Pierre Joseph Proudhon was born 15th January, 1809, in a suburb of Besancon. His father was a cooper, his mother a cook; and Pierre Joseph, in spite of his thirst for knowledge, had to devote himself to hard work, instead of completing his studies; he became a proofreader in some printing works at Besancon, and as a journeyman printer wandered all through France. Having returned to Besancon, he entered the printing house again as a factor. In the year 1836 he founded, with a fellow-workman in the same town, a little printing shop, which, however, he wound up after his partner had died in 1838, being determined to change the occupation he had followed so far, for another for which he had already long been preparing by diligent study both during his wanderings and in his leisure hours in past years. Proudhon's activity as an author began in the year 1837. The Academy at Besancon had to award a three years' scholarship, which had been founded by Suard, the secretary of the French Academy, for poor young men of Franche-Comte who wished to devote themselves to a literary or scientific career. Proudhon entered as a competitor, and won the scholarship. In the memoir of his life, which he drew up for the Academy, he said: "Born and reared in the midst of the working classes, to which I belong with my heart and in my affections, and above all by the community of sufferings and aspirations, it will be my greatest joy, if I receive the approval of the Academy, to work unceasingly with the help of philosophy and science, and with the whole energy of my will and all my mental powers, for the physical, moral, and intellectual improvement of those whom I call brothers and companions, in order to sow amongst them the seeds of a doctrine which I consider as the law of the moral world, and hoping to succeed in my endeavours, to appear before you, gentlemen, as their representative." As to the studies to which he devoted himself in Paris for several years after receiving the scholarship, Proudhon relates himself that he received light, not from the socialistic schools which then existed and were coming into fashion, not from partisans or from journalists, but that he began with a study of the antiquities of Socialism, a study which, according to his opinion, was absolutely necessary in order to determine the theoretical and practical laws of the social movement.