The Psychology of Revolution by Gustave le Bon (ebook pdf reader for pc TXT) 📕

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