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.
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