The first self-declared anarchist was a printer who taught himself Latin
Pierre-Joseph Proudhon grew up working in his family's tavern, too poor for shoes at school. As a printer's apprentice he taught himself Latin, then wrote the book that declared property is theft. He became the first person known to call himself an anarchist, and his quarrel with Karl Marx split the left.
Proudhon was born in Besançon on 15 January 1809, son of a brewer and cooper. His mother taught him to read, and until he was ten his books were the Gospels, a medieval romance and local almanacs. A bursary got him into the city college, where wealthier classmates mocked his lack of books and shoes, and he buried himself in the library. In 1827 he was apprenticed to a printer; proofreading church texts at a Besançon press led him to abandon Christianity.
Printing brought him lucky encounters. In 1829 he supervised a book by Charles Fourier, whose conversations marked him for life, and the scholar Gustave Fallot, impressed by his corrections to a Latin manuscript, introduced him to Montaigne, Rabelais, Voltaire and Diderot. Fallot funded a stay in Paris, cut short when cholera struck his patron. After a failed printing venture in 1838 Proudhon won a bursary from the Academy of Besançon, whose judges admired an artisan so thoroughly self-educated.
What Is Property? appeared in 1840 and caught the eye of both the authorities and Marx, who began writing to him. Tried for a later pamphlet on property, he was acquitted because the jury could not condemn ideas it could not follow. His 1846 Philosophy of Poverty drew Marx's scornful reply, The Poverty of Philosophy, a rupture that fed the lasting split between anarchists and Marxists. He also traded insults in print with the economist Frédéric Bastiat over whether charging interest was legitimate.
Proudhon's mutualism favoured cooperatives, workers' associations and personal possession over both private ownership and state control, and he believed social revolution could be peaceful. Elected to parliament after the 1848 revolution, he tried and failed to create a national bank offering interest-free credit. Through translations by Francesc Pi i Margall, briefly president of Spain in 1873, his ideas shaped Spanish federalism and anarchism. He died at Passy on 19 January 1865.
Source: Pierre-Joseph Proudhon
