5. CHAPTER V
THE PSYCHOLOGY OF THE REVOLUTIONARY
ASSEMBLIES
1. Psychological Characteristics of the great
Revolutionary Assemblies.
A GREAT political assembly, a parliament for example, is a
crowd, but a crowd which sometimes fails in effectual action on
account of the contrary sentiments of the hostile groups
composing it.
The presence of these groups, actuated by different
interests, must make us consider an assembly as formed of
superimposed and heterogeneous crowds, each obeying its
particular leaders. The law of the mental unity of crowds is
manifested only in each group, and it is only as a result of
exceptional circumstances that the different groups act with a
single intention.
Each group in an assembly represents a single being. The
individuals contributing to the formation of this being are no
longer themselves, and will unhesitatingly vote against their
convictions and their wishes. On the eve of the day when Louis
XVI. was to be condemned Vergniaud protested with indignation
against the suggestion that he should vote for his death; but he
did so vote on the following day.
The action of a group consists chiefly in fortifying hesitating
opinions. All feeble individual convictions become confirmed
upon becoming collective.
Leaders of great repute or unusual violence can sometimes,
by acting on all the groups of an assembly, make them a single
crowd. The majority of the members of the Convention enacted
measures entirely contrary to their opinions under the influence
of a very small number of such leaders.
Collectivities have always given way before active
sectaries. The history of the revolutionary Assemblies shows how
pusillanimous they were, despite the boldness of their language
respecting kings, before the leaders of the popular riots. The
invasion of a band of energumens commanded by an imperious leader
was enough to make them vote then and there the most absurd and
contradictory measures.
An assembly, having the characteristics of a crowd, will,
like a crowd, be extreme in its sentiments. Excessive in its
violence, it will be excessive in its cowardice. In general it
will be insolent to the weak and servile before the strong.
We remember the fearful humility of the Parliament when
the youthful Louis XIV. entered, whip in hand, to pronounce his
brief speech. We know with what increasing impertinence the
Constituent Assembly treated Louis XVI. as it felt that he was
becoming defenceless. Finally, we recall the terror of the
Convention under the reign of Robespierre.
This characteristic of assemblies being a general law, the
convocation of an assembly by a sovereign when his power is
failing must be regarded as a gross error in psychology. The
assembling of the States
General cost the life of Louis XVI. It all but lost Henry III.
his throne, when, obliged to leave Paris, he had the unhappy idea
of assembling the Estates at Blois. Conscious of the weakness of
the king, the Estates at once spoke as masters of the situation,
modifying taxes, dismissing officials, and claiming that their
decisions should have the force of law.
This progressive exaggeration of sentiments was plainly
demonstrated in all the assemblies of the Revolution. The
Constituent Assembly, at first extremely respectful toward the
royal authority and its prerogatives, finally proclaimed itself a
sovereign Assembly, and treated Louis XVI as a mere official.
The Convention, after relatively moderate beginnings, ended with
a preliminary form of the Terror, when judgments were still
surrounded by certain legal guarantees: then, quickly increasing
its powers, it enacted a law depriving all accused persons of the
right of defence, permitting their condemnation upon the mere
suspicion of being suspect. Yielding more and more to its
sanguinary frenzy, it finally decimated itself. Girondists,
Hébertists, Dantonists, and Robespierrists successively
ended their careers at the hands of the executioner.
This exaggeration of the sentiments of assemblies explains
why they were always so little able to control their own
destinies and why they so often arrived at conclusions exactly
contrary to the ends proposed. Catholic and royalist, the
Constituent Assembly, instead of the constitutional monarchy it
wished to establish and the religion it wished to defend, rapidly
led France to a violent republic and the persecution of the
clergy.
Political assemblies are composed, as we have seen, of
heterogeneous groups, but they have sometimes been formed of
homogeneous groups, as, for instance, certain of the clubs, which
played so enormous a part during the Revolution, and whose
psychology deserves a special examination.
2. The Psychology of the Revolutionary Clubs.
Small assemblies of men possessing the same opinions, the
same beliefs, and the same interests, which eliminate all
dissentient voices, differ from the great assemblies by the unity
of their sentiments and therefore their wills. Such were the
communes, the religious congregations, the corporations, and the
clubs during the Revolution, the secret societies during the
first half of the nineteenth century, and the Freemasons and
syndicalists of to-day.
The points of difference between a heterogeneous assembly
and a homogeneous club must be thoroughly grasped if we are to
comprehend the progress of the French Revolution. Until the
Directory and especially during the Convention the Revolution was
directed by the clubs.
Despite the unity of will due to the absence of dissident
parties the clubs obey the laws of the psychology of crowds.
They are consequently subjugated by leaders. This we see
especially in the Jacobin Club, which was dominated by
Robespierre.
The function of the leader of a club, a homogeneous crowd,
is far more difficult than that of a leader of a heterogeneous
crowd. The latter may easily be led by harping on a small number
of strings, but in a homogeneous group like a club, whose
sentiments
and interests are identical, the leader must know how to humour
them and is often himself led.
Part of the strength of homogeneous agglomerations resides
in their anonymity. We know that during the Commune of 1871 a
few anonymous orders sufficed to effect the burning of the finest
monuments of Paris: the Hôtel de Ville, the Tuileries, the
Cour des Comptes, the buildings of the Legion of Honour, &c. A
brief order from the anonymous committees, “Burn Finances,
burn Tuileries,” &c., was immediately executed. An unlooked-
for chance only saved the Louvre and its collections. We know
too what religious attention is in our days accorded to the most
absurd injunctions of the anonymous leaders of the trades unions.
The clubs of Paris and the insurrectionary Commune were not less
scrupulously obeyed at the time of the Revolution. An order
emanating from these was sufficient to hurl upon the Assembly a
popular army which dictated its wishes.
Summing up the history of the Convention in another
chapter, we shall see how frequent were these irruptions, and
with what servility the Assembly, which according to the legends
was so powerful bowed itself before the most imperative
injunctions of a handful of rioters. Instructed by experience,
the Directory closed the clubs and put an end to the invasion of
the populace by energetically shooting them down.
The Convention had early grasped the superiority of
homogeneous groups over heterogeneous assemblies in matters of
government, which is why it subdivided itself into committees
composed each of a limited number of individuals. These
committees—
of Public Safety, of Finance, &c.—formed small sovereign
assemblies in the midst of the larger Assembly. Their power was
held in check only by that of the clubs.
The preceding considerations show the power of groups over
the wills of the members composing them. If the group is
homogeneous, this action is considerable; if it is heterogeneous,
it is less considerable but may still become important, either
because the more powerful groups of an assembly will dominate
those whose cohesion is weaker or because certain contagious
sentiments will often extend themselves to all the members of an
assembly.
A memorable example of this influence of groups occurred
at the time of the Revolution, when, on the night of the 4th of
August, the nobles voted, on the proposition of one of their
members, the abandonment of feudal privileges. Yet we know that
the Revolution resulted in part from the refusal of the clergy
and the nobles to renounce their privileges. Why did they refuse
to renounce them at first? Simply because men in a crowd do not
act as the same men singly. Individually no member of the
nobility would ever have abandoned his rights.
Of this influence of assemblies upon their members
Napoleon at St. Helena cited some curious examples: “Nothing
was more common than to meet with men at this period quite unlike
the reputation that their acts and words would seem to justify.
For instance, one might have supposed Monge to be a terrible
fellow; when war was decided upon he mounted the tribune of the
Jacobins and declared that he would give his two daughters to the
two first soldiers to be
wounded by the enemy. He wanted the nobles to be killed, &c.
Now, Monge was the most gentle and feeble of men, and wouldn't
have had a chicken killed if he had had to do it with his own
hands, or even to have it done in his presence.”
3. A Suggested Explanation of the Progressive
Exaggeration of Sentiments in Assemblies.
If collective sentiments were susceptible of exact
quantitative measurement, we might translate them by a curve
which, after a first gradual ascent, runs upward with extreme
rapidity and then falls almost vertically. The equation of this
curve might be called the equation of the variations of
collective sentiments subjected to a constant excitation.
It is not always easy to explain the acceleration of
certain sentiments under the influence of a constant exciting
cause. Perhaps, however, one may say that if the laws of
psychology are comparable to those of mechanics, a cause of
invariable dimensions acting in a continuous fashion will rapidly
increase the intensity of a sentiment. We know, for example,
that a force which is constant in dimension and direction, such
as gravity acting upon a mass, will cause an accelerated
movement. The speed of a free object falling in space under the
influence of gravity will be about 32 feet during the first
second, 64 feet during the next, 96 feet during the next, &c. It
would be easy, were the moving body allowed to fall from a
sufficient height, to give it a velocity sufficient to perforate
a plate of steel.
But although this explanation is applicable to the
acceleration of a sentiment subjected to a constant
exciting cause, it does not tell us why the effects of
acceleration finally and suddenly cease. Such a fall is only
comprehensible if we bring in physiological factors—that is, if
we remember that pleasure, like pain, cannot exceed certain
limits, and that all sensations, when too violent, result in the
paralysis of sensation. Our organism can only support a certain
maximum of joy, pain, or effort, and it cannot support that
maximum for long together. The hand which grasps a dynamometer
soon exhausts its effort, and is obliged suddenly to let go.
The study of the causes of the rapid disappearance of
certain groups of sentiments in assemblies will remind us of the
fact that beside the party which is predominant by means of its
strength or prestige there are others whose sentiments,
restrained by this force or prestige, have not reached their full
development. Some chance circumstance may somewhat weaken the
prevailing party, when immediately the suppressed sentiments of
the adverse parties may become preponderant. The Mountain
learned this lesson after Thermidor.
All analogies that we may seek to establish between the
laws of material phenomena and those which condition the
evolution of affective and mystic factors are evidently extremely
rough. They must be so until the mechanism of the cerebral
functions is better understood than it is to-day.
