all, there was some truth in it.
How my father decided between the conflicting ideas of Proudhon and Considérant—the latter having defended the right to possess property—I do not know.
There were great discussions in my family on all the questions raised apropos of the association of insects, and of their life in common; but my father, full of gratitude for my grandmother’s generous gift, would have found it difficult to speak of bourgeoise selfishness, therefore he let us joke about his “theories of animal socialism and his insects’ minds,” as grandmother said.
But my grandfather abhorred revolutionary ideas to such a degree that he scarcely tolerated the mention of Proudhon, even in a joking way.