Proudhon — Erosophia Encyclopedia

Entry

Proudhon — Typesetter turned polemicist, author of What Is Property?, 1809–1865

The son of a cooper and a cook, he left school for the printing trade and was a typesetter, then a partner in a small printing house that failed. The Suard pension of his home town’s academy let him study; in June 1840 he published What Is Property?, answering “property is theft”, and was the first to call himself an anarchist. Elected to the Constituent Assembly in 1848, he was sentenced the next year to three years in prison, then exiled to Brussels in 1858. Courbet painted a posthumous portrait of him. (Editorial synthesis)

Proudhon was born on 15 January 1809. (source: Encyclopædia Britannica)

Proudhon was born in Besançon. (source: Encyclopædia Britannica)

Proudhon died on 19 January 1865. (source: Encyclopædia Britannica)

Proudhon died in Paris. (source: Encyclopædia Britannica)

← Ask the encyclopedia another question

Answers are drawn from a corpus established and verified by an editorial team; each one shows its source.

When a piece of information is not in that collection, the encyclopedia says so rather than inventing it — that principle is what makes every answer it does give trustworthy.