1.4.
CHAPTER IV.
A RELIGIOUS SHAPE ASSUMED BY ALL THE
CONVICTIONS OF CROWDS.
What is meant by the religious sentiment — It is independent of the
worship of a divinity — Its characteristics — The strength of convictions
assuming a religious shape — Various examples — Popular gods have never
disappeared — New forms under which they are revived — Religious forms of
atheism — Importance of these notions from the historical point of view —
The Reformation, Saint Bartholomew, the Terror, and all analogous events
are the result of the religious sentiments of crowds and not of the will
of isolated individuals.
WE have shown that crowds do not reason, that they accept or reject
ideas as a whole, that they tolerate neither discussion nor
contradiction, and that the suggestions brought to bear on them invade
the entire field of their understanding and tend at once to transform
themselves into acts. We have shown that crowds suitably influenced are
ready to sacrifice themselves for the ideal with which they have been
inspired. We have also seen that they only entertain violent and
extreme sentiments,
that in their case sympathy quickly becomes
adoration, and antipathy almost as soon as it is aroused is transformed
into hatred. These general indications furnish us already with a presentiment
of the nature of the convictions of crowds.
When these convictions are closely examined, whether at epochs
marked by fervent religious faith, or by great political upheavals such
as those of the last century, it is apparent that they always assume a
peculiar form which I cannot better define than by giving it the name of
a religious sentiment.
This sentiment has very simple characteristics, such as worship of
a being supposed superior, fear of the power with which the being is
credited, blind submission to its commands, inability to discuss its
dogmas, the desire to spread them, and a tendency to consider as enemies
all by whom they are not accepted. Whether such a sentiment apply to an
invisible God, to a wooden or stone idol, to a hero or to a political
conception, provided that it presents the preceding characteristics, its
essence always remains religious. The supernatural and the miraculous
are found to be present to the same extent. Crowds unconsciously accord
a mysterious power to the political formula or the victorious leader
that for the moment arouses their enthusiasm.
A person is not religious solely when he worships a divinity, but
when he puts all the resources of his mind, the complete submission of
his will, and the whole-souled ardour of fanaticism at the service of a
cause or an individual who becomes the goal and guide of his thoughts
and actions.
Intolerance and fanaticism are the necessary accompaniments of the
religious sentiment. They are inevitably displayed by those who believe
themselves in the possession of the secret of earthly or eternal
happiness. These two characteristics are to be found in all men grouped
together when they are inspired by a conviction of any kind. The
Jacobins of the Reign of Terror were at bottom as religious as the
Catholics of the Inquisition, and their cruel ardour proceeded from the
same source.
The convictions of crowds assume those characteristics of blind
submission, fierce intolerance, and the need of violent propaganda which
are inherent in the religious sentiment, and it is for this reason that
it may be said that all their beliefs have a religious form. The hero
acclaimed by a crowd is a veritable god for that crowd. Napoleon was
such a god for fifteen years, and a divinity never had more fervent
worshippers or sent men to their death with greater ease. The Christian
and Pagan Gods never exercised a more absolute empire over the minds
that had fallen under their sway.
All founders of religious or political creeds have established them
solely because they were successful in inspiring crowds with those
fanatical sentiments which have as result that men find their happiness
in worship and obedience and are ready to lay down their lives for their
idol. This has been the case at all epochs. Fustel de Coulanges, in
his excellent work on Roman Gaul, justly remarks that the Roman Empire
was in no wise maintained by force, but by the religious admiration it
inspired. "It would be without a parallel in the history of the world,"
he observes rightly, "that a form of government held in popular detestation
should have lasted for five centuries. . . . It would be
inexplicable that the thirty legions of the Empire should have
constrained a hundred million men to obedience." The reason of their
obedience was that the Emperor, who personified the greatness of Rome,
was worshipped like a divinity by unanimous consent. There were altars
in honour of the Emperor in the smallest townships of his realm. "From
one end of the Empire to the other a new religion was seen to arise in
those days which had for its divinities the emperors themselves. Some
years before the Christian era the whole of Gaul, represented by sixty
cities, built in common a temple near the town of Lyons in honour of
Augustus. . . . Its priests, elected by the united Gallic cities, were
the principal personages
in their country. . . . It is impossible
to attribute all this to fear and servility. Whole nations are not
servile, and especially for three centuries. It was not the courtiers
who worshipped the prince, it was Rome, and it was not Rome merely, but
it was Gaul, it was Spain, it was Greece and Asia."
To-day the majority of the great men who have swayed men's minds no
longer have altars, but they have statues, or their portraits are in the
hands of their admirers, and the cult of which they are the object is
not notably different from that accorded to their predecessors. An
understanding of the philosophy of history is only to be got by a
thorough appreciation of this fundamental point of the psychology of
crowds. The crowd demands a god before everything else.
It must not be supposed that these are the superstitions of a
bygone age which reason has definitely banished. Sentiment has never
been vanquished in its eternal conflict with reason. Crowds will hear
no more of the words divinity and religion, in whose name they were so
long enslaved; but they have never possessed so many fetishes as in the
last hundred years, and the old divinities have never had so many
statues and altars raised in their honour. Those who in recent years
have studied the popular movement known under the name of Boulangism
have been able to see with what ease
the religious instincts of
crowds are ready to revive. There was not a country inn that did not
possess the hero's portrait. He was credited with the power of
remedying all injustices and all evils, and thousands of men would have
given their lives for him. Great might have been his place in history
had his character been at all on a level with his legendary reputation.
It is thus a very useless commonplace to assert that a religion is
necessary for the masses, because all political, divine, and social
creeds only take root among them on the condition of always assuming the
religious shape — a shape which obviates the danger of discussion. Were
it possible to induce the masses to adopt atheism, this belief would exhibit
all the intolerant ardour of a religious sentiment, and in its
exterior forms would soon become a cult. The evolution of the small
Positivist sect furnishes us a curious proof in point. What happened to
the Nihilist whose story is related by that profound thinker
Dostoïewsky has quickly happened to the Positivists. Illumined one
day by the light of reason he broke the images of divinities and saints
that adorned the altar of a chapel, extinguished the candles, and,
without losing a moment, replaced the destroyed objects by the works of
atheistic philosophers such as Büchner and Moleschott, after which he
piously relighted the candles. The object of his religious beliefs had
been transformed, but can it be truthfully said that his religious
sentiments had changed?
Certain historical events — and they are precisely the most
important — I again repeat, are not to be understood unless one has
attained to an appreciation of the religious form which the convictions
of crowds always assume in the long run. There are social phenomena
that need to be studied far more from the point of view of the
psychologist than from that of the naturalist. The great historian
Taine has only studied the Revolution as a naturalist, and on this
account the real genesis of events has often escaped him. He has
perfectly observed the facts, but from want of having studied the
psychology of crowds he has not always been able to trace their causes.
The facts having appalled him by their bloodthirsty, anarchic, and
ferocious side, he has scarcely seen in the heroes of the great drama
anything more than a horde of epileptic savages abandoning themselves
without restraint to their instincts. The violence of the Revolution,
its massacres, its need of propaganda, its declarations of war upon all
things, are only to be properly explained by reflecting that the
Revolution was merely the establishment of a new religious belief in the
mind of the masses. The Reformation, the massacre of Saint Bartholomew,
the French religious wars, the Inquisition, the Reign of Terror are
phenomena of an identical kind, brought about by
crowds animated by
those religious sentiments which necessarily lead those imbued with them
to pitilessly extirpate by fire and sword whoever is opposed to the
establishment of the new faith. The methods of the Inquisition are
those of all whose convictions are genuine and sturdy. Their
convictions would not deserve these epithets did they resort to other
methods.
Upheavals analogous to those I have just cited are only possible
when it is the soul of the masses that brings them about. The most
absolute despots could not cause them. When historians tell us that the
massacre of Saint Bartholomew was the work of a king, they show
themselves as ignorant of the psychology of crowds as of that of
sovereigns. Manifestations of this order can only proceed from the soul
of crowds. The most absolute power of the most despotic monarch can
scarcely do more than hasten or retard the moment of their apparition.
The massacre of Saint Bartholomew or the religious wars were no more the
work of kings than the Reign of Terror was the work of Robespierre,
Danton, or Saint Just. At the bottom of such events is always to be
found the working of the soul of the masses, and never the power of
potentates.