About the Work
The Psychology of Revolution is a work of historical and social psychology by Gustave Le Bon, the French thinker best known for his studies of crowd behaviour and the irrational foundations of belief. The book applies a general theory of how beliefs are formed, spread, and dissolved to the most consequential upheaval in modern European history: the French Revolution. It is not a narrative history in the ordinary sense. Le Bon does not set out to recount the events of 1789 and after in sequence, nor to adjudicate between rival chronicles of what happened. His aim is explanatory and, in his own understanding, scientific: to identify the psychological laws that governed the behaviour of the Revolution’s actors, and to show that those laws operated with something close to regularity beneath the apparent chaos of the period.
“A crowd never has any opinion but that of its leaders.”
The work is organised as a sustained argument rather than a story. It opens with a general theory of revolutions—what they are, how they differ from one another, and what part governments, armies, and populations play in them—and then narrows its focus to the French case, which occupies the greater part of the book. Le Bon treats the Revolution as a single phenomenon composed of simultaneous but independent currents, each phase revealing events “engendered by psychological laws working with clockwork regularity.” The actors, in his account, moved like characters in a predetermined drama, saying what they were bound to say, and were often as astonished by events as any later observer. He quotes Billaud-Varenne’s admission that the decisions for which the revolutionaries were reproached were frequently neither intended nor desired by them a day or two beforehand—the crisis alone evoked them.
The book is written in a confident, often polemical register. Le Bon is not a neutral chronicler; he is a theorist with a thesis, and he states it plainly. He insists that the Revolution was misunderstood both by those who made it and by those who described it, and that the misunderstanding arose from a single error: the assumption that men are guided by rational logic when in fact they are guided by affective and mystic logic. The work is therefore as much a critique of historians as a study of revolutionaries. It belongs to a period of intellectual revision, and Le Bon presents it as a contribution to what he calls the revision of history—an effort to re-examine received certainties in the light of a new psychology.
Context
Le Bon situates his book within a broader movement of intellectual revision. The present age, he argues, is one in which knowledge is being re-examined on every side. Science has resumed the examination of its own certitudes and discovered their fragility; mechanics is losing its axioms, and matter itself dissolves into an aggregate of ephemeral forces. History has not escaped this revision. No phase of the past is certainly known, and what once seemed settled is again in question. The French Revolution, though analysed by generations of writers, now finds its most confident defenders hesitating; the ancient evidence proves far from impeccable, and the latest literature betrays uncertainty. Thinkers have begun to ask whether the new order that followed the old regime might have established itself naturally, without violence.
Le Bon attributes this revision to three causes: time, which calms the passions that once made impartial judgment impossible; the emergence of documents from the archives; and the development of modern psychology, which enables a better reading of men and motives. He lists the psychological discoveries he considers applicable to history: the understanding of ancestral influences, the laws governing the actions of crowds, the disaggregation of personality, mental contagion, the unconscious formation of beliefs, and the distinction between different forms of logic. These are the tools he brings to the Revolution.
The book also has a personal context. Le Bon describes being struck, over many years, by the impenetrable aspect of phenomena relating to the genesis of beliefs. He studied the problem for two decades, publishing successive volumes. One early work addressed the psychological laws governing the evolution of peoples, showing that historic races acquire psychological characteristics as stable as anatomical ones, and explaining how a people transforms its institutions, languages, and arts, and how individual personalities may be entirely disaggregated under sudden environmental change. He then examined crowds—mobile, transitory collectivities—in The Psychology of the Crowd. Next he addressed beliefs in Opinions and Beliefs, arguing that they are usually irrational and always involuntary, and solving the puzzle of how beliefs that no reason could justify were admitted by enlightened minds. He concluded that beside rational logic there exist affective logic, collective logic, and mystic logic, which usually overrule reason. The Psychology of Revolution is the application of these principles to the revolutionary phenomenon, and notably to the French Revolution.
The intellectual climate in which Le Bon wrote was one in which the Revolution was still a live political battleground. He notes that foreigners in France avoid the subject in conversation, and that a century after the events, calm judgment still seemed impossible. For de Maistre the Revolution was “a satanic piece of work”; for modern Jacobins it regenerated the human race. Barrett Wendell observed that memory and tradition retained their vitality, and that few considered the Revolution dispassionately. Le Bon’s own position is that events must cease to produce results and cease to touch religious or political beliefs before they can be judged equitably—and that the Revolution had not yet reached that point.
Structure of the Book
The book falls into three large movements. The first sets out the psychological elements of revolutionary movements in general. It opens with a consideration of the general characteristics of revolutions, distinguishing scientific revolutions from political and religious ones, and examining the action of governments in revolutions and the part played by the people. It then turns to the forms of mentality prevalent during revolution: the individual variations of character that occur in such times, the mystic and Jacobin mentalities, the revolutionary and criminal mentalities, and the psychology of revolutionary crowds and revolutionary assemblies. This first movement is theoretical and comparative; it draws on examples from many nations and periods, including the Reformation, the Russian Revolution, the revolutions of the Latin American republics, and the political history of England and France.
The second and longest movement is devoted to the French Revolution. It begins with the origins of the Revolution: the opinions of historians concerning it, the psychological foundations of the Ancien Régime, the mental anarchy of the time and the influence attributed to the philosophers, and the psychological illusions respecting the Revolution. It then examines the rational, affective, mystic, and collective influences active during the Revolution, working through the psychology of the Constituent Assembly, the Legislative Assembly, and the Convention, the government of the Convention, instances of revolutionary violence, the armies of the Revolution, and the psychology of the revolutionary leaders—among them Danton, Robespierre, Fouquier-Tinville, Marat, and Billaud-Varenne. A third book within this movement addresses the conflict between ancestral influences and revolutionary principles, covering the last convulsions of anarchy under the Directory, the restoration of order under the Consular Republic, and the political results of the conflict over the following century.
The third movement turns to the recent evolution of revolutionary principles. It traces the progress of democratic beliefs since the Revolution, the results of democratic evolution, and the new forms of democratic belief—including the conflict between Capital and Labour and the Syndicalist Movement—before concluding. The book thus moves from general theory, to the detailed psychological analysis of a single great revolution, to the long-term consequences of that revolution in the modern world. Its final concern is not the France of 1789 but the democratic and socialist movements of Le Bon’s own time, which he presents as the continuing unfolding of the beliefs first proclaimed by the Revolution.
Inside the Book
The Revision of History
Gustave Le Bon opens The Psychology of Revolution by framing his age as one of revision. Science, he observes, has turned its scrutiny upon its own certitudes and found them fragile: mechanics is losing its axioms, and matter dissolves into an aggregate of ephemeral forces. History has not escaped this upheaval. No phase of the past is certainly known, and what once seemed settled is again in question. Even the French Revolution, analysed by generations of writers, now finds its most confident defenders hesitating, as ancient evidence proves far from impeccable and the latest scholarship betrays uncertainty. Thinkers have begun to ask whether the new order that followed the ancien régime might have established itself naturally, without violence.
Three forces, Le Bon suggests, have produced this revision: time, which calms passions; archives, which yield fresh documents; and modern psychology, which allows a better reading of men and motives. He lists the psychological discoveries applicable to history—ancestral influences, the laws governing crowd action, the disaggregation of personality, mental contagion, the unconscious formation of beliefs, and the distinction between forms of logic. Struck for twenty years by the impenetrable aspect of how beliefs are born, he published successive volumes: one on the psychological laws of the evolution of peoples, showing that historic races acquire psychological characteristics as stable as anatomical ones; The Psychology of the Crowd, on mobile, transitory collectivities; and Opinions and Beliefs, proving that beliefs are usually irrational and always involuntary. Beside rational logic, he concluded, exist affective, collective, and mystic logic, which usually overrule reason.
Applying these principles to revolutions, Le Bon insists the French Revolution must be considered as a whole—simultaneous but independent phenomena, each phase revealing events engendered by psychological laws working with clockwork regularity. The actors moved like characters in a predetermined drama, as astonished by events as we are. He quotes Billaud-Varenne: the decisions for which the revolutionaries are reproached were often not intended or desired two days beforehand; the crisis alone evoked them. Yet Le Bon denies any imperious fatality: the man of superior qualities may avert fatalities, though he is often powerless before the sequence of events. When a question gives rise to violently contradictory opinions, it belongs to beliefs, not knowledge—and belief, of unconscious origin, can never be influenced by reason. The Revolution, work of believers, has seldom been judged by any but believers. Its power lay not in its principles, which were anything but novel, nor in its institutions, for the people cares little for either. It was potent because it founded not a new system of government but a new religion—one that left indelible traces still active. Nor was it a clean sweep: the past never dies, being more truly within us than without, and the reformers remained saturated with it, continuing under other names the traditions of the monarchy.
Equality as the Revolution’s Gospel
The fraternity and liberty proclaimed by the Revolution, Le Bon writes, never greatly seduced the peoples; equality became their gospel—the pivot of socialism and of the whole evolution of modern democratic ideas. The Revolution therefore did not end with the Empire or the restorations that followed; secretly or openly it has slowly unrolled itself and still affects men’s minds. Studying it will deprive the reader of more than one illusion, proving that its histories contain a mass of legends remote from reality. These legends will doubtless outlive history itself, and Le Bon does not regret this, since peoples will always prefer dreams; such synthesised ideals—Joan of Arc, the Giants of the Convention, the Imperial epic—are powerful motives of action, dazzling images that remain sources of hope after defeat. The dream, the ideal, the legend: the unreal is what shapes history.
Scientific, Political, and Religious Revolutions
The book’s first part examines the psychological elements of revolutionary movements. “Revolution” is generally applied to sudden political changes but may denote all sudden transformations of beliefs, ideas, or doctrines. A revolution may begin under perfectly rational motives—the suppression of crying abuses, a detested despot, an unpopular sovereign—but the reasons invoked in preparing it do not influence the crowd until transformed into sentiments. Rational logic points to abuses; only affective and mystic elements can awaken the multitude’s hopes. In the French Revolution, rational logic demonstrated the inconveniences of the ancien régime; mystic logic inspired belief in a society rebuilt on certain principles; affective logic unchained passions confined by the bonds of ages; collective logic ruled the clubs and Assemblies. A revolution produces no results until it has sunk into the soul of the multitude, and the multitude is the agent, not the point of departure: the crowd is an amorphous being that can do nothing without a head to lead it, quickly exceeding the impulse once received but never creating it. Sudden political revolutions are often the least important; the great revolutions are those of manners and thought. True revolutions transforming destinies are usually accomplished so slowly that “evolution” is far more appropriate than “revolution.”
Scientific revolutions, though attracting little attention, are by far the most important. If conceptions of the universe have profoundly changed, it is because astronomical discoveries and experimental methods demonstrated that phenomena are ruled by invariable laws rather than the caprices of the gods. Such revolutions are fittingly called evolution for their slowness, but others deserve the name revolution for their rapidity: Darwin’s theories, overthrowing all biology in a few years; Pasteur’s discoveries, revolutionising medicine in their author’s lifetime; the theory of the dissociation of matter, proving the atom is not immune from the laws condemning all elements of the universe to decline and perish. These revolutions in the domain of ideas are purely intellectual; men submit without discussing, and results being controllable by experience, they escape all criticism.
Political and religious revolutions stand beneath and remote from scientific ones, with no kinship: while scientific revolutions derive solely from rational elements, political and religious beliefs are sustained almost exclusively by affective and mystic factors. A political or religious belief is an act of faith elaborated in unconsciousness, over which reason has no hold despite appearances. The man hypnotised by faith becomes an Apostle ready to sacrifice interests, happiness, even life for its triumph; absurdity matters little, for it is a burning reality. Being regarded as absolute truth, a belief necessarily becomes intolerant—explaining the violence, hatred, and persecution accompanying great political and religious revolutions, notably the Reformation and the French Revolution. These conceptions are too novel to have modified historians’ mentality; they will continue explaining by rational logic phenomena foreign to it.
The Reformation: A Belief Born of Unreason
The Reformation profoundly influenced the sentiments and moral ideas of much of mankind. It began modestly as a struggle against clerical abuses and, practically, as a return to the Gospel’s prescriptions—never as an aspiration toward freedom of thought. Calvin was as intolerant as Robespierre, and wherever the Reformation was established, the sovereign replaced the Pope of Rome with the same rights and powers. In France, lacking publicity and communication, the new faith spread slowly: around 1520 Luther recruited a few adepts; only by about 1535 was it widespread enough that men thought it necessary to burn its disciples. Executions, by a well-known psychological law, favoured its propagation. Its first followers included priests and magistrates but were principally obscure artisans, converted almost exclusively by mental contagion and suggestion. Once a new belief spreads, many indifferent persons group around it, finding a pretext to gratify passions or greed—as when German lords found merit in a faith letting them seize Church goods, and Henry VIII enriched himself similarly. The Reformation exaggerated rather than diminished rulers’ absolutism.
England, Race, and the Limits of Revolution
Le Bon contrasts England with France to show that revolutions do not always destroy a nation’s inherited character. England had known two revolutions and had even slain a king, yet its “mental armour” proved both stable enough to keep past acquisitions and flexible enough to modify them only where necessary. The Englishman never dreamed, as the men of 1789 did, of demolishing his ancestral heritage to build a new society in the name of reason. Quoting M. A. Sorel, Le Bon notes that the Frenchman despised his government, detested his clergy, hated the nobility, and revolted against the laws, while the Englishman was proud of his religion, constitution, aristocracy, and House of Lords—towers of a formidable Bastille within which he entrenched himself to judge and despise Europe. Command might be disputed inside the fort, but no stranger was to approach it.
Race, for Le Bon, is destiny. The perpetual revolutions of the Spanish republics of South America illustrate the point: populations of half-castes, whose mixed heredities have dissociated ancestral characteristics, possess no national soul and therefore no stability—a people of half-castes is always ungovernable. To isolate the political capacity of races, he suggests studying the same nation governed successively by two races, as happened in Cuba and the Philippines after their sudden passage from Spain to the United States. Cuba under Spanish rule lay in anarchy and poverty; under American rule it reached prosperity within a few years. The Philippines, governed by Spain for centuries, had become a vast jungle and home of epidemics, its miserable population vegetating without commerce or industry; after a few years of American administration malaria, yellow fever, plague, and cholera disappeared, swamps were drained, and railways, factories, and schools covered the country, with mortality reduced by two-thirds in thirteen years. Such examples, Le Bon argues, refute the theorist who has not grasped the meaning of the word race and how far a people’s ancestral soul rules its destiny.
The People’s Part in Revolution
The people’s role, Le Bon insists, is the same in every revolution: it never conceives or directs them; its activity is released by leaders. Only when its direct interests are touched does a fraction rise spontaneously, and even then it amounts to a mere riot. Revolution becomes easy when leaders are very influential, as Portugal and Brazil recently proved. New ideas penetrate the people very slowly; generally it accepts a revolution without knowing why, and by the time it understands, the revolution is long over. The people makes a revolution because it has been persuaded to, but it grasps little of its leaders’ ideas, interpreting them in its own fashion rather than that of the true authors—the French Revolution being the striking example.
The real object of 1789 was to substitute the power of the bourgeoisie for that of the nobility: an old, incapable elite replaced by a new, capable one. The people figured little in this first phase; the sovereignty of the people was proclaimed but amounted only to the right of electing representatives. Extremely illiterate, without hope of rising socially like the middle classes, feeling neither equal to the nobles nor aspiring to become their equals, the people held views and interests very different from the upper classes. As the assembly’s struggles with royal power led it to call for popular intervention, the people intervened more and more, and the bourgeois revolution rapidly became a popular revolution. An idea has no force of its own, acting only through an affective and mystic substratum; the bourgeoisie’s theoretical ideas had to transform into a definite faith springing from obvious practical interests before they could act on the people. That transformation occurred when the people heard men they envisaged as the Government assuring them of equality with their former masters. Regarding itself as a victim, it pillaged, burned, and massacred, imagining it was exercising a right. The great strength of revolutionary principles was that they gave free course to primitive barbarity normally restrained by environment, tradition, and law. Social bonds dissolved daily, and the multitude conceived unlimited power and joy at seeing ancient masters despoiled. As sovereign people, all things seemed permissible. Liberty, Equality, Fraternity—at the start a manifestation of hope and faith—soon merely covered the legal justification of jealousy, cupidity, and hatred of superiors, the true motives of undisciplined crowds. Thus the Revolution ended in disorder, violence, and anarchy. Once it descended from the middle to the lower classes, it ceased being the domination of the instinctive by the rational and became the effort of the instinctive to overpower the rational. This legal triumph of atavistic instincts was terrible; society’s indispensable effort had always been to restrain natural instincts inherited from primitive animality—possible to dominate, the more so the more civilised, but never to destroy, since exciting causes readily revive them. Hence liberating popular passions is dangerous; the escaped torrent does not return until it has spread devastation. Rivarol said at the Revolution’s beginning: “Woe to him who stirs up the dregs of a nation. There is no age of enlightenment for the populace.”
The Supposed Part of the People
Crowd psychology shows that the people never acts without leaders; it plays a considerable part by following and exaggerating impulses but never directs its own movements. In every political revolution we discover the action of leaders, who do not create the ideas but utilise them. Ideas, leaders, armies, and crowds are the four elements. The roused crowd acts by its mass, comparable to a shell perforating armour by a momentum it did not create. It rarely understands the revolutions accomplished with its assistance; it follows leaders without trying to learn their aims. It overthrew Charles X because of his Ordinances without knowing their contents, and would have been embarrassed later if asked why it overthrew Louis-Philippe. Deceived by appearances, many authors from Michelet to Aulard supposed the people effected the great Revolution; Michelet declared that “the principal actor is the people.”
The Variability of Personality
Every individual possesses, alongside a habitual mentality that remains nearly constant while the environment is unchanged, various possibilities of character that passing events may evoke. People are creatures of certain circumstances, not of all circumstances. The ego is composed of an association of innumerable cellular egos, residues of ancestral personalities; their combination forms a fairly permanent equilibrium when the social environment does not vary. When the environment is considerably modified—as in time of insurrection—this equilibrium breaks, and the dissociated elements form, by fresh aggregation, a new personality manifesting ideas, feelings, and actions very different from those formerly observed in the same individual. Thus during the Terror, honest bourgeois and peaceful magistrates noted for kindness became bloodthirsty fanatics. Under environmental influence the old personality may give place to an entirely new one; the actors in great religious and political crises seem of a different essence, yet do not differ from us—repetition of the same events would bring back the same men.
Napoleon understood these possibilities of character. At Saint Helena he said that, knowing how great a part chance plays in political decisions, he had always been without prejudices and very indulgent as to the part men took during disturbances; in time of revolution one can only say what one has done, and it would not be wise to say one could not have done otherwise. Men are difficult to understand if we want to be just; there are virtues and vices of circumstance.
The Clubs, the Committees, and the Power of Crowds
The clubs of Paris and the insurrectionary Commune were obeyed with a scrupulousness that made them the true masters of the Revolution. A single order from them was enough to hurl a popular army against the Assembly, which then dictated its wishes. The history of the Convention bears this out: despite legends of its power, it shows repeated irruptions and an Assembly servile before the injunctions of a handful of rioters. The Directory, taught by experience, closed the clubs and ended the invasion of the populace by energetically shooting the rioters down.
The Convention understood the superiority of homogeneous groups over heterogeneous assemblies, and so subdivided itself into committees of limited individuals—Public Safety, Finance, and others—small sovereign assemblies within the larger one, checked only by the clubs. Groups exert real power over the wills of their members: considerable when homogeneous, less so when heterogeneous, but still important, since stronger groups dominate weaker ones and contagious sentiments spread to all. The Night of the Fourth of August offered a memorable example, when the nobles voted on one member’s proposition to abandon their feudal privileges—yet the Revolution had partly sprung from the clergy and nobles refusing to renounce those same privileges. They refused at first because men in a crowd do not act as the same men singly; individually, no noble would have surrendered his rights. Napoleon, at St. Helena, cited curious cases of men unlike their reputations: Monge, who seemed a terrible fellow and declared he would give his two daughters to the first wounded soldiers and wanted nobles killed, was in truth the gentlest and feeblest of men, who would not have had a chicken killed in his presence.
Collective sentiments, if measurable, would trace a curve rising gradually, then rapidly, then falling almost vertically—the equation of variations under constant excitation. A constant cause may rapidly increase a sentiment’s intensity, as gravity accelerates a falling mass, but the sudden cessation of that acceleration is comprehensible only through physiological factors: pleasure and pain cannot exceed limits, and violent sensations paralyze sensation. The organism supports only a maximum of joy, pain, or effort, and not for long—like a hand grasping a dynamometer, soon exhausted, suddenly letting go. Beside the predominant party, other sentiments, restrained by force or prestige, have not fully developed; a chance circumstance may weaken the prevailing party, and the suppressed sentiments of adverse parties become preponderant. The Mountain learned this after Thermidor. Such analogies between material phenomena and affective or mystic factors remain extremely rough until cerebral functions are better understood.
Historians and the Impartiality of History
Contradictory opinions surround the Revolution; only a century separates us, and calm judgment seems impossible. For de Maistre it was a satanic piece of work; for modern Jacobins it regenerated the human race. Foreigners in France avoid the subject in conversation, and Barrett Wendell observed that memory and tradition retain their vitality, that few consider them dispassionately, and that no study strikes any Frenchman as impartial. Events must cease to produce results and to touch religious or political beliefs before they can be judged equitably. Older historians—Thiers, Quinet, Michelet—have been eclipsed. Thiers traced the Revolution to centuries of absolute monarchy and the Terror to foreign invasion; Quinet blamed the excesses of 1793 on long despotism while judging the Convention’s tyranny unnecessary; Michelet blindly admired the work of the people. Taine effaced their reputation, impassioned but brilliant, his work long unsurpassed. His faults were that he judged by rational logic events not dictated by reason, and his psychology was weak when explanatory: affirming Robespierre was a pedantic swotter does not reveal the causes of his absolute power over a Convention he had decimated with impunity for months. It was said Taine saw well and understood little, yet his influence is measured by the exasperation he causes among Jacobin orthodoxy, whose high priest is M. Aulard. Aulard devoted two years to a passionate pamphlet against him, rectifying insignificant material errors while perpetrating the same ones. M. A. Cochin showed that Aulard was deceived by his quotations, whereas Taine erred more rarely; Aulard’s sources—proceedings, pamphlets, journals, speeches of patriots—were the authentic publications of patriotism, edited by patriots for the public, a ready-made history offering a ready-made explanation for every act of the People. The fairest criticism of Taine is that his work was left incomplete: he studied the populace and its leaders, but several important aspects escaped him. An irreducible difference separates the school of Taine from that of Aulard: the latter regards the sovereign people as admirable; the former shows that when abandoned to its instincts and liberated from social restraint it relapses into primitive savagery.
The passage opens with a patriotic appeal to tell one’s own country the truth. Germany, it asserts, sees France regarding the past as a people who used the words liberty and fraternity while oppressing, trampling, murdering, pillaging, and fleecing her for fifteen years; and regarding the present, as a people who under the same banners organize a despotic, oppressive, and ruinous democracy none would imitate. Whatever verdicts are pronounced, future writers will find the Revolution as passionately interesting as it is instructive: a government bloodthirsty enough to guillotine old men of eighty, young girls, and little children, which covered France with ruins yet repulsed 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. Psychologists especially will derive lessons from a history little studied by them, and will discover that psychology can progress only by renouncing chimerical theories and laboratory experiments to study events and the men around us. A footnote defends this advice: the psychologists of the day pay little attention to the world and are surprised anyone studies it; a review reproached the author with exploring the world and the newspapers rather than books, a reproach he gladly accepts, since the manifold facts of journals and the realities of the world are more instructive than philosophical lucubrations. Mr. William James realized the fragility of a science that oozes metaphysical criticism at every joint, and for over twenty years the author has tried to interest psychologists in realities, though university metaphysics has hardly turned aside.
Impartiality has always been considered the historian’s most essential quality, and all historians since Tacitus assure us they are impartial. In reality the writer sees events as the painter sees a landscape—through his own temperament, character, and the mind of his race. Several artists before the same landscape would interpret it differently, each reproduction a personal work interpreted by a certain sensibility. The historian may confine himself to reproducing documents, the present tendency, but for periods as near as the Revolution documents are so abundant a whole life would not suffice; he must choose, and consciously or unconsciously selects material corresponding with his political, moral, and social opinions. No author could be impartial, and this is not to be regretted; the claim to impartiality results in flat, gloomy, wearisome works that render comprehension of a period impossible. Whether the historian should abstain from judging men admits of two correct solutions.
The Fall of the Bastille and the Birth of Popular Power
On 9 June the deputies took the title of Constituent Assembly. For the first time in centuries the king was forced to recognize a new power—that of the people, represented by elected representatives. Absolute monarchy was no more.
Feeling increasingly threatened, Louis XVI summoned regiments of foreign mercenaries to Versailles. The Assembly demanded their withdrawal. The king refused and dismissed Necker, replacing him with Marshal de Broglie, reputed to be extremely authoritative. The Assembly had able supporters: Camille Desmoulins and others harangued the crowd, calling it to defend liberty. They sounded the tocsin, organized a militia of 12,000 men, took muskets and cannon from the Invalides, and on 14 July armed bands marched on the Bastille. The barely defended fortress capitulated in a few hours. Seven prisoners were found, one an idiot and four accused of forgery. The Bastille symbolized royal power to many minds, but the people who demolished it had not suffered by it; scarcely any but nobles were imprisoned there.
The influence of the taking of the fortress continues. Serious historians like M. Rambaud call it a culminating fact in the history of France and all Europe, inaugurating a new epoch. Such credulity is excessive. Its importance lay in the psychological fact that for the first time the people received obvious proof of the weakness of an authority lately formidable. When the principle of authority is injured in the public mind it dissolves rapidly. What might one not demand of a king who could not defend his principal fortress? The master regarded as all-powerful had ceased to be so.
The taking of the Bastille began phenomena of mental contagion. Foreign mercenary troops began to show symptoms of mutiny. Louis XVI accepted their disbandment, recalled Necker, went to the Hotel de Ville, sanctioned accomplished facts, and accepted from La Fayette, commandant of the National Guard, the new cockade of red, white, and blue. The riot marks the precise moment of the commencement of popular government. The armed people thenceforth intervened daily in the deliberations of the revolutionary Assemblies. This intervention provoked the respectful admiration of many historians, but a superficial study of crowd psychology would show that the mystic entity called the people merely translated the will of a few leaders. It is not correct to say the people took the Bastille, attacked the Tuileries, invaded the Convention, but that certain leaders—generally by means of the clubs—united armed bands which they led against these targets. During the Revolution the same crowds attacked or defended the most contrary parties, according to their leaders. A crowd never has any opinion but that of its leaders.
Example being a potent form of suggestion, the taking of the Bastille was followed by the destruction of other fortresses. Many chateaux were regarded as little Bastilles; peasants burned them, with greater fury because the seigneurial homes contained titles of feudal dues—a species of Jacquerie. The Constituent Assembly, proud and haughty toward the king, was pusillanimous before the people. Hoping to end the disorders of the night of August 4th, it voted, on the proposition of the Comte de Noailles, the abolition of seigneurial rights. This measure suppressed the privileges of the nobles, voted with tears and embracings—explained by the contagiousness of emotion in a crowd, especially an assembly oppressed by fear. Had the nobility renounced their rights a few years earlier, the Revolution would doubtless have been avoided, but it was too late. To give way only when forced merely increases demands. In politics one should look ahead and give way long before being forced to do so.
Louis XVI hesitated two months to ratify the decisions of August 4th. He had retired to Versailles. The leaders sent 7,000 or 8,000 men and women, assuring them the royal residence contained great stores of bread. The railings were forced, some bodyguard killed, and the king and family led back to Paris amid a shrieking crowd, many bearing on pikes the heads of massacred soldiers. The dreadful journey lasted six hours—the “days” of October. Popular power increased; the king and whole assembly were henceforth in the hands of the people—at the mercy of the clubs and their leaders. This popular power was to prevail nearly ten years, and the Revolution was to be almost entirely its work.
While proclaiming the people the only sovereign, the Assembly was embarrassed by riots beyond its theoretical expectations. It had supposed order would be restored while it fabricated a Constitution destined to assure the eternal happiness of mankind. During the whole Revolution one of the chief occupations of the assemblies was to make, unmake, and remake Constitutions. The theorists attributed to them the power of transforming society; the Assembly published a solemn Declaration of the Rights of Man summarizing its principles. The Constitution, proclamations, declarations, and speeches had not the slightest effect on popular movements nor on dissentients increasing in the Assembly. The latter became more subjected to the advanced party supported by the clubs. Danton, Camille Desmoulins, and later Marat and Hebert violently excited the populace by harangues and journals. The Assembly was rapidly going down the slope to extremes.
During these disorders the finances did not improve. Convinced that philanthropic speeches would not alter the lamentable condition, and seeing bankruptcy threatened, the Assembly decreed on 2 November 1789 the confiscation of the goods of the Church. Their revenues, consisting of tithes, amounted to some L8,000,000, and their value was estimated at about L120,000,000. They were divided among some hundreds of prelates, Court abbes, etc., who owned a quarter of all France. These goods, henceforth “national domains,” formed the guarantee.
The Insurrection of 10 August and the King’s Fate
Carried away by Danton, the delegates of the sections installed themselves at the Hotel de Ville as an insurrectionary Commune. This Commune arrested the commandant of the National Guard, who was devoted to the king, sounded the tocsin, equipped the National Guard, and on 10 August hurled them, together with the populace, against the Tuileries. The regiments Louis called in disbanded themselves; soon only his Swiss and a few gentlemen remained to defend him, and nearly all were killed. Left alone, the king took refuge with the Assembly. The crowds demanded his denouncement; the Legislative Assembly decreed his suspension and left a future Assembly, the Convention, to decide his fate.
The Mental Characteristics of the Legislative Assembly
Formed of new men, it comprised 750 deputies: pure royalists, constitutional royalists, republicans, Girondists, and Montagnards. Advocates and men of letters were the majority, with smaller numbers of superior officers, priests, and very few scientists. Members’ philosophical conceptions were rudimentary; many were imbued with Rousseau’s idea of a return to a state of nature, but all were dominated by recollections of Greek and Latin antiquity—Cato, Brutus, Gracchus, Plutarch, Marcus Aurelius, and Plato were continually evoked; Louis XVI was called Caligula. In destroying tradition they were revolutionaries, but in claiming to return to a remote past they were extremely reactionary. Theories had little influence on conduct: reason figured in speeches, never in actions, which were dominated by affective and mystic elements. Its characteristics—shared with the Constituent Assembly but accentuated—are summed up as impressionability, mobility, timidity, and weakness.
The Revolutionary Armies and the Vendée
After the treaty of Basle, France faced no major Continental adversary except Austria, and the Directory entrusted the Italian campaign to Bonaparte. Between April 1796 and April 1797, a single year of fighting forced the last enemies of the Republic to sue for peace. The astonishing success of the revolutionary armies rested less on equipment than on psychology: ragged, often barefoot troops displayed prodigious enthusiasm, endurance, and self-sacrifice, seeing themselves as apostles of a new religion destined to regenerate the world. Le Bon compares them to the fanaticized Arab nomads inspired by Mohammed, whose faith gave them unshakeable heroism. When the Convention gave way to the Directory, these soldiers were the only true Republicans left in France.
Because faith is contagious, invaded peoples oppressed by absolutist monarchs often welcomed the invaders as liberators—the inhabitants of Savoy ran out to meet the troops, and at Mayence crowds planted trees of liberty and formed a Convention imitating Paris. Against peoples with no personal ideal to defend, victory came easily; against peoples whose own ideal was as strong, it became far harder. Thus Bretons and Vendéeans, steeped in religious and monarchical sentiment, fought the Republic for years. In March 1793 insurrections spread across ten departments, fielding some 80,000 men, and the conflict between contrary beliefs turned ferocious, like a religious war. It lasted until the end of 1795, when Hoche “pacified” the country—in practice exterminating its defenders. Molinari is quoted: after two years of civil war the Vendée was a hideous heap of ruins, roughly 900,000 men, women, children, and aged had perished, and survivors could scarcely find food or shelter.
Generals of the Revolution, and the Psychology of Crowds
Beyond faith, the revolutionary armies had remarkable generals, formed on the battlefield. Since most former officers, being nobles, had emigrated, a new officer body emerged in which innate aptitude rose fast: Hoche, a corporal in 1789, commanded an army at twenty-five. Their extreme youth produced an aggression their opponents were unaccustomed to, and, selected by merit and bound by no tradition, they devised tactics suited to new necessities. Against professional troops drilled in the methods of the Seven Years’ War, complicated manoeuvres were impossible; attacks came in great masses, and the gaps left by this efficacious but barbarous procedure were rapidly filled. Deep columns attacking with the bayonet routed enemies used to methods more careful of soldiers’ lives. The triumph was costly: between 1792 and 1800 the French army left more than a third of its effective force on the battlefield—700,000 men out of 2,000,000.
Examining events psychologically, Le Bon contrasts revolutionary crowds in Paris and in the armies. Crowds cannot reason and obey changing impulses, yet are capable of heroism and readily yield thousands ready to die for a belief. The same multitudes acted so differently in Paris and on the frontiers that one can hardly believe they were the same people. In Paris they were disorderly, violent, murderous, and so changeable as to make government impossible; in the armies, restrained by the orderly elements of a laborious peasant population, standardized by discipline, and inspired by contagious enthusiasm, they heroically bore privation and helped form the fabulous strain that triumphed over Europe’s most redoubtable troops. These facts show the force of discipline: it transforms men, and liberated from it peoples and armies become barbarian hordes. The multitude must be shown the road to follow; it is not for them to choose it.
Robespierre: The High Priest of the Terror
Chapter VII, on the psychology of the Revolution’s leaders, opens by arguing that men judge with their intelligence but are guided by their characters, and that in great periods of activity character takes first rank. Circumstances aided Robespierre, and people turned to him as a needed master, though the cause of his rapid ascent—a personal fascination now lost—is hard to recover. His success with women hints at it: when he spoke, the tribunes were choked with 700 or 800 women; at the Jacobins there were sobs, cries, and stamping, and the young widow Mme. de Chalabre sent him burning love-letters. His character hardly explains it: he was hypochondriac, of mediocre intelligence, incapable of grasping realities, confined to abstractions, crafty and dissimulating, with a pride that grew until his last day. As high priest of a new faith he believed God had sent him to establish the reign of virtue, and received writings calling him the Messiah promised by the Eternal Being. Full of literary pretensions, he laboriously polished his speeches and was jealous of other orators and men of letters, such as Camille Desmoulins, whose death he caused. His contempt for colleagues was immense: giving Barras audience at his toilet, he finished shaving, spat toward him as if he did not exist, and disdained to answer his questions. Only the multitude found grace; when the sovereign people exercises power, he said, all it does is virtue and truth, and no excess, error, or crime is possible. Suffering persecution mania, he had heads cut off not only from apostolic mission but because he believed himself hemmed in by enemies and conspirators.
His dictatorship, absolute for five months, illustrates a leader’s power: a tyrant backed by an army can destroy whom he pleases, but one man sending many equals to death is not easily explained. He sent eminent deputies—Desmoulins, Hébert, Danton, and many another—to the Tribunal and scaffold; brilliant Girondists melted away; he attacked the terrible Commune, guillotined its leaders, and replaced it with one obedient to his orders. To rid himself of displeasing men he induced the Convention to enact the law of Prairial, permitting the execution of mere suspects, by which he had 1,373 heads cut off in Paris in forty-nine days. Colleagues, in insane terror, no longer slept at home; scarcely a hundred deputies attended sessions, and David said he did not believe twenty members of the Mountain would be left. Excessive confidence in his powers and the Convention’s cowardice lost him his life. Having tried to make the Assembly vote a measure permitting deputies to be sent before the Revolutionary Tribunal without its authorisation, several Montagnards conspired with members of the Plain to overthrow him. Tallien, knowing himself marked for early execution and having nothing to lose, loudly accused him of tyranny. Robespierre tried to defend himself with a long-prepared speech, but learned that while men may be destroyed in the name of logic, an assembly cannot be led by logic. Shouts drowned his voice; the cry “Down with the tyrant!” spread by mental contagion and completed his downfall. The Assembly decreed his accusation; the Commune wished to save him, so the Assembly outlawed him; struck by this magic formula, he was lost. Williams writes that outlawry then produced the effect of pestilence: the outlaw became civilly excommunicated, as though men feared contamination from the air he breathed. Gunners who had trained cannon against the Convention, merely hearing the Commune was “outside the law,” immediately turned their batteries about.
The Century of Revolutionary Movement in France
The conflict between the principles dividing France has now lasted more than a century and shows no sign of resolution; unforeseeable upheavals still lie ahead. The Athenians, had they foreseen that their social dissensions would end in the enslavement of Greece, would surely have renounced them—but no generation can see that far. As Guiraud observed, a generation rarely understands the task it is accomplishing; it prepares a future that is often the opposite of what it intends.
After Napoleon’s defeat by the coalition of sovereigns, France was reduced to her former limits and Louis XVIII, the only possible sovereign, took the throne. By a special charter he accepted the position of constitutional monarch under a representative system, recognizing the Revolution’s conquests: the civil Code, equality before the law, liberty of worship, and the irrevocability of the sale of national property. Suffrage was limited to those paying a certain amount in taxes. The ultra-royalists and returned émigrés opposed this liberal constitution, demanding restitution of national property and their ancient privileges. Fearing a new revolution, Louis XVIII dissolved the Chamber; the elections returned moderate deputies, letting him govern on the same principles, since he understood that governing the French by the ancien régime would provoke general rebellion.
His death in 1824 placed Charles X on the throne. Narrow and incapable of understanding the new world, boasting that he had not modified his ideas since 1789, he prepared reactionary laws: an indemnity of forty millions sterling to émigrés, a law of sacrilege, laws establishing primogeniture and the preponderance of the clergy. In 1830, facing a hostile majority, he enacted Ordinances dissolving the Chamber, suppressing press liberty, and preparing the ancien régime’s restoration. This provoked a coalition of Republicans, Bonapartists, Liberals, and Royalists, who raised the Parisian populace. Four days after the Ordinances, insurgents held the capital; Charles X fled to England. Leaders—Thiers, Casimir-Perier, La Fayette—summoned Louis-Philippe, scarcely known to the people, and declared him king of the French. Amid popular indifference and noble hostility, he relied on the bourgeoisie; an electoral law reduced electors to under 200,000, giving this class an exclusive governmental role.
Louis-Philippe struggled against legitimists supporting Henry V, Bonapartists recognizing Louis-Napoleon, and republicans. Republican secret societies provoked riots between 1830 and 1840, easily repressed. Clericals and legitimists intrigued; the Duchess de Berry vainly tried to raise the Vendée; clergy demands became so intolerable that an insurrection sacked the archbishop of Paris’s palace. Republicans were not very dangerous, as the Chamber sided with the king. Minister Guizot, advocating strong central power, declared two things indispensable: “reason and cannon”—though he was deluded as to reason’s necessity or efficacy. Despite this central power, republicans and especially Socialists agitated. Louis Blanc claimed government must procure work for every citizen. The Catholic party, led by Lacordaire and Montalembert, united with Socialists against the Government.
An electoral-reform campaign ended in 1848 in a riot that unexpectedly overthrew Louis-Philippe, whose fall was less justifiable than Charles X’s; he was suspicious of universal suffrage, but the French Revolution had also been suspicious of it, and unlike the Directory he could not annul unfavourable elections. A provisional Government at the Hôtel de Ville proclaimed the Republic, established universal suffrage, and decreed election of a National Assembly of nine hundred members. It immediately became victim of socialistic manoeuvres and riots. The first Revolution’s psychological phenomena recurred: clubs sent the people against the Assembly for reasons generally devoid of common sense. To satisfy Socialists, the Assembly organized national workshops; 100,000 men cost the State over £40,000 weekly. Their claim to pay without working forced closure of the workshops, originating a formidable insurrection of 50,000 workers. The terrified Assembly gave executive powers to General Cavaignac. A four-day battle followed; three generals and the Archbishop of Paris were killed; 3,000 prisoners were deported to Algeria; revolutionary Socialism was annihilated for fifty years. Government stock fell from 116 to 50 francs; business stood still. Peasants fearing Socialists and bourgeois whose taxes the Assembly had raised by half turned against the Republic; Louis-Napoleon, promising order, was elected President by 5,500,000 votes. Soon at odds with the Chamber, he staged a coup d’état: the Assembly dissolved, 30,000 arrested, 10,000 deported, a hundred deputies exiled. The coup was favourably received: a plebiscite gave 7,500,000 of 8,000,000 votes. On 2 November 1852 he was named Emperor by an even greater majority—French horror of demagogues and Socialists had restored the Empire. Its first part was absolute government, its latter half liberal. After eighteen years he was overthrown by the revolution of 4 September 1870, after the capitulation of Sedan. Since then revolutionary movements were rare; the only important one was March 1871, resulting in the burning of many Paris monuments and execution of about 20,000 insurgents.
The Democracy of the Lettered Classes and Popular Democracy
Two forms of democracy must be distinguished. The “democracy of the lettered classes” seeks only to establish a selection that recruits the directing classes exclusively from itself. The author would have nothing against this if the selection were real, since it would then apply Napoleon’s maxim: “The true method of government is to employ the aristocracy, but under the forms of democracy.” Unhappily, the democracy of the “intellectuals” would merely substitute the divine right of a petty oligarchy—too often narrow and tyrannical—for the divine right of kings. Liberty cannot be created by replacing one tyranny with another.
Popular democracy does not aim at manufacturing rulers. Dominated by the spirit of equality and the desire to ameliorate the lot of workers, it rejects fraternity and shows no anxiety about liberty. No government is conceivable to popular democracy except autocracy—seen both in history, since all despotic Governments since the Revolution have been vigorously acclaimed, and in the autocratic conduct of workers’ trades unions. This distinction is far more obvious to workers than to intellectuals; the two classes share nothing mentally and do not speak the same language. Syndicalists assert no alliance is possible with bourgeois politicians—an assertion the author calls strictly true. Popular democracy, from Plato’s time onward, has never been defended by great thinkers. Faguet, while writing his study of nineteenth-century political thinkers, could not find one democrat to formulate democratic doctrine; he might have found professional politicians, but these rarely belong to the category of thinkers.
Natural Inequalities and Democratic Equalisation
Reconciling democratic equalisation with natural inequalities is among the most difficult present problems. Democratic ideas, from the heroic ages of Greece to modern times, always clash with natural inequalities. Some observers, with Helvetius, held inequality is created by education. In fact, Nature knows no equality: she unevenly distributes genius, beauty, health, vigour, intelligence, and all qualities conferring superiority. No theory can alter these discrepancies; democratic doctrines remain confined to words until the laws of heredity unify men’s capacities. Theorists long believed education might effect general levelling; years of experience show the depth of this illusion.
Main Arguments
Le Bon’s central argument is that revolutions are not primarily rational events. A revolution may begin under rational motives—the suppression of crying abuses, of a detested despotic government, or an unpopular sovereign—but the reasons invoked in preparing it do not influence the crowd until they have been transformed into sentiments. Rational logic may point to abuses, but to move the multitude its hopes must be awakened, and only affective and mystic elements can effect that. In the French Revolution, rational logic in the hands of the philosophers demonstrated the inconveniences of the old regime and excited the desire to change it; mystic logic inspired belief in the virtues of a society created according to certain principles; affective logic unchained the passions that had been confined by the bonds of ages and led to the worst excesses; and collective logic ruled the clubs and assemblies and impelled their members to actions no other logic would have caused.
From this it follows that a revolution produces no results until it has sunk into the soul of the multitude. The multitude is the agent, not the point of departure, of a revolution. The crowd is an amorphous being that can do nothing and will nothing without a head to lead it; it quickly exceeds the impulse once received but never creates it. The people, Le Bon insists, never conceives or directs a revolution; its activity is released by leaders. Only when its direct interests are involved does a fraction of it rise spontaneously, and then only in a riot. New ideas penetrate the people very slowly; generally it accepts a revolution without knowing why, and when it understands why, the revolution is long over. The people creates a revolution because it has been persuaded to, but it understands little of its leaders’ ideas and interprets them in its own fashion—not that of the true authors. The French Revolution is the striking example: its real object was to substitute the power of the bourgeoisie for that of the nobility, an old incapable elite replaced by a new capable one. The people figured little in this first phase. Only when the assembly’s struggles with royal power led it to call for popular intervention did the people intervene more and more, and the bourgeois revolution rapidly became a popular revolution. Once it descended from the middle to the lower classes, it ceased to be the domination of the instinctive by the rational and became the effort of the instinctive to overpower the rational.
A second major argument concerns the nature of belief. When a question gives rise to violently contradictory opinions, Le Bon argues, it belongs to beliefs, not knowledge. Belief is of unconscious origin and independent of reason, and can never be influenced by reason. The Revolution, being the work of believers, has seldom been judged by any but believers—execrated by some, praised by others, accepted or rejected as a whole. Though a revolution may begin supported by rational elements, it develops only by mystic and affective elements foreign to reason, and historians judging in the name of rational logic could not comprehend it. This is why the Revolution was a phenomenon equally misunderstood by those who caused it and those who described it.
Le Bon draws a sharp distinction between scientific and political revolutions. Scientific revolutions are by far the most important, though they attract little attention. They are purely intellectual; sentiments and beliefs do not affect them; men submit without discussing, and because their results are controllable by experience, they escape all criticism. Political and religious revolutions, by contrast, are sustained almost exclusively by affective and mystic factors, with reason playing only a feeble part. A political or religious belief is an act of faith elaborated in unconsciousness, over which reason has no hold despite appearances. It often reaches such intensity that nothing can oppose it; the man hypnotised by faith becomes an apostle ready to sacrifice interests, happiness, even life for its triumph. Being regarded as absolute truth, a belief necessarily becomes intolerant, which explains the violence, hatred, and persecution that habitually accompany great political and religious revolutions.
This intolerance, Le Bon argues, is not an aberration but a law. Mutual intolerance among sectaries of the same religion is always much greater than intolerance of defenders of remote, alien faiths. Catholics and Protestants adored exactly the same God and differed only in the manner of adoring Him; had reason played the smallest part, it could have proved it indifferent to God whether He is adored this way or that. Instead they fought ferociously, and every effort at reconciliation failed. Catherine de Medicis, seeing the Reformed party increase despite persecution, convoked an assembly at Poissy in 1561 to fuse the two doctrines—an attempt that showed she knew nothing of the laws of mystic logic. Not in all history, Le Bon says, can one cite a belief destroyed or reduced by refutation. Toleration is with difficulty possible between individuals but impossible between collectivities.
A third argument concerns the weakness of governments in time of revolution. Many modern nations have known revolutions in the last century, usually instantaneous and marked by the facility with which attacked governments were overthrown. The instantaneous quality is explained by rapid mental contagion due to modern publicity; the slight resistance is more surprising and implies an inability to comprehend and foresee, created by blind confidence in their own strength. Le Bon examines several cases. The Ordinances of Charles X were overthrown in four days; his minister Polignac took no defensive measures, and the king, confident of Paris’s tranquillity, had gone hunting. The overthrow of Louis-Philippe was more typical, resulting not from arbitrary action but from an insignificant riot easily repressed. Historians attributed his fall to deep-seated causes, but the real cause was the incapacity of the generals entrusted with his defence. Thirty-six thousand troops were in Paris, but weak and incapable officers made them unusable; contradictory orders were given, troops were forbidden to fire on the people, and the people were permitted to mingle with the troops. The riot succeeded without fighting and forced the king to abdicate. Le Bon uses this to warn against speaking too readily of general laws of history: without the riot, there would probably have been no Republic of 1848, no Second Empire, no Sedan, no invasion, no loss of Alsace.
Against this record of governmental collapse, Le Bon sets the Russian Revolution as proof that an energetically defending government may triumph. Never was a revolution more menacing: after disasters in the Orient and a too-oppressive autocratic regime, all classes including part of the army and fleet revolted; railways, posts, and telegraphs struck, interrupting communications across the vast empire. The government resolved to conciliate the rural class, the nation’s majority, by turning the peasants into proprietors: special laws forced landlords to sell peasants part of their lands, and banks were created to lend purchase-money, repaid by small annuities deducted from crop sales. Assured of peasant neutrality, the government contended with fanatics burning towns and throwing bombs among crowds, and killed all who were taken—extermination being, in Le Bon’s view, the only method discovered since the world’s beginning to protect society from rebels wishing to destroy it. The victorious government also understood the necessity of satisfying legitimate claims by creating a parliament to prepare laws and control expenditure. The lesson Le Bon draws is that a government whose natural supports have crumbled can, with wisdom and firmness, triumph over formidable obstacles; governments, he concludes, are not overthrown but commit suicide.
A fourth argument concerns race and national character. Le Bon holds that the influence of race appears in the perpetual revolutions of the Spanish republics of South America. Composed of half-castes whose diverse heredities have dissociated ancestral characteristics, these populations have no national soul and therefore no stability; a people of half-castes is always ungovernable. To study racial differences in political capacity, he suggests examining the same nation governed by two races successively—as in Cuba and the Philippines, which passed suddenly from Spain to the United States. Cuba under Spanish rule was in anarchy and poverty; under the United States it reached prosperity in a few years. The Philippines, governed by Spain for centuries, became a vast jungle, home of epidemics, with a miserable population vegetating without commerce or industry; after a few years of American rule it was transformed—malaria, yellow fever, plague and cholera disappeared, swamps were drained, railways, factories and schools covered the country, and in thirteen years mortality was reduced by two-thirds. Such examples, Le Bon argues, refute the theorist who has not grasped the significance of the word race and how far a people’s ancestral soul rules its destiny.
A fifth argument concerns the nature of the Jacobin mentality. Le Bon treats it not as a rationalist outlook but as a form of belief. The Jacobin, he says, is not a rationalist but a believer; far from building belief on reason, he moulds reason to his belief. Although his speeches are steeped in appeals to reason, and although he invoked reason incessantly during the Revolution and considered it his only guide, his actual psychology is that of a sectary. Le Bon quotes Taine’s celebrated description: the Jacobin respects 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. The millions of metaphysical wills he has created in the image of his own will sustain him by their unanimous assent, and he projects outward, like a chorus of triumph, the inward echo of his own voice. Le Bon admires Taine’s description but thinks he has not exactly grasped the Jacobin’s psychology. The true Jacobin, at the Revolution as in Le Bon’s own day, is a believer whose certitude is absolute and whose intolerance follows necessarily from it.
Key Concepts
The most important of Le Bon’s concepts is the distinction between rational logic and the other forms of logic that govern human conduct. Beside rational logic, he argues, there exist affective logic, collective logic, and mystic logic, which usually overrule reason. This distinction is the foundation of the entire book. It explains why arguments that seem irresistible to a rational mind have no effect on a believer, why assemblies vote for measures their members would reject as individuals, and why the Revolution followed a course that neither its friends nor its enemies could have predicted from the principles they professed.
Closely related is the concept of the mystic mentality. A mystic belief is an act of faith elaborated in unconsciousness, over which reason has no hold. It confers on those who hold it a certitude that nothing can shake, and it necessarily becomes intolerant because it regards itself as absolute truth. The mystic mentality is not confined to religion; it appears in political and social movements as well, and Le Bon treats Jacobinism, socialism, and spiritualism as sharing identical mystic and affective bases with Buddhism, Christianity, Islamism, and the Reformation. Their might, he says, lies in reason’s inability to create or transform them.
The concept of mental contagion is central to Le Bon’s account of how beliefs and sentiments spread. In a crowd, gestures and actions are extremely contagious; acclamations of hatred, fury, or love are immediately approved and repeated. Common sentiments and will propagate by contagion, but a point of departure is needed before contagion can take effect: without a leader, the crowd is an amorphous entity incapable of action. Mental contagion may affect a whole people instantaneously, but more often it operates slowly, creeping from group to group—as the Reformation was propagated in France. The elements of persuasion Le Bon identifies are affirmation, repetition, prestige, and contagion.
The concept of the disaggregation of personality explains how ordinary men become capable of extraordinary acts in revolutionary times. Every individual possesses, alongside a habitual mentality that remains nearly constant when the environment is unchanged, various possibilities of character that passing events may evoke. The ego is composed of an association of innumerable cellular egos, residues of ancestral personalities; their combination forms a fairly permanent equilibrium when the social environment does not vary. When the environment is considerably modified—as in time of insurrection—this equilibrium breaks, and the dissociated elements form, by fresh aggregation, a new personality manifesting ideas, feelings, and actions very different from those formerly observed in the same individual. Thus during the Terror, honest bourgeois and peaceful magistrates noted for kindness became bloodthirsty fanatics. The new personality forms chiefly through the acquisition of a strong belief, which orientates all elements of the understanding as a magnet collects iron filings into regular curves.
The concept of the racial mind, or ancestral soul, limits the oscillations of the crowd mind. A people can be likened to a crowd, but its oscillations are limited by the soul or mind of the race, which 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 in being composed of groups with different interests and passions. Behind its mobility, enthusiasms, violence, and destructiveness persist the extremely tenacious and conservative instincts of the racial mind. The history of the Revolution and the following century shows the conservative spirit finally overcoming the spirit of destruction; more than one system of government shattered by the people has been restored by the people.
The concept of prestige is one of the means by which beliefs are imposed and crowds are controlled. Le Bon notes that the multitude is extremely sensible to prestige, needing a great display of force to impress it, which would at once suppress hostile demonstrations. The failure to understand this was one of the errors that cost Louis-Philippe his throne.
Finally, the concept of the revolutionary and criminal mentalities is treated as a distinct psychological type. Le Bon examines the hatreds that animated the men of the Revolution, the envy and ambition that engendered them, and the readiness to exterminate opponents that he regards as characteristic of religious and political warfare alike. 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 more than twenty thousand after victory, he says, this bloody law has never failed.
Themes
The deepest theme of the book is the power of belief over reason. Le Bon returns to this again and again: beliefs are of unconscious origin, independent of reason, and inaccessible to rational argument. The Revolution was potent not because of its principles, which were anything but novel, nor because of its institutions, for the people cares little for institutions and less for doctrines. It was potent because it founded not a new system of government but a new religion. History shows the might of a strong belief: invincible Rome bowed before nomad shepherds illuminated by Mahommed’s faith; the kings of Europe could not resist the tatterdemalion soldiers of the Convention, who like apostles were ready to immolate themselves to propagate their beliefs. This religion had the force of other religions, if not their duration, and left indelible traces still active.
A second theme is the continuity of the past. The past never dies, Le Bon writes; it is more truly within us than without. The reformers of the Revolution remained saturated with the past, continuing under other names the traditions of the monarchy, even exaggerating autocracy. The Revolution was not a clean sweep. This theme connects to the concept of the racial mind and to Le Bon’s insistence that true revolutions—those that transform a people’s destiny—are usually accomplished so slowly that historians can hardly point to their beginnings, so that “evolution” is far more appropriate than “revolution.”
A third theme is the contrast between the rational and the irrational in history. Le Bon repeatedly contrasts scientific revolutions, which are purely intellectual and submit to experience, with political and religious revolutions, which are sustained by affective and mystic factors. He argues that historians have persistently failed to understand the Revolution because they have tried to explain it by rational logic. Taine, he says, saw well and understood little; his psychology was weak when explanatory. Affirming that Robespierre was a pedantic swotter does not reveal the causes of his absolute power over the Convention when he had decimated it with impunity for months. The historians of the Jacobin school, by contrast, regard the sovereign people as admirable, while the school of Taine shows that when abandoned to its instincts and liberated from social restraint it relapses into primitive savagery.
A fourth theme is the danger of liberating popular passions. Societies’ indispensable effort, Le Bon argues, has always been to restrain the natural instincts inherited from primitive animality. These instincts can be dominated—the more so, the more civilised—but not destroyed; exciting causes readily revive them. Hence liberating popular passions is dangerous; the escaped torrent does not return until it has spread devastation. He quotes Rivarol at the beginning of the Revolution: “Woe to him who stirs up the dregs of a nation. There is no age of enlightenment for the populace.”
A fifth theme is the role of the individual in history. Le Bon denies that events were dominated by an imperious fatality, and recognises in the man of superior qualities the role of averting fatalities, though he is often powerless before the sequence of events. He notes that Napoleon understood how great a part chance plays in political decisions, and that in time of revolution one can only say what one has done, and it would not be wise to say one could not have done otherwise. The book is, among other things, a meditation on the limits of individual agency in the face of collective forces.
A sixth theme, present throughout but especially in the later parts, is the continuing evolution of the revolutionary principles. The fraternity and liberty proclaimed by the Revolution never greatly seduced the peoples, Le Bon argues, but equality became their gospel—the pivot of socialism and of the entire evolution of modern democratic ideas. The Revolution therefore did not end with the advent of the Empire nor with the successive restorations that followed it; secretly or openly it has slowly unrolled itself and still affects men’s minds. The book’s final movement examines the progress of democratic beliefs, the results of democratic evolution, and the new forms of democratic belief, including the conflict between Capital and Labour and the Syndicalist Movement. Le Bon’s concern is not merely historical; it is with the world his readers inhabited.
The Author’s Conclusions
Le Bon’s conclusions are both psychological and political. Psychologically, he concludes that the French Revolution was a phenomenon equally misunderstood by those who caused it and those who described it, because both parties assumed that men are guided by rational logic. The Revolution was the work of believers, and it has seldom been judged by any but believers. Its power did not reside in its principles, which were not novel, nor in its institutions, for the people cares little for institutions and less for doctrines. It was potent because it founded a new religion—a religion with the force of other religions, if not their duration, which left indelible traces still active.
He concludes that the Revolution was not a clean sweep. The past never dies; it is more truly within us than without. The reformers remained saturated with the past, continuing under other names the traditions of the monarchy, even exaggerating autocracy. The true revolutions, those that transform a people’s destiny, are accomplished so slowly that historians can hardly point to their beginnings. The history of the Revolution and the following century shows the conservative spirit finally overcoming the spirit of destruction; more than one system of government shattered by the people has been restored by the people.
