CHAPTER IV
THE PART PLAYED BY THE PEOPLE IN
REVOLUTIONS
The Psychology of Revolution | ||
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.
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,
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,
CHAPTER IV
THE PART PLAYED BY THE PEOPLE IN
REVOLUTIONS
The Psychology of Revolution | ||