Pierre-Joseph Proudhon

Independent activity Anarchists 1809–1865 ○ Natural causes

Mutualist thinker of "property is theft", the first to call himself an anarchist, deputy in the Constituent Assembly of 1848

Born to a brewer's family in Besançon in 1809, he worked as a printer and taught himself. In What Is Property? (1840) he wrote that "property is theft" and became the first person known to call himself an anarchist. His System of Economic Contradictions, or The Philosophy of Poverty (1846) drew Marx's The Poverty of Philosophy and the break between the two. In 1848 he founded Le Représentant du peuple; elected for the Seine at the by-election of 4 June, he moved on 31 July a bill to levy a third of property incomes that the Assembly formally condemned, and he was one of the thirty deputies who voted against the constitution on 4 November. His People's Bank of free credit failed, and on 28 March 1849 he was sentenced to three years for articles against the president and from June was held in Sainte-Pélagie. He died at Passy in 1865.