4. CHAPTER IV
THE PART PLAYED BY THE PEOPLE IN
REVOLUTIONS
1. The stability and malleability of the national
mind.
THE knowledge of a people at any given moment of its history
involves an understanding of its environment and above all of its
past. Theoretically one may deny that past, as did the men of
the Revolution, as many men of the present day have done, but its
influence remains indestructible.
In the past, built up by slow accumulations of centuries,
was formed the aggregation of thoughts, sentiments, traditions,
and prejudices constituting the national mind which makes the
strength of a race. Without it no progress is possible. Each
generation would necessitate a fresh beginning.
The aggregate composing the soul of a people is solidly
established only if it possesses a certain rigidity, but this
rigidity must not pass a certain limit, or there would be no such
thing as malleability.
Without rigidity the ancestral soul would have no fixity,
and without malleability it could not adapt itself to the changes
of environment resulting from the progress of civilization.
Excessive malleability of the national mind impels a
people to incessant revolutions. Excess of rigidity
leads it to decadence. Living species, like the races of
humanity, disappear when, too fixedly established by a long past,
they become incapable of adapting themselves to new conditions of
existence.
Few peoples have succeeded in effecting a just equilibrium
between these two contrary qualities of stability and
malleability. The Romans in antiquity and the English in modern
times may be cited among those who have best attained it.
The peoples whose mind is most fixed and established often
effect the most violent revolutions. Not having succeeded in
evolving progressively, in adapting themselves to changes of
environment, they are forced to adapt themselves violently when
such adaptation becomes indispensable.
Stability is only acquired very slowly. The history of a
race is above all the story of its long efforts to establish its
mind. So long as it has not succeeded it forms a horde of
barbarians without cohesion and strength. After the invasions of
the end of the Roman Empire France took several centuries to form
a national soul.
She finally achieved one; but in the course of centuries
this soul finally became too rigid. With a little more
malleability, the ancient monarchy would have been slowly
transformed as it was elsewhere, and we should have avoided,
together with the Revolution and its consequences, the heavy task
of remaking a national soul.
The preceding considerations show us the part of race in
the genesis of revolutions, and explain why the same revolutions
will produce such different effects in different countries; why,
for example, the ideas of the
French Revolution, welcomed with such enthusiasm by some peoples,
were rejected by others.
Certainly England, although a very stable country, has
suffered two revolutions and slain a king; but the mould of her
mental armour was at once stable enough to retain the
acquisitions of the past and malleable enough to modify them only
within the necessary limits. Never did England dream, as did the
men of the French Revolution, of destroying the ancestral
heritage in order to erect a new society in the name of reason.
“While the Frenchman,” writes M. A. Sorel,
“despised his government, detested his clergy, hated the
nobility, and revolted against the laws, the Englishman was proud
of his religion, his constitution, his aristocracy, his House of
Lords. These were like so many towers of the formidable Bastille
in which he entrenched himself, under the British standard, to
judge Europe and cover her with contempt. He admitted that the
command was disputed inside the fort, but no stranger must
approach.”
The influence of race in the destiny of the peoples
appears plainly in the history of the perpetual revolutions of
the Spanish republics of South America. Composed of half-castes,
that is to say, of individuals whose diverse heredities have
dissociated their ancestral characteristics, these populations
have no national soul and therefore no stability. A people of
half-castes is always ungovernable.
If we would learn more of the differences of political
capacity which the racial factor creates we must examine the same
nation as governed by two races successively.
The event is not rare in history. It has been manifested
in a striking manner of late in Cuba and the Phillipines, which
passed suddenly from the rule of Spain to that of the United
States.
We know in what anarchy and poverty Cuba existed under
Spanish rule; we know, too, to what a degree of prosperity the
island was brought in a few years when it fell into the hands of
the United States.
The same experience was repeated in the Phillipines, which
for centuries had been governed by Spain. Finally the country
was no more than a vast jungle, the home of epidemics of every
kind, where a miserable population vegetated without commerce or
industry. After a few years of American rule the country was
entirely transformed: malaria, yellow fever, plague and cholera
had entirely disappeared. The swamps were drained; the country
was covered with railways, factories and schools. In thirteen
years the mortality was reduced by two-thirds.
It is to such examples that we must refer the theorist who
has not yet grasped the profound significance of the word race,
and how far the ancestral soul of a people rules over its
destiny.
2. How the people regards Revolution.
The part of the people has been the same in all revolutions.
It is never the people that conceives them nor directs them. Its
activity is released by means of leaders.
Only when the direct interests of the people are involved
do we see, as recently in Champagne, any fraction of the people
rising spontaneously. A movement thus localised constitutes a
mere riot.
Revolution is easy when the leaders are very influential.
Of this Portugal and Brazil have recently furnished proofs. But
new ideas penetrate the people very slowly indeed. Generally it
accepts a revolution without knowing why, and when by chance it
does succeed in understanding why, the revolution is over long
ago.
The people will create a revolution because it is
persuaded to do so, but it does not understand very much of the
ideas of its leaders; it interprets them in its own fashion, and
this fashion is by no means that of the true authors of the
revolution. The French Revolution furnished a striking example
of this fact.
The Revolution of 1789 had as its real object the
substitution of the power of the nobility by that of the
bourgeoisie; that is, an old élite which had
become incapable was to be replaced by a new élite
which did possess capacity.
There was little question of the people in this first
phase of the Revolution. The sovereignty of the people was
proclaimed, but it amounted only to the right of electing its
representatives.
Extremely illiterate, not hoping, like the middle classes,
to ascend the social scale, not in any way feeling itself the
equal of the nobles, and not aspiring ever to become their equal,
the people had views and interests very different to those of the
upper classes of society.
The struggles of the assembly with the royal power led it
to call for the intervention of the people in these struggles.
It intervened more and more, and the bourgeois revolution rapidly
became a popular revolution.
An idea having no force of its own, and acting only by
virtue of possessing an affective and mystic substratum which
supports it, the theoretical ideas of the bourgeoisie,
before they could act on the people, had to be transformed into a
new and very definite faith, springing from obvious practical
interests.
This transformation was rapidly effected when the people
heard the men envisaged by it as the Government assuring it that
it was the equal of its former masters. It began to regard
itself as a victim, and proceeded to pillage, burn, and massacre,
imagining that in so doing it was exercising a right.
The great strength of the revolutionary principles was
that they gave a free course to the instincts of primitive
barbarity which had been restrained by the secular and inhibitory
action of environment, tradition, and law.
All the social bonds that formerly contained the multitude
were day by day dissolving, so that it conceived a notion of
unlimited power, and the joy of seeing its ancient masters
ferreted out and despoiled. Having become the sovereign people,
were not all things permissible to it?
The motto of Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, a true
manifestation of hope and faith at the beginning of the
Revolution, soon merely served to cover a legal justification of
the sentiments of jealousy, cupidity, and hatred of superiors,
the true motives of crowds unrestrained by discipline. This is
why the Revolution so soon ended in disorder, violence, and
anarchy.
From the moment when the Revolution descended from the
middle to the lower classes of society, it ceased to be a
domination of the instinctive by the
rational, and became, on the contrary, the effort of the
instinctive to overpower the rational.
This legal triumph of the atavistic instincts was
terrible. The whole effort of societies an effort indispensable
to their continued existence—had always been to restrain, thanks
to the power of tradition, customs, and codes, certain natural
instincts which man has inherited from his primitive animality.
It is possible to dominate them—and the more a people does
overcome them the more civilised it is—but they cannot be
destroyed. The influence of various exciting causes will readily
result in their reappearance.
This is why the liberation of popular passions is so
dangerous. The torrent, once escaped from its bed, does not
return until it has spread devastation far and wide. “Woe to
him who stirs up the dregs of a nation,” said Rivarol at the
beginning of the Revolution. “There is no age of
enlightenment for the populace.”
The supposed Part of the People during
Revolution.
The laws of the psychology of crowds show us that the people
never acts without leaders, and that although it plays a
considerable part in revolutions by following and exaggerating
the impulses received, it never directs its own movements.
In all political revolutions we discover the action of
leaders. They do not create the ideas which serve as the basis
of revolutions, but they utilise them as a means of action.
Ideas, leaders, armies, and crowds constitute four elements which
all have their part to play in revolutions.
The crowd, roused by the leaders, acts especially by means of its
mass. Its action is comparable to that of the shell which
perforates an armour-plate by the momentum of a force it did not
create. Rarely does the crowd understand anything of the
revolutions accomplished with its assistance. It obediently
follows its leaders without even trying to find out what they
want. It overthrew Charles X. because of his Ordinances without
having any idea of the contents of the latter, and would have
been greatly embarrassed had it been asked at a later date why it
overthrew Louis-Philippe.
Deceived by appearances, many authors, from Michelet to
Aulard, have supposed that the people effected our great
Revolution.
“The principal actor,” said Michelet, “is the
people.”
“It is an error to say,” writes M. Aulard,
“that the French Revolution was effected by a few
distinguished people or a few heroes. . . . I believe that in
the whole history of the period included between 1789 and 1799
not a single person stands out who led or shaped events:
neither Louis XVI. nor Mirabeau nor Danton nor Robespierre.
Must we say that it was the French people that was the real
hero of the French Revolution? Yes—provided we see the
French people not as a multitude but as a number of
organised groups.”
And in a recent work M. A. Cochin insists on this
conception of popular action.
“And here is the wonder: Michelet is right. In
proportion as we know them better the facts seem to consecrate
the fiction: this crowd, without chiefs and without laws, the
very image of chaos, did for five years govern and command, speak
and act, with a precision,
a consistency, and an entirety that were marvellous. Anarchy
gave lessons in order and discipline to the defeated party of
order . . . twenty-five millions of men, spread over an area of
30,000 square leagues, acted as one.”
Certainly if this simultaneous conduct of the people had
been spontaneous, as the author supposes, it would have been
marvellous. M. Aulard himself understands very well the
impossibilities of such a phenomenon, for he is careful, in
speaking of the people, to say that he is speaking of groups, and
that these groups may have been guided by leaders:—
“And what, then, cemented the national unity? Who
saved this nation, attacked by the king and rent by civil war?
Was it Danton? Was it Robespierre? Was it Carnot? Certainly
these individual men were of service: but unity was in fact
maintained and independence assured by the grouping of the French
into communes and popular societies—people's clubs. It was the
municipal and Jacobin organisation of France that forced the
coalition of Europe to retreat. But in each group, if we look
more closely, there were two or three individuals more capable
than the rest, who, whether leaders or led, executed decisions
and had the appearance of leaders, but who (if, for instance, we
read the proceedings of the people's clubs) seem to us to have
drawn their strength far more from their group than from
themselves.
M. Aulard's mistake consists in supposing that all these
groups were derived “from a spontaneous movement of
fraternity and reason.” France at that time was covered with
thousands of little clubs,
receiving a single impulsion from the great Jacobin Club of
Paris, and obeying it with perfect docility. This is what
reality teaches us, though the illusions of the Jacobins do not
permit them to accept the fact.
3
4. The Popular Entity and its Constituent
Elements.
In order to answer to certain theoretical conceptions the
people was erected into a mystic entity, endowed with all the
powers and all the virtues, incessantly praised by the
politicians, and overwhelmed with flattery. We shall see what we
are to make of this conception of the part played by the people
in the French Revolution.
To the Jacobins of this epoch, as to those of our own
days, this popular entity constitutes a superior personality
possessing the attributes, peculiar to divinities, of never
having to answer for its actions and never making a mistake. Its
wishes must be
humbly acceded. The people may kill, burn, ravage, commit the
most frightful cruelties, glorify its hero to-day and throw him
into the gutter to-morrow; it is all one; the politicians will
not cease to vaunt its virtues, its high wisdom, and to bow to
its every decision.
4
Now in what does this entity really consist, this
mysterious fetich which revolutionists have revered for more than
a century?
It may be decomposed into two distinct categories. The
first includes the peasants, traders, and workers of all sorts
who need tranquillity and order that they may exercise their
calling. This people forms the majority, but a majority which
never caused a revolution. Living in laborious silence, it is
ignored by the historians.
The second category, which plays a capital part in all
national disturbances, consists of a subversive social residue
dominated by a criminal mentality. Degenerates of alcoholism and
poverty, thieves, beggars, destitute “casuals,”
indifferent workers without employment—these constitute the
dangerous bulk of the
armies of insurrection.
The fear of punishment prevents many of them from becoming
criminals at ordinary times, but they do become criminals as soon
as they can exercise their evil instincts without danger.
To this sinister substratum are due the massacres which
stain all revolutions.
It was this class which, guided by its leaders,
continually invaded the great revolutionary Assemblies. These
regiments of disorder had no other ideal than that of massacre,
pillage, and incendiarism. Their indifference to theories and
principles was complete.
To the elements recruited from the lowest dregs of the
populace are added, by way of contagion, a host of idle and
indifferent persons who are simply drawn into the movement. They
shout because there are men shouting, and revolt because there is
a revolt, without having the vaguest idea of the cause of
shouting or revolution. The suggestive power of their
environment absolutely hypnotises them, and impels them to
action.
These noisy and maleficent crowds, the kernel of all
insurrections, from antiquity to our own times, are the only
crowds known to the orator. To the orator they are the sovereign
people. As a matter of fact this sovereign people is principally
composed of the lower populace of whom Thiers said:—
“Since the time when Tacitus saw it applaud the crimes
of the emperors the vile populace has not changed. These
barbarians who swarm at the bottom of societies are always ready
to stain the people with every crime, at the beck of every power,
and to the dishonour of every cause.”
At no period of history was the rôle of the
lowest elements of the population exercised in such a lasting
fashion as in the French Revolution.
The massacres began as soon as the beast was unchained—
that is, from 1789, long before the
Convention. They were carried out with all possible refinements
of cruelty. During the killing of September the prisoners were
slowly chopped to bits by sabre-cuts in order to prolong their
agonies and amuse the spectators, who experienced the greatest
delight before the spectacle of the convulsions of the victims
and their shrieks of agony.
Similar scenes were observed all over France, even in the
early days of the Revolution, although the foreign war did not
excuse them then, nor any other pretext.
From March to September a whole series of burnings,
killings, and pillagings drenched all France in blood. Taine
cites one hundred and twenty such cases. Rouen, Lyons,
Strasbourg, &c., fell into the power of the populace.
The Mayor of Troyes, his eyes destroyed by blows of
scissors, was murdered after hours of suffering. The Colonel of
Dragoons Belzuce was cut to pieces while living. In many places
the hearts of the victims were torn out and carried about the
cities on the point of a pike.
Such is the behaviour of the base populace so soon as
imprudent hands have broken the network of constraints which
binds its ancestral savagery. It meets with every indulgence
because it is in the interests of the politicians to flatter it.
But let us for a moment suppose the thousands of beings who
constitute it condensed into one single being. The personality
thus formed would appear as a cruel and narrow and abominable
monster, more horrible than the bloodiest tyrants of history.
This impulsive and ferocious people has always
been easily dominated so soon as a strong power has opposed it.
If its violence is unlimited, so is its servility. All the
despotisms have had it for their servant. The Cæsars are
certain of being acclaimed by it, whether they are named
Caligula, Nero, Marat, Robespierre, or Boulanger.
Beside these destructive hordes whose action during
revolution is capital, there exists, as we have already remarked,
the mass of the true people, which asks only the right to labour.
It sometimes benefits by revolutions, but never causes them. The
revolutionary theorists know little of it and distrust it, aware
of its traditional and conservative basis. The resistant nucleus
of a country, it makes the strength and continuity of the latter.
Extremely docile through fear, easily influenced by its leaders,
it will momentarily commit every excess while under their
influence, but the ancestral inertia of the race will soon take
charge again, which is the reason why it so quickly tires of
revolution. Its traditional soul quickly incites it to oppose
itself to anarchy when the latter goes too far. At such times it
seeks the leader who will restore order.
This people, resigned and peaceable, has evidently no very
lofty nor complicated political conceptions. Its governmental
ideal is always very simple, is something very like dictatorship.
This is why, from the times of the Greeks to our own,
dictatorship has always followed anarchy. It followed it after
the first Revolution, when Bonaparte was acclaimed, and again
when, despite opposition, four successive plebiscites raised
Louis Napoleon to the head of the republic, ratified his coup
d État, re-established the Empire, and in 1870, before
the war, approved of his rule.
Doubtless in these last instances the people was
deceived. But without the revolutionary conspiracies which led
to disorder, it would not have been impelled to seek the means of
escape therefrom.
The facts recalled in this chapter must not be forgotten
if we wish fully to comprehend the various rôles of
the people during revolution. Its action is considerable, but
very unlike that imagined by the legends whose repetition alone
constitutes their vitality.
