4. CHAPTER IV
THE PSYCHOLOGY OF REVOLUTIONARY CROWDS
1. General Characteristics of the Crowd.
WHATEVER their origin, revolutions do not produce their full
effects until they have penetrated the soul of the multitude.
They therefore represent a consequence of the psychology of
crowds.
Although I have studied collective psychology at length in
another volume, I must here recall its principal laws.
Man, as part of a multitude, is a very different being
from the same man as an isolated individual. His conscious
individuality vanishes in the unconscious personality of the
crowd.
Material contact is not absolutely necessary to produce in
the individual the mentality of the crowd. Common passions and
sentiments, provoked by certain events, are often sufficient to
create it.
The collective mind, momentarily formed, represents a very
special kind of aggregate. Its chief peculiarity is that it is
entirely dominated by unconscious elements, and is subject to a
peculiar collective logic.
Among the other characteristics of crowds, we must note
their infinite credulity and exaggerated sensibility, their
short-sightedness, and their incapacity
to respond to the influences of reason. Affirmation, contagion,
repetition, and prestige constitute almost the only means of
persuading them. Reality and experience have no effect upon
them. The multitude will admit anything; nothing is impossible
in the eyes of the crowd.
By reason of the extreme sensibility of crowds, their
sentiments, good or bad, are always exaggerated. This
exaggeration increases still further in times of revolution. The
least excitement will then lead the multitude to act with the
utmost fury. Their credulity, so great even in the normal state,
is still further increased; the most improbable statements are
accepted. Arthur Young relates that when he visited the springs
near Clermont, at the time of the French Revolution, his guide
was stopped by the people, who were persuaded that he had come by
order of the Queen to mine and blow up the town. The most
horrible tales concerning the Royal Family were circulated,
depicting it as a nest of ghouls and vampires.
These various characteristics show that man in the crowd
descends to a very low degree in the scale of civilisation. He
becomes a savage, with all a savage's faults and qualities, with
all his momentary violence, enthusiasm, and heroism. In the
intellectual domain a crowd is always inferior to the isolated
unit. In the moral and sentimental domain it may be his
superior. A crowd will commit a crime as readily as an act of
abnegation.
Personal characteristics vanish in the crowd, which exerts
an extraordinary influence upon the individuals which form it.
The miser becomes generous, the
sceptic a believer, the honest man a criminal, the coward a hero.
Examples of such transformations abounded during the great
Revolution.
As part of a jury or a parliament, the collective man
renders verdicts or passes laws of which he would never have
dreamed in his isolated condition.
One of the most notable consequences of the influence of a
collectivity upon the individuals who compose it is the
unification of their sentiments and wills. This psychological
unity confers a remarkable force upon crowds.
The formation of such a mental unity results chiefly from
the fact that in a crowd gestures and actions are extremely
contagious. Acclamations of hatred, fury, or love are
immediately approved and repeated.
What is the origin of these common sentiments, this common
will? They are propagated by contagion, but a point of departure
is necessary before this contagion can take effect. Without a
leader the crowd is an amorphous entity incapable of action.
A knowledge of the laws relating to the psychology of
crowds is indispensable to the interpretation of the elements of
our Revolution, and to a comprehension of the conduct of
revolutionary assemblies, and the singular transformations of the
individuals who form part of them. Pushed by the unconscious
forces of the collective soul, they more often than not say what
they did not intend, and vote what they would not have wished to
vote.
Although the laws of collective psychology have sometimes
been divined instinctively by superior statesmen, the majority of
Governments have not
understood and do not understand them. It is because they do not
understand them that so many of them have fallen so easily. When
we see the facility with which certain Governments were over-thrown by an insignificant riot—as happened in the case of the
monarchy of Louis-Philippe—the dangers of an ignorance of
collective psychology are evident. The marshal in command of the
troops in 1848, which were more than sufficient to defend the
king, certainly did not understand that the moment he allowed the
crowd to mingle with the troops the latter, paralysed by
suggestion and contagion, would cease to do their duty. Neither
did he know that as the multitude is extremely sensible to
prestige it needs a great display of force to impress it, and
that such a display will at once suppress hostile demonstrations.
He was equally ignorant of the fact that all gatherings should be
dispersed immediately. All these things have been taught by
experience, but in 1848 these lessons had not been grasped. At
the time of the great Revolution the psychology of crowds was
even less understood.
2. How the Stability of the Racial Mind limits the
Oscillations of the Mind of the Crowd.
A people can in a sense be likened to a crowd. It possesses
certain characteristics, but the oscillations of these
characteristics are limited by the soul or mind of the race. The
mind of the race has a fixity unknown to the transitory mind of
the crowd.
When a people possesses an ancestral soul established by a
long past the soul of the crowd is always dominated thereby.
A people differs from a crowd also in that it is composed
of a collection of groups, each having different interests and
passions. In a crowd properly so-called—a popular assembly, for
example—there are unities which may belong to very different
social categories.
A people sometimes seems as mobile as a crowd, but we must
not forget that behind its mobility, its enthusiasms, its
violence and destructiveness, the extremely tenacious and
conservative instincts of the racial mind persist. The history
of the Revolution and the century which has followed shows how
the conservative spirit finally overcomes the spirit of
destruction. More than one system of government which the people
has shattered has been restored by the people.
It is not as easy to work upon the mind of the people—
that is, the mind of the race—as on the mind of a crowd. The
means of action are indirect and slower (journals, conferences,
speeches, books, &c.). The elements of persuasion always come
under the headings already given: affirmation, repetition,
prestige, and contagion.
Mental contagion may affect a whole people
instantaneously, but more often it operates slowly, creeping from
group to group. Thus was the Reformation propagated in France.
A people is far less excitable than a crowd; but certain
events—national insults, threats of invasion, &c.—may arouse it
instantly. Such a phenomenon was observed on several occasions
during the Revolution, notably at the time of the insolent
manifesto issued by the Duke of Brunswick. The Duke knew little
indeed of the psychology of the French race
when he proffered his threats. Not only did he considerably
prejudice the cause of Louis XVI.; but he also damaged his own,
since his intervention raised from the soil an army eager to
fight him.
This sudden explosion of feeling throughout a whole race
has been observed in all nations. Napoleon did not understand
the power of such explosions when he invaded Spain and Russia.
One may easily disaggregate the facile mind of a crowd, but one
can do nothing before the permanent soul of a race. Certainly
the Russian peasant is a very indifferent being, gross and narrow
by nature, yet at the first news of invasion he was transformed.
One may judge of this fact on reading a letter written by
Elizabeth, wife of the Emperor Alexander I.
“From the moment when Napoleon had crossed our
frontiers it was as though an electric spark had spread through
all Russia; and if the immensity of its area had made it possible
for the news to penetrate simultaneously to every corner of the
Empire a cry of indignation would have arisen so terrible that I
believe it would have resounded to the ends of the earth. As
Napoleon advances this feeling is growing yet stronger. Old men
who have lost all or nearly all their goods are saying: `We
shall find a way of living. Anything is preferable to a shameful
peace.' Women all of whose kin are in the army regard the
dangers they are running as secondary, and fear nothing but
peace. Happily this peace, which would be the death-warrant of
Russia, will not be negotiated; the Emperor does not conceive of
such an idea, and even if he would he could not. This is the
heroic side of our position.”
The Empress describes to her mother the two following
traits, which give some idea of the degree of resistance of
which the soul of the Russian is capable:—
“The Frenchmen had caught some unhappy peasants in
Moscow, whom they thought to force to serve in their ranks, and
in order that they should not be able to escape they branded
their hands as one brands horses in the stud. One of them asked
what this mark meant; he was told it signified that he was a
French soldier. `What! I am a soldier of the Emperor of the
French!' he said. And immediately he took his hatchet, cut off
his hand, and threw it at the feet of those present, saying,
`Take it—there's your mark!'
“At Moscow, too, the French had taken a score of
peasants of whom they wished to make an example in order to
frighten the villagers, who were picking off the French foraging
parties and were making war as well as the detachments of regular
troops. They ranged them against a wall and read their sentence
in Russian. They waited for them to beg for mercy: instead of
that they took farewell of one another and made their sign of the
cross. The French fired on the first of them; they waited for
the rest to beg for pardon in their terror, and to promise to
change their conduct. They fired on the second, and on the
third, and so on all the twenty, without a single one having
attempted to implore the clemency of the enemy. Napoleon
has not once had the pleasure of profaning this word in
Russia.”
Among the characteristics of the popular mind we must
mention that in all peoples and all ages it has
been saturated with mysticism. The people will always be
convinced that superior beings—divinities, Governments, or great
men—have the power to change things at will. This mystic side
produces an intense need of adoration. The people must have a
fetich, either a man or a doctrine. This is why, when threatened
with anarchy, it calls for a Messiah to save it.
Like the crowd, but more slowly, the people readily passes
from adoration to hatred. A man may be the hero of the people at
one period, and finally earn its curses. These variations of
popular opinion concerning political personalities may be
observed in all times. The history of Cromwell furnishes us with
a very curious example.5
4. The Rôle of the Leader in Revolutionary
Movements.
All the varieties of crowds—homogeneous and
heterogeneous, assemblies, peoples, clubs, &c.—are, as we have
often repeated, aggregates incapable of unity and action so long
as they find no master to lead them.
I have shown elsewhere, making use of certain
physiological experiments, that the unconscious collective mind
of the crowd seems bound up with the mind of the leader. The
latter gives it a single will and imposes absolute obedience.
The leader acts especially through suggestion. His
success depends on his fashion of provoking this suggestion.
Many experiments have shown to what point a collectivity may be
subjected to suggestion.6
According to the suggestions of the leaders, the multitude
will be calm, furious, criminal, or heroic. These various
suggestions may sometimes appear to present a rational aspect,
but they will only appear to be reasonable. A crowd is in
reality inaccessible to reason; the only ideas capable of
influencing it will always be sentiments evoked in the form of
images.
The history of the Revolution shows on every page how
easily the multitude follows the most
contradictory impulses given by its different leaders. We see it
applaud just as vigorously at the triumph of the Girondists, the
Hébertists, the Dantonists, and the Terrorists as at their
successive downfalls. One may be quite sure, also, that the
crowd understood nothing of these events.
At a distance one can only confusedly perceive the part
played by the leaders, for they commonly work in the shade. To
grasp this clearly we must study them in contemporary events. We
shall then see how readily the leader can provoke the most
violent popular movements. We are not thinking here of the
strikes of the postmen or railway men, in which the discontent of
the employees might intervene, but of events in which the crowd
was not in the least interested. Such, for example, was the
popular rising provoked by a few Socialist leaders amidst the
Parisian populace on the morrow of the execution of Ferrer, in
Spain. The French crowd had never heard of Ferrer. In Spain his
execution was almost unnoticed. In Paris the incitements of a
few leaders sufficed to hurl a regular popular army upon the
Spanish Embassy, with the intention of burning it. Part of the
garrison had to be employed to protect it. Energetically
repulsed, the assailants contented themselves with sacking a few
shops and building some barricades.
At the same time, the leaders gave another proof of their
influence. Finally understanding that the burning of a foreign
embassy might be extremely dangerous, they ordered a pacific
demonstration for the following day, and were as faithfully
obeyed as if they had ordered the most violent riot. No
example could better show the importance of leaders and the
submission of the crowd
The historians who, from Michelet to M. Aulard, have
represented the revolutionary crowd as having acted on its own
initiative, without leaders, do not comprehend its psychology.
