The Psychology of Revolution
by Gustave Le Bon · English · Gutenberg #448 · 509,485 chars · public domain (US)
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Title: The Psychology of Revolution
Author: Gustave Le Bon
Release date: February 1, 1996 [eBook #448]
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Language: English
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THE PSYCHOLOGY OF REVOLUTION
BY
GUSTAVE LE BON
CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION. THE REVISION OF HISTORY
PART I
THE PSYCHOLOGICAL ELEMENTS OF REVOLUTIONARY MOVEMENTS
BOOK I
GENERAL CHARACTERISTICS OF REVOLUTIONS
CHAPTER I. SCIENTIFIC AND POLITICAL REVOLUTIONS
1. Classification of Revolutions
2. Scientific Revolutions
3. Political Revolutions
4. The results of Political Revolutions
CHAPTER II. RELIGIOUS REVOLUTIONS
1. The importance of the study of Religious Revolutions in
respect of the comprehension of the great Political
Revolutions
2. The beginnings of the Reformation and its first
disciples
3. Rational value of the doctrines of the Reformation
4. Propagation of the Reformation
5. Conflict between different religious beliefs. The
impossibility of tolerance
6. The results of Religious Revolutions
CHAPTER III. THE ACTION OF GOVERNMENTS IN REVOLUTIONS
1. The feeble resistance of Governments in time of
Revolution
2. How the resistance of Governments may overcome
Revolution
3. Revolutions effected by Governments. Examples: China,
Turkey, &c
4. Social elements which survive the changes of Government
after Revolution
CHAPTER IV. THE PART PLAYED BY THE PEOPLE IN REVOLUTIONS
1. The stability and malleability Of the national mind
2. How the People regards Revolution
3. The supposed part of the People during Revolution
4. The popular entity and its constituent elements
BOOK II
THE FORMS OF MENTALITY PREVALENT DURING REVOLUTION
CHAPTER I. INDIVIDUAL VARIATIONS OF CHARACTER IN TIME OF
REVOLUTION
1. Transformations of Personality
2. Elements of character predominant in time of Revolution
CHAPTER II. THE MYSTIC MENTALITY AND THE JACOBIN MENTALITY
1. Classification of mentalities predominant in time of
Revolution
2. The Mystic Mentality
3. The Jacobin Mentality
CHAPTER III. THE REVOLUTIONARY AND CRIMINAL MENTALITIES
1. The Revolutionary Mentality
2. The Criminal Mentality
CHAPTER IV. THE PSYCHOLOGY OF REVOLUTIONARY CROWDS
1. General characteristics of the crowd
2. How the stability of the racial mind limits the
oscillations of the mind of the crowd
3. The role of the leader in Revolutionary Movements
CHAPTER V. THE PSYCHOLOGY OF THE REVOLUTIONARY ASSEMBLIES
1. Psychological characteristics of the great Revolutionary
Assemblies
2. The Psychology of the Revolutionary Clubs
3. A suggested explanation of the progressive exaggeration
of sentiments in assemblies
PART II
BOOK I
THE ORIGINS OF THE FRENCH REVOLUTION
CHAPTER 1. THE OPINIONS OF HISTORIANS CONCERNING THE FRENCH
REVOLUTION
1. The Historians of the Revolution
2. The theory of Fatalism in respect of the Revolution
3. The hesitation of recent Historians of the Revolution
4. Impartiality in History
CHAPTER II. THE PSYCHOLOGICAL FOUNDATIONS OF THE ANCIEN REGIME
1. The Absolute Monarchy and the Basis of the Ancien Regime
2. The inconveniences of the Ancien Regime
3. Life under the Ancien Regime
4. Evolution of Monarchical feeling during the Revolution
CHAPTER III. MENTAL ANARCHY AT THE TIME OF THE REVOLUTION
AND THE INFLUENCE ATTRIBUTED TO THE PHILOSOPHERS
1. Origin and Propagation of Revolutionary Ideas
2. The supposed influence of the Philosophers of the
eighteenth century upon the Genesis of the Revolution.
Their dislike of Democracy
3. The philosophical ideas of the Bourgeoisie at the time of
the Revolution
CHAPTER IV. PSYCHOLOGICAL ILLUSIONS RESPECTING THE FRENCH
REVOLUTION
1. Illusions respecting Primitive Man, the return to the
State of Nature, and the Psychology of the People
2. Illusions respecting the possibility of separating Man
from his Past and the power of Transformation attributed
to the Law
3. Illusions respecting the Theoretical Value of the great
Revolutionary Principles
BOOK II
THE RATIONAL, AFFECTIVE, MYSTIC, AND COLLECTIVE INFLUENCES ACTIVE
DURING THE REVOLUTION
CHAPTER I. THE PSYCHOLOGY OF THE CONSTITUENT ASSEMBLY
1. Psychological influences active during the French
Revolution
2. Dissolution of the Ancien Regime. The assembling of
the States General
3. The constituent Assembly
CHAPTER II. THE PSYCHOLOGY OF THE LEGISLATIVE ASSEMBLY
1. Political events during the life of the Legislative
Assembly
2. Mental characteristics of the Legislative Assembly
CHAPTER III. THE PSYCHOLOGY OF THE CONVENTION
1. The Legend of the Convention
2. Results of the triumph of the Jacobin Religion
3. Mental characteristics of the Convention
CHAPTER IV. THE GOVERNMENT OF THE CONVENTION
1. The activity of the Clubs and the Commune during the
Convention
2. The Government of France during the Convention: the
Terror
3. The End of the Convention. The Beginnings of the
Directory
CHAPTER V. INSTANCES OF REVOLUTIONARY VIOLENCE
1. Psychological Causes of Revolutionary Violence
2. The Revolutionary Tribunals
3. The Terror in the Provinces
CHAPTER VI. THE ARMIES OF THE REVOLUTION
1. The Revolutionary Assemblies and the Armies
2. The Struggle of Europe against the Revolution
3. Psychological and Military Factors which determined the
success of the Revolutionary Armies
CHAPTER VII. PSYCHOLOGY OF THE LEADERS OF THE REVOLUTION
1. Mentality of the men of the Revolution. The respective
influence of violent and feeble characters
2. Psychology of the Commissaries or Representatives
``on Mission''
3. Danton and Robespierre
4. Fouquier-Tinville, Marat, Billaud-Varenne, &c.
5. The destiny of those Members of the Convention who
survived the Revolution
BOOK III
THE CONFLICT BETWEEN ANCESTRAL INFLUENCES AND REVOLUTIONARY
PRINCIPLES
CHAPTER I. THE LAST CONVULSIONS OF ANARCHY. THE DIRECTORY
1. Psychology of the Directory
2. Despotic Government of the Directory. Recrudescence of
the Terror
3. The Advent of Bonaparte
4. Causes of the Duration of the Revolution
CHAPTER II. THE RESTORATION OF ORDER. THE CONSULAR REPUBLIC
1. How the work of the Revolution was confirmed by the
Consulate
2. The re-organisation of France by the Consulate
3. Psychological elements which determined the success of
the work of the Consulate
CHAPTER III. POLITICAL RESULTS OF THE CONFLICT BETWEEN
TRADITIONS AND THE REVOLUTIONARY PRINCIPLES DURING THE
LAST CENTURY
1. The psychological causes of the continued Revolutionary
Movements to which France has been subject
2. Summary of a century's Revolutionary Movements in France
PART III
THE RECENT EVOLUTION OF THE REVOLUTIONARY PRINCIPLES
CHAPTER I. THE PROGRESS OF DEMOCRATIC BELIEFS SINCE THE
REVOLUTION
1. Gradual propagation of Democratic Ideas after the
Revolution
2. The unequal influence of the three fundamental principles
of the Revolution
3. The Democracy of the ``Intellectuals'' and Popular
Democracy
4. Natural Inequalities and Democratic Equalisation
CHAPTER II. THE RESULTS OF DEMOCRATIC EVOLUTION
1. The influence upon social evolution of theories of no
rational value
2. The Jacobin Spirit and the Mentality created by
Democratic Beliefs
3. Universal Suffrage and its representatives
4. The craving for Reforms
5. Social distinctions in Democracies and Democratic Ideas
in various countries
CHAPTER III. THE NEW FORMS OF DEMOCRATIC BELIEF
1. The conflict between Capital and Labour
2. The evolution of the Working Classes and the Syndicalist
Movement
3. Why certain modern Democratic Governments are gradually
being transformed into Governments by Administrative
Castes
CONCLUSIONS
THE PSYCHOLOGY OF REVOLUTION
INTRODUCTION
THE REVISION OF HISTORY
The present age is not merely an epoch of discovery; it is also a
period of revision of the various elements of knowledge. Having
recognised that there are no phenomena of which the first cause
is still accessible, science has resumed the examination of her
ancient certitudes, and has proved their fragility. To-day she
sees her ancient principles vanishing one by one. Mechanics is
losing its axioms, and matter, formerly the eternal substratum of
the worlds, becomes a simple aggregate of ephemeral forces in
transitory condensation.
Despite its conjectural side, by virtue of which it to some
extent escapes the severest form of criticism, history has not
been free from this universal revision. There is no longer a
single one of its phases of which we can say that it is certainly
known. What appeared to be definitely acquired is now once more
put in question.
Among the events whose study seemed completed was the French
Revolution. Analysed by several generations of writers, one
might suppose it to be perfectly elucidated. What new thing can
be said of it, except in modification of some of its details?
And yet its most positive defenders are beginning to hesitate in
their judgments. Ancient evidence proves to be far from
impeccable. The faith in dogmas once held sacred is shaken. The
latest literature of the Revolution betrays these uncertainties.
Having related, men are more and more chary of drawing
conclusions.
Not only are the heroes of this great drama discussed without
indulgence, but thinkers are asking whether the new dispensation
which followed the ancien regime would not have established
itself naturally, without violence, in the course of progressive
civilisation. The results obtained no longer seem in
correspondence either with their immediate cost or with the
remoter consequences which the Revolution evoked from the
possibilities of history.
Several causes have led to the revision of this tragic period.
Time has calmed passions, numerous documents have gradually
emerged from the archives, and the historian is learning to
interpret them independently.
But it is perhaps modern psychology that has most effectually
influenced our ideas, by enabling us more surely to read men and
the motives of their conduct.
Among those of its discoveries which are henceforth applicable to
history we must mention, above all, a more profound understanding
of ancestral influences, the laws which rule the actions of the
crowd, data relating to the disaggregation of personality, mental
contagion, the unconscious formation of beliefs, and the
distinction between the various forms of logic.
To tell the truth, these applications of science, which are
utilised in this book, have not been so utilised hitherto.
Historians have generally stopped short at the study of
documents, and even that study is sufficient to excite the doubts
of which I have spoken.
The great events which shape the destinies of peoples--
revolutions, for example, and the outbreak of religious beliefs--
are sometimes so difficult to explain that one must limit oneself
to a mere statement.
From the time of my first historical researches I have been
struck by the impenetrable aspect of certain essential phenomena,
those relating to the genesis of beliefs especially; I felt
convinced that something fundamental was lacking that was
essential to their interpretation. Reason having said all it
could say, nothing more could be expected of it, and other means
must be sought of comprehending what had not been elucidated.
For a long time these important questions remained obscure to me.
Extended travel, devoted to the study of the remnants of vanished
civilisations, had not done much to throw light upon them.
Reflecting upon it continually, I was forced to recognise that
the problem was composed of a series of other problems, which I
should have to study separately. This I did for a period of
twenty years, presenting the results of my researches in a
succession of volumes.
One of the first was devoted to the study of the psychological
laws of the evolution of peoples. Having shown that the
historic races--that is, the races formed by the hazards of
history--finally acquired psychological characteristics as stable
as their anatomical characteristics, I attempted to explain how a
people transforms its institutions, its languages, and its arts.
I explained in the same work why it was that individual
personalities, under the influence of sudden variations of
environment, might be entirely disaggregated.
But besides the fixed collectivities formed by the peoples, there
are mobile and transitory collectivities known as crowds. Now
these crowds or mobs, by the aid of which the great movements of
history are accomplished, have characteristics absolutely
different from those of the individuals who compose them. What
are these characteristics, and how are they evolved? This new
problem was examined in The Psychology of the Crowd.
Only after these studies did I begin to perceive certain
influences which had escaped me.
But this was not all. Among the most important factors of
history one was preponderant--the factor of beliefs. How are
these beliefs born, and are they really rational and voluntary,
as was long taught? Are they not rather unconscious and
independent of all reason? A difficult question, which I dealt
with in my last book, Opinions and Beliefs.
So long as psychology regards beliefs as voluntary and rational
they will remain inexplicable. Having proved that they are
usually irrational and always involuntary, I was able to propound
the solution of this important problem; how it was that beliefs
which no reason could justify were admitted without
difficulty by the most enlightened spirits of all ages.
The solution of the historical difficulties which had so long
been sought was thenceforth obvious. I arrived at the conclusion
that beside the rational logic which conditions thought, and was
formerly regarded as our sole guide, there exist very different
forms of logic: affective logic, collective logic, and mystic
logic, which usually overrule the reason and engender the
generative impulses of our conduct.
This fact well established, it seemed to me evident that if a
great number of historical events are often uncomprehended, it is
because we seek to interpret them in the light of a logic which
in reality has very little influence upon their genesis.
All these researches, which are here summed up in a few lines,
demanded long years for their accomplishment. Despairing of
completing them, I abandoned them more than once to return to
those labours of the laboratory in which one is always sure of
skirting the truth and of acquiring fragments at least of
certitude.
But while it is very interesting to explore the world of material
phenomena, it is still more so to decipher men, for which reason
I have always been led back to psychology.
Certain principles deduced from my researches appearing likely to
prove fruitful, I resolved to apply them to the study of concrete
instances, and was thus led to deal with the Psychology of
Revolutions--notably that of the French Revolution.
Proceeding in the analysis of our great Revolution, the
greater part of the opinions determined by the reading of books
deserted me one by one, although I had considered them
unshakable.
To explain this period we must consider it as a whole, as many
historians have done. It is composed of phenomena simultaneous
but independent of one another.
Each of its phases reveals events engendered by psychological
laws working with the regularity of clockwork. The actors in
this great drama seem to move like the characters of a previously
determined drama. Each says what he must say, acts as he is
bound to act.
To be sure, the actors in the revolutionary drama differed from
those of a written drama in that they had not studied their
parts, but these were dictated by invisible forces.
Precisely because they were subjected to the inevitable
progression of logics incomprehensible to them we see them as
greatly astonished by the events of which they were the heroes as
are we ourselves. Never did they suspect the invisible powers
which forced them to act. They were the masters neither of their
fury nor their weakness. They spoke in the name of reason,
pretending to be guided by reason, but in reality it was by no
means reason that impelled them.
``The decisions for which we are so greatly reproached,'' wrote
Billaud-Varenne, ``were more often than otherwise not intended or
desired by us two days or even one day beforehand: the crisis
alone evoked them.''
Not that we must consider the events of the Revolution as
dominated by an imperious fatality. The readers of our works
will know that we recognise in the man of superior qualities the
role of averting fatalities. But he can dissociate himself
only from a few of such, and is often powerless before the
sequence of events which even at their origin could scarcely be
ruled. The scientist knows how to destroy the microbe before it
has time to act, but he knows himself powerless to prevent the
evolution of the resulting malady.
When any question gives rise to violently contradictory opinions
we may be sure that it belongs to the province of beliefs and not
to that of knowledge.
We have shown in a preceding work that belief, of unconscious
origin and independent of all reason, can never be influenced by
reason.
The Revolution, the work of believers, has seldom been judged by
any but believers. Execrated by some and praised by others, it
has remained one of those dogmas which are accepted or rejected
as a whole, without the intervention of rational logic.
Although in its beginnings a religious or political revolution
may very well be supported by rational elements, it is developed
only by the aid of mystic and affective elements which are
absolutely foreign to reason.
The historians who have judged the events of the French
Revolution in the name of rational logic could not comprehend
them, since this form of logic did not dictate them. As the
actors of these events themselves understood them but ill, we
shall not be far from the truth in saying that our
Revolution was a phenomenon equally misunderstood by those
who caused it and by those who have described it. At no period
of history did men so little grasp the present, so greatly ignore
the past, and so poorly divine the future.
. . . The power of the Revolution did not reside in the
principles--which for that matter were anything but novel--which
it sought to propagate, nor in the institutions which it sought
to found. The people cares very little for institutions and even
less for doctrines. That the Revolution was potent indeed, that
it made France accept the violence, the murders, the ruin and the
horror of a frightful civil war, that finally it defended itself
victoriously against a Europe in arms, was due to the fact that
it had founded not a new system of government but a new religion.
Now history shows us how irresistible is the might of a strong
belief. Invincible Rome herself had to bow before the armies of
nomad shepherds illuminated by the faith of Mahommed. For the
same reason the kings of Europe could not resist the
tatterdemalion soldiers of the Convention. Like all apostles,
they were ready to immolate themselves in the sole end of
propagating their beliefs, which according to their dream were to
renew the world.
The religion thus founded had the force of other religions, if
not their duration. Yet it did not perish without leaving
indelible traces, and its influence is active still.
We shall not consider the Revolution as a clean sweep in
history, as its apostles believed it. We know that to
demonstrate their intention of creating a world distinct from the
old they initiated a new era and professed to break entirely with
all vestiges of the past.
But the past never dies. It is even more truly within us than
without us. Against their will the reformers of the Revolution
remained saturated with the past, and could only continue, under
other names, the traditions of the monarchy, even exaggerating
the autocracy and centralisation of the old system. Tocqueville
had no difficulty in proving that the Revolution did little but
overturn that which was about to fall.
If in reality the Revolution destroyed but little it favoured the
fruition of certain ideas which continued thenceforth to develop.
The fraternity and liberty which it proclaimed never greatly
seduced the peoples, but equality became their gospel: the pivot
of socialism and of the entire evolution of modern democratic
ideas. We may therefore say that the Revolution did not end with
the advent of the Empire, nor with the successive restorations
which followed it. Secretly or in the light of day it has slowly
unrolled itself and still affects men's minds.
The study of the French Revolution to which a great part of this
book is devoted will perhaps deprive the reader of more than one
illusion, by proving to him that the books which recount the
history of the Revolution contain in reality a mass of legends
very remote from reality.
These legends will doubtless retain more life than history
itself. Do not regret this too greatly. It may interest a few
philosophers to know the truth, but the peoples will always
prefer dreams. Synthetising their ideal, such dreams will always
constitute powerful motives of action. One would lose courage
were it not sustained by false ideas, said Fontenelle. Joan of
Arc, the Giants of the Convention, the Imperial epic--all these
dazzling images of the past will always remain sources of hope in
the gloomy hours that follow defeat. They form part of that
patrimony of illusions left us by our fathers, whose power is
often greater than that of reality. The dream, the ideal, the
legend--in a word, the unreal--it is that which shapes history.
PART I
THE PSYCHOLOGICAL ELEMENTS OF REVOLUTIONARY MOVEMENTS
BOOK I
GENERAL CHARACTERISTICS OF REVOLUTIONS
CHAPTER I
SCIENTIFIC AND POLITICAL REVOLUTIONS
1. Classification of Revolutions.
We generally apply the term revolution to sudden political
changes, but the expression may be employed to denote all sudden
transformations, or transformations apparently sudden, whether of
beliefs, ideas, or doctrines.
We have considered elsewhere the part played by the rational,
affective, and mystic factors in the genesis of the opinions and
beliefs which determine conduct. We need not therefore return to
the subject here.
A revolution may finally become a belief, but it often commences
under the action of perfectly rational motives: the suppression
of crying abuses, of a detested despotic government, or an
unpopular sovereign, &c.
Although the origin of a revolution may be perfectly rational, we
must not forget that the reasons invoked in preparing for it do
not influence the crowd until they have been transformed
into sentiments. Rational logic can point to the abuses to be
destroyed, but to move the multitude its hopes must be awakened.
This can only be effected by the action of the affective and
mystic elements which give man the power to act. At the time of
the French Revolution, for example, rational logic, in the hands
of the philosophers, demonstrated the inconveniences of the
ancien regime, and excited the desire to change it. Mystic
logic inspired belief in the virtues of a society created in all
its members according to certain principles. Affective logic
unchained the passions confined by the bonds of ages and led to
the worst excesses. Collective logic ruled the clubs and the
Assemblies and impelled their members to actions which neither
rational nor affective nor mystic logic would ever have caused
them to commit.
Whatever its origin, a revolution is not productive of results
until it has sunk into the soul of the multitude. Then events
acquire special forms resulting from the peculiar psychology of
crowds. Popular movements for this reason have characteristics
so pronounced that the description of one will enable us to
comprehend the others.
The multitude is, therefore, the agent of a revolution; but not
its point of departure. The crowd represents an amorphous being
which can do nothing, and will nothing, without a head to lead
it. It will quickly exceed the impulse once received, but it
never creates it.
The sudden political revolutions which strike the historian most
forcibly are often the least important. The great revolutions
are those of manners and thought. Changing the name of a
government does not transform the mentality of a people. To
overthrow the institutions of a people is not to re-shape its
soul.
The true revolutions, those which transform the destinies of the
peoples, are most frequently accomplished so slowly that the
historians can hardly point to their beginnings. The term
evolution is, therefore, far more appropriate than revolution.
The various elements we have enumerated as entering into the
genesis of the majority of revolutions will not suffice to
classify them. Considering only the designed object, we will
divide them into scientific revolutions, political revolutions,
and religious revolutions.
2. Scientific Revolutions.
Scientific revolutions are by far the most important. Although
they attract but little attention, they are often fraught with
remote consequences, such as are not engendered by political
revolutions. We will therefore put them first, although we
cannot study them here.
For instance, if our conceptions of the universe have profoundly
changed since the time of the Revolution, it is because
astronomical discoveries and the application of experimental
methods have revolutionised them, by demonstrating that
phenomena, instead of being conditioned by the caprices of the
gods, are ruled by invariable laws.
Such revolutions are fittingly spoken of as evolution, on account
of their slowness. But there are others which, although of the
same order, deserve the name of revolution by reason of their
rapidity: we may instance the theories of Darwin,
overthrowing the whole science of biology in a few years; the
discoveries of Pasteur, which revolutionised medicine during the
lifetime of their author; and the theory of the dissociation of
matter, proving that the atom, formerly supposed to be eternal,
is not immune from the laws which condemn all the elements of the
universe to decline and perish.
These scientific revolutions in the domain of ideas are purely
intellectual. Our sentiments and beliefs do not affect them.
Men submit to them without discussing them. Their results being
controllable by experience, they escape all criticism.
3. Political Revolutions.
Beneath and very remote from these scientific revolutions, which
generate the progress of civilisations, are the religious and
political revolutions, which have no kinship with them. While
scientific revolutions derive solely from rational elements,
political and religious beliefs are sustained almost exclusively
by affective and mystic factors. Reason plays only a feeble part
in their genesis.
I insisted at some length in my book Opinions and Beliefs on
the affective and mystic origin of beliefs, showing that a
political or religious belief constitutes an act of faith
elaborated in unconsciousness, over which, in spite of all
appearances, reason has no hold. I also showed that belief often
reaches such a degree of intensity that nothing can be opposed to
it. The man hypnotised by his faith becomes an Apostle, ready to
sacrifice his interests, his happiness, and even his life for the
triumph of his faith. The absurdity of his belief matters
little; for him it is a burning reality. Certitudes of mystic
origin possess the marvellous power of entire domination over
thought, and can only be affected by time.
By the very fact that it is regarded as an absolute truth a
belief necessarily becomes intolerant. This explains the
violence, hatred, and persecution which were the habitual
accompaniments of the great political and religious revolutions,
notably of the Reformation and the French Revolution.
Certain periods of French history remain incomprehensible if we
forget the affective and mystic origin of beliefs, their
necessary intolerance, the impossibility of reconciling them when
they come into mutual contact, and, finally, the power conferred
by mystic beliefs upon the sentiments which place themselves at
their service.
The foregoing conceptions are too novel as yet to have modified
the mentality of the historians. They will continue to attempt
to explain, by means of rational logic, a host of phenomena which
are foreign to it.
Events such as the Reformation, which overwhelmed France for a
period of fifty years, were in no wise determined by rational
influences. Yet rational influences are always invoked in
explanation, even in the most recent works. Thus, in the
General History of Messrs. Lavisse and Rambaud, we read the
following explanation of the Reformation:--
``It was a spontaneous movement, born here and there amidst the
people, from the reading of the Gospels and the free individual
reflections which were suggested to simple persons by an
extremely pious conscience and a very bold reasoning power.''
Contrary to the assertion of these historians, we may say with
certainty, in the first place, that such movements are never
spontaneous, and secondly, that reason takes no part in their
elaboration.
The force of the political and religious beliefs which have moved
the world resides precisely in the fact that, being born of
affective and mystic elements, they are neither created nor
directed by reason.
Political or religious beliefs have a common origin and obey the
same laws. They are formed not with the aid of reason, but more
often contrary to all reason. Buddhism, Islamism, the
Reformation, Jacobinism, Socialism, &c., seem very different
forms of thought. Yet they have identical affective and mystic
bases, and obey a logic that has no affinity with rational logic.
Political revolutions may result from beliefs established in the
minds of men, but many other causes produce them. The word
discontent sums them up. As soon as discontent is generalised a
party is formed which often becomes strong enough to struggle
against the Government.
Discontent must generally have been accumulating for a long time
in order to produce its effects. For this reason a revolution
does not always represent a phenomenon in process of termination
followed by another which is commencing but rather a continuous
phenomenon, having somewhat accelerated its evolution. All the
modern revolutions, however, have been abrupt movements,
entailing the instantaneous overthrow of governments. Such, for
example, were the Brazilian, Portuguese, Turkish, and Chinese
revolutions.
To the contrary of what might be supposed, the very conservative
peoples are addicted to the most violent revolutions. Being
conservative, they are not able to evolve slowly, or to adapt
themselves to variations of environment, so that when the
discrepancy becomes too extreme they are bound to adapt
themselves suddenly. This sudden evolution constitutes a
revolution.
Peoples able to adapt themselves progressively do not always
escape revolution. It was only by means of a revolution that the
English, in 1688, were able to terminate the struggle which had
dragged on for a century between the monarchy, which sought to
make itself absolute, and the nation, which claimed the right to
govern itself through the medium of its representatives.
The great revolutions have usually commenced from the top, not
from the bottom; but once the people is unchained it is to the
people that revolution owes its might.
It is obvious that revolutions have never taken place, and will
never take place, save with the aid of an important fraction of
the army. Royalty did not disappear in France on the day when
Louis XVI. was guillotined, but at the precise moment when his
mutinous troops refused to defend him.
It is more particularly by mental contagion that armies become
disaffected, being indifferent enough at heart to the established
order of things. As soon as the coalition of a few officers had
succeeded in overthrowing the Turkish Government the Greek
officers thought to imitate them and to change their government,
although there was no analogy between the two regimes.
A military movement may overthrow a government--and in the
Spanish republics the Government is hardly ever destroyed by any
other means--but if the revolution is to be productive of great
results it must always be based upon general discontent and
general hopes.
Unless it is universal and excessive, discontent alone is not
sufficient to bring about a revolution. It is easy to lead a
handful of men to pillage, destroy, and massacre, but to raise a
whole people, or any great portion of that people, calls for the
continuous or repeated action of leaders. These exaggerate the
discontent; they persuade the discontented that the government is
the sole cause of all the trouble, especially of the prevailing
dearth, and assure men that the new system proposed by them will
engender an age of felicity. These ideas germinate, propagating
themselves by suggestion and contagion, and the moment arrives
when the revolution is ripe.
In this fashion the Christian Revolution and the French
Revolution were prepared. That the latter was effected in a few
years, while the first required many, was due to the fact that
the French Revolution promptly had an armed force at its
disposal, while Christianity was long in winning material power.
In the beginning its only adepts were the lowly, the poor, and
the slaves, filled with enthusiasm by the prospect of seeing
their miserable life transformed into an eternity of delight. By
a phenomenon of contagion from below, of which history affords us
more than one example, the doctrine finally invaded the upper
strata of the nation, but it was a long time before an
emperor considered the new faith sufficiently widespread to be
adopted as the official religion.
4. The Results of Political Revolutions.
When a political party is triumphant it naturally seeks to
organise society in accordance with its interests. The
organisation will differ accordingly as the revolution has been
effected by the soldiers, the Radicals, or the Conservatives, &c.
The new laws and institutions will depend on the interests of the
triumphant party and of the classes which have assisted it--the
clergy for instance.
If the revolution has triumphed only after a violent struggle, as
was the case with the French Revolution, the victors will reject
at one sweep the whole arsenal of the old law. The supporters of
the fallen regime will be persecuted, exiled, or exterminated.
The maximum of violence in these persecutions is attained when
the triumphant party is defending a belief in addition to its
material interests. Then the conquered need hope for no pity.
Thus may be explained the expulsion of the Moors from Spain, the
autodafes of the Inquisition, the executions of the
Convention, and the recent laws against the religious
congregations in France.
The absolute power which is assumed by the victors leads them
sometimes to extreme measures, such as the Convention's decree
that gold was to be replaced by paper, that goods were to be sold
at determined prices, &c. Very soon it runs up against a wall of
unavoidable necessities, which turn opinion against its tyranny,
and finally leave it defenceless before attack, as befell at the
end of the French Revolution. The same thing happened
recently to a Socialist Australian ministry composed almost
exclusively of working-men. It enacted laws so absurd, and
accorded such privileges to the trade unions, that public opinion
rebelled against it so unanimously that in three months it was
overthrown.
But the cases we have considered are exceptional. The majority
of revolutions have been accomplished in order to place a new
sovereign in power. Now this sovereign knows very well that the
first condition of maintaining his power consists in not too
exclusively favouring a single class, but in seeking to
conciliate all. To do this he will establish a sort of
equilibrium between them, so as not to be dominated by any one of
these classes. To allow one class to become predominant is to
condemn himself presently to accept that class as his master.
This law is one of the most certain of political psychology. The
kings of France understood it very well when they struggled so
energetically against the encroachments first of the nobility and
then of the clergy. If they had not done so their fate would
have been that of the German Emperors of the Middle Ages, who,
excommunicated by the Pope, were reduced, like Henry IV. at
Canossa, to make a pilgrimage and humbly to sue for the Pope's
forgiveness.
This same law has continually been verified during the course of
history. When at the end of the Roman Empire the military caste
became preponderant, the emperors depended entirely upon their
soldiers, who appointed and deposed them at will.
It was therefore a great advantage for France that she was so
long governed by a monarch almost absolute, supposed to
hold his power by divine right, and surrounded therefore by a
considerable prestige. Without such an authority he could have
controlled neither the feudal nobility, nor the clergy, nor the
parliaments. If Poland, towards the end of the sixteenth
century, had also possessed an absolute and respected monarchy,
she would not have descended the path of decadence which led to
her disappearance from the map of Europe.
We have shewn in this chapter that political revolutions may be
accompanied by important social transformations. We shall soon
see how slight are these transformations compared to those
produced by religious revolutions.
CHAPTER II
RELIGIOUS REVOLUTIONS
1. The importance of the study of Religious Revolutions in
respect of the comprehension of the great Political Revolutions.
A portion of this work will be devoted to the French Revolution.
It was full of acts of violence which naturally had their
psychological causes.
These exceptional events will always fill us with astonishment,
and we even feel them to be inexplicable. They become
comprehensible, however, if we consider that the French
Revolution, constituting a new religion, was bound to obey the
laws which condition the propagation of all beliefs. Its fury
and its hecatombs will then become intelligible.
In studying the history of a great religious revolution, that of
the Reformation, we shall see that a number of psychological
elements which figured therein were equally active during the
French Revolution. In both we observe the insignificant bearing
of the rational value of a belief upon its propagation, the
inefficacy of persecution, the impossibility of tolerance between
contrary beliefs, and the violence and the desperate struggles
resulting from the conflict of different faiths. We also observe
the exploitation of a belief by interests quite independent
of that belief. Finally we see that it is impossible to modify
the convictions of men without also modifying their existence.
These phenomena verified, we shall see plainly why the gospel of
the Revolution was propagated by the same methods as all the
religious gospels, notably that of Calvin. It could not have
been propagated otherwise.
But although there are close analogies between the genesis of a
religious revolution, such as the Reformation, and that of a
great political revolution like our own, their remote
consequences are very different, which explains the difference of
duration which they display. In religious revolutions no
experience can reveal to the faithful that they are deceived,
since they would have to go to heaven to make the discovery. In
political revolutions experience quickly demonstrates the error
of a false doctrine and forces men to abandon it.
Thus at the end of the Directory the application of Jacobin
beliefs had led France to such a degree of ruin, poverty, and
despair that the wildest Jacobins themselves had to renounce
their system. Nothing survived of their theories except a few
principles which cannot be verified by experience, such as the
universal happiness which equality should bestow upon humanity.
2. The beginnings of the Reformation and its first disciples.
The Reformation was finally to exercise a profound influence upon
the sentiments and moral ideas of a great proportion of mankind.
Modest in its beginnings, it was at first a simple struggle
against the abuses of the clergy, and, from a practical point of
view, a return to the prescriptions of the Gospel. It never
constituted, as has been claimed, an aspiration towards freedom
of thought. Calvin was as intolerant as Robespierre, and all the
theorists of the age considered that the religion of subjects
must be that of the prince who governed them. Indeed in every
country where the Reformation was established the sovereign
replaced the Pope of Rome, with the same rights and the same
powers.
In France, in default of publicity and means of communication,
the new faith spread slowly enough at first. It was about 1520
that Luther recruited a few adepts, and only towards 1535 was the
new belief sufficiently widespread for men to consider it
necessary to burn its disciples.
In conformity with a well-known psychological law, these
executions merely favoured the propagation of the Reformation.
Its first followers included priests and magistrates, but were
principally obscure artisans. Their conversion was effected
almost exclusively by mental contagion and suggestion.
As soon as a new belief extends itself, we see grouped round it
many persons who are indifferent to the belief, but who find in
it a pretext or opportunity for gratifying their passions or
their greed. This phenomenon was observed at the time of the
Reformation in many countries, notably in Germany and in England.
Luther having taught that the clergy had no need of wealth, the
German lords found many merits in a faith which enabled them to
seize upon the goods of the Church. Henry VIII. enriched
himself by a similar operation. Sovereigns who were often
molested by the Pope could as a rule only look favourably upon a
doctrine which added religious powers to their political powers
and made each of them a Pope. Far from diminishing the
absolutism of rulers, the Reformation only exaggerated it.
3. Rational value of the doctrines of the Reformation.
The Reformation overturned all Europe, and came near to ruining
France, of which it made a battle-field for a period of fifty
years. Never did a cause so insignificant from the rational
point of view produce such great results.
Here is one of the innumerable proofs of the fact that beliefs
are propagated independently of all reason. The theological
doctrines which aroused men's passions so violently, and notably
those of Calvin, are not even worthy of examination in the light
of rational logic.
Greatly concerned about his salvation, having an excessive fear
of the devil, which his confessor was unable to allay, Luther
sought the surest means of pleasing God that he might avoid Hell.
Having commenced by denying the Pope the right to sell
indulgences, he presently entirely denied his authority, and that
of the Church, condemned religious ceremonies, confession, and
the worship of the saints, and declared that Christians should
have no rules of conduct other than the Bible. He also
considered that no one could be saved without the grace of God.
This last theory, known as that of predestination, was in Luther
rather uncertain, but was stated precisely by Calvin, who made it
the very foundation of a doctrine to which the majority of
Protestants are still subservient. According to him: ``From
all eternity God has predestined certain men to be burned and
others to be saved.'' Why this monstrous iniquity? Simply
because ``it is the will of God.''
Thus according to Calvin, who for that matter merely developed
certain assertions of St. Augustine, an all-powerful God would
amuse Himself by creating living beings simply in order to burn
them during all eternity, without paying any heed to their acts
or merits. It is marvellous that such revolting insanity could
for such a length of time subjugate so many minds--marvellous
that it does so still.[1]
[1] The doctrine of predestination is still taught in Protestant
catechisms, as is proved by the following passage extracted from
the last edition of an official catechism for which I sent to
Edinburgh:
``By the decree of God, for the manifestation of His glory, some
men and angels are predestinated unto everlasting life, and
others foreordained to everlasting death.
``These angels and men, thus predestinated and foreordained, are
particularly and unchangeably designed; and their number is so
certain and definite that it cannot be either increased or
diminished.
``Those of mankind that are predestinated unto life, God, before
the foundation of the world was laid, according to His eternal
and immutable purpose, and the secret counsel and good pleasure
of His will, hath chosen in Christ unto everlasting glory, out of
His mere free grace and love, without any foresight of faith or
good works, or perseverance in either of them, or any other thing
in the creature, as conditions, or causes moving him thereunto;
and all to the praise of his glorious grace.
``As God hath appointed the elect unto glory, so hath He, by the
eternal and most free purpose of His will, foreordained all the
means thereunto. Wherefore they who are elected being fallen in
Adam, are redeemed by Christ; are effectually called unto faith
in Christ by His spirit working in due season; are justified,
adopted, sanctified, and kept by His power through faith unto
salvation. Neither are any other redeemed by Christ, effectually
called, justified, adopted, sanctified, and saved, but the elect
only.''
The psychology of Calvin is not without affinity with that of
Robespierre. Like the latter, the master of the pure truth, he
sent to death those who would not accept his doctrines. God, he
stated, wishes ``that one should put aside all humanity when it
is a question of striving for his glory.''
The case of Calvin and his disciples shows that matters which
rationally are the most contradictory become perfectly reconciled
in minds which are hypnotised by a belief. In the eyes of
rational logic, it seems impossible to base a morality upon the
theory of predestination, since whatever they do men are sure of
being either saved or damned. However, Calvin had no difficulty
in erecting a most severe morality upon this totally illogical
basis. Considering themselves the elect of God, his disciples
were so swollen by pride and the sense of their own dignity that
they felt obliged to serve as models in their conduct.
4. Propagation of the Reformation.
The new faith was propagated not by speech, still less by process
of reasoning, but by the mechanism described in our preceding
work: that is, by the influence of affirmation, repetition,
mental contagion, and prestige. At a much later date
revolutionary ideas were spread over France in the same fashion.
Persecution, as we have already remarked, only favoured this
propagation. Each execution led to fresh conversions, as was
seen in the early years of the Christian Church. Anne Dubourg,
Parliamentary councillor, condemned to be burned alive, marched
to the stake exhorting the crowd to be converted. ``His
constancy,'' says a witness, ``made more Protestants among the
young men of the colleges than the books of Calvin.''
To prevent the condemned from speaking to the people their
tongues were cut out before they were burned. The horror of
their sufferings was increased by attaching the victims to an
iron chain, which enabled the executioners to plunge them into
the fire and withdraw them several times in succession.
But nothing induced the Protestants to retract, even the offer of
an amnesty after they had felt the fire.
In 1535 Francis I., forsaking his previous tolerance, ordered six
fires to be lighted simultaneously in Paris. The Convention, as
we know, limited itself to a single guillotine in the same city.
It is probable that the sufferings of the victims were not very
excruciating; the insensibility of the Christian martyrs had
already been remarked. Believers are hypnotised by their faith,
and we know to-day that certain forms of hypnotism engender
complete insensibility.
The new faith progressed rapidly. In 1560 there were two
thousand reformed churches in France, and many great lords, at
first indifferent enough, adhered to the new doctrine.
5. Conflict between different religious beliefs--Impossibility
of Tolerance.
I have already stated that intolerance is always an accompaniment
of powerful religious beliefs. Political and religious
revolutions furnish us with numerous proofs of this fact, and
show us also that the mutual intolerance of sectaries of the same
religion is always much greater than that of the defenders
of remote and alien faiths, such as Islamism and Christianity.
In fact, if we consider the faiths for whose sake France was so
long rent asunder, we shall find that they did not differ on any
but accessory points. Catholics and Protestants adored exactly
the same God, and only differed in their manner of adoring Him.
If reason had played the smallest part in the elaboration of
their belief, it could easily have proved to them that it must be
quite indifferent to God whether He sees men adore Him in this
fashion or in that.
Reason being powerless to affect the brain of the convinced,
Protestants and Catholics continued their ferocious conflicts.
All the efforts of their sovereigns to reconcile them were in
vain. Catherine de Medicis, seeing the party of the Reformed
Church increasing day by day in spite of persecution, and
attracting a considerable number of nobles and magistrates,
thought to disarm them by convoking at Poissy, in 1561, an
assembly of bishops and pastors with the object of fusing the two
doctrines. Such an enterprise indicated that the queen, despite
her subtlety, knew nothing of the laws of mystic logic. Not in
all history can one cite an example of a belief destroyed or
reduced by means of refutation. Catherine did not even know that
although toleration is with difficulty possible between
individuals, it is impossible between collectivities. Her
attempt failed completely. The assembled theologians hurled
texts and insults at one another's heads, but no one was moved.
Catherine thought to succeed better in 1562 by promulgating an
edict according Protestants the right to unite in the public
celebration of their cult.
This tolerance, very admirable from a philosophical point of
view, but not at all wise from the political standpoint, had no
other result beyond exasperating both parties. In the Midi,
where the Protestants were strongest, they persecuted the
Catholics, sought to convert them by violence, cut their throats
if they did not succeed, and sacked their cathedrals. In the
regions where the Catholics were more numerous the Reformers
suffered like persecutions.
Such hostilities as these inevitably engendered civil war. Thus
arose the so-called religious wars, which so long spilled the
blood of France. The cities were ravaged, the inhabitants
massacred, and the struggle rapidly assumed that special quality
of ferocity peculiar to religious or political conflicts, which,
at a later date, was to reappear in the wars of La Vendee.
Old men, women, and children, all were exterminated. A certain
Baron d'Oppede, first president of the Parliament of Aix, had
already set an example by killing 3,000 persons in the space of
ten days, with refinements of cruelty, and destroying three
cities and twenty-two villages. Montluc, a worthy forerunner of
Carrier, had the Calvinists thrown living into the wells until
these were full. The Protestants were no more humane. They did
not spare even the Catholic churches, and treated the tombs and
statues just as the delegates of the Convention were to treat the
royal tombs of Saint Denis.
Under the influence of these conflicts France was progressively
disintegrated, and at the end of the reign of Henri III. was
parcelled out into veritable little confederated municipal
republics, forming so many sovereign states. The royal power was
vanishing. The States of Blois claimed to dictate their wishes
to Henri III., who had fled from his capital. In 1577 the
traveller Lippomano, who traversed France, saw important cities--
Orleans, Tours, Blois, Poitiers--entirely devastated, the
cathedrals and churches in ruins, and the tombs shattered. This
was almost the state of France at the end of the Directory.
Among the events of this epoch, that which has left the darkest
memory, although it was not perhaps the most murderous, was the
massacre of St. Bartholomew in 1572, ordered, according to the
historians, by Catherine de Medicis and Charles IX.
One does not require a very profound knowledge of psychology to
realise that no sovereign could have ordered such an event. St.
Bartholomew's Day was not a royal but a popular crime. Catherine
de Medicis, believing her existence and that of the king
threatened by a plot directed by four or five Protestant leaders
then in Paris, sent men to kill them in their houses, according
to the summary fashion of the time. The massacre which followed
is very well explained by M. Battifol in the following terms:--
``At the report of what was afoot the rumour immediately ran
through Paris that the Huguenots were being massacred; Catholic
gentlemen, soldiers of the guard, archers, men of the people, in
short all Paris, rushed into the streets, arms in hand, in order
to participate in the execution, and the general massacre
commenced, to the sound of ferocious cries of `The
Huguenots! Kill, kill!' They were struck down, they were
drowned, they were hanged. All that were known as heretics were
so served. Two thousand persons were killed in Paris.''
By contagion, the people of the provinces imitated those of
Paris, and six to eight thousand Protestants were slain.
When time had somewhat cooled religious passions, all the
historians, even the Catholics, spoke of St. Bartholomew's Day
with indignation. They thus showed how difficult it is for the
mentality of one epoch to understand that of another.
Far from being criticised, St. Bartholomew's Day provoked an
indescribable enthusiasm throughout the whole of Catholic Europe.
Philip II. was delirious with joy when he heard the news, and the
King of France received more congratulations than if he had won a
great battle.
But it was Pope Gregory XIII. above all who manifested the
keenest satisfaction. He had a medal struck to commemorate the
happy event,[2] ordered joy-fires to be lit and cannon fired,
celebrated several masses, and sent for the painter Vasari to
depict on the walls of the Vatican the principal scenes of
carnage. Further, he sent to the King of France an ambassador
instructed to felicitate that monarch upon his fine action. It
is historical details of this kind that enable us to comprehend
the mind of the believer. The Jacobins of the Terror had a
mentality very like that of Gregory XIII.
[2] The medal must have been distributed pretty widely, for the
cabinet of medals at the Bibliotheque Nationale possesses
three examples: one in gold, one in silver, and one in copper.
This medal, reproduced by Bonnani in his Numism. Pontific.
(vol. i. p. 336), represents on one side Gregory XIII., and on
the other an angel striking Huguenots with a sword. The exergue
is Ugonotorum strages, that is, Massacre of the Huguenots.
(The word strages may be translated by carnage or massacre, a
sense which it possesses in Cicero and Livy; or again by
disaster, ruin, a sense attributed to it in Virgil and Tacitus.)
Naturally the Protestants were not indifferent to such a
hecatomb, and they made such progress that in 1576 Henri III. was
reduced to granting them, by the Edict of Beaulieu, entire
liberty of worship, eight strong places, and, in the Parliaments,
Chambers composed half of Catholics and half of Huguenots.
These forced concessions did not lead to peace. A Catholic
League was created, having the Duke of Guise at its head, and the
conflict continued. But it could not last for ever. We know how
Henri IV. put an end to it, at least for a time, by his
abjuration in 1593, and by the Edict of Nantes.
The struggle was quieted but not terminated. Under Louis XIII.
the Protestants were still restless, and in 1627 Richelieu was
obliged to besiege La Rochelle, where 15,000 Protestants
perished. Afterwards, possessing more political than religious
feeling, the famous Cardinal proved extremely tolerant toward the
Reformers.
This tolerance could not last. Contrary beliefs cannot come into
contact without seeking to annihilate each other, as soon as one
feels capable of dominating the other. Under Louis XIV. the
Protestants had become by far the weaker, and were forced to
renounce the struggle and live at peace. Their number was then
about 1,200,000, and they possessed more than 600 churches,
served by about 700 pastors. The presence of these
heretics on French soil was intolerable to the Catholic clergy,
who endeavoured to persecute them in various ways. As these
persecutions had little result, Louis XIV. resorted to
dragonnading them in 1685, when many individuals perished, but
without further result. Under the pressure of the clergy,
notably of Bossuett, the Edict of Nantes was revoked, and the
Protestants were forced to accept conversion or to leave France.
This disastrous emigration lasted a long time, and is said to
have cost France 400,000 inhabitants, men of notable energy,
since they had the courage to listen to their conscience rather
than their interests.
6. The results of Religious Revolutions.
If religious revolutions were judged only by the gloomy story of
the Reformation, we should be forced to regard them as highly
disastrous. But all have not played a like part, the civilising
influence of certain among them being considerable.
By giving a people moral unity they greatly increase its material
power. We see this notably when a new faith, brought by
Mohammed, transforms the petty and impotent tribes of Arabia into
a formidable nation.
Such a new religious belief does not merely render a people
homogeneous. It attains a result that no philosophy, no code
ever attained: it sensibly transforms what is almost
unchangeable, the sentiments of a race.
We see this at the period when the most powerful religious
revolution recorded by history overthrew paganism to substitute a
God who came from the plains of Galilee. The new ideal demanded
the renunciation of all the joys of existence in order to
acquire the eternal happiness of heaven. No doubt such an ideal
was readily accepted by the poor, the enslaved, the disinherited
who were deprived of all the joys of life here below, to whom an
enchanting future was offered in exchange for a life without
hope. But the austere existence so easily embraced by the poor
was also embraced by the rich. In this above all was the power
of the new faith manifested.
Not only did the Christian revolution transform manners: it also
exercised, for a space of two thousand years, a preponderating
influence over civilisation. Directly a religious faith triumphs
all the elements of civilisation naturally adapt themselves to
it, so that civilisation is rapidly transformed. Writers,
artists and philosophers merely symbolise, in their works, the
ideas of the new faith.
When any religious or political faith whatsoever has triumphed,
not only is reason powerless to affect it, but it even finds
motives which impel it to interpret and so justify the faith in
question, and to strive to impose it upon others. There were
probably as many theologians and orators in the time of Moloch,
to prove the utility of human sacrifices, as there were at other
periods to glorify the Inquisition, the massacre of St.
Bartholomew, and the hecatombs of the Terror.
We must not hope to see peoples possessed by strong beliefs
readily achieve tolerance. The only people who attained to
toleration in the ancient world were the polytheists. The
nations which practise toleration at the present time are those
that might well be termed polytheistical, since, as in England
and America, they are divided into innumerable sects.
Under identical names they really adore very different deities.
The multiplicity of beliefs which results in such toleration
finally results also in weakness. We therefore come to a
psychological problem not hitherto resolved: how to possess a
faith at once powerful and tolerant.
The foregoing brief explanation reveals the large part played by
religious revolutions and the power of beliefs. Despite their
slight rational value they shape history, and prevent the peoples
from remaining a mass of individuals without cohesion or
strength. Man has needed them at all times to orientate his
thought and guide his conduct. No philosophy has as yet
succeeded in replacing them.
CHAPTER III
THE ACTION OF GOVERNMENTS IN REVOLUTIONS
1. The feeble resistance of Governments in time of Revolution.
Many modern nations--France, Spain, Italy, Austria, Poland,
Japan, Turkey, Portugal, &c.--have known revolutions within the
last century. These were usually characterised by their
instantaneous quality and the facility with which the governments
attacked were overthrown.
The instantaneous nature of these revolutions is explained by the
rapidity of mental contagion due to modern methods of publicity.
The slight resistance of the governments attacked is more
surprising. It implies a total inability to comprehend and
foresee created by a blind confidence in their own strength.
The facility with which governments fall is not however a new
phenomenon. It has been proved more than once, not only in
autocratic systems, which are always overturned by palace
conspiracies, but also in governments perfectly instructed in the
state of public opinion by the press and their own agents.
Among these instantaneous downfalls one of the most striking was
that which followed the Ordinances of Charles X. This monarch
was, as we know, overthrown in four days. His minister
Polignac had taken no measures of defence, and the king was so
confident of the tranquillity of Paris that he had gone hunting.
The army was not in the least hostile, as in the reign of Louis
XVI., but the troops, badly officered, disbanded before the
attacks of a few insurgents.
The overthrow of Louis-Philippe was still more typical, since it
did not result from any arbitrary action on the part of the
sovereign. This monarch was not surrounded by the hatred which
finally surrounded Charles X., and his fall was the result of an
insignificant riot which could easily have been repressed.
Historians, who can hardly comprehend how a solidly constituted
government, supported by an imposing army, can be overthrown by a
few rioters, naturally attributed the fall of Louis-Philippe to
deep-seated causes. In reality the incapacity of the generals
entrusted with his defence was the real cause of his fall.
This case is one of the most instructive that could be cited, and
is worthy of a moment's consideration. It has been perfectly
investigated by General Bonnal, in the light of the notes of an
eye-witness, General Elchingen. Thirty-six thousand troops were
then in Paris, but the weakness and incapacity of their officers
made it impossible to use them. Contradictory orders were given,
and finally the troops were forbidden to fire on the people, who,
moreover--and nothing could have been more dangerous--were
permitted to mingle with the troops. The riot succeeded without
fighting and forced the king to abdicate.
Applying to the preceding case our knowledge of the
psychology of crowds, General Bonnal shows how easily the riot
which overthrew Louis-Philippe could have been controlled. He
proves, notably, that if the commanding officers had not
completely lost their heads quite a small body of troops could
have prevented the insurgents from invading the Chamber of
Deputies. This last, composed of monarchists, would certainly
have proclaimed the Count of Paris under the regency of his
mother.
Similar phenomena were observable in the revolutions of Spain and
Portugal.
These facts show the role of petty accessory circumstances
in great events, and prove that one must not speak too readily of
the general laws of history. Without the riot which overthrew
Louis-Philippe, we should probably have seen neither the Republic
of 1848, nor the Second Empire, nor Sedan, nor the invasion, nor
the loss of Alsace.
In the revolutions of which I have just been speaking the army
was of no assistance to the government, but did not turn against
it. It sometimes happens otherwise. It is often the army which
effects the revolution, as in Turkey and Portugal. The
innumerable revolutions of the Latin republics of America are
effected by the army.
When a revolution is effected by an army the new rulers naturally
fall under its domination. I have already recalled the fact that
this was the case at the end of the Roman Empire, when the
emperors were made and unmade by the soldiery.
The same thing has sometimes been witnessed in modern times. The
following extract from a newspaper, with reference to the
Greek revolution, shows what becomes of a government dominated by
its army:--
``One day it was announced that eighty officers of the navy would
send in their resignations if the government did not dismiss the
leaders of whom they complained. Another time it was the
agricultural labourers on a farm (metairie) belonging to the
Crown Prince who demanded the partition of the soil among them.
The navy protested against the promotion promised to Colonel
Zorbas. Colonel Zorbas, after a week of discussion with
Lieutenant Typaldos, treated with the President of the Council as
one power with another. During this time the Federation of the
corporations abused the officers of the navy. A deputy demanded
that these officers and their families should be treated as
brigands. When Commander Miaoulis fired on the rebels, the
sailors, who first of all had obeyed Typaldos, returned to duty.
This is no longer the harmonious Greece of Pericles and
Themistocles. It is a hideous camp of Agramant.''
A revolution cannot be effected without the assistance or at
least the neutrality of the army, but it often happens that the
movement commences without it. This was the case with the
revolutions of 1830 and 1848, and that of 1870, which overthrew
the Empire after the humiliation of France by the surrender of
Sedan.
The majority of revolutions take place in the capitals, and by
means of contagion spread through the country; but this is not a
constant rule. We know that during the French Revolution La
Vendee, Brittany, and the Midi revolted spontaneously against
Paris.
2. How the resistance of Governments may overcome Revolution.
In the greater number of the revolutions enumerated above, we
have seen governments perish by their weakness. As soon as they
were touched they fell.
The Russian Revolution proved that a government which defends
itself energetically may finally triumph.
Never was revolution more menacing to the government. After the
disasters suffered in the Orient, and the severities of a too
oppressive autocratic regime, all classes of society, including a
portion of the army and the fleet, had revolted. The railways,
posts, and telegraph services had struck, so that communications
between the various portions of the vast empire were interrupted.
The rural class itself, forming the majority of the nation, began
to feel the influence of the revolutionary propaganda. The lot
of the peasants was wretched. They were obliged, by the system
of the mir, to cultivate soil which they could not acquire. The
government resolved immediately to conciliate this large class of
peasants by turning them into proprietors. Special laws forced
the landlords to sell the peasants a portion of their lands, and
banks intended to lend the buyers the necessary purchase-money
were created. The sums lent were to be repaid by small annuities
deducted from the product of the sale of the crops.
Assured of the neutrality of the peasants, the government could
contend with the fanatics who were burning the towns, throwing
bombs among the crowds, and waging a merciless warfare. All
those who could be taken were killed. Such extermination is the
only method discovered since the beginning of the world by which
a society can be protected against the rebels who wish to destroy
it.
The victorious government understood moreover the necessity of
satisfying the legitimate claims of the enlightened portion of
the nation. It created a parliament instructed to prepare laws
and control expenditure.
The history of the Russian Revolution shows us how a government,
all of whose natural supports have crumbled in succession, can,
with wisdom and firmness, triumph over the most formidable
obstacles. It has been very justly said that governments are not
overthrown, but that they commit suicide.
3. Revolutions effected by Governments.--Examples:
China, Turkey, &c.
Governments almost invariably fight revolutions; they hardly ever
create them. Representing the needs of the moment and general
opinion, they follow the reformers timidly; they do not precede
them. Sometimes, however, certain governments have attempted
those sudden reforms which we know as revolutions. The stability
or instability of the national mind decrees the success or
failure of such attempts.
They succeed when the people on whom the government seeks to
impose new institutions is composed of semi-barbarous tribes,
without fixed laws, without solid traditions; that is to say,
without a settled national mind. Such was the condition of
Russia in the days of Peter the Great. We know how he sought to
Europeanise the semi-Asiatic populations by means of force.
Japan is another example of a revolution effected by a
government, but it was her machinery, not her mind that was
reformed.
It needs a very powerful autocrat, seconded by a man of genius,
to succeed, even partially, in such a task. More often than not
the reformer finds that the whole people rises up against him.
Then, to the contrary of what befalls in an ordinary revolution,
the autocrat is revolutionary and the people is conservative.
But an attentive study will soon show you that the peoples are
always extremely conservative.
Failure is the rule with these attempts. Whether effected by the
upper classes or the lower, revolutions do not change the souls
of peoples that have been a long time established. They only
change those things that are worn by time and ready to fall.
China is at the present time making a very interesting but
impossible experiment, in seeking, by means of the government,
suddenly to renew the institutions of the country. The
revolution which overturned the dynasty of her ancient sovereigns
was the indirect consequence of the discontent provoked by
reforms which the government had sought to impose with a view to
ameliorating the condition of China. The suppression of opium
and gaming, the reform of the army, and the creation of schools,
involved an increase of taxation which, as well as the reforms
themselves, greatly indisposed the general opinion.
A few cultured Chinese educated in the schools of Europe profited
by this discontent to raise the people and proclaim a republic,
an institution of which the Chinese could have had no conception.
It surely cannot long survive, for the impulse which has given
birth to it is not a movement of progress, but of reaction. The
word republic, to the Chinaman intellectualised by his European
education, is simply synonymous with the rejection of the yoke of
laws, rules, and long-established restraints. Cutting off his
pigtail, covering his head with a cap, and calling himself a
Republican, the young Chinaman thinks to give the rein to all his
instincts. This is more or less the idea of a republic that a
large part of the French people entertained at the time of the
great Revolution.
China will soon discover the fate that awaits a society deprived
of the armour slowly wrought by the past. After a few years of
bloody anarchy it will be necessary to establish a power whose
tyranny will inevitably be far severer than that which was
overthrown. Science has not yet discovered the magic ring
capable of saving a society without discipline. There is no need
to impose discipline when it has become hereditary, but when the
primitive instincts have been allowed to destroy the barriers
painfully erected by slow ancestral labours, they cannot be
reconstituted save by an energetic tyranny.
As a proof of these assertions we may instance an experiment
analogous to that undertaken by China; that recently attempted by
Turkey. A few years ago young men instructed in European schools
and full of good intentions succeeded, with the aid of a
number of officers, in overthrowing a Sultan whose tyranny seemed
insupportable. Having acquired our robust Latin faith in the
magic power of formulae, they thought they could establish the
representative system in a country half-civilised, profoundly
divided by religious hatred, and peopled by divers races.
The attempt has not prospered hitherto. The authors of the
reformation had to learn that despite their liberalism they were
forced to govern by methods very like those employed by the
government overthrown. They could neither prevent summary
executions nor wholesale massacres of Christians, nor could they
remedy a single abuse.
It would be unjust to reproach them. What in truth could they
have done to change a people whose traditions have been fixed so
long, whose religious passions are so intense, and whose
Mohammedans, although in the minority, legitimately claim to
govern the sacred city of their faith according to their code?
How prevent Islam from remaining the State religion in a country
where civil law and religious law are not yet plainly separated,
and where faith in the Koran is the only tie by which the idea of
nationality can be maintained?
It was difficult to destroy such a state of affairs, so that we
were bound to see the re-establishment of an autocratic
organisation with an appearance of constitutionalism--that is to
say, practically the old system once again. Such attempts afford
a good example of the fact that a people cannot choose its
institutions until it has transformed its mind.
4. Social elements which survive the changes of Government after
Revolution.
What we shall say later on as to the stable foundation of the
national soul will enable us to appreciate the force of systems
of government that have been long established, such as ancient
monarchies. A monarch may easily be overthrown by conspirators,
but these latter are powerless against the principles which the
monarch represents. Napoleon at his fall was replaced not by his
natural heir, but by the heir of kings. The latter incarnated an
ancient principle, while the son of the Emperor personified ideas
that were as yet imperfectly established in men's minds.
For the same reason a minister, however able, however great the
services he has rendered to his country, can very rarely
overthrow his Sovereign. Bismarck himself could not have done
so. This great minister had single-handed created the unity of
Germany, yet his master had only to touch him with his finger and
he vanished. A man is as nothing before a principle supported by
opinion.
But even when, for various reasons, the principle incarnated by a
government is annihilated with that government, as happened at
the time of the French Revolution, all the elements of social
organisation do not perish at the same time.
If we knew nothing of France but the disturbances of the last
hundred years and more we might suppose the country to live in a
state of profound anarchy. Now her economic, industrial, and
even her political life manifests, on the contrary, a continuity
that seems to be independent of all revolutions and governments.
The fact is that beside the great events of which history treats
are the little facts of daily life which the books neglect to
tell. They are ruled by imperious necessities which halt for no
man. Their total mass forms the real framework of the life of
the people.
While the study of great events shows us that the nominal
government of France has been frequently changed in the space of
a century, an examination of the little daily events will prove,
on the contrary, that her real government has been little
altered.
Who in truth are the real rulers of a people? Kings and
ministers, no doubt, in the great crises of national life, but
they play no part whatever in the little realities which make up
the life of every day. The real directing forces of a country
are the administrations, composed of impersonal elements which
are never affected by the changes of government. Conservative of
traditions, they are anonymous and lasting, and constitute an
occult power before which all others must eventually bow. Their
action has even increased to such a degree that, as we shall
presently show, there is a danger that they may form an anonymous
State more powerful than the official State. France has thus
come to be governed by heads of departments and government
clerks. The more we study the history of revolutions the more we
discover that they change practically nothing but the label. To
create a revolution is easy, but to change the soul of a people
is difficult indeed.
CHAPTER IV
THE PART PLAYED BY THE PEOPLE IN REVOLUTIONS
1. The stability and malleability of the national mind.
The knowledge of a people at any given moment of its history
involves an understanding of its environment and above all of its
past. Theoretically one may deny that past, as did the men of
the Revolution, as many men of the present day have done, but its
influence remains indestructible.
In the past, built up by slow accumulations of centuries, was
formed the aggregation of thoughts, sentiments, traditions, and
prejudices constituting the national mind which makes the
strength of a race. Without it no progress is possible. Each
generation would necessitate a fresh beginning.
The aggregate composing the soul of a people is solidly
established only if it possesses a certain rigidity, but this
rigidity must not pass a certain limit, or there would be no such
thing as malleability.
Without rigidity the ancestral soul would have no fixity, and
without malleability it could not adapt itself to the changes of
environment resulting from the progress of civilization.
Excessive malleability of the national mind impels a people to
incessant revolutions. Excess of rigidity leads it to
decadence. Living species, like the races of humanity, disappear
when, too fixedly established by a long past, they become
incapable of adapting themselves to new conditions of existence.
Few peoples have succeeded in effecting a just equilibrium
between these two contrary qualities of stability and
malleability. The Romans in antiquity and the English in modern
times may be cited among those who have best attained it.
The peoples whose mind is most fixed and established often effect
the most violent revolutions. Not having succeeded in evolving
progressively, in adapting themselves to changes of environment,
they are forced to adapt themselves violently when such
adaptation becomes indispensable.
Stability is only acquired very slowly. The history of a race is
above all the story of its long efforts to establish its mind.
So long as it has not succeeded it forms a horde of barbarians
without cohesion and strength. After the invasions of the end of
the Roman Empire France took several centuries to form a national
soul.
She finally achieved one; but in the course of centuries this
soul finally became too rigid. With a little more malleability,
the ancient monarchy would have been slowly transformed as it was
elsewhere, and we should have avoided, together with the
Revolution and its consequences, the heavy task of remaking a
national soul.
The preceding considerations show us the part of race in the
genesis of revolutions, and explain why the same revolutions will
produce such different effects in different countries; why, for
example, the ideas of the French Revolution, welcomed with
such enthusiasm by some peoples, were rejected by others.
Certainly England, although a very stable country, has suffered
two revolutions and slain a king; but the mould of her mental
armour was at once stable enough to retain the acquisitions of
the past and malleable enough to modify them only within the
necessary limits. Never did England dream, as did the men of the
French Revolution, of destroying the ancestral heritage in order
to erect a new society in the name of reason.
``While the Frenchman,'' writes M. A. Sorel, ``despised his
government, detested his clergy, hated the nobility, and revolted
against the laws, the Englishman was proud of his religion, his
constitution, his aristocracy, his House of Lords. These were
like so many towers of the formidable Bastille in which he
entrenched himself, under the British standard, to judge Europe
and cover her with contempt. He admitted that the command was
disputed inside the fort, but no stranger must approach.''
The influence of race in the destiny of the peoples appears
plainly in the history of the perpetual revolutions of the
Spanish republics of South America. Composed of half-castes,
that is to say, of individuals whose diverse heredities have
dissociated their ancestral characteristics, these populations
have no national soul and therefore no stability. A people of
half-castes is always ungovernable.
If we would learn more of the differences of political capacity
which the racial factor creates we must examine the same nation
as governed by two races successively.
The event is not rare in history. It has been manifested in a
striking manner of late in Cuba and the Philippines, which passed
suddenly from the rule of Spain to that of the United States.
We know in what anarchy and poverty Cuba existed under Spanish
rule; we know, too, to what a degree of prosperity the island was
brought in a few years when it fell into the hands of the United
States.
The same experience was repeated in the Philippines, which for
centuries had been governed by Spain. Finally the country was no
more than a vast jungle, the home of epidemics of every kind,
where a miserable population vegetated without commerce or
industry. After a few years of American rule the country was
entirely transformed: malaria, yellow fever, plague and cholera
had entirely disappeared. The swamps were drained; the country
was covered with railways, factories and schools. In thirteen
years the mortality was reduced by two-thirds.
It is to such examples that we must refer the theorist who has
not yet grasped the profound significance of the word race, and
how far the ancestral soul of a people rules over its destiny.
2. How the people regards Revolution.
The part of the people has been the same in all revolutions. It
is never the people that conceives them nor directs them. Its
activity is released by means of leaders.
Only when the direct interests of the people are involved do we
see, as recently in Champagne, any fraction of the people rising
spontaneously. A movement thus localised constitutes a mere
riot.
Revolution is easy when the leaders are very influential. Of
this Portugal and Brazil have recently furnished proofs. But new
ideas penetrate the people very slowly indeed. Generally it
accepts a revolution without knowing why, and when by chance it
does succeed in understanding why, the revolution is over long
ago.
The people will create a revolution because it is persuaded to do
so, but it does not understand very much of the ideas of its
leaders; it interprets them in its own fashion, and this fashion
is by no means that of the true authors of the revolution. The
French Revolution furnished a striking example of this fact.
The Revolution of 1789 had as its real object the substitution of
the power of the nobility by that of the bourgeoisie; that is,
an old elite which had become incapable was to be replaced
by a new elite which did possess capacity.
There was little question of the people in this first phase of
the Revolution. The sovereignty of the people was proclaimed,
but it amounted only to the right of electing its
representatives.
Extremely illiterate, not hoping, like the middle classes, to
ascend the social scale, not in any way feeling itself the equal
of the nobles, and not aspiring ever to become their equal, the
people had views and interests very different to those of the
upper classes of society.
The struggles of the assembly with the royal power led it to call
for the intervention of the people in these struggles. It
intervened more and more, and the bourgeois revolution rapidly
became a popular revolution.
An idea having no force of its own, and acting only by virtue of
possessing an affective and mystic substratum which supports it,
the theoretical ideas of the bourgeoisie, before they could act
on the people, had to be transformed into a new and very definite
faith, springing from obvious practical interests.
This transformation was rapidly effected when the people heard
the men envisaged by it as the Government assuring it that it was
the equal of its former masters. It began to regard itself as a
victim, and proceeded to pillage, burn, and massacre, imagining
that in so doing it was exercising a right.
The great strength of the revolutionary principles was that they
gave a free course to the instincts of primitive barbarity which
had been restrained by the secular and inhibitory action of
environment, tradition, and law.
All the social bonds that formerly contained the multitude were
day by day dissolving, so that it conceived a notion of unlimited
power, and the joy of seeing its ancient masters ferreted out and
despoiled. Having become the sovereign people, were not all
things permissible to it?
The motto of Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, a true manifestation
of hope and faith at the beginning of the Revolution, soon merely
served to cover a legal justification of the sentiments of
jealousy, cupidity, and hatred of superiors, the true motives of
crowds unrestrained by discipline. This is why the Revolution so
soon ended in disorder, violence, and anarchy.
From the moment when the Revolution descended from the middle to
the lower classes of society, it ceased to be a domination of the
instinctive by the rational, and became, on the contrary,
the effort of the instinctive to overpower the rational.
This legal triumph of the atavistic instincts was terrible. The
whole effort of societies an effort indispensable to their
continued existence--had always been to restrain, thanks to the
power of tradition, customs, and codes, certain natural instincts
which man has inherited from his primitive animality. It is
possible to dominate them--and the more a people does overcome
them the more civilised it is--but they cannot be destroyed. The
influence of various exciting causes will readily result in their
reappearance.
This is why the liberation of popular passions is so dangerous.
The torrent, once escaped from its bed, does not return until it
has spread devastation far and wide. ``Woe to him who stirs up
the dregs of a nation,'' said Rivarol at the beginning of the
Revolution. ``There is no age of enlightenment for the
populace.''
3. The supposed Part of the People during Revolution.
The laws of the psychology of crowds show us that the people
never acts without leaders, and that although it plays a
considerable part in revolutions by following and exaggerating
the impulses received, it never directs its own movements.
In all political revolutions we discover the action of leaders.
They do not create the ideas which serve as the basis of
revolutions, but they utilise them as a means of action. Ideas,
leaders, armies, and crowds constitute four elements which all
have their part to play in revolutions.
The crowd, roused by the leaders, acts especially by means of its
mass. Its action is comparable to that of the shell which
perforates an armour-plate by the momentum of a force it did not
create. Rarely does the crowd understand anything of the
revolutions accomplished with its assistance. It obediently
follows its leaders without even trying to find out what they
want. It overthrew Charles X. because of his Ordinances without
having any idea of the contents of the latter, and would have
been greatly embarrassed had it been asked at a later date why it
overthrew Louis-Philippe.
Deceived by appearances, many authors, from Michelet to Aulard,
have supposed that the people effected our great Revolution.
``The principal actor,'' said Michelet, ``is the people.''
``It is an error to say,'' writes M. Aulard, ``that the French
Revolution was effected by a few distinguished people or a few
heroes. . . . I believe that in the whole history of the period
included between 1789 and 1799 not a single person stands out who
led or shaped events: neither Louis XVI. nor Mirabeau nor Danton
nor Robespierre. Must we say that it was the French people that
was the real hero of the French Revolution? Yes--provided we see
the French people not as a multitude but as a number of organised
groups.''
And in a recent work M. A. Cochin insists on this conception of
popular action.
``And here is the wonder: Michelet is right. In proportion as
we know them better the facts seem to consecrate the fiction:
this crowd, without chiefs and without laws, the very image of
chaos, did for five years govern and command, speak and act, with
a precision, a consistency, and an entirety that were
marvellous. Anarchy gave lessons in order and discipline to the
defeated party of order . . . twenty-five millions of men, spread
over an area of 30,000 square leagues, acted as one.''
Certainly if this simultaneous conduct of the people had been
spontaneous, as the author supposes, it would have been
marvellous. M. Aulard himself understands very well the
impossibilities of such a phenomenon, for he is careful, in
speaking of the people, to say that he is speaking of groups, and
that these groups may have been guided by leaders:--
``And what, then, cemented the national unity? Who saved this
nation, attacked by the king and rent by civil war? Was it
Danton? Was it Robespierre? Was it Carnot? Certainly these
individual men were of service: but unity was in fact maintained
and independence assured by the grouping of the French into
communes and popular societies--people's clubs. It was the
municipal and Jacobin organisation of France that forced the
coalition of Europe to retreat. But in each group, if we look
more closely, there were two or three individuals more capable
than the rest, who, whether leaders or led, executed decisions
and had the appearance of leaders, but who (if, for instance, we
read the proceedings of the people's clubs) seem to us to have
drawn their strength far more from their group than from
themselves.
M. Aulard's mistake consists in supposing that all these groups
were derived ``from a spontaneous movement of fraternity and
reason.'' France at that time was covered with thousands of
little clubs, receiving a single impulsion from the great
Jacobin Club of Paris, and obeying it with perfect docility.
This is what reality teaches us, though the illusions of the
Jacobins do not permit them to accept the fact.[3]
[3] In the historical manuals which M. Aulard has prepared for
the use of classes in collaboration with M. Debidour the
role attributed to the people as an entity is even more
marked. We see it intervening continually and spontaneously;
here are a few examples:--
The ``Day'' of June the 20th: ``The king dismissed the
Girondist members. The people of Paris, indignant, rose
spontaneously and invaded the Tuileries.''
The ``Day'' of August 10th: ``The Legislative Assembly dared
not overthrow it; it was the people of Paris, aided by the
Federals of the Departments, who effected this revolution at the
price of its blood.''
The conflict of the Girondists and the Mountain: ``This
discord in the face of the enemy was dangerous. The people put
an end to it on the days of the 31st of May and the 2nd of June,
1793, when it forced the Convention to expel the leaders of the
Gironde from its midst and to decree their arrest.''
4. The Popular Entity and its Constituent Elements.
In order to answer to certain theoretical conceptions the people
was erected into a mystic entity, endowed with all the powers and
all the virtues, incessantly praised by the politicians, and
overwhelmed with flattery. We shall see what we are to make of
this conception of the part played by the people in the French
Revolution.
To the Jacobins of this epoch, as to those of our own days, this
popular entity constitutes a superior personality possessing the
attributes, peculiar to divinities, of never having to answer for
its actions and never making a mistake. Its wishes must be
humbly acceded. The people may kill, burn, ravage, commit the
most frightful cruelties, glorify its hero to-day and throw him
into the gutter to-morrow; it is all one; the politicians will
not cease to vaunt its virtues, its high wisdom, and to bow to
its every decision.[4]
[4] These pretensions do at least seem to be growing untenable to
the more advanced republicans.
``The rage with the socialists'' writes M. Clemenceau, ``is to
endow with all the virtues, as though by a superhuman reason, the
crowd whose reason cannot be much to boast of.'' The famous
statesman might say more correctly that reason not only cannot be
prominent in the crowd but is practically nonexistent.
Now in what does this entity really consist, this mysterious
fetich which revolutionists have revered for more than a century?
It may be decomposed into two distinct categories. The first
includes the peasants, traders, and workers of all sorts who need
tranquillity and order that they may exercise their calling.
This people forms the majority, but a majority which never caused
a revolution. Living in laborious silence, it is ignored by the
historians.
The second category, which plays a capital part in all national
disturbances, consists of a subversive social residue dominated
by a criminal mentality. Degenerates of alcoholism and poverty,
thieves, beggars, destitute ``casuals,'' indifferent workers
without employment--these constitute the dangerous bulk of the
armies of insurrection.
The fear of punishment prevents many of them from becoming
criminals at ordinary times, but they do become criminals as soon
as they can exercise their evil instincts without danger.
To this sinister substratum are due the massacres which stain all
revolutions.
It was this class which, guided by its leaders, continually
invaded the great revolutionary Assemblies. These regiments of
disorder had no other ideal than that of massacre, pillage, and
incendiarism. Their indifference to theories and principles was
complete.
To the elements recruited from the lowest dregs of the populace
are added, by way of contagion, a host of idle and indifferent
persons who are simply drawn into the movement. They shout
because there are men shouting, and revolt because there is a
revolt, without having the vaguest idea of the cause of shouting
or revolution. The suggestive power of their environment
absolutely hypnotises them, and impels them to action.
These noisy and maleficent crowds, the kernel of all
insurrections, from antiquity to our own times, are the only
crowds known to the orator. To the orator they are the sovereign
people. As a matter of fact this sovereign people is principally
composed of the lower populace of whom Thiers said:--
``Since the time when Tacitus saw it applaud the crimes of the
emperors the vile populace has not changed. These barbarians who
swarm at the bottom of societies are always ready to stain the
people with every crime, at the beck of every power, and to the
dishonour of every cause.''
At no period of history was the role of the lowest elements
of the population exercised in such a lasting fashion as in the
French Revolution.
The massacres began as soon as the beast was unchained--that is,
from 1789, long before the Convention. They were carried
out with all possible refinements of cruelty. During the killing
of September the prisoners were slowly chopped to bits by sabre-
cuts in order to prolong their agonies and amuse the spectators,
who experienced the greatest delight before the spectacle of the
convulsions of the victims and their shrieks of agony.
Similar scenes were observed all over France, even in the early
days of the Revolution, although the foreign war did not excuse
them then, nor any other pretext.
From March to September a whole series of burnings, killings, and
pillagings drenched all France in blood. Taine cites one hundred
and twenty such cases. Rouen, Lyons, Strasbourg, &c., fell into
the power of the populace.
The Mayor of Troyes, his eyes destroyed by blows of scissors, was
murdered after hours of suffering. The Colonel of Dragoons
Belzuce was cut to pieces while living. In many places the
hearts of the victims were torn out and carried about the cities
on the point of a pike.
Such is the behaviour of the base populace so soon as imprudent
hands have broken the network of constraints which binds its
ancestral savagery. It meets with every indulgence because it is
in the interests of the politicians to flatter it. But let us
for a moment suppose the thousands of beings who constitute it
condensed into one single being. The personality thus formed
would appear as a cruel and narrow and abominable monster, more
horrible than the bloodiest tyrants of history.
This impulsive and ferocious people has always been easily
dominated so soon as a strong power has opposed it. If its
violence is unlimited, so is its servility. All the despotisms
have had it for their servant. The Caesars are certain of
being acclaimed by it, whether they are named Caligula, Nero,
Marat, Robespierre, or Boulanger.
Beside these destructive hordes whose action during revolution is
capital, there exists, as we have already remarked, the mass of
the true people, which asks only the right to labour. It
sometimes benefits by revolutions, but never causes them. The
revolutionary theorists know little of it and distrust it, aware
of its traditional and conservative basis. The resistant nucleus
of a country, it makes the strength and continuity of the latter.
Extremely docile through fear, easily influenced by its leaders,
it will momentarily commit every excess while under their
influence, but the ancestral inertia of the race will soon take
charge again, which is the reason why it so quickly tires of
revolution. Its traditional soul quickly incites it to oppose
itself to anarchy when the latter goes too far. At such times it
seeks the leader who will restore order.
This people, resigned and peaceable, has evidently no very lofty
nor complicated political conceptions. Its governmental ideal is
always very simple, is something very like dictatorship. This is
why, from the times of the Greeks to our own, dictatorship has
always followed anarchy. It followed it after the first
Revolution, when Bonaparte was acclaimed, and again when, despite
opposition, four successive plebiscites raised Louis Napoleon to
the head of the republic, ratified his coup d'etat,
re-established the Empire, and in 1870, before the war, approved
of his rule.
Doubtless in these last instances the people was deceived. But
without the revolutionary conspiracies which led to disorder, it
would not have been impelled to seek the means of escape
therefrom.
The facts recalled in this chapter must not be forgotten if we
wish fully to comprehend the various roles of the people
during revolution. Its action is considerable, but very unlike
that imagined by the legends whose repetition alone constitutes
their vitality.
BOOK II
THE FORMS OF MENTALITY PREVALENT DURING REVOLUTION
CHAPTER I
INDIVIDUAL VARIATIONS OF CHARACTER IN TIME OF REVOLUTION
1. Transformations of Personality.
I have dwelt at length elsewhere upon a certain theory of
character, without which it is absolutely impossible to
understand divers transformations or inconsistencies of conduct
which occur at certain moments, notably in time of revolution.
Here are the principal points of this theory:
Every individual possesses, besides his habitual mentality,
which, when the environment does not alter, is almost constant,
various possibilities of character which may be evoked by passing
events.
The people who surround us are the creatures of certain
circumstances, but not of all circumstances. Our ego consists of
the association of innumerable cellular egos, the residues of
ancestral personalities. By their combination they form an
equilibrium which is fairly permanent when the social environment
does not vary. As soon as this environment is considerably
modified, as in time of insurrection, this equilibrium is broken,
and the dissociated elements constitute, by a fresh aggregation,
a new personality, which is manifested by ideas, feelings, and
actions very different from those formerly observed in the same
individual. Thus it is that during the Terror we see honest
bourgeois and peaceful magistrates who were noted for their
kindness turned into bloodthirsty fanatics.
Under the influence of environment the old personality may
therefore give place to one entirely new. For this reason the
actors in great religious and political crises often seem of a
different essence to ourselves; yet they do not differ from us;
the repetition of the same events would bring back the same men.
Napoleon perfectly understood these possibilities of character
when he said, in Saint Helena:--
``It is because I know just how great a part chance plays in our
political decisions, that I have always been without prejudices,
and very indulgent as to the part men have taken during our
disturbances. . . . In time of revolution one can only say what
one has done; it would not be wise to say that one could not have
done otherwise. . . . Men are difficult to understand if we want
to be just. . . . Do they know themselves? Do they account for
themselves very clearly? There are virtues and vices of
circumstance.''
When the normal personality has been disaggregated under the
influence of certain events, how does the new personality form
itself? By several means, the most active of which is the
acquisition of a strong belief. This orientates all the elements
of the understanding, as the magnet collects into regular
curves the filings of a magnetic metal.
Thus were formed the personalities observed in times of great
crises: the Crusades, the Reformation, the Revolution notably.
At normal times the environment varies little, so that as a rule
we see only a single personality in the individuals that surround
us. Sometimes, however, it happens that we observe several,
which in certain circumstances may replace one another.
These personalities may be contradictory and even inimical. This
phenomenon, exceptional under normal conditions, is considerably
accentuated in certain pathological conditions. Morbid
psychology has recorded several examples of multiple personality
in a single subject, such as the cases cited by Morton Prince and
Pierre Janet.
In all these variations of personality it is not the intelligence
which is modified, but the feelings, whose association forms the
character.
2. Elements of Character Predominant in Time of Revolution.
During revolution we see several sentiments developed which are
commonly repressed, but to which the destruction of social
constraints gives a free vent.
These constraints, consisting of the law, morality, and
tradition, are not always completely broken. Some survive the
upheaval and serve to some extent to damp the explosion of
dangerous sentiments.
The most powerful of these restraints is the soul of the race.
This determines a manner of seeing, feeling, and willing
common to the majority of the individuals of the same people; it
constitutes a hereditary custom, and nothing is more powerful
than the ties of custom.
This racial influence limits the variations of a people and
determines its destiny within certain limits in spite of all
superficial changes.
For example, to take only the instances of history, it would seem
that the mentality of France must have varied enormously during a
single century. In a few years it passed from the Revolution to
Caesarism, returned to the monarchy, effected another
Revolution, and then summoned a new Caesar. In reality only
the outsides of things had changed.
We cannot insist further here on the limits of national
variability, but must now consider the influence of certain
affective elements, whose development during revolution
contributes to modify individual or collective personalities. In
particular I will mention hatred, fear, ambition, jealousy or
envy, vanity, and enthusiasm. We observe their influence during
several of the upheavals of history, notably during the course of
the French Revolution, which will furnish us with most of our
examples.
Hatred.--The hatred of persons, institutions, and things which
animated the men of the Revolution is one of these affective
phenomena which are the more striking the more one studies their
psychology. They detested, not only their enemies, but the
members of their own party. ``If one were to accept
unreservedly,'' said a recent writer, ``the judgments which they
expressed of one another, we should have to conclude that they
were all traitors and boasters, all incapable and corrupt,
all assassins or tyrants.'' We know with what hatred, scarcely
appeased by the death of their enemies, men persecuted the
Girondists, Dantonists, Hebertists, Robespierrists, &c.
One of the chief causes of this feeling resided in the fact that
these furious sectaries, being apostles in possession of the
absolute verity, were unable, like all believers, to tolerate the
sight of infidels. A mystic or sentimental certitude is always
accompanied by the need of forcing itself on others, is never
convinced, and does not shrink from wholesale slaughter when it
has the power to commit it.
If the hatreds that divided the men of the Revolution had been of
rational origin they would not have lasted long, but, arising
from affective and mystic factors, men could neither forget nor
forgive. Their sources being identical in the different parties,
they manifested themselves on every hand with identical violence.
It has been proved, by means of documents, that the Girondists
were no less sanguinary than the Montagnards. They were the
first to declare, with Petion, that the vanquished parties
should perish. They also, according to M. Aulard, attempted to
justify the massacres of September. The Terror must not be
considered simply as a means of defence, but as the general
process of destruction to which triumphant believers have always
treated their detested enemies. Men who can put up with the
greatest divergence of ideas cannot tolerate differences of
belief.
In religious or political warfare the vanquished can hope for no
quarter. From Sulla, who cut the throats of two hundred senators
and five or six thousand Romans, to the men who suppressed the
Commune, and shot down more than twenty thousand after
their victory, this bloody law has never failed. Proved over and
over again in the past, it will doubtless be so in the future.
The hatreds of the Revolution did not arise entirely from
divergence of belief. Other sentiments--envy, ambition, and
self-love--also engendered them. The rivalry of individuals
aspiring to power led the chiefs of the various groups in
succession to the scaffold.
We must remember, moreover, that the need of division and the
hatred resulting therefrom seem to be constituent elements of the
Latin mind. They cost our Gaulish ancestors their independence,
and had already struck Caesar.
``No city,'' he said, ``but was divided into two factions; no
canton, no village, no house in which the spirit of party did not
breathe. It was very rarely that a year went by without a city
taking up arms to attack or repulse its neighbours.''
As man has only recently entered upon the age of knowledge, and
has always hitherto been guided by sentiments and beliefs, we may
conceive the vast importance of hatred as a factor of his
history.
Commandant Colin, professor at the College of War, remarks in the
following terms on the importance of this feeling during certain
wars:--
``In war more than at any other time there is no better inspiring
force than hatred; it was hatred that made Blucher victorious
over Napoleon. Analyse the most wonderful manoeuvres, the most
decisive operations, and if they are not the work of an
exceptional man, a Frederick or a Napoleon, you will find they
are inspired by passion more than by calculation. What
would the war of 1870 have been without the hatred which we bore
the Germans?''
The writer might have added that the intense hatred of the
Japanese for the Russians, who had so humiliated them, might be
classed among the causes of their success. The Russian soldiers,
ignorant of the very existence of the Japanese, had no animosity
against them, which was one of the reasons of their failure.
There was assuredly a good deal of talk of fraternity at the time
of the Revolution, and there is even more to-day. Pacificism,
humanitarianism, and solidarity have become catchwords of the
advanced parties, but we know how profound are the hatreds
concealed beneath these terms, and what dangers overhang our
modern society.
Fear.--Fear plays almost as large a part in revolutions as
hatred. During the French Revolution there were many examples of
great individual courage and many exhibitions of collective
cowardice.
Facing the scaffold, the men of the Convention were always brave
in the extreme; but before the threats of the rioters who invaded
the Assembly they constantly exhibited an excessive
pusillanimity, obeying the most absurd injunctions, as we shall
see if we re-read the history of the revolutionary Assemblies.
All the forms of fear were observed at this period. One of the
most widespread was the fear of appearing moderate. Members of
the Assemblies, public prosecutors, representatives ``on
mission,'' judges of the revolutionary tribunals, &c., all sought
to appear more advanced than their rivals. Fear was one of the
principal elements of the crimes committed at this period.
If by some miracle it could have been eliminated from the
revolutionary Assemblies, their conduct would have been quite
other than it was, and the Revolution itself would have taken a
very different direction.
Ambition, Envy, Vanity, &c.--In normal times the influence of
these various affective elements is forcibly contained by social
necessities. Ambition, for instance, is necessarily limited in a
hierarchical form of society. Although the soldier does
sometimes become a general, it is only after a long term of
service. In time of revolution, on the other hand, there is no
need to wait. Every one may reach the upper ranks almost
immediately, so that all ambitions are violently aroused. The
humblest man believes himself fitted for the highest employments,
and by this very fact his vanity grows out of all measure.
All the passions being more or less aroused, including ambition
and vanity, we see the development of jealousy and envy of those
who have succeeded more quickly than others.
The effect of jealousy, always important in times of revolution,
was especially so during the great French Revolution. Jealousy
of the nobility constituted one of its most important factors.
The middle classes had increased in capacity and wealth, to the
point of surpassing the nobility. Although they mingled with the
nobles more and more, they felt, none the less, that they were
held at a distance, and this they keenly resented. This frame of
mind had unconsciously made the bourgeoisie keen supporters of
the philosophic doctrine of equality.
Wounded self-love and jealousy were thus the causes of
hatreds that we can scarcely conceive today, when the social
influence of the nobility is so small. Many members of the
Convention--Carrier, Marat, and others--remembered with anger
that they had once occupied subordinate positions in the
establishments of great nobles. Mme. Roland was never able to
forget that, when she and her mother were invited to the house of
a great lady under the ancien regime, they had been sent to
dine in the servants' quarters.
The philosopher Rivarol has very well described in the following
passage, already cited by Taine, the influence of wounded self-
love and jealousy upon the revolutionary hatreds:--
``It is not,'' he writes, ``the taxes, nor the lettres de
cachet, nor any of the other abuses of authority; it is not the
sins of the intendants, nor the long and ruinous delays of
justice, that has most angered the nation; it is the prejudices
of the nobility for which it has exhibited the greatest hatred.
What proves this clearly is the fact that it is the bourgeois,
the men of letters, the men of money, in fact all those who are
jealous of the nobility, who have raised the poorer inhabitants
of the cities against them, and the peasants in the country
districts.''
This very true statement partly justifies the saying of Napoleon:
``Vanity made the Revolution; liberty was only the pretext.''
Enthusiasm.--The enthusiasm of the founders of the Revolution
equalled that of the apostles of the faith of Mohammed. And it
was really a religion that the bourgeois of the first Assembly
thought to found. They thought to have destroyed an old
world, and to have built a new one upon its ruins. Never
did illusion more seductive fire the hearts of men. Equality and
fraternity, proclaimed by the new dogmas, were to bring the reign
of eternal happiness to all the peoples. Man had broken for ever
with a past of barbarity and darkness. The regenerated world
would in future be illuminated by the lucid radiance of pure
reason. On all hands the most brilliant oratorical formulae
saluted the expected dawn.
That this enthusiasm was so soon replaced by violence was due to
the fact that the awakening was speedy and terrible. One can
readily conceive the indignant fury with which the apostles of
the Revolution attacked the daily obstacles opposed to the
realisation of their dreams. They had sought to reject the past,
to forget tradition, to make man over again. But the past
reappeared incessantly, and men refused to change. The
reformers, checked in their onward march, would not give in.
They sought to impose by force a dictatorship which speedily made
men regret the system abolished, and finally led to its return.
It is to be remarked that although the enthusiasm of the first
days did not last in the revolutionary Assemblies, it survived
very much longer in the armies, and constituted their chief
strength. To tell the truth, the armies of the Revolution were
republican long before France became so, and remained republican
long after France had ceased to be so.
The variations of character considered in this chapter, being
conditioned by certain common aspirations and identical changes
of environment, finally became concrete in a small number
of fairly homogeneous mentalities. Speaking only of the more
characteristic, we may refer them to four types: the Jacobin,
mystic, revolutionary, and criminal mentalities.
CHAPTER II
THE MYSTIC MENTALITY AND THE JACOBIN MENTALITY
1. Classification of Mentalities predominant in Time of
Revolution.
The classifications without which the study of the sciences is
impossible must necessarily establish the discontinuous in the
continuous, and for that reason are to a certain extent
artificial. But they are necessary, since the continuous is only
accessible in the form of the discontinuous.
To create broad distinctions between the various mentalities
observable in time of revolution, as we are about to do, is
obviously to separate elements which encroach upon one another,
which are fused or superimposed. We must resign ourselves to
losing a little in exactitude in order to gain in lucidity. The
fundamental types enumerated at the end of the preceding chapter,
and which we are about to describe, synthetise groups which would
escape analysis were we to attempt to study them in all their
complexity.
We have shown that man is influenced by different logics, which
under normal conditions exist in juxtaposition, without mutually
influencing one another. Under the action of various events they
enter into mutual conflict, and the irreducible differences
which divide them are visibly manifested, involving considerable
individual and social upheavals.
Mystic logic, which we shall presently consider as it appears in
the Jacobin mind, plays a very important part. But it is not
alone in its action. The other forms of logic--affective logic,
collective logic, and rational logic--may predominate according
to circumstances.
2. The Mystic Mentality.
Leaving aside for the moment the influence of affective,
rational, and collective logic, we will occupy ourselves solely
with the considerable part played by the mystic elements which
have prevailed in so many revolutions, and notably in the French
Revolution.
The chief characteristic of the mystic temperament consists in
the attribution of a mysterious power to superior beings or
forces, which are incarnated in the form of idols, fetiches,
words, or formulae.
The mystic spirit is at the bottom of all the religious and most
political beliefs. These latter would often vanish could we
deprive them of the mystic elements which are their chief
support.
Grafted on the sentiments and passionate impulses which it
directs, mystic logic constitutes the might of the great popular
movements. Men who would be by no means ready to allow
themselves to be killed for the best of reasons will readily
sacrifice their lives to a mystic ideal which has become an
object of adoration.
The principles of the Revolution speedily inspired a wave of
mystic enthusiasm analogous to those provoked by the various
religious beliefs which had preceded it. All they did was to
change the orientation of a mental ancestry which the
centuries had solidified.
So there is nothing astonishing in the savage zeal of the men of
the Convention. Their mystic mentality was the same as that of
the Protestants at the time of the Reformation. The principal
heroes of the Terror--Couthon, Saint-Just, Robespierre, &c.--were
Apostles. Like Polyeuctes, destroying the altars of the false
gods to propagate his faith, they dreamed of converting the
globe. Their enthusiasm spilled itself over the earth.
Persuaded that their magnificent formulae were sufficient to
overturn thrones, they did not hesitate to declare war upon
kings. And as a strong faith is always superior to a doubtful
faith, they victoriously faced all Europe.
The mystic spirit of the leaders of the Revolution was betrayed
in the least details of their public life. Robespierre,
convinced that he was supported by the Almighty, assured his
hearers in a speech that the Supreme Being had ``decreed the
Republic since the beginning of time.'' In his quality of High
Pontiff of a State religion he made the Convention vote a decree
declaring that ``the French People recognises the existence of
the Supreme Being and the immortality of the soul.'' At the
festival of this Supreme Being, seated on a kind of throne, he
preached a lengthy sermon.
The Jacobin Club, directed by Robespierre, finally assumed all
the functions of a council. There Maximilien proclaimed ``the
idea of a Great Being who watches over oppressed innocence and
who punishes triumphant crime.''
All the heretics who criticised the Jacobin orthodoxy were
excommunicated--that is, were sent to the Revolutionary Tribunal,
which they left only for the scaffold.
The mystic mentality of which Robespierre was the most celebrated
representative did not die with him. Men of identical mentality
are to be found among the French politicians of to-day. The old
religious beliefs no longer rule their minds, but they are the
creatures of political creeds which they would very soon force on
others, as did Robespierre, if they had the chance of so doing.
Always ready to kill if killing would spread their faith, the
mystics of all ages have employed the same means of persuasion as
soon as they have become the masters.
It is therefore quite natural that Robespierre should still have
many admirers. Minds moulded like his are to be met with in
their thousands. His conceptions were not guillotined with him.
Old as humanity, they will only disappear with the last believer.
This mystic aspect of all revolutions has escaped the majority of
the historians. They will persist for a long time yet in trying
to explain by means of rational logic a host of phenomena which
have nothing to do with reason. I have already cited a passage
from the history of MM. Lavisse and Rambaud, in which the
Reformation is explained as ``the result of the free individual
reflections suggested to simple folk by an extremely pious
conscience, and a bold and courageous reason.''
Such movements are never comprehended by those who imagine that
their origin is rational. Political or religious, the beliefs
which have moved the world possess a common origin and
follow the same laws. They are formed, not by the reason, but
more often contrary to reason. Buddhism, Christianity, Islamism,
the Reformation, sorcery, Jacobinism, socialism, spiritualism,
&c., seem very different forms of belief, but they have, I
repeat, identical mystic and affective bases, and obey forms of
logic which have no affinity with rational logic. Their might
resides precisely in the fact that reason has as little power to
create them as to transform them.
The mystic mentality of our modern political apostles is strongly
marked in an article dealing with one of our recent ministers,
which I cite from a leading journal:
``One may ask into what category does M. A----fall? Could we
say, for instance, that he belongs to the group of unbelievers?
Far from it! Certainly M. A---- has not adopted any positive
faith; certainly he curses Rome and Geneva, rejecting all the
traditional dogmas and all the known Churches. But if he makes a
clean sweep it is in order to found his own Church on the ground
so cleared, a Church more dogmatic than all the rest; and his own
inquisition, whose brutal intolerance would have no reason to
envy the most notorious of Torquemadas.
`` `We cannot,' he says, `allow such a thing as scholastic
neutrality. We demand lay instruction in all its plenitude, and
are consequently the enemies of educational liberty.' If he does
not suggest erecting the stake and the pyre, it is only on
account of the evolution of manners, which he is forced to take
into account to a certain extent, whether he will or no. But,
not being able to commit men to the torture, he invokes the
secular arm to condemn their doctrines to death. This is exactly
the point of view of the great inquisitors. It is the same
attack upon thought. This freethinker has so free a spirit that
every philosophy he does not accept appears to him, not only
ridiculous and grotesque, but criminal. He flatters himself that
he alone is in possession of the absolute truth. Of this he is
so entirely sure that everyone who contradicts him seems to him
an execrable monster and a public enemy. He does not suspect for
a moment that after all his personal views are only hypotheses,
and that he is all the more laughable for claiming a Divine right
for them precisely because they deny divinity. Or, at least,
they profess to do so; but they re-establish it in another shape,
which immediately makes one regret the old. M. A---- is a
sectary of the goddess Reason, of whom he has made a Moloch, an
oppressive deity hungry for sacrifice. No more liberty of
thought for any one except for himself and his friends; such is
the free thought of M. A----. The outlook is truly attractive.
But perhaps too many idols have been cast down during the last
few centuries for men to bow before this one.''
We must hope for the sake of liberty that these gloomy fanatics
will never finally become our masters.
Given the silent power of reason over mystic beliefs, it is quite
useless to seek to discuss, as is so often done, the rational
value of revolutionary or political ideas. Only their influence
can interest us. It matters little that the theories of the
supposed equality of men, the original goodness of mankind, the
possibility of re-making society by means of laws, have
been given the lie by observation and experience. These empty
illusions must be counted among the most potent motives of action
that humanity has known.
3. The Jacobin Mentality.
Although the term ``Jacobin mentality'' does not really belong to
any true classification, I employ it here because it sums up a
clearly defined combination which constitutes a veritable
psychological species.
This mentality dominates the men of the French Revolution, but is
not peculiar to them, as it still represents one of the most
active elements in our politics.
The mystic mentality which we have already considered is an
essential factor of the Jacobin mind, but it is not in itself
enough to constitute that mind. Other elements, which we shall
now examine, must be added.
The Jacobins do not in the least suspect their mysticism. On the
contrary, they profess to be guided solely by pure reason.
During the Revolution they invoked reason incessantly, and
considered it as their only guide to conduct.
The majority of historians have adopted this rationalist
conception of the Jacobin mind, and Taine fell into the same
error. It is in the abuse of rationalism that he seeks the
origin of a great proportion of the acts of the Jacobins. The
pages in which he has dealt with the subject contain many truths,
however, and as they are in other ways very remarkable, I
reproduce the most important passages here:--
``Neither exaggerated self-love nor dogmatic reasoning is
rare in the human species. In all countries these two roots of
the Jacobin spirit subsist, secret and indestructible. . . . At
twenty years of age, when a young man is entering into the world,
his reason is stimulated simultaneously with his pride. In the
first place, whatever society he may move in, it is contemptible
to pure reason, for it has not been constructed by a philosophic
legislator according to a principle, but successive generations
have arranged it according to their multiple and ever-changing
needs. It is not the work of logic, but of history, and the
young reasoner shrugs his shoulders at the sight of this old
building, whose site is arbitrary, whose architecture is
incoherent, and whose inconveniences are obvious. . . . The
majority of young people, above all those who have their way to
make, are more or less Jacobin on leaving college. . . .
Jacobinism is born of social decomposition just as mushrooms are
born of a fermenting soil. Consider the authentic monuments of
its thought--the speeches of Robespierre and Saint-Just, the
debates of the Legislative Assembly and the Convention, the
harangues, addresses, and reports of Girondists and Montagnards.
Never did men speak so much to say so little; the empty verbiage
and swollen emphasis swamp any truth there may be beneath their
monotony and their turgidity. The Jacobin is full of respect for
the phantoms of his reasoning brain; in his eyes they are more
real than living men, and their suffrage is the only suffrage he
recognises--he will march onward in all sincerity at the head of
a procession of imaginary followers. The millions of
metaphysical wills which he has created in the image of his own
will sustain him by their unanimous assent, and he will
project outwards, like a chorus of triumph and acclamation, the
inward echo of his own voice.''
While admiring Taine's description, I think he has not exactly
grasped the psychology of the Jacobin.
The mind of the true Jacobin, at the time of the Revolution as
now, was composed of elements which we must analyse if we are to
understand its function.
This analysis will show in the first place that the Jacobin is
not a rationalist, but a believer. Far from building his belief
on reason, he moulds reason to his belief, and although his
speeches are steeped in rationalism he employs it very little in
his thoughts and his conduct.
A Jacobin who reasoned as much as he is accused of reasoning
would be sometimes accessible to the voice of reason. Now,
observation proves, from the time of the Revolution to our own
days, that the Jacobin is never influenced by reasoning, however
just, and it is precisely here that his strength resides.
And why is he not accessible to reason? Simply because his
vision of things, always extremely limited, does not permit of
his resisting the powerful and passionate impulses which guide
him.
These two elements, feeble reason and strong passions, would not
of themselves constitute the Jacobin mind. There is another.
Passion supports convictions, but hardly ever creates them. Now,
the true Jacobin has forcible convictions. What is to sustain
them? Here the mystic elements whose action we have already
studied come into play. The Jacobin is a mystic who has
replaced the old divinities by new gods. Imbued with the power
of words and formulae, he attributes to these a mysterious
power. To serve these exigent divinities he does not shrink from
the most violent measures. The laws voted by our modern Jacobins
furnish a proof of this fact.
The Jacobin mentality is found especially in narrow and
passionate characters. It implies, in fact, a narrow and rigid
mind, inaccessible to all criticism and to all considerations but
those of faith.
The mystic and affective elements which dominate the mind of the
Jacobin condemn him to an extreme simplicity. Grasping only the
superficial relations of things, nothing prevents him from taking
for realities the chimerical images which are born of his
imagination. The sequence of phenomena and their results escape
him. He never raises his eyes from his dream.
As we may see, it is not by the development of his logical reason
that the Jacobin exceeds. He possesses very little logic of this
kind, and therefore he often becomes dangerous. Where a superior
man would hesitate or halt the Jacobin, who has placed his feeble
reason at the service of his impulses, goes forward with
certainty.
So that although the Jacobin is a great reasoner, this does not
mean that he is in the least guided by reason. When he imagines
he is being led by reason it is really his passions and his
mysticism that lead him. Like all those who are convinced and
hemmed in by the walls of faith, he can never escape therefrom.
A true aggressive theologian, he is astonishingly like the
disciples of Calvin described in a previous chapter. Hypnotised
by their faith, nothing could deter them from their object. All
those who contradicted their articles of faith were considered
worthy of death. They too seemed to be powerful reasoners.
Ignorant, like the Jacobins, of the secret forces that led them,
they believed that reason was their sole guide, while in reality
they were the slaves of mysticism and passion.
The truly rationalistic Jacobin would be incomprehensible, and
would merely make reason despair. The passionate and mystical
Jacobin is, on the contrary, easily intelligible.
With these three elements--a very weak reasoning power, very
strong passions, and an intense mysticism--we have the true
psychological components of the mind of the Jacobin.
CHAPTER III
THE REVOLUTIONARY AND CRIMINAL MENTALITIES
1. The Revolutionary Mentality.
We have just seen that the mystic elements are one of the
components of the Jacobin mentality. We shall now see that they
enter into another form of mentality which is also clearly
defined, the revolutionary mentality.
In all ages societies have contained a certain number of restless
spirits, unstable and discontented, ready to rebel against any
established order of affairs. They are actuated by the mere love
of revolt, and if some magic power could realise all their
desires they would simply revolt again.
This special mentality often results from a faulty adaptation of
the individual to his surroundings, or from an excess of
mysticism, but it may also be merely a question of temperament or
arise from pathological disturbances.
The need of revolt presents very different degrees of intensity,
from simple discontent expressed in words directed against men
and things to the need of destroying them. Sometimes the
individual turns upon himself the revolutionary frenzy that he
cannot otherwise exercise. Russia is full of these madmen,
who, not content with committing arson or throwing bombs at
hazard into the crowd, finally mutilate themselves, like the
Skopzis and other analogous sects.
These perpetual rebels are generally highly suggestible beings,
whose mystic mentality is obsessed by fixed ideas. Despite the
apparent energy indicated by their actions they are really weak
characters, and are incapable of mastering themselves
sufficiently to resist the impulses that rule them. The mystic
spirit which animates them furnishes pretexts for their violence,
and enables them to regard themselves as great reformers.
In normal times the rebels which every society contains are
restrained by the laws, by their environment--in short, by all
the usual social constraints, and therefore remain undetected.
But as soon as a time of disturbance begins these constraints
grow weaker, and the rebel can give a free reign to his
instincts. He then becomes the accredited leader of a movement.
The motive of the revolution matters little to him; he will give
his life indifferently for the red flag or the white, or for the
liberation of a country which he has heard vaguely mentioned.
The revolutionary spirit is not always pushed to the extremes
which render it dangerous. When, instead of deriving from
affective or mystic impulses, it has an intellectual origin, it
may become a source of progress. It is thanks to those spirits
who are sufficiently independent to be intellectually
revolutionary that a civilisation is able to escape from the yoke
of tradition and habit when this becomes too heavy. The
sciences, arts, and industries especially have progressed by
the aid of such men. Galileo, Lavoisier, Darwin, and Pasteur
were such revolutionaries.
Although it is not necessary that a nation should possess any
large number of such spirits, it is very necessary that it should
possess some. Without them men would still be living in caves.
The revolutionary audacity which results in discoveries implies
very rare faculties. It necessitates notably an independence of
mind sufficient to escape from the influence of current opinions,
and a judgement that can grasp, under superficial analogies, the
hidden realities. This form of revolutionary spirit is creative,
while that examined above is destructive.
The revolutionary mentality may, therefore, be compared to
certain physiological states in the life of the individual which
are normally useful, but which, when exaggerated, take a
pathological form which is always hurtful.
2. The Criminal Mentality.
All the civilised societies inevitably drag behind them a residue
of degenerates, of the unadapted, of persons affected by various
taints. Vagabonds, beggars, fugitives from justice, thieves,
assassins, and starving creatures that live from day to day, may
constitute the criminal population of the great cities. In
ordinary times these waste products of civilisation are more or
less restrained by the police. During revolution nothing
restrains them, and they can easily gratify their instincts to
murder and plunder. In the dregs of society the revolutionaries
of all times are sure of finding recruits. Eager only to kill
and to plunder, little matters to them the cause they are
sworn to defend. If the chances of murder and pillage are better
in the party attacked, they will promptly change their colours.
To these criminals, properly so called, the incurable plague of
all societies, we must add the class of semi-criminals.
Wrongdoers on occasion, they never rebel so long as the fear of
the established order restrains them, but as soon as it weakens
they enrol themselves in the army of revolution.
These two categories--habitual and occasional criminals--form an
army of disorder which is fit for nothing but the creation of
disorder. All the revolutionaries, all the founders of religious
or political leagues, have constantly counted on their support.
We have already stated that this population, with its criminal
mentality, exercised a considerable influence during the French
Revolution. It always figured in the front rank of the riots
which occurred almost daily. Certain historians have spoken with
respect and emotion of the way in which the sovereign people
enforced its will upon the Convention, invading the hall armed
with pikes, the points of which were sometimes decorated with
newly severed heads. If we analyse the elements composing the
pretended delegations of the sovereign people, we shall find
that, apart from a small number of simple souls who submitted to
the impulses of the leaders, the mass was almost entirely formed
of the bandits of whom I have been speaking. To them were due
the innumerable murders of which the massacres of September and
the killing of the Princesse de Lamballe were merely typical.
They terrorised all the great Assemblies, from the Constituent
Assembly to the Convention, and for ten years they helped to
ravage France. If by some miracle this army of criminals could
have been eliminated, the progress of the Revolution would have
been very different. They stained it with blood from its dawn to
its decline. Reason could do nothing with them but they could do
much against reason.
CHAPTER IV
THE PSYCHOLOGY OF REVOLUTIONARY CROWDS
1. General Characteristics of the Crowd.
Whatever their origin, revolutions do not produce their full
effects until they have penetrated the soul of the multitude.
They therefore represent a consequence of the psychology of
crowds.
Although I have studied collective psychology at length in
another volume, I must here recall its principal laws.
Man, as part of a multitude, is a very different being from the
same man as an isolated individual. His conscious individuality
vanishes in the unconscious personality of the crowd.
Material contact is not absolutely necessary to produce in the
individual the mentality of the crowd. Common passions and
sentiments, provoked by certain events, are often sufficient to
create it.
The collective mind, momentarily formed, represents a very
special kind of aggregate. Its chief peculiarity is that it is
entirely dominated by unconscious elements, and is subject to a
peculiar collective logic.
Among the other characteristics of crowds, we must note their
infinite credulity and exaggerated sensibility, their short-
sightedness, and their incapacity to respond to the influences of
reason. Affirmation, contagion, repetition, and prestige
constitute almost the only means of persuading them. Reality and
experience have no effect upon them. The multitude will admit
anything; nothing is impossible in the eyes of the crowd.
By reason of the extreme sensibility of crowds, their sentiments,
good or bad, are always exaggerated. This exaggeration increases
still further in times of revolution. The least excitement will
then lead the multitude to act with the utmost fury. Their
credulity, so great even in the normal state, is still further
increased; the most improbable statements are accepted. Arthur
Young relates that when he visited the springs near Clermont, at
the time of the French Revolution, his guide was stopped by the
people, who were persuaded that he had come by order of the Queen
to mine and blow up the town. The most horrible tales concerning
the Royal Family were circulated, depicting it as a nest of
ghouls and vampires.
These various characteristics show that man in the crowd descends
to a very low degree in the scale of civilisation. He becomes a
savage, with all a savage's faults and qualities, with all his
momentary violence, enthusiasm, and heroism. In the intellectual
domain a crowd is always inferior to the isolated unit. In the
moral and sentimental domain it may be his superior. A crowd
will commit a crime as readily as an act of abnegation.
Personal characteristics vanish in the crowd, which exerts an
extraordinary influence upon the individuals which form it. The
miser becomes generous, the sceptic a believer, the honest
man a criminal, the coward a hero. Examples of such
transformations abounded during the great Revolution.
As part of a jury or a parliament, the collective man renders
verdicts or passes laws of which he would never have dreamed in
his isolated condition.
One of the most notable consequences of the influence of a
collectivity upon the individuals who compose it is the
unification of their sentiments and wills. This psychological
unity confers a remarkable force upon crowds.
The formation of such a mental unity results chiefly from the
fact that in a crowd gestures and actions are extremely
contagious. Acclamations of hatred, fury, or love are
immediately approved and repeated.
What is the origin of these common sentiments, this common will?
They are propagated by contagion, but a point of departure is
necessary before this contagion can take effect. Without a
leader the crowd is an amorphous entity incapable of action.
A knowledge of the laws relating to the psychology of crowds is
indispensable to the interpretation of the elements of our
Revolution, and to a comprehension of the conduct of
revolutionary assemblies, and the singular transformations of the
individuals who form part of them. Pushed by the unconscious
forces of the collective soul, they more often than not say what
they did not intend, and vote what they would not have wished to
vote.
Although the laws of collective psychology have sometimes been
divined instinctively by superior statesmen, the majority of
Governments have not understood and do not understand
them. It is because they do not understand them that so many of
them have fallen so easily. When we see the facility with which
certain Governments were overthrown by an insignificant riot--as
happened in the case of the monarchy of Louis-Philippe--the
dangers of an ignorance of collective psychology are evident.
The marshal in command of the troops in 1848, which were more
than sufficient to defend the king, certainly did not understand
that the moment he allowed the crowd to mingle with the troops
the latter, paralysed by suggestion and contagion, would cease to
do their duty. Neither did he know that as the multitude is
extremely sensible to prestige it needs a great display of force
to impress it, and that such a display will at once suppress
hostile demonstrations. He was equally ignorant of the fact that
all gatherings should be dispersed immediately. All these things
have been taught by experience, but in 1848 these lessons had not
been grasped. At the time of the great Revolution the psychology
of crowds was even less understood.
2. How the Stability of the Racial Mind limits the Oscillations
of the Mind of the Crowd.
A people can in a sense be likened to a crowd. It possesses
certain characteristics, but the oscillations of these
characteristics are limited by the soul or mind of the race. The
mind of the race has a fixity unknown to the transitory mind of
the crowd.
When a people possesses an ancestral soul established by a long
past the soul of the crowd is always dominated thereby.
A people differs from a crowd also in that it is composed of a
collection of groups, each having different interests and
passions. In a crowd properly so-called--a popular assembly, for
example--there are unities which may belong to very different
social categories.
A people sometimes seems as mobile as a crowd, but we must not
forget that behind its mobility, its enthusiasms, its violence
and destructiveness, the extremely tenacious and conservative
instincts of the racial mind persist. The history of the
Revolution and the century which has followed shows how the
conservative spirit finally overcomes the spirit of destruction.
More than one system of government which the people has shattered
has been restored by the people.
It is not as easy to work upon the mind of the people--that is,
the mind of the race--as on the mind of a crowd. The means of
action are indirect and slower (journals, conferences, speeches,
books, &c.). The elements of persuasion always come under the
headings already given: affirmation, repetition, prestige, and
contagion.
Mental contagion may affect a whole people instantaneously, but
more often it operates slowly, creeping from group to group.
Thus was the Reformation propagated in France.
A people is far less excitable than a crowd; but certain events--
national insults, threats of invasion, &c.--may arouse it
instantly. Such a phenomenon was observed on several occasions
during the Revolution, notably at the time of the insolent
manifesto issued by the Duke of Brunswick. The Duke knew little
indeed of the psychology of the French race when he
proffered his threats. Not only did he considerably prejudice
the cause of Louis XVI.; but he also damaged his own, since his
intervention raised from the soil an army eager to fight him.
This sudden explosion of feeling throughout a whole race has been
observed in all nations. Napoleon did not understand the power
of such explosions when he invaded Spain and Russia. One may
easily disaggregate the facile mind of a crowd, but one can do
nothing before the permanent soul of a race. Certainly the
Russian peasant is a very indifferent being, gross and narrow by
nature, yet at the first news of invasion he was transformed.
One may judge of this fact on reading a letter written by
Elizabeth, wife of the Emperor Alexander I.
``From the moment when Napoleon had crossed our frontiers it was
as though an electric spark had spread through all Russia; and if
the immensity of its area had made it possible for the news to
penetrate simultaneously to every corner of the Empire a cry of
indignation would have arisen so terrible that I believe it would
have resounded to the ends of the earth. As Napoleon advances
this feeling is growing yet stronger. Old men who have lost all
or nearly all their goods are saying: `We shall find a way of
living. Anything is preferable to a shameful peace.' Women all
of whose kin are in the army regard the dangers they are running
as secondary, and fear nothing but peace. Happily this peace,
which would be the death-warrant of Russia, will not be
negotiated; the Emperor does not conceive of such an idea, and
even if he would he could not. This is the heroic side of our
position.''
The Empress describes to her mother the two following traits,
which give some idea of the degree of resistance of which the
soul of the Russian is capable:--
``The Frenchmen had caught some unhappy peasants in Moscow, whom
they thought to force to serve in their ranks, and in order that
they should not be able to escape they branded their hands as one
brands horses in the stud. One of them asked what this mark
meant; he was told it signified that he was a French soldier.
`What! I am a soldier of the Emperor of the French!' he said.
And immediately he took his hatchet, cut off his hand, and threw
it at the feet of those present, saying, `Take it--there's your
mark!'
``At Moscow, too, the French had taken a score of peasants of
whom they wished to make an example in order to frighten the
villagers, who were picking off the French foraging parties and
were making war as well as the detachments of regular troops.
They ranged them against a wall and read their sentence in
Russian. They waited for them to beg for mercy: instead of that
they took farewell of one another and made their sign of the
cross. The French fired on the first of them; they waited for
the rest to beg for pardon in their terror, and to promise to
change their conduct. They fired on the second, and on the
third, and so on all the twenty, without a single one having
attempted to implore the clemency of the enemy. Napoleon has
not once had the pleasure of profaning this word in Russia.''
Among the characteristics of the popular mind we must mention
that in all peoples and all ages it has been saturated
with mysticism. The people will always be convinced that
superior beings--divinities, Governments, or great men--have the
power to change things at will. This mystic side produces an
intense need of adoration. The people must have a fetich, either
a man or a doctrine. This is why, when threatened with anarchy,
it calls for a Messiah to save it.
Like the crowd, but more slowly, the people readily passes from
adoration to hatred. A man may be the hero of the people at one
period, and finally earn its curses. These variations of popular
opinion concerning political personalities may be observed in all
times. The history of Cromwell furnishes us with a very curious
example.[5]
[5] After having overthrown a dynasty and refused a crown he was
buried like a king among kings. Two years later his body was
torn from the tomb, and his head, cut off by the executioner, was
exposed above the gate of the House of Parliament. A little
while ago a statue was raised to him. The old anarchist turned
autocrat now figures in the gallery of demigods.
4. The Role of the Leader in Revolutionary Movements.
All the varieties of crowds--homogeneous and heterogeneous,
assemblies, peoples, clubs, &c.--are, as we have often repeated,
aggregates incapable of unity and action so long as they find no
master to lead them.
I have shown elsewhere, making use of certain physiological
experiments, that the unconscious collective mind of the crowd
seems bound up with the mind of the leader. The latter gives it
a single will and imposes absolute obedience.
The leader acts especially through suggestion. His success
depends on his fashion of provoking this suggestion. Many
experiments have shown to what point a collectivity may be
subjected to suggestion.[6]
[6] Among the numerous experiments made to prove this fact one of
the most remarkable was performed on the pupils of his class by
Professor Glosson and published in the Revue Scientifique for
October 28, 1899.
``I prepared a bottle filled with distilled water carefully
wrapped in cotton and packed in a box. After several other
experiments I stated that I wished to measure the rapidity with
which an odour would diffuse itself through the air, and asked
those present to raise their hands the moment they perceived the
odour. . . . I took out the bottle and poured the water on the
cotton, turning my head away during the operation, then took up a
stop-watch and awaited the result. . . . I explained that I was
absolutely sure that no one present had ever smelt the odour of
the chemical composition I had spilt. . . . At the end of
fifteen seconds the majority of those in front had held up their
hands, and in forty seconds the odour had reached the back of the
hall by fairly regular waves. About three-quarters of those
present declared that they perceived the odour. A larger number
would doubtless have succumbed to suggestion, if at the end of a
minute I had not been forced to stop the experiment, some of
those in the front rows being unpleasantly affected by the odour,
and wishing to leave the hall.''
According to the suggestions of the leaders, the multitude will
be calm, furious, criminal, or heroic. These various suggestions
may sometimes appear to present a rational aspect, but they will
only appear to be reasonable. A crowd is in reality inaccessible
to reason; the only ideas capable of influencing it will always
be sentiments evoked in the form of images.
The history of the Revolution shows on every page how easily the
multitude follows the most contradictory impulses given by
its different leaders. We see it applaud just as vigorously at
the triumph of the Girondists, the Hebertists, the Dantonists,
and the Terrorists as at their successive downfalls. One may be
quite sure, also, that the crowd understood nothing of these
events.
At a distance one can only confusedly perceive the part played by
the leaders, for they commonly work in the shade. To grasp this
clearly we must study them in contemporary events. We shall then
see how readily the leader can provoke the most violent popular
movements. We are not thinking here of the strikes of the
postmen or railway men, in which the discontent of the employees
might intervene, but of events in which the crowd was not in the
least interested. Such, for example, was the popular rising
provoked by a few Socialist leaders amidst the Parisian populace
on the morrow of the execution of Ferrer, in Spain. The French
crowd had never heard of Ferrer. In Spain his execution was
almost unnoticed. In Paris the incitements of a few leaders
sufficed to hurl a regular popular army upon the Spanish Embassy,
with the intention of burning it. Part of the garrison had to be
employed to protect it. Energetically repulsed, the assailants
contented themselves with sacking a few shops and building some
barricades.
At the same time, the leaders gave another proof of their
influence. Finally understanding that the burning of a foreign
embassy might be extremely dangerous, they ordered a pacific
demonstration for the following day, and were as faithfully
obeyed as if they had ordered the most violent riot. No
example could better show the importance of leaders and the
submission of the crowd
The historians who, from Michelet to M. Aulard, have represented
the revolutionary crowd as having acted on its own initiative,
without leaders, do not comprehend its psychology.
CHAPTER V
THE PSYCHOLOGY OF THE REVOLUTIONARY ASSEMBLIES
1. Psychological Characteristics of the great Revolutionary
Assemblies.
A great political assembly, a parliament for example, is a crowd,
but a crowd which sometimes fails in effectual action on account
of the contrary sentiments of the hostile groups composing it.
The presence of these groups, actuated by different interests,
must make us consider an assembly as formed of superimposed and
heterogeneous crowds, each obeying its particular leaders. The
law of the mental unity of crowds is manifested only in each
group, and it is only as a result of exceptional circumstances
that the different groups act with a single intention.
Each group in an assembly represents a single being. The
individuals contributing to the formation of this being are no
longer themselves, and will unhesitatingly vote against their
convictions and their wishes. On the eve of the day when Louis
XVI. was to be condemned Vergniaud protested with indignation
against the suggestion that he should vote for his death; but he
did so vote on the following day.
The action of a group consists chiefly in fortifying hesitating
opinions. All feeble individual convictions become confirmed
upon becoming collective.
Leaders of great repute or unusual violence can sometimes, by
acting on all the groups of an assembly, make them a single
crowd. The majority of the members of the Convention enacted
measures entirely contrary to their opinions under the influence
of a very small number of such leaders.
Collectivities have always given way before active sectaries.
The history of the revolutionary Assemblies shows how
pusillanimous they were, despite the boldness of their language
respecting kings, before the leaders of the popular riots. The
invasion of a band of energumens commanded by an imperious leader
was enough to make them vote then and there the most absurd and
contradictory measures.
An assembly, having the characteristics of a crowd, will, like a
crowd, be extreme in its sentiments. Excessive in its violence,
it will be excessive in its cowardice. In general it will be
insolent to the weak and servile before the strong.
We remember the fearful humility of the Parliament when the
youthful Louis XIV. entered, whip in hand, to pronounce his brief
speech. We know with what increasing impertinence the
Constituent Assembly treated Louis XVI. as it felt that he was
becoming defenceless. Finally, we recall the terror of the
Convention under the reign of Robespierre.
This characteristic of assemblies being a general law, the
convocation of an assembly by a sovereign when his power is
failing must be regarded as a gross error in psychology. The
assembling of the States General cost the life of Louis
XVI. It all but lost Henry III. his throne, when, obliged to
leave Paris, he had the unhappy idea of assembling the Estates at
Blois. Conscious of the weakness of the king, the Estates at
once spoke as masters of the situation, modifying taxes,
dismissing officials, and claiming that their decisions should
have the force of law.
This progressive exaggeration of sentiments was plainly
demonstrated in all the assemblies of the Revolution. The
Constituent Assembly, at first extremely respectful toward the
royal authority and its prerogatives, finally proclaimed itself a
sovereign Assembly, and treated Louis XVI as a mere official.
The Convention, after relatively moderate beginnings, ended with
a preliminary form of the Terror, when judgments were still
surrounded by certain legal guarantees: then, quickly increasing
its powers, it enacted a law depriving all accused persons of the
right of defence, permitting their condemnation upon the mere
suspicion of being suspect. Yielding more and more to its
sanguinary frenzy, it finally decimated itself. Girondists,
Hebertists, Dantonists, and Robespierrists successively ended
their careers at the hands of the executioner.
This exaggeration of the sentiments of assemblies explains why
they were always so little able to control their own destinies
and why they so often arrived at conclusions exactly contrary to
the ends proposed. Catholic and royalist, the Constituent
Assembly, instead of the constitutional monarchy it wished to
establish and the religion it wished to defend, rapidly led
France to a violent republic and the persecution of the clergy.
Political assemblies are composed, as we have seen, of
heterogeneous groups, but they have sometimes been formed of
homogeneous groups, as, for instance, certain of the clubs, which
played so enormous a part during the Revolution, and whose
psychology deserves a special examination.
2. The Psychology of the Revolutionary Clubs.
Small assemblies of men possessing the same opinions, the same
beliefs, and the same interests, which eliminate all dissentient
voices, differ from the great assemblies by the unity of their
sentiments and therefore their wills. Such were the communes,
the religious congregations, the corporations, and the clubs
during the Revolution, the secret societies during the first half
of the nineteenth century, and the Freemasons and syndicalists of
to-day.
The points of difference between a heterogeneous assembly and a
homogeneous club must be thoroughly grasped if we are to
comprehend the progress of the French Revolution. Until the
Directory and especially during the Convention the Revolution was
directed by the clubs.
Despite the unity of will due to the absence of dissident parties
the clubs obey the laws of the psychology of crowds. They are
consequently subjugated by leaders. This we see especially in
the Jacobin Club, which was dominated by Robespierre.
The function of the leader of a club, a homogeneous crowd, is far
more difficult than that of a leader of a heterogeneous crowd.
The latter may easily be led by harping on a small number of
strings, but in a homogeneous group like a club, whose
sentiments and interests are identical, the leader must
know how to humour them and is often himself led.
Part of the strength of homogeneous agglomerations resides in
their anonymity. We know that during the Commune of 1871 a few
anonymous orders sufficed to effect the burning of the finest
monuments of Paris: the Hotel de Ville, the Tuileries, the
Cour des Comptes, the buildings of the Legion of Honour, &c. A
brief order from the anonymous committees, ``Burn Finances, burn
Tuileries,'' &c., was immediately executed. An unlooked-for
chance only saved the Louvre and its collections. We know too
what religious attention is in our days accorded to the most
absurd injunctions of the anonymous leaders of the trades unions.
The clubs of Paris and the insurrectionary Commune were not less
scrupulously obeyed at the time of the Revolution. An order
emanating from these was sufficient to hurl upon the Assembly a
popular army which dictated its wishes.
Summing up the history of the Convention in another chapter, we
shall see how frequent were these irruptions, and with what
servility the Assembly, which according to the legends was so
powerful bowed itself before the most imperative injunctions of a
handful of rioters. Instructed by experience, the Directory
closed the clubs and put an end to the invasion of the populace
by energetically shooting them down.
The Convention had early grasped the superiority of homogeneous
groups over heterogeneous assemblies in matters of government,
which is why it subdivided itself into committees composed each
of a limited number of individuals. These committees--of
Public Safety, of Finance, &c.--formed small sovereign assemblies
in the midst of the larger Assembly. Their power was held in
check only by that of the clubs.
The preceding considerations show the power of groups over the
wills of the members composing them. If the group is
homogeneous, this action is considerable; if it is heterogeneous,
it is less considerable but may still become important, either
because the more powerful groups of an assembly will dominate
those whose cohesion is weaker or because certain contagious
sentiments will often extend themselves to all the members of an
assembly.
A memorable example of this influence of groups occurred at the
time of the Revolution, when, on the night of the 4th of August,
the nobles voted, on the proposition of one of their members, the
abandonment of feudal privileges. Yet we know that the
Revolution resulted in part from the refusal of the clergy and
the nobles to renounce their privileges. Why did they refuse to
renounce them at first? Simply because men in a crowd do not act
as the same men singly. Individually no member of the nobility
would ever have abandoned his rights.
Of this influence of assemblies upon their members Napoleon at
St. Helena cited some curious examples: ``Nothing was more
common than to meet with men at this period quite unlike the
reputation that their acts and words would seem to justify. For
instance, one might have supposed Monge to be a terrible fellow;
when war was decided upon he mounted the tribune of the Jacobins
and declared that he would give his two daughters to the two
first soldiers to be wounded by the enemy. He wanted the
nobles to be killed, &c. Now, Monge was the most gentle and
feeble of men, and wouldn't have had a chicken killed if he had
had to do it with his own hands, or even to have it done in his
presence.''
3. A Suggested Explanation of the Progressive Exaggeration of
Sentiments in Assemblies.
If collective sentiments were susceptible of exact quantitative
measurement, we might translate them by a curve which, after a
first gradual ascent, runs upward with extreme rapidity and then
falls almost vertically. The equation of this curve might be
called the equation of the variations of collective sentiments
subjected to a constant excitation.
It is not always easy to explain the acceleration of certain
sentiments under the influence of a constant exciting cause.
Perhaps, however, one may say that if the laws of psychology are
comparable to those of mechanics, a cause of invariable
dimensions acting in a continuous fashion will rapidly increase
the intensity of a sentiment. We know, for example, that a force
which is constant in dimension and direction, such as gravity
acting upon a mass, will cause an accelerated movement. The
speed of a free object falling in space under the influence of
gravity will be about 32 feet during the first second, 64 feet
during the next, 96 feet during the next, &c. It would be easy,
were the moving body allowed to fall from a sufficient height, to
give it a velocity sufficient to perforate a plate of steel.
But although this explanation is applicable to the acceleration
of a sentiment subjected to a constant exciting cause, it
does not tell us why the effects of acceleration finally and
suddenly cease. Such a fall is only comprehensible if we bring
in physiological factors--that is, if we remember that pleasure,
like pain, cannot exceed certain limits, and that all sensations,
when too violent, result in the paralysis of sensation. Our
organism can only support a certain maximum of joy, pain, or
effort, and it cannot support that maximum for long together.
The hand which grasps a dynamometer soon exhausts its effort, and
is obliged suddenly to let go.
The study of the causes of the rapid disappearance of certain
groups of sentiments in assemblies will remind us of the fact
that beside the party which is predominant by means of its
strength or prestige there are others whose sentiments,
restrained by this force or prestige, have not reached their full
development. Some chance circumstance may somewhat weaken the
prevailing party, when immediately the suppressed sentiments of
the adverse parties may become preponderant. The Mountain
learned this lesson after Thermidor.
All analogies that we may seek to establish between the laws of
material phenomena and those which condition the evolution of
affective and mystic factors are evidently extremely rough. They
must be so until the mechanism of the cerebral functions is
better understood than it is to-day.
PART II
THE FRENCH REVOLUTION
BOOK I
THE ORIGINS OF THE FRENCH REVOLUTION
CHAPTER I
THE OPINIONS OF HISTORIANS CONCERNING THE FRENCH REVOLUTION
1. The Historians of the Revolution.
The most contradictory opinions have been expressed respecting
the French Revolution, and although only a century separates us
from the period in question it seems impossible as yet to judge
it calmly. For de Maistre it was ``a satanic piece of work,''
and ``never was the action of the spirit of darkness so evidently
manifested.'' For the modern Jacobins it has regenerated the
human race.
Foreigners who live in France still regard it as a subject to be
avoided in conversation.
``Everywhere,'' writes Barrett Wendell, ``this memory and these
traditions are still endowed with such vitality that few persons
are capable of considering them dispassionately. They still
excite both enthusiasm and resentment; they are still regarded
with a loyal and ardent spirit of partisanship. The better you
come to understand France the more clearly you see that even to-
day no study of the Revolution strikes any Frenchman as
having been impartial.''
This observation is perfectly correct. To be interpretable with
equity, the events of the past must no longer be productive of
results and must not touch the religious or political beliefs
whose inevitable intolerance I have denoted.
We must not therefore be surprised that historians express very
different ideas respecting the Revolution. For a long time to
come some will still see in it one of the most sinister events of
history, while to others it will remain one of the most glorious.
All writers on the subject have believed that they have related
its course with impartiality, but in general they have merely
supported contradictory theories of peculiar simplicity. The
documents being innumerable and contradictory, their conscious or
unconscious choice has readily enabled them to justify their
respective theories.
The older historians of the Revolution--Thiers, Quinet, and,
despite his talent, Michelet himself, are somewhat eclipsed to-
day. Their doctrines were by no means complicated; a historic
fatalism prevails generally in their work. Thiers regarded the
Revolution as the result of several centuries of absolute
monarchy, and the Terror as the necessary consequence of foreign
invasion. Quinet described the excesses of 1793 as the result of
a long-continued despotism, but declared that the tyranny of the
Convention was unnecessary, and hampered the work of the
Revolution. Michelet saw in this last merely the work of the
people, whom he blindly admired, and commenced the glorification
continued by other historians.
The former reputation of all these historians has been to a great
extent effaced by that of Taine. Although equally impassioned,
he threw a brilliant light upon the revolutionary period, and it
will doubtless be long before his work is superseded.
Work so important is bound to show faults. Taine is admirable in
the representation of facts and persons, but he attempts to judge
by the standard of rational logic events which were not dictated
by reason, and which, therefore, he cannot interpret. His
psychology, excellent when it is merely descriptive, is very weak
as soon as it becomes explanatory. To affirm that Robespierre
was a pedantic ``swotter'' is not to reveal the causes of his
absolute power over the Convention, at a time when he had spent
several months in decimating it with perfect impunity. It has
very justly been said of Taine that he saw well and understood
little.
Despite these restrictions his work is highly remarkable and has
not been equalled. We may judge of his immense influence by the
exasperation which he causes among the faithful defenders of
Jacobin orthodoxy, of which M. Aulard, professor at the Sorbonne,
is to-day the high priest. The latter has devoted two years to
writing a pamphlet against Taine, every line of which is steeped
in passion. All this time spent in rectifying a few material
errors which are not really significant has only resulted in the
perpetration of the very same errors.
Reviewing his work, M. A. Cochin shows that M. Aulard has at
least on every other occasion been deceived by his quotations,
whereas Taine erred far more rarely. The same historian shows
also that we must not trust M. Aulard's sources.
``These sources--proceedings, pamphlets, journals, and the
speeches and writings of patriots--are precisely the authentic
publications of patriotism, edited by patriots, and edited, as a
rule, for the benefit of the public. He ought to have seen in
all this simply the special pleading of the defendant: he had,
before his eyes, a ready-made history of the Revolution, which
presents, side by side with each of the acts of the `People,'
from the massacres of September to the law of Prairial, a ready-
made explanation according to the republican system of defence.''
Perhaps the fairest criticism that one can make of the work of
Taine is that it was left incomplete. He studied more especially
the role of the populace and its leaders during the
revolutionary period. This inspired him with pages vibrating
with an indignation which we can still admire, but several
important aspects of the Revolution escaped him.
Whatever one may think of the Revolution, an irreducible
difference will always exist between historians of the school of
Taine and those of the school of M. Aulard. The latter regards
the sovereign people as admirable, while the former shows us that
when abandoned to its instincts and liberated from all social
restraint it relapses into primitive savagery. The conception of
M. Aulard, entirely contrary to the lessons of the psychology of
crowds, is none the less a religious dogma in the eyes of modern
Jacobins. They write of the Revolution according to the methods
of believers, and take for learned works the arguments of virtual
theologians.
2. The Theory of Fatalism in respect of the Revolution.
Advocates and detractors of the Revolution often admit the
fatality of revolutionary events. This theory is well
synthetised in the following passage from the History of the
Revolution, by Emile Olivier:--
``No man could oppose it. The blame belongs neither to those who
perished nor to those who survived; there was no individual force
capable of changing the elements and of foreseeing the events
which were born of the nature of things and circumstances.''
Taine himself inclines to this idea:--
``At the moment when the States General were opened the course of
ideas and events was not only determined but even visible. Each
generation unwittingly bears within itself its future and its
past; from the latter its destinies might have been foretold long
before the issue.''
Other modern authors, who profess no more indulgence for the
violence of the revolutionaries than did Taine, are equally
convinced of this fatality. M. Sorel, after recalling the saying
of Bossuet concerning the revolutions of antiquity: ``Everything
is surprising if we only consider particular causes, and yet
everything goes forward in regular sequence,'' expresses an
intention which he very imperfectly realises: ``to show in the
Revolution, which seems to some the subversion and to others the
regeneration of the old European world, the natural and necessary
result of the history of Europe, and to show, moreover, that this
revolution had no result--not even the most unexpected--that did
not ensue from this history, and was not explained by the
precedents of the ancien regime.''
Guizot also had formerly attempted to prove that our Revolution,
which he quite wrongly compared to that of England, was perfectly
natural and effected no innovations:--
``Far from having broken with the natural course of events in
Europe, neither the English revolution nor our own did, intended,
or said anything that had not been said, intended, and done a
hundred years before its outbreak.
`` . . . Whether we regard the general doctrines of the two
revolutions or the application made of them--whether we deal with
the government of the State or with the civil legislation, with
property or with persons, with liberty or with power, we shall
find nothing of which the invention can be attributed to them,
nothing that will not be encountered elsewhere, or that was not
at least originated in times which we qualify as normal.''
All these assertions merely recall the banal law that a
phenomenon is simply the consequence of previous phenomena. Such
very general propositions do not teach us much.
We must not try to explain too many events by the principle of
fatality adopted by so many historians. I have elsewhere
discussed the significance of such fatalities, and have shown
that the whole effort of civilisation consists in trying to
escape therefrom. Certainly history is full of necessities, but
it is also full of contingent facts which were, and might not
have been. Napoleon himself, on St. Helena, enumerated six
circumstances which might have checked his prodigious career. He
related, notably, that on taking a bath at Auxonne, in 1786, he
only escaped death by the fortuitous presence of a sandbank. If
Bonaparte had died, then we may admit that another general would
have arisen, and might have become dictator. But what would have
become of the Imperial epic and its consequences without
the man of genius who led our victorious armies into all the
capitals of Europe?
It is permissible to consider the Revolution as being partly a
necessity, but it was above all--which is what the fatalistic
writers already cited do not show us--a permanent struggle
between theorists who were imbued with a new ideal, and the
economic, social, and political laws which ruled mankind, and
which they did not understand. Not understanding them, they
sought in vain to direct the course of events, were exasperated
at their failure, and finally committed every species of
violence. They decreed that the paper money known as assignats
should be accepted as the equivalent of gold, and all their
threats could not prevent the fictitious value of such money
falling almost to nothing. They decreed the law of the maximum,
and it merely increased the evils it was intended to remedy.
Robespierre declared before the Convention ``that all the sans-
culottes will be paid at the expense of the public treasury,
which will be fed by the rich,'' and in spite of requisitions and
the guillotine the treasury remained empty.
Having broken all human restraints, the men of the Revolution
finally discovered that a society cannot live without them; but
when they sought to create them anew they saw that even the
strongest society, though supported by the fear of the
guillotine, could not replace the discipline which the past had
slowly built up in the minds of men. As for understanding the
evolution of society, or judging men's hearts and minds, or
foreseeing the consequences of the laws they enacted, they
scarcely attempted to do so.
The events of the Revolution did not ensue from
irreducible necessities. They were far more the consequence of
Jacobin principles than of circumstances, and might have been
quite other than they were. Would the Revolution have followed
the same path if Louis XVI. had been better advised, or if the
Constituent Assembly had been less cowardly in times of popular
insurrection? The theory of revolutionary fatality is only
useful to justify violence by presenting it as inevitable.
Whether we are dealing with science or with history we must
beware of the ignorance which takes shelter under the shibboleth
of fatalism Nature was formerly full of a host of fatalities
which science is slowly contriving to avoid. The function of the
superior man is, as I have shown elsewhere, to avert such
fatalities.
3. The Hesitations of recent Historians of the Revolution.
The historians whose ideas we have examined in the preceding
chapter were extremely positive in their special pleading.
Confined within the limits of belief, they did not attempt to
penetrate the domain of knowledge. A monarchical writer was
violently hostile to the Revolution, and a liberal writer was its
violent apologist.
At the present time we can see the commencement of a movement
which will surely lead to the study of the Revolution as one of
those scientific phenomena into which the opinions and beliefs of
a writer enter so little that the reader does not even suspect
them.
This period has not yet come into being; we are still in the
period of doubt. The liberal writers who used to be so positive
are now so no longer. One may judge of this new state of
mind by the following extracts from recent authors:--
M. Hanotaux, having vaunted the utility of the Revolution, asks
whether its results were not bought too dearly, and adds:--
``History hesitates, and will, for a long time yet, hesitate to
answer.''
M. Madelin is equally dubious in the book he has recently
published:--
``I have never felt sufficient authority to form, even in my
inmost conscience, a categorical judgment on so complex a
phenomenon as the French Revolution. To-day I find it even more
difficult to form a brief judgement. Causes, facts, and
consequences seem to me to be still extremely debatable
subjects.''
One may obtain a still better idea of the transformation of the
old ideas concerning the Revolution by perusing the latest
writings of its official defenders. While they professed
formerly to justify every act of violence by representing it as a
simple act of defence, they now confine themselves to pleading
extenuating circumstances. I find a striking proof of this new
frame of mind in the history of France for the use of schools,
published by MM. Aulard and Debidour. Concerning the Terror we
read the following lines:--
``Blood flowed in waves; there were acts of injustice and crimes
which were useless from the point of view of national defence,
and odious. But men had lost their heads in the tempest, and,
harassed by a thousand dangers, the patriots struck out in their
rage.''
We shall see in another part of this work that the first of the
two authors whom I have cited is, in spite of his
uncompromising Jacobinism, by no means indulgent toward the men
formerly qualified as the ``Giants of the Convention.''
The judgments of foreigners upon our Revolution are usually
distinctly severe, and we cannot be surprised when we remember
how Europe suffered during the twenty years of upheaval in
France.
The Germans in particular have been most severe. Their opinion
is summed up in the following lines by M. Faguet:--
``Let us say it courageously and patriotically, for patriotism
consists above all in telling the truth to one's own country:
Germany sees in France, with regard to the past, a people who,
with the great words `liberty' and `fraternity' in its mouth,
oppressed, trampled, murdered, pillaged, and fleeced her for
fifteen years; and with regard to the present, a people who, with
the same words on its banners, is organising a despotic,
oppressive, mischievous, and ruinous democracy, which none would
seek to imitate. This is what Germany may well see in France;
and this, according to her books and journals, is, we may assure
ourselves, what she does see.''
For the rest, whatever the worth of the verdicts pronounced upon
the French Revolution, we may be certain that the writers of the
future will consider it as an event as passionately interesting
as it is instructive.
A Government bloodthirsty enough to guillotine old men of eighty
years, young girls, and little children: which covered France
with ruins, and yet succeeded in repulsing Europe in arms; an
archduchess of Austria, Queen of France, dying on the
scaffold, and a few years later another archduchess, her
relative, replacing her on the same throne and marrying a sub-
lieutenant, turned Emperor--here are tragedies unique in human
history. The psychologists, above all, will derive lessons from
a history hitherto so little studied by them. No doubt they will
finally discover that psychology can make no progress until it
renounces chimerical theories and laboratory experiments in order
to study the events and the men who surround us.[7]
[7] This advice is far from being banal. The psychologists of
the day pay very little attention to the world about them, and
are even surprised that any one should study it. I have come
across an interesting proof of this indifferent frame of mind in
a review of one of my books which appeared in the Revue
philosophique and was inspired by the editor of the review. The
author reproaches me with ``exploring the world and the
newspapers rather than books.''
I most gladly accept this reproach. The manifold facts of the
journals and the realities of the world are far more instructive
than philosophical lucubrations such as the Revue is stuffed
with.
Philosophers are beginning to see the puerility of such
reproaches. It was certainly of the forty volumes of this
fastidious publication that Mr. William James was thinking when
he wrote that all these dissertations simply represented ``a
string of facts clumsily observed and a few quarrelsome
discussions.'' Although he is the author of the best known
treatise on psychology extant, the eminent thinker realises ``the
fragility of a science that oozes metaphysical criticism at every
joint.'' For more than twenty years I have tried to interest
psychologists in the study of realities, but the stream of
university metaphysics is hardly yet turned aside, although it
has lost its former force
4. Impartiality in History.
Impartiality has always been considered as the most essential
quality of the historian. All historians since Tacitus have
assured us that they are impartial.
In reality the writer sees events as the painter sees a
landscape--that is, through his own temperament; through his
character and the mind of the race.
A number of artists, placed before the same landscape, would
necessarily interpret it in as many different fashions. Some
would lay stress upon details neglected by others. Each
reproduction would thus be a personal work--that is to say, would
be interpreted by a certain form of sensibility.
It is the same with the writer. We can no more speak of the
impartiality of the historian than we can speak of the
impartiality of the painter.
Certainly the historian may confine himself to the reproduction
of documents, and this is the present tendency. But these
documents, for periods as near us as the Revolution, are so
abundant that a man's whole life would not suffice to go through
them. Therefore the historian must make a choice.
Consciously sometimes, but more often unconsciously, the author
will select the material which best corresponds with his
political, moral, and social opinions.
It is therefore impossible, unless he contents himself with
simple chronologies summing up each event with a few words and a
date, to produce a truly impartial volume of history. No author
could be impartial; and it is not to be regretted. The claim to
impartiality, so common to-day, results in those flat, gloomy,
and prodigiously wearisome works which render the comprehension
of a period completely impossible.
Should the historian, under a pretext of impartiality, abstain
from judging men--that is, from speaking in tones of admiration
or reprobation?
This question, I admit, allows of two very different solutions,
each of which is perfectly correct, according to the point of
view assumed--that of the moralist or that of the psychologist.
The moralist must think exclusively of the interest of society,
and must judge men only according to that interest. By the very
fact that it exists and wishes to continue to exist a society is
obliged to admit a certain number of rules, to have an
indestructible standard of good and evil, and consequently to
create very definite distinctions between vice and virtue. It
thus finally creates average types, to which the man of the
period approaches more or less closely, and from which he cannot
depart very widely without peril to society.
It is by such similar types and the rules derived from social
necessities that the moralist must judge the men of the past.
Praising those which were useful and blaming the rest, he thus
helps to form the moral types which are indispensable to the
progress of civilisation and which may serve others as models.
Poets such as Corneille, for example, create heroes superior to
the majority of men, and possibly inimitable; but they thereby
help greatly to stimulate our efforts. The example of heroes
must always be set before a people in order to ennoble its mind.
Such is the moralist's point of view. That of the psychologist
would be quite different. While a society has no right to be
tolerant, because its first duty is to live, the psychologist may
remain indifferent. Considering things as a scientist, he no
longer asks their utilitarian value, but seeks merely to explain
them.
His situation is that of the observer before any phenomenon. It
is obviously difficult to read in cold blood that Carrier ordered
his victims to be buried up to the neck so that they might then
be blinded and subjected to horrible torments. Yet if we wish to
comprehend such acts we must be no more indignant than the
naturalist before the spider slowly devouring a fly. As soon as
the reason is moved it is no longer reason, and can explain
nothing.
The functions of the historian and the psychologist are not, as
we see, identical, but of both we may demand the endeavour, by a
wise interpretation of the facts, to discover, under the visible
evidences, the invisible forces which determine them.
CHAPTER II
THE PSYCHOLOGICAL FOUNDATIONS OF THE ANCIEN REGIME
1. The Absolute Monarchy and the Bases of the Ancien Regime.
Many historians assure us that the Revolution was directed
against the autocracy of the monarchy. In reality the kings of
France had ceased to be absolute monarchs long before its
outbreak.
Only very late in history--not until the reign of Louis XIV.--did
they finally obtain incontestable power. All the preceding
sovereigns, even the most powerful, such as Francis I., for
example, had to sustain a constant struggle either against the
seigneurs, or the clergy, or the parliaments, and they did not
always win. Francis himself had not sufficient power to protect
his most intimate friends against the Sorbonne and the
Parliament. His friend and councillor Berquin, having offended
the Sorbonne, was arrested upon the order of the latter body.
The king ordered his release, which was refused. He was obliged
to send archers to remove him from the Conciergerie, and could
find no other means of protecting him than that of keeping him
beside him in the Louvre. The Sorbonne by no means considered
itself beaten. Profiting by the king's absence, it
arrested Berquin again and had him tried by Parliament.
Condemned at ten in the morning, he was burned alive at noon.
Built up very gradually, the power of the kings of France was not
absolute until the time of Louis XIV. It then rapidly declined,
and it would be truly difficult to speak of the absolutism of
Louis XVI.
This pretended master was the slave of his court, his ministers,
the clergy, and the nobles. He did what they forced him to do
and rarely what he wished. Perhaps no Frenchman was so little
free as the king.
The great power of the monarchy resided originally in the Divine
origin which was attributed to it, and in the traditions which
had accumulated during the ages. These formed the real social
framework of the country.
The true cause of the disappearance of the ancien regime was
simply the weakening of the traditions which served as its
foundations. When after repeated criticism it could find no more
defenders, the ancien regime crumbled like a building whose
foundations have been destroyed.
2. The Inconveniences of the Ancien Regime
A long-established system of government will always finally seem
acceptable to the people governed. Habit masks its
inconveniences, which appear only when men begin to think. Then
they ask how they could ever have supported them. The truly
unhappy man is the man who believes himself miserable.
It was precisely this belief which was gaining ground at the time
of the Revolution, under the influence of the writers whose work
we shall presently study. Then the imperfections of the
ancien regime stared all men in the face. They were
numerous; it is enough to mention a few.
Despite the apparent authority of the central power, the kingdom,
formed by the successive conquest of independent provinces, was
divided into territories each of which had its own laws and
customs, and each of which paid different imposts. Internal
customs-houses separated them. The unity of France was thus
somewhat artificial. It represented an aggregate of various
countries which the repeated efforts of the kings, including
Louis XIV., had not succeeded in wholly unifying. The most
useful effect of the Revolution was this very unification.
To such material divisions were added social divisions
constituted by different classes--nobles, clergy, and the Third
Estate, whose rigid barriers could only with the utmost
difficulty be crossed.
Regarding the division of the classes as one of its sources of
power, the ancien regime had rigorously maintained that
division. This became the principal cause of the hatreds which
the system inspired. Much of the violence of the triumphant
bourgeoisie represented vengeance for a long past of disdain
and oppression. The wounds of self-love are the most difficult
of all to forget. The Third Estate had suffered many such
wounds. At a meeting of the States General in 1614, at which its
representatives were obliged to remain bareheaded on their knees,
one member of the Third Estate having dared to say that the three
orders were like three brothers, the spokesman of the nobles
replied ``that there was no fraternity between it and the Third;
that the nobles did not wish the children of cobblers and
tanners to call them their brothers.''
Despite the march of enlightenment the nobles and the clergy
obstinately preserved their privileges and their demands, no
longer justifiable now that these classes had ceased to render
services.
Kept from the exercise of public functions by the royal power,
which distrusted them, and progressively replaced by a
bourgeoisie which was more and more learned and capable, the
social role of nobility and clergy was only an empty show.
This point has been luminously expounded by Taine:--
``Since the nobility, having lost its special capacity, and the
Third Estate, having acquired general capacity, were now on a
level in respect of education and aptitudes, the inequality which
divided them had become hurtful and useless. Instituted by
custom, it was no longer ratified by the consciousness, and the
Third Estate was with reason angered by privileges which nothing
justified, neither the capacity of the nobles nor the incapacity
of the bourgeoisie.''
By reason of the rigidity of castes established by a long past we
cannot see what could have persuaded the nobles and the clergy to
renounce their privileges. Certainly they did finally abandon
them one memorable evening, when events forced them to do so; but
then it was too late, and the Revolution, unchained, was pursuing
its course.
It is certain that modern progress would successively have
established all that the Revolution effected--the equality of
citizens before the law, the suppression of the privileges of
birth, &c. Despite the conservative spirit of the Latins, these
things would have been won, as they were by the majority
of the peoples. We might in this manner have been saved twenty
years of warfare and devastation; but we must have had a
different mental constitution, and, above all, different
statesmen.
The profound hostility of the bourgeoisie against the classes
maintained above it by tradition was one of the great factors of
the Revolution, and perfectly explains why, after its triumph,
the first class despoiled the vanquished of their wealth. They
behaved as conquerors--like William the Conqueror, who, after the
conquest of England, distributed the soil among his soldiers.
But although the bourgeoisie detested the nobility they had no
hatred for royalty, and did not regard it as revocable. The
maladdress of the king and his appeals to foreign powers only
very gradually made him unpopular.
The first Assembly never dreamed of founding a republic.
Extremely royalist, in fact, it thought simply to substitute a
constitutional for an absolute monarchy. Only the consciousness
of its increasing power exasperated it against the resistance of
the king; but it dared not overthrow him.
3. Life under the Ancien Regime.
It is difficult to form a very clear idea of life under the
ancien regime, and, above all, of the real situation of the
peasants.
The writers who defend the Revolution as theologians defend
religious dogmas draw such gloomy pictures of the existence of
the peasants under the ancien regime that we ask ourselves
how it was that all these unhappy creatures had not died
of hunger long before. A good example of this style of writing
may be found in a book by M. A. Rambaud, formerly professor at
the Sorbonne, published under the title History of the French
Revolution. One notices especially an engraving bearing the
legend, Poverty of Peasants under Louis XIV. In the foreground
a man is fighting some dogs for some bones, which for that matter
are already quite fleshless. Beside him a wretched fellow is
twisting himself and compressing his stomach. Farther back a
woman lying on the ground is eating grass. At the back of the
landscape figures of which one cannot say whether they are
corpses or persons starving are also stretched on the soil. As
an example of the administration of the ancien regime the
same author assures us that ``a place in the police cost 300
livres and brought in 400,000.'' Such figures surely indicate a
great disinterestedness on the part of those who sold such
productive employment! He also informs us ``that it cost only
120 livres to get people arrested,'' and that ``under Louis XV.
more than 150,000 lettres de cachet were distributed.''
The majority of books dealing with the Revolution are conceived
with as little impartiality and critical spirit, which is one
reason why this period is really so little known to us.
Certainly there is no lack of documents, but they are absolutely
contradictory. To the celebrated description of La Bruyere we
may oppose the enthusiastic picture drawn by the English
traveller Young of the prosperous condition of the peasants of
some of the French provinces.
Were they really crushed by taxation, and did they, as has been
stated, pay four-fifths of their revenue instead of a fifth as
to-day? Impossible to say with certainty. One capital fact,
however, seems to prove that under the ancien regime the
situation of the inhabitants of the rural districts could not
have been so very wretched, since it seems established that more
than a third of the soil had been bought by peasants.
We are better informed a
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