1. CHAPTER I
INDIVIDUAL VARIATIONS OF CHARACTER IN
TIME OF REVOLUTION
1. Transformations of Personality.
I HAVE dwelt at length elsewhere upon a certain theory of
character, without which it is absolutely impossible to
understand divers transformations or inconsistencies of conduct
which occur at certain moments, notably in time of revolution.
Here are the principal points of this theory:
Every individual possesses, besides his habitual
mentality, which, when the environment does not alter, is almost
constant, various possibilities of character which may be evoked
by passing events.
The people who surround us are the creatures of certain
circumstances, but not of all circumstances. Our ego consists of
the association of innumerable cellular egos, the residues of
ancestral personalities. By their combination they form an
equilibrium which is fairly permanent when the social environment
does not vary. As soon as this environment is considerably
modified, as in time of insurrection, this equilibrium is broken,
and the dissociated elements constitute, by a fresh aggregation,
a new personality, which is manifested by ideas, feelings, and
actions very different from those formerly observed in the same
individual. Thus it is that during the Terror we see honest
bourgeois and peaceful magistrates who were noted for
their kindness turned into bloodthirsty fanatics.
Under the influence of environment the old personality may
therefore give place to one entirely new. For this reason the
actors in great religious and political crises often seem of a
different essence to ourselves; yet they do not differ from us;
the repetition of the same events would bring back the same men.
Napoleon perfectly understood these possibilities of
character when he said, in Saint Helena:—
“It is because I know just how great a part chance
plays in our political decisions, that I have always been without
prejudices, and very indulgent as to the part men have taken
during our disturbances. . . . In time of revolution one can
only say what one has done; it would not be wise to say that one
could not have done otherwise. . . . Men are difficult to
understand if we want to be just. . . . Do they know themselves?
Do they account for themselves very clearly? There are virtues
and vices of circumstance.”
When the normal personality has been disaggregated under
the influence of certain events, how does the new personality
form itself? By several means, the most active of which is the
acquisition of a strong belief. This orientates all the elements
of the understanding,
as the magnet collects into regular curves the filings of a
magnetic metal.
Thus were formed the personalities observed in times of
great crises: the Crusades, the Reformation, the Revolution
notably.
At normal times the environment varies little, so that as
a rule we see only a single personality in the individuals that
surround us. Sometimes, however, it happens that we observe
several, which in certain circumstances may replace one another.
These personalities may be contradictory and even
inimical. This phenomenon, exceptional under normal conditions,
is considerably accentuated in certain pathological conditions.
Morbid psychology has recorded several examples of multiple
personality in a single subject, such as the cases cited by
Morton Prince and Pierre Janet.
In all these variations of personality it is not the
intelligence which is modified, but the feelings, whose
association forms the character.
2. Elements of Character Predominant in Time of
Revolution.
During revolution we see several sentiments developed which
are commonly repressed, but to which the destruction of social
constraints gives a free vent.
These constraints, consisting of the law, morality, and
tradition, are not always completely broken. Some survive the
upheaval and serve to some extent to damp the explosion of
dangerous sentiments.
The most powerful of these restraints is the soul of the
race. This determines a manner of seeing, feeling,
and willing common to the majority of the individuals of the same
people; it constitutes a hereditary custom, and nothing is more
powerful than the ties of custom.
This racial influence limits the variations of a people
and determines its destiny within certain limits in spite of all
superficial changes.
For example, to take only the instances of history, it
would seem that the mentality of France must have varied
enormously during a single century. In a few years it passed
from the Revolution to Cæsarism, returned to the monarchy,
effected another Revolution, and then summoned a new Cæsar.
In reality only the outsides of things had changed.
We cannot insist further here on the limits of national
variability, but must now consider the influence of certain
affective elements, whose development during revolution
contributes to modify individual or collective personalities. In
particular I will mention hatred, fear, ambition, jealousy or
envy, vanity, and enthusiasm. We observe their influence during
several of the upheavals of history, notably during the course of
the French Revolution, which will furnish us with most of our
examples.
Hatred.—The hatred of persons, institutions, and
things which animated the men of the Revolution is one of these
affective phenomena which are the more striking the more one
studies their psychology. They detested, not only their enemies,
but the members of their own party. “If one were to accept
unreservedly,” said a recent writer, “the judgments which
they expressed of one another, we should have to conclude that
they were all traitors and boasters, all
incapable and corrupt, all assassins or tyrants.” We know
with what hatred, scarcely appeased by the death of their
enemies, men persecuted the Girondists, Dantonists,
Hébertists, Robespierrists, &c.
One of the chief causes of this feeling resided in the
fact that these furious sectaries, being apostles in possession
of the absolute verity, were unable, like all believers, to
tolerate the sight of infidels. A mystic or sentimental
certitude is always accompanied by the need of forcing itself on
others, is never convinced, and does not shrink from wholesale
slaughter when it has the power to commit it.
If the hatreds that divided the men of the Revolution had
been of rational origin they would not have lasted long, but,
arising from affective and mystic factors, men could neither
forget nor forgive. Their sources being identical in the
different parties, they manifested themselves on every hand with
identical violence. It has been proved, by means of documents,
that the Girondists were no less sanguinary than the Montagnards.
They were the first to declare, with Pétion, that the
vanquished parties should perish. They also, according to M.
Aulard, attempted to justify the massacres of September. The
Terror must not be considered simply as a means of defence, but
as the general process of destruction to which triumphant
believers have always treated their detested enemies. Men who
can put up with the greatest divergence of ideas cannot tolerate
differences of belief.
In religious or political warfare the vanquished can hope
for no quarter. From Sulla, who cut the throats of two hundred
senators and five or six thousand Romans, to the men who
suppressed the Commune,
and shot down more than twenty thousand after their victory, this
bloody law has never failed. Proved over and over again in the
past, it will doubtless be so in the future.
The hatreds of the Revolution did not arise entirely from
divergence of belief. Other sentiments—envy, ambition, and
self-love—also engendered them. The rivalry of individuals
aspiring to power led the chiefs of the various groups in
succession to the scaffold.
We must remember, moreover, that the need of division and
the hatred resulting therefrom seem to be constituent elements of
the Latin mind. They cost our Gaulish ancestors their
independence, and had already struck Cæsar.
“No city,” he said, “but was divided into two
factions; no canton, no village, no house in which the spirit of
party did not breathe. It was very rarely that a year went by
without a city taking up arms to attack or repulse its
neighbours.”
As man has only recently entered upon the age of
knowledge, and has always hitherto been guided by sentiments and
beliefs, we may conceive the vast importance of hatred as a
factor of his history.
Commandant Colin, professor at the College of War, remarks
in the following terms on the importance of this feeling during
certain wars:—
“In war more than at any other time there is no better
inspiring force than hatred; it was hatred that made Blücher
victorious over Napoleon. Analyse the most wonderful
manœuvres, the most decisive operations, and if they are
not the work of an exceptional man, a Frederick or a Napoleon,
you will find they are inspired by passion more than by
calculation.
What would the war of 1870 have been without the hatred which we
bore the Germans?”
The writer might have added that the intense hatred of the
Japanese for the Russians, who had so humiliated them, might be
classed among the causes of their success. The Russian soldiers,
ignorant of the very existence of the Japanese, had no animosity
against them, which was one of the reasons of their failure.
There was assuredly a good deal of talk of fraternity at
the time of the Revolution, and there is even more to-day.
Pacificism, humanitarianism, and solidarity have become
catchwords of the advanced parties, but we know how profound are
the hatreds concealed beneath these terms, and what dangers
overhang our modern society.
Fear.—Fear plays almost as large a part in
revolutions as hatred. During the French Revolution there were
many examples of great individual courage and many exhibitions of
collective cowardice.
Facing the scaffold, the men of the Convention were always
brave in the extreme; but before the threats of the rioters who
invaded the Assembly they constantly exhibited an excessive
pusillanimity, obeying the most absurd injunctions, as we shall
see if we re-read the history of the revolutionary Assemblies.
All the forms of fear were observed at this period. One
of the most widespread was the fear of appearing moderate.
Members of the Assemblies, public prosecutors, representatives
“on mission,” judges of the revolutionary tribunals, &c.,
all sought to appear more advanced than their rivals. Fear was
one of the principal elements of the crimes committed at this
period. If by some miracle it could have been eliminated from
the revolutionary Assemblies, their conduct would have been quite
other than it was, and the Revolution itself would have taken a
very different direction.
Ambition, Envy, Vanity, &c.—In normal times the
influence of these various affective elements is forcibly
contained by social necessities. Ambition, for instance, is
necessarily limited in a hierarchical form of society. Although
the soldier does sometimes become a general, it is only after a
long term of service. In time of revolution, on the other hand,
there is no need to wait. Every one may reach the upper ranks
almost immediately, so that all ambitions are violently aroused.
The humblest man believes himself fitted for the highest
employments, and by this very fact his vanity grows out of all
measure.
All the passions being more or less aroused, including
ambition and vanity, we see the development of jealousy and envy
of those who have succeeded more quickly than others.
The effect of jealousy, always important in times of
revolution, was especially so during the great French Revolution.
Jealousy of the nobility constituted one of its most important
factors. The middle classes had increased in capacity and
wealth, to the point of surpassing the nobility. Although they
mingled with the nobles more and more, they felt, none the less,
that they were held at a distance, and this they keenly resented.
This frame of mind had unconsciously made the bourgeoisie
keen supporters of the philosophic doctrine of equality.
Wounded self-love and jealousy were thus the
causes of hatreds that we can scarcely conceive today, when the
social influence of the nobility is so small. Many members of
the Convention—Carrier, Marat, and others—remembered with anger
that they had once occupied subordinate positions in the
establishments of great nobles. Mme. Roland was never able
to forget that, when she and her mother were invited to the
house of a great lady under the
ancien régime,
they had been sent to dine in the servants' quarters.
The philosopher Rivarol has very well described in the
following passage, already cited by Taine, the influence of
wounded self-love and jealousy upon the revolutionary hatreds:—
“It is not,” he writes, “the taxes, nor the
lettres de cachet, nor any of the other abuses of
authority; it is not the sins of the intendants, nor the long and
ruinous delays of justice, that has most angered the nation; it
is the prejudices of the nobility for which it has exhibited the
greatest hatred. What proves this clearly is the fact that it is
the bourgeois, the men of letters, the men of money, in
fact all those who are jealous of the nobility, who have raised
the poorer inhabitants of the cities against them, and the
peasants in the country districts.”
This very true statement partly justifies the saying of
Napoleon: “Vanity made the Revolution; liberty was only the
pretext.”
Enthusiasm.—The enthusiasm of the founders of the
Revolution equalled that of the apostles of the faith of
Mohammed. And it was really a religion that the bourgeois
of the first Assembly thought to found. They thought to have
destroyed an old world,
and to have built a new one upon its ruins. Never did illusion
more seductive fire the hearts of men. Equality and fraternity,
proclaimed by the new dogmas, were to bring the reign of eternal
happiness to all the peoples. Man had broken for ever with a
past of barbarity and darkness. The regenerated world would in
future be illuminated by the lucid radiance of pure reason. On
all hands the most brilliant oratorical formulæ saluted the
expected dawn.
That this enthusiasm was so soon replaced by violence was
due to the fact that the awakening was speedy and terrible. One
can readily conceive the indignant fury with which the apostles
of the Revolution attacked the daily obstacles opposed to the
realisation of their dreams. They had sought to reject the past,
to forget tradition, to make man over again. But the past
reappeared incessantly, and men refused to change. The
reformers, checked in their onward march, would not give in.
They sought to impose by force a dictatorship which speedily made
men regret the system abolished, and finally led to its return.
It is to be remarked that although the enthusiasm of the
first days did not last in the revolutionary Assemblies, it
survived very much longer in the armies, and constituted their
chief strength. To tell the truth, the armies of the Revolution
were republican long before France became so, and remained
republican long after France had ceased to be so.
The variations of character considered in this chapter,
being conditioned by certain common aspirations and identical
changes of environment, finally
became concrete in a small number of fairly homogeneous
mentalities. Speaking only of the more characteristic, we may
refer them to four types: the Jacobin, mystic, revolutionary, and
criminal mentalities.
