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.
