§ 4. THE INTOLERANCE, DICTATORIALNESS
AND CONSERVATISM OF CROWDS.
Crowds are only cognisant of simple and extreme sentiments; the
opinions, ideas, and beliefs suggested to them are accepted or rejected
as a whole, and considered as absolute truths or as not less absolute
errors. This is always the case with beliefs induced by a process of
suggestion instead of engendered by reasoning. Every one is aware of
the intolerance that accompanies religious beliefs, and of the despotic
empire they exercise on men's minds.
Being in doubt as to what constitutes truth or error, and having,
on the other hand, a clear notion of its strength, a crowd is as
disposed to give authoritative effect to its inspirations as it is
intolerant. An individual may accept contradiction and discussion; a
crowd will never do so. At public meetings the slightest contradiction
on the part of an orator is immediately received with howls of fury and
violent invective, soon followed by blows, and expulsion should the
orator stick to his point. Without the restraining presence of the
representatives of authority the contradictor, indeed, would often be
done to death.
Dictatorialness and intolerance are common to all categories of
crowds, but they are met with in a varying degree of intensity. Here,
once more, reappears that fundamental notion of race which
dominates
all the feelings and all the thoughts of men. It is more especially in
Latin crowds that authoritativeness and intolerance are found developed
in the highest measure. In fact, their development is such in crowds of
Latin origin that they have entirely destroyed that sentiment of the
independence of the individual so powerful in the Anglo-Saxon. Latin
crowds are only concerned with the collective independence of the sect
to which they belong, and the characteristic feature of their conception
of independence is the need they experience of bringing those who are in
disagreement with themselves into immediate and violent subjection to
their beliefs. Among the Latin races the Jacobins of every epoch, from
those of the Inquisition downwards, have never been able to attain to a
different conception of liberty.
Authoritativeness and intolerance are sentiments of which crowds
have a very clear notion, which they easily conceive and which they
entertain as readily as they put them in practice when once they are
imposed upon them. Crowds exhibit a docile respect for force, and are
but slightly impressed by kindness, which for them is scarcely other
than a form of weakness. Their sympathies have never been bestowed on
easy-going masters, but on tyrants who vigorously oppressed them. It is
to these latter that they always erect the loftiest statues.
It is
true that they willingly trample on the despot whom they have stripped
of his power, but it is because, having lost his strength, he has
resumed his place among the feeble, who are to be despised because they
are not to be feared. The type of hero dear to crowds will always have
the semblance of a Caesar. His insignia attracts them, his authority
overawes them, and his sword instils them with fear.
A crowd is always ready to revolt against a feeble, and to bow down
servilely before a strong authority. Should the strength of an
authority be intermittent, the crowd, always obedient to its extreme
sentiments, passes alternately from anarchy to servitude, and from
servitude to anarchy.
However, to believe in the predominance among crowds of
revolutionary instincts would be to entirely misconstrue their
psychology. It is merely their tendency to violence that deceives us on
this point. Their rebellious and destructive outbursts are always very
transitory. Crowds are too much governed by unconscious considerations,
and too much subject in consequence to secular hereditary influences not
to be extremely conservative. Abandoned to themselves, they soon weary
of disorder, and instinctively turn to servitude. It was the proudest
and most untractable of the Jacobins who acclaimed Bonaparte with
greatest energy when he suppressed all liberty and made his hand of
iron severely felt.
It is difficult to understand history, and popular revolutions in
particular, if one does not take sufficiently into account the
profoundly conservative instincts of crowds. They may be desirous, it
is true, of changing the names of their institutions, and to obtain
these changes they accomplish at times even violent revolutions, but the
essence of these institutions is too much the expression of the
hereditary needs of the race for them not invariably to abide by it.
Their incessant mobility only exerts its influence on quite superficial
matters. In fact they possess conservative instincts as indestructible
as those of all primitive beings. Their fetish like respect for all
traditions is absolute; their unconscious horror of all novelty capable
of changing the essential conditions of their existence is very deeply
rooted. Had democracies possessed the power they wield to-day at the
time of the invention of mechanical looms or of the introduction of
steam-power and of railways, the realisation of these inventions would
have been impossible, or would have been achieved at the cost of
revolutions and repeated massacres. It is fortunate for the progress of
civilisation that the power of crowds only began to exist when the great
discoveries of science and industry had already been effected.
