we have been able to collect, his life, narrated by Sainte Beuve,
from whom we make numerous extracts, may be summed up in a few
pages.

Pierre Joseph Proudhon was born on the 15th of January, 1809, in
a suburb of Besancon, called Mouillere. His father and mother
were employed in the great brewery belonging to M. Renaud. His
father, though a cousin of the jurist Proudhon, the celebrated
professor in the faculty of Dijon, was a journeyman brewer. His
mother, a genuine peasant, was a common servant. She was an
orderly person of great good sense; and, as they who knew her
say, a superior woman of HEROIC character,--to use the
expression of the venerable M. Weiss, the librarian at Besancon.
She it was especially that Proudhon resembled: she and his
grandfather Tournesi, the soldier peasant of whom his mother told
him, and whose courageous deeds he has described in his work on
"Justice." Proudhon, who always felt a great veneration for his
mother Catharine, gave her name to the elder of his daughters.
In 1814, when Besancon was blockaded, Mouillere, which stood in
front of the walls of the town, was destroyed in the defence
of the place; and Proudhon's father established a cooper's shop
in a suburb of Battant, called Vignerons. Very honest, but
simple-minded and short-sighted, this cooper, the father of five
children, of whom Pierre Joseph was the eldest, passed his life
in poverty. At eight years of age, Proudhon either made himself
useful in the house, or tended the cattle out of doors. No one
should fail to read that beautiful and precious page of his work
on "Justice," in which he describes the rural sports which he
enjoyed when a neatherd. At the age of twelve, he was a cellar-
boy in an inn. This, however, did not prevent him from studying.