On the 19th of the month Juliette installed herself in the bookseller’s back shop, and inscribed on the fly-leaves of fifty copies suitable dedications to the most important figures in the world of journalism and letters: George Sand, Daniel Stern, Littré, Émile de Girardin, Prosper Mérimée, Edmond About, Octave Feuillet, Jules Grévy, Hippolyte Carnot and others. Then dispatching an errand-boy with the celebrities’ copies, she herself took a cab and delivered the books at the newspaper offices.
This done, her next concern was to go down to Chauny and put a volume into her father’s hands. What would he say to her impudence in attacking so great a philosopher, to her Idées Anti-Proudhoniennes? And, indeed, the title was a shock to him. He took the little volume in his hand, turned it round and round. “What if it’s bad?” he began. “But if it’s good?” interposed Juliette. “Ah, at your age, even if you have half a success, you are distinguished for life.”[47]
After dinner, finding her very agitated, he sent her to bed. “Va te coucher, Basile,” he said. “I will read your book to-night, and tell you what I think of it in the morning.”
“At three o’clock in the morning he came into his daughter’s room and awakened her with the words:[48] ”It is good, it is good. But it is mine. I sowed the seed in your mind of these Idées Anti-Proudhoniennes. My dear child, this means your success, your salvation,[49] influential friendships, your grandmother’s wishes realised. Why is she not here at this moment?“
The next morning at breakfast even the usually despondent Mme. Lambert was gay, although she could not help her customary gloom breaking out in the exclamation, “I tremble to think what a life of work and worry this will mean for you.”
Dr. Lambert was eager for his daughter to be off to Paris, there to receive the congratulations which he was convinced were awaiting her. And he was not mistaken. Every day brought some new proof of the attention this little volume had attracted. The book was widely noticed in the press. The review which pleased her most, even to the point, she confesses, of for the moment making her lose her head (cet article me monta un peu à la tête),[50] was by Eugène Pelletan, in La Presse. The writer came to see her the day after the article’s appearance: and from that moment he became one of her most faithful and devoted friends. The Siècle, the periodical which had published her first prose effort,[51] in the following terms noticed her volume only a few days after its publication—
“We received yesterday a book destined to produce a profound sensation. It is a reply to Proudhon and to the insulting attack upon George Sand and Daniel Stern contained in his last work. This book, despite its virility, is said to be by a very young woman. The title of the volume is Idées Anti-Proudhoniennes. It is signed ‘Juliette Lamessine.’”
Virility is, indeed, the dominating feature of this, Juliette’s first production, as it was to be of all her work. She writes as one having authority. Her style is crisp, terse, dramatic, vivid and, above all, forcible. It is essentially the style of a woman of action as well as of thought. In controversy she has always been at her best. And she could not possibly have found a subject better suited to her temperament and training than this answer to Proudhon’s attack on women. That in this year, 1858, three years before John Stuart Mill began to write his Subjection of Women, three years before our first woman doctor, Mrs. Garrett Anderson, began to study medicine, a young woman of twenty-two should have been able to present a bird’s-eye view of the whole field of feminist reform; that she should, in such forcible terms, have enunciated feminist principles and contended for those rights which it has required half a century of conflict to win, was a very remarkable achievement.
This little book of one hundred and ninety-six pages, polished off in two months, naturally makes no pretence at being an adequate answer to Proudhon’s great work, the result of years of laborious effort. It is, indeed, only with the last part of the book, that treating of women and of marriage, that the authoress of Idées Anti-Proudhoniennes is concerned. “Therein,” she writes, “are things which every woman who knows how to hold a pen has the right to regard as personal insults, and it is to these personalities that I intend to reply.”
Nevertheless, in her first chapter, entitled “Generalities,” she permits herself a few remarks on the main trend of her adversary’s book. She blames the narrow dogmatism which blinds him to the complexity of the social problem. A pure economist, this founder of the People’s Bank had attempted to solve the social problem in terms of pounds, shillings and pence. This Proudhon was the J. A. Hobson of that day. His absorption in the idea of justice caused him to forget what is equally important, passion, affection, solidarity and mercy. “There is no heart in your dialectics,” writes Juliette. “Now to understand life, you must be yourself alive. Had you the most powerful brain in the universe, you would never comprehend man and humanity.”