2.2.
CHAPTER II.
THE IMMEDIATE FACTORS OF THE OPINIONS OF
CROWDS.
§ 1. Images, words and formulæ. The magical power of words
and formulæ — The power of words bound up with the images they evoke,
and independent of their real sense — These images vary from age to age,
and from race to race — The wear and tear of words — Examples of the
considerable variations of sense of much-used words — The political
utility of baptizing old things with new names when the words by which
they were designated produced an unfavourable impression on the masses —
variations of the sense of words in consequence of race differences — The
different meanings of the word "democracy" in Europe and America. §
2. Illusions. Their importance — They are to be found at the root
of all civilisations — The social necessity of illusions — Crowds always
prefer them to truths. § 3. Experience. Experience alone can
fix in the mind of crowds truths become necessary and destroy illusions
grown dangerous — Experience is only effective on the condition that it
be frequently repeated — The cost of the experiences requisite to
persuade crowds. § 4. Reason. The nullity of its influence on
crowds — Crowds only to be influenced by their unconscious sentiments —
The rôle of logic in history — The secret causes of improbable
events.
WE have just investigated the remote and preparatory factors which give
the mind of crowds
a special receptivity, and make possible
therein the growth of certain sentiments and certain ideas. It now
remains for us to study the factors capable of acting in a direct
manner. We shall see in a forthcoming chapter how these factors should
be put in force in order that they may produce their full effect.
In the first part of this work we studied the sentiments, ideas,
and methods of reasoning of collective bodies, and from the knowledge
thus acquired it would evidently be possible to deduce in a general way
the means of making an impression on their mind. We already know what
strikes the imagination of crowds, and are acquainted with the power and
contagiousness of suggestions, of those especially that are presented
under the form of images. However, as suggestions may proceed from very
different sources, the factors capable of acting on the minds of crowds
may differ considerably. It is necessary, then, to study them separately.
This is not a useless study. Crowds are somewhat like the
sphinx of ancient fable: it is necessary to arrive at a solution of the
problems offered by their psychology or to resign ourselves to being
devoured by them.
§ 1. IMAGES, WORDS, AND FORMULAS.
When studying the imagination of crowds we saw that it is
particularly open to the impressions
produced by images. These
images do not always lie ready to hand, but it is possible to evoke them
by the judicious employment of words and formulas. Handled with art,
they possess in sober truth the mysterious power formerly attributed to
them by the adepts of magic. They cause the birth in the minds of
crowds of the most formidable tempests, which in turn they are capable
of stilling. A pyramid far loftier than that of old Cheops could be
raised merely with the bones of men who have been victims of the power
of words and formulas.
The power of words is bound up with the images they evoke, and is
quite independent of their real significance. Words whose sense is the
most ill-defined are sometimes those that possess the most influence.
Such, for example, are the terms democracy, socialism, equality,
liberty, &c., whose meaning is so vague that bulky volumes do not
suffice to precisely fix it. Yet it is certain that a truly magical
power is attached to those short syllables, as if they contained the
solution of all problems. They synthesise the most diverse unconscious
aspirations and the hope of their realisation.
Reason and arguments are incapable of combatting certain words and
formulas. They are uttered with solemnity in the presence of crowds,
and as soon as they have been pronounced an
expression of respect
is visible on every countenance, and all heads are bowed. By many they
are considered as natural forces, as supernatural powers. They evoke
grandiose and vague images in men's minds, but this very vagueness that
wraps them in obscurity augments their mysterious power. They are the
mysterious divinities hidden behind the tabernacle, which the devout
only approach in fear and trembling.
The images evoked by words being independent of their sense, they
vary from age to age and from people to people, the formulas remaining
identical. Certain transitory images are attached to certain words: the
word is merely as it were the button of an electric bell that calls them
up.
All words and all formulas do not possess the power of evoking
images, while there are some which have once had this power, but lose it
in the course of use, and cease to waken any response in the mind. They
then become vain sounds, whose principal utility is to relieve the
person who employs them of the obligation of thinking. Armed with a
small stock of formulas and commonplaces learnt while we are young, we
possess all that is needed to traverse life without the tiring necessity
of having to reflect on anything whatever.
If any particular language be studied, it is seen that the words of
which it is composed change
rather slowly in the course of ages,
while the images these words evoke or the meaning attached to them
changes ceaselessly. This is the reason why, in another work, I have
arrived at the conclusion that the absolute translation of a language,
especially of a dead language, is totally impossible. What do we do in
reality when we substitute a French for a Latin, Greek, or Sanscrit
expression, or even when we endeavour to understand a book written in
our own tongue two or three centuries back? We merely put the images
and ideas with which modern life has endowed our intelligence in the
place of absolutely distinct notions and images which ancient life had
brought into being in the mind of races submitted to conditions of
existence having no analogy with our own. When the men of the
Revolution imagined they were copying the Greeks and Romans, what were
they doing except giving to ancient words a sense the latter had never
had? What resemblance can possibly exist between the institutions of
the Greeks and those designated to-day by corresponding words? A
republic at that epoch was an essentially aristocratic institution,
formed of a reunion of petty despots ruling over a crowd of slaves kept
in the most absolute subjection. These communal aristocracies, based on
slavery, could not have existed for a moment without it.
The word "liberty," again, what signification could
it have in
any way resembling that we attribute to it to-day at a period when the
possibility of the liberty of thought was not even suspected, and when
there was no greater and more exceptional crime than that of discussing
the gods, the laws and the customs of the city? What did such a word as
"fatherland" signify to an Athenian or Spartan unless it were the cult
of Athens or Sparta, and in no wise that of Greece, composed of rival
cities always at war with each other? What meaning had the same word
"fatherland" among the ancient Gauls, divided into rival tribes and
races, and possessing different languages and religions, and who were
easily vanquished by Caesar because he always found allies among them?
It was Rome that made a country of Gaul by endowing it with political
and religious unity. Without going back so far, scarcely two centuries
ago, is it to be believed that this same notion of a fatherland was
conceived to have the same meaning as at present by French princes like
the great Condé, who allied themselves with the foreigner against
their sovereign? And yet again, the same word had it not a sense very
different from the modern for the French royalist emigrants, who thought
they obeyed the laws of honour in fighting against France, and who from
their point of view did indeed obey them, since the feudal law bound the
vassal to the lord and not to the soil, so that
where the sovereign
was there was the true fatherland?
Numerous are the words whose meaning has thus profoundly changed
from age to age — words which we can only arrive at understanding in the
sense in which they were formerly understood after a long effort. It
has been said with truth that much study is necessary merely to arrive
at conceiving what was signified to our great grandfathers by such words
as the "king" and the "royal family." What, then, is likely to be the
case with terms still more complex?
Words, then, have only mobile and transitory significations which
change from age to age and people to people; and when we desire to exert
an influence by their means on the crowd what it is requisite to know is
the meaning given them by the crowd at a given moment, and not the
meaning which they formerly had or may yet have for individuals of a
different mental constitution.
Thus, when crowds have come, as the result of political upheavals
or changes of belief, to acquire a profound antipathy for the images
evoked by certain words, the first duty of the true statesman is to
change the words without, of course, laying hands on the things
themselves, the latter being too intimately bound up with the inherited
constitution to be transformed. The judicious Tocqueville
long ago
made the remark that the work of the consulate and the empire consisted
more particularly in the clothing with new words of the greater part of
the institutions of the past — that is to say, in replacing words evoking
disagreeable images in the imagination of the crowd by other words of
which the novelty prevented such evocations. The "taille" or tallage
has become the land tax; the "gabelle," the tax on salt; the "aids," the
indirect contributions and the consolidated duties; the tax on trade
companies and guilds, the license, &c.
One of the most essential functions of statesmen consists, then, in
baptizing with popular or, at any rate, indifferent words things the
crowd cannot endure under their old names. The power of words is so
great that it suffices to designate in well-chosen terms the most odious
things to make them acceptable to crowds. Taine justly observes that it
was by invoking liberty and fraternity — words very popular at the time —
that the Jacobins were able "to install a despotism worthy of Dahomey, a
tribunal similar to that of the Inquisition, and to accomplish human
hecatombs akin to those of ancient Mexico." The art of those who
govern, as is the case with the art of advocates, consists above all in
the science of employing words. One of the greatest difficulties of
this art is, that in one and the same society the
same words most
often have very different meanings for the different social classes, who
employ in appearance the same words, but never speak the same language.
In the preceding examples it is especially time that has been made
to intervene as the principal factor in the changing of the meaning of
words. If, however, we also make race intervene, we shall then see
that, at the same period, among peoples equally civilised but of
different race, the same words very often correspond to extremely dissimilar
ideas. It is impossible to understand these differences without
having travelled much, and for this reason I shall not insist upon them.
I shall confine myself to observing that it is precisely the words most
often employed by the masses which among different peoples possess the
most different meanings. Such is the case, for instance, with the words
"democracy" and "socialism" in such frequent use nowadays.
In reality they correspond to quite contrary ideas and images in
the Latin and Anglo-Saxon mind. For the Latin peoples the word "democracy"
signifies more especially the subordination of the will and the
initiative of the individual to the will and the initiative of the
community represented by the State. It is the State that is charged, to
a greater and greater degree, with the direction of everything, the
centralisation, the
monopolisation, and the manufacture of everything.
To the State it is that all parties without exception, radicals,
socialists, or monarchists, constantly appeal. Among the Anglo-Saxons
and notably in America this same word "democracy" signifies, on the
contrary, the intense development of the will of the individual, and as
complete a subordination as possible of the State, which, with the
exception of the police, the army, and diplomatic relations, is not
allowed the direction of anything, not even of public instruction. It
is seen, then, that the same word which signifies for one people the
subordination of the will and the initiative of the individual and the
preponderance of the State, signifies for another the excessive
development of the will and the initiative of the individual and the
complete subordination of the State.
[13]
[_]
In my book, "The Psychological Laws of the Evolution of
Peoples," I have insisted at length on the differences which distinguish
the Latin democratic ideal from the Anglo-Saxon democratic ideal.
Independently, and as the result of his travels, M. Paul Bourget has
arrived, in his quite recent book, "Outre-Mer," at conclusions almost
identical with mine.
§ 2. ILLUSIONS.
From the dawn of civilisation onwards crowds have always undergone
the influence of illusions. It is to the creators of illusions that
they have raised more temples, statues, and altars than to
any
other class of men. Whether it be the religious illusions of the past
or the philosophic and social illusions of the present, these formidable
sovereign powers are always found at the head of all the civilisations
that have successively flourished on our planet. It is in their name
that were built the temples of Chaldea and Egypt and the religious
edifices of the Middle Ages, and that a vast upheaval shook the whole of
Europe a century ago, and there is not one of our political, artistic,
or social conceptions that is free from their powerful impress.
Occasionally, at the cost of terrible disturbances, man overthrows them,
but he seems condemned to always set them up again. Without them he
would never have emerged from his primitive barbarian state, and without
them again he would soon return to it. Doubtless they are futile
shadows; but these children of our dreams have forced the nations to
create whatever the arts may boast of splendour or civilisation of
greatness.
"If one destroyed in museums and libraries, if one hurled down on
the flagstones before the churches all the works and all the monuments
of art that religions have inspired, what would remain of the great
dreams of humanity? To give to men that portion of hope and illusion
without which they cannot live, such is the reason for the existence of
gods, heroes, and poets. During fifty
years science appeared to
undertake this task. But science has been compromised in hearts
hungering after the ideal, because it does not dare to be lavish enough
of promises, because it cannot lie."
[14]
The philosophers of the last century devoted themselves with
fervour to the destruction of the religious, political, and social
illusions on which our forefathers had lived for a long tale of
centuries. By destroying them they have dried up the springs of hope
and resignation. Behind the immolated chimeras they came face to face
with the blind and silent forces of nature, which are inexorable to
weakness and ignore pity.
Notwithstanding all its progress, philosophy has been unable as yet
to offer the masses any ideal that can charm them; but, as they must
have their illusions at all cost, they turn instinctively, as the insect
seeks the light, to the rhetoricians who accord them what they want.
Not truth, but error has always been the chief factor in the evolution
of nations, and the reason why socialism is so powerful to-day is that
it constitutes the last illusion that is still vital. In spite of all
scientific demonstrations it continues on the increase. Its principal
strength lies in the fact that it is championed by minds sufficiently
ignorant of things as they are in reality to venture boldly to promise
mankind happiness. The social illusion reigns to-day upon all the
heaped-up ruins of the past, and to it belongs the future. The masses
have never thirsted after truth. They turn aside from evidence that is
not to their taste, preferring to deify error, if error seduce them.
Whoever can supply them with illusions is easily their master; whoever
attempts to destroy their illusions is always their victim.
§ 3. EXPERIENCE.
Experience constitutes almost the only effective process by which a
truth may be solidly established in the mind of the masses, and
illusions grown too dangerous be destroyed. To this end, however, it is
necessary that the experience should take place on a very large scale,
and be very frequently repeated. The experiences undergone by one
generation are useless, as a rule, for the generation that follows,
which is the reason why historical facts, cited with a view to
demonstration, serve no purpose. Their only utility is to prove to what
an extent experiences need to be repeated from age to age to exert any
influence, or to be successful in merely shaking an erroneous opinion
when it is solidly implanted in the mind of the masses.
Our century and that which preceded it will doubtless be alluded to
by historians as an era
of curious experiments, which in no other
age have been tried in such number.
The most gigantic of these experiments was the French Revolution.
To find out that a society is not to be refashioned from top to bottom
in accordance with the dictates of pure reason, it was necessary that
several millions of men should be massacred and that Europe should be
profoundly disturbed for a period of twenty years. To prove to us
experimentally that dictators cost the nations who acclaim them dear,
two ruinous experiences have been required in fifty years, and in spite
of their clearness they do not seem to have been sufficiently
convincing. The first, nevertheless, cost three millions of men and an
invasion, the second involved a loss of territory, and carried in its
wake the necessity for permanent armies. A third was almost attempted
not long since, and will assuredly be attempted one day. To bring an
entire nation to admit that the huge German army was not, as was
currently alleged thirty years ago, a sort of harmless national
guard,
the terrible war
which cost us so dear had to take
place. To bring about the recognition that Protection ruins the nations
who adopt it, at least twenty years of disastrous experience will be
needful. These examples might be indefinitely multiplied.
[15]
[_]
The opinion of the crowd was formed in this case by those
rough-and-ready associations of dissimilar things, the mechanism of
which I have previously explained. The French national guard of that
period, being composed of peaceable shopkeepers, utterly lacking in
discipline and quite incapable of being taken seriously, whatever bore a
similar name, evoked the same conception and was considered in
consequence as harmless. The error of the crowd was shared at the time
by its leaders, as happens so often in connection with opinions dealing
with generalisations. In a speech made in the Chamber on the 31st of
December, 1867, and quoted in a book by M. E. Ollivier that has appeared
recently, a statesman who often followed the opinion of the crowd but
was never in advance of it — I allude to M. Thiers — declared that Prussia
only possessed a national guard analogous to that of France, and in
consequence without importance, in addition to a regular army about
equal to the French regular army; assertions about as accurate as the
predictions of the same statesman as to the insignificant future
reserved for railways.
§ 4. REASON.
In enumerating the factors capable of making an impression on the
minds of crowds all mention of reason might be dispensed with, were it
not necessary to point out the negative value of its influence.
We have already shown that crowds are not to be influenced by
reasoning, and can only comprehend rough-and-ready associations of
ideas. The orators who know how to make an impression upon them always
appeal in consequence to their sentiments and never to their reason.
The laws
of logic have no action on crowds.
To bring home
conviction to crowds it is necessary first of all to thoroughly
comprehend the sentiments by which they are animated, to pretend to
share these sentiments, then to endeavour to modify them by calling up,
by means of rudimentary associations, certain eminently suggestive
notions, to be capable, if need be, of going back to the point of view
from which a start was made, and, above all, to
divine from instant
to instant the sentiments to which one's discourse is giving birth.
This necessity of ceaselessly varying one's language in accordance with
the effect produced at the moment of speaking deprives from the outset a
prepared and studied harangue of all efficaciousness. In such a speech
the orator follows his own line of thought, not that of his hearers, and
from this fact alone his influence is annihilated.
[16]
[_]
My first observations with regard to the art of impressing
crowds and touching the slight assistance to be derived in this
connection from the rules of logic date back to the seige of Paris, to
the day when I saw conducted to the Louvre, where the Government was
then sitting, Marshal V — , whom a furious crowd asserted they had
surprised in the act of taking the plans of the fortifications to sell
them to the Prussians. A member of the Government (G. P — ), a very
celebrated orator, came out to harangue the crowd, which was demanding
the immediate execution of the prisoner. I had expected that the
speaker would point out the absurdity of the accusation by remarking
that the accused Marshal was positively one of those who had constructed
the fortifications, the plan of which, moreover, was on sale at every
booksellers. To my immense stupefaction — I was very young then — the
speech was on quite different lines. "Justice shall be done," exclaimed
the orator, advancing towards the prisoner, "and pitiless justice. Let
the Government of the National Defence conclude your inquiry. In the
meantime we will keep the prisoner in custody." At once calmed by this
apparent concession, the crowd broke up, and a quarter of an hour later
the Marshal was able to return home. He would infallibly have been torn
in pieces had the speaker treated the infuriated crowd to the logical
arguments that my extreme youth induced me to consider as very
convincing.
Logical minds, accustomed to be convinced by a chain of somewhat
close reasoning, cannot avoid having recourse to this mode of persuasion
when addressing crowds, and the inability of their arguments always
surprises them. "The usual mathematical consequences based on the
syllogism — that is, on associations of identities — are imperative . . ."
writes a logician. "This imperativeness would enforce the assent even
of an inorganic mass were it capable of following associations of
identities." This is doubtless true, but a crowd is no more capable
than an inorganic mass of following such associations, nor even of
understanding them. If the attempt be made to convince by reasoning
primitive minds — savages or children, for instance — the slight value
possessed by this method of arguing will be understood.
It is not even necessary to descend so low as primitive beings to
obtain an insight into the utter powerlessness of reasoning when it has
to fight
against sentiment. Let us merely call to mind how
tenacious, for centuries long, have been religious superstitions in
contradiction with the simplest logic. For nearly two thousand years
the most luminous geniuses have bowed before their laws, and modern
times have to be reached for their veracity to be merely contested. The
Middle Ages and the Renaissance possessed many enlightened men, but not
a single man who attained by reasoning to an appreciation of the
childish side of his superstitions, or who promulgated even a slight
doubt as to the misdeeds of the devil or the necessity of burning
sorcerers.
Should it be regretted that crowds are never guided by reason? We
would not venture to affirm it. Without a doubt human reason would not
have availed to spur humanity along the path of civilisation with the
ardour and hardihood its illusions have done. These illusions, the
offspring of those unconscious forces by which we are led, were
doubtless necessary. Every race carries in its mental constitution the
laws of its destiny, and it is, perhaps, these laws that it obeys with a
resistless impulse, even in the case of those of its impulses which
apparently are the most unreasoned. It seems at times as if nations
were submitted to secret forces analogous to those which compel the
acorn to transform itself into an oak or a comet to follow its orbit.
What little insight we can get into these forces must be sought for
in the general course of the evolution of a people, and not in the
isolated facts from which this evolution appears at times to proceed.
Were these facts alone to be taken into consideration, history would
seem to be the result of a series of improbable chances. It was
improbable that a Galilean carpenter should become for two thousand
years an all-powerful God in whose name the most important civilisations
were founded; improbable, too, that a few bands of Arabs, emerging from
their deserts, should conquer the greater part of the old Graco-Roman
world, and establish an empire greater than that of Alexander;
improbable, again, that in Europe, at an advanced period of its development,
and when authority throughout it had been systematically
hierarchised, an obscure lieutenant of artillery should have succeeded
in reigning over a multitude of peoples and kings.
Let us leave reason, then, to philosophers, and not insist too
strongly on its intervention in the governing of men. It is not by
reason, but most often in spite of it, that are created those sentiments
that are the mainsprings of all civilisation — sentiments such as honour,
self-sacrifice, religious faith, patriotism, and the love of glory.
