2. The Criminal Mentality.
All the civilised societies inevitably drag behind them a
residue of degenerates, of the unadapted, of persons affected by
various taints. Vagabonds, beggars, fugitives from justice,
thieves, assassins, and starving creatures that live from day to
day, may constitute the criminal population of the great cities.
In ordinary times these waste products of civilisation are more
or less restrained by the police. During revolution nothing
restrains them, and they can easily gratify their instincts to
murder and plunder. In the dregs of society the revolutionaries
of all times are sure of finding recruits. Eager only to kill
and to plunder, little matters to them the cause they are
sworn to defend. If the chances of murder and pillage are better
in the party attacked, they will promptly change their colours.
To these criminals, properly so called, the incurable
plague of all societies, we must add the class of semi-criminals.
Wrongdoers on occasion, they never rebel so long as the fear of
the established order restrains them, but as soon as it weakens
they enrol themselves in the army of revolution.
These two categories—habitual and occasional criminals—
form an army of disorder which is fit for nothing but the
creation of disorder. All the revolutionaries, all the founders
of religious or political leagues, have constantly counted on
their support.
We have already stated that this population, with its
criminal mentality, exercised a considerable influence during the
French Revolution. It always figured in the front rank of the
riots which occurred almost daily. Certain historians have
spoken with respect and emotion of the way in which the sovereign
people enforced its will upon the Convention, invading the hall
armed with pikes, the points of which were sometimes decorated
with newly severed heads. If we analyse the elements composing
the pretended delegations of the sovereign people, we shall find
that, apart from a small number of simple souls who submitted to
the impulses of the leaders, the mass was almost entirely formed
of the bandits of whom I have been speaking. To them were due
the innumerable murders of which the massacres of September and
the killing of the Princesse de Lamballe were merely typical.
They terrorised all the great Assemblies, from the Constituent
Assembly to the Convention, and for ten years they helped to
ravage France. If by some miracle this army of criminals could
have been eliminated, the progress of the Revolution would have
been very different. They stained it with blood from its dawn to
its decline. Reason could do nothing with them but they could do
much against reason.
