The Académie de Besançon having honors and prizes to distribute, proposed every year a subject for an essay. In 1839 the subject was “The Utility of the Celebration of Sunday.” Proudhon competed for the prize, but was not successful, although the book met with some praise, and passed through two editions in two years. He had, however, already been fortunate enough to secure a pension of 1500 francs, which had been founded to encourage literature and science, and placed in charge of the Académie. Besides his work demonstrating the utility of the observation of Sunday, Proudhon had written several essays of more or less merit on comparative philology, and he was considered a very promising young man. But he was thinking all this time of means to elevate the laboring classes. When he solicited the votes of the Académie for the pension, he told them plainly that it was his intention to direct his studies towards the means of ameliorating the physical, moral, and intellectual condition of the most numerous and the poorest class. In a letter to Paul Ackermann, a distinguished man of letters, with whom he had formed a connection, he wrote as follows, concerning the congratulations he had received on being awarded the pension: “I have received the congratulations of more than two hundred people. Why do you think that people felicitate me? Because it is almost certain that I shall attain honors equal to those which the Jouffroys, the Pouillets have obtained, and perhaps, I am told, even greater honors. No one has come to me and said: ‘Proudhon, you ought before everything else to devote yourself to the cause of the poor, to the enfranchisement of the little ones, to the instruction of the people. You will perhaps be an abomination to the rich and powerful; pursue your way as a reformer regardless of persecutions, of calumny, of sorrow, and of death itself.’”[118] About this time he founded a printing establishment in his native city, which appears never to have flourished greatly. He had already taken up the study of political economy, in addition to theology and philology, to both of which he hereafter devoted comparatively little attention. One of his first instructors in his new study was the able economist, Pellegrino Rossi. His economic studies bore fruit in 1840, in his work on property, “Qu’est-ce que la Propriété?”[119]—“What is Property?” A startling answer to the question is given—viz., “Property is theft” and “Property-holders are thieves.”