PROUDHON, PIERRE JOSEPH, French Socialist, born at Besancon, the son of a cooper; worked in a printing establishment, spent his spare hours in study, specially of the social problem, and in 1840 published a work entitled “What is Property?” and in which he boldly enunciated the startling proposition, “Property is theft”; for the publication of this thesis he was at first unmolested, and only with its application was he called to account, and for which at last, in 1849, he was committed to prison, where, however, he kept himself busy with his pen, and whence he from time to time emitted socialistic publications till his release in 1852, after which he was in 1858 compelled to flee the country, to return again under an act of amnesty in 1860 and die; he was not only the assailant of property, but of government itself, and preached anarchy as the goal of all social progress and not the starting-point, as so many unfortunately fancy; but by anarchy, it would seem, he meant the right of government spiritually free, and, in the Christian sense of that expression, to exemption from all external control (see I Tim. i. 9) (1809-1865).

PROUT, SAMUEL, eminent English water-colour artist, born at Plymouth; had from a child an irrepressible penchant for drawing, which, though discouraged at first by his father, was fostered by his schoolmaster; was patronised by Britton the antiquary, and employed by him to assist him in collecting materials for his “Beauties of England and Wales,” but it was not till his visit to Rouen in 1818 that he was first fascinated with the subject that henceforth occupied him; from this time excursions were continually made to the Continent, and every corner of France, Germany, the Netherlands, and Italy ransacked for its fragments of carved stone; the old architecture that then fascinated him henceforth became a conspicuous feature in all his after-works; “the works of Prout,” says Ruskin, “will one day become memorials of the most precious of things that have been ...  A time will come when that zeal will be understood, and his works will be cherished with a melancholy gratitude, when the pillars of Venice shall be mouldering in the salt shallows of her sea, and the stones of the goodly towers of Rouen have become ballast for the barges of the Seine” (1789-1852).

PROUT, FATHER.  See MAHONY, FRANCIS.

PROVENCAL LANGUAGE, one of the Romance dialects of France, spoken in the South of France, and different from that spoken in the N. as in closer connection with the original Latin than that of the N., which was modified by Teutonic influence.

PROVENCE, a maritime province in the South of France, originally called Provincia by the Romans, and which included the departments of Bouches-du-Rhone, Basses-Alpes, Var, and part of Vaucluse.