one of them to memoir No. 4; that is, to P. J. Proudhon, printer
at Besancon. The judges were MM. Amedde Jaubert, Reinaud, and
Burnouf.


"The committee," said the report presented at the annual meeting
of the five academies on Thursday, May 2, 1839, "has paid
especial attention to manuscripts No. 1 and No. 4. Still,
it does not feel able to grant the prize to either of these
works, because they do not appear to be sufficiently elaborated.
The committee, which finds in No. 4 some ingenious analyses,
particularly in regard to the mechanism of the Hebrew language,
regrets that the author has resorted to hazardous conjectures,
and has sometimes forgotten the special recommendation of the
committee to pursue the experimental and comparative method."


Proudhon remembered this. He attended the lectures of Eugene
Burnouf, and, as soon as he became acquainted with the labors and
discoveries of Bopp and his successors, he definitively abandoned
an hypothesis which had been condemned by the Academy of
Inscriptions and Belles-lettres. He then sold, for the value of
the paper, the remaining copies of the "Essay" published by him
in 1837. In 1850, they were still lying in a grocer's back-shop.

A neighboring publisher then placed the edition on the market,
with the attractive name of Proudhon upon it. A lawsuit ensued,
in which the author was beaten. His enemies, and at that time
there were many of them, would have been glad to have proved him
a renegade and a recanter. Proudhon, in his work on "Justice,"