2. CHAPTER II
THE PSYCHOLOGY OF THE LEGISLATIVE ASSEMBLY
1. Political Events during the Life of the Legislative
Assembly.
BEFORE examining the mental characteristics of the Legislative
Assembly let us briefly sum up the considerable political events
which marked its short year's life. They naturally played an
important part in respect of its psychological manifestations.
Extremely monarchical, the Legislative Assembly had no
more idea than its predecessor of destroying the monarchy. The
king appeared to it to be slightly suspect, but it still hoped to
be able to retain him on the throne.
Unhappily for him, Louis was incessantly begging for
intervention from abroad. Shut up in the Tuileries, defended
only by his Swiss Guards, the timid sovereign was drifting among
contrary influences. He subsidised journals intended to modify
public opinion, but the obscure “penny-a-liners” who
edited them knew nothing of acting on the mind of the crowd.
Their only means of persuasion was to menace with the gallows all
the partisans of the Revolution, and to predict the invasion of
France by an army which would rescue the king.
Royalty no longer counted on anything but the
foreign Courts. The nobles were emigrating. Prussia, Austria,
and Russia were threatening France with a war of invasion. The
Court favoured their lead. To the coalition of the three kings
against France the Jacobin Club proposed to oppose a league of
peoples. The Girondists were then, with the Jacobins, at the
head of the revolutionary movement. They incited the masses to
arm themselves—600,000 volunteers were equipped. The Court
accepted a Girondist minister. Dominated by him, Louis XVI. was
obliged to propose to the Assembly a war against Austria. It was
immediately agreed to.
In declaring war the king was not sincere. The queen
revealed the French plans of campaign and the secret
deliberations of the Council to the Austrians.
The beginnings of the struggle were disastrous. Several
columns of troops, attacked by panic, disbanded. Stimulated by
the clubs, and persuaded—justly, for that matter—that the king
was conspiring with the enemies of France, the population of the
faubourgs rose in insurrection. Its leaders, the
Jacobins, and above all Danton, sent to the Tuileries on the 20th
of June a petition threatening the king with revocation. It then
invaded the Tuileries, heaping invectives on the sovereign.
Fatality impelled Louis toward his tragic destiny. While
the threats of the Jacobins against royalty had roused many of
the departments to indignation, it was learned that a Prussian
army had arrived on the frontiers of Lorraine.
The hope of the king and queen respecting the help to be
obtained from abroad was highly chimerical.
Marie-Antoinette suffered from an absolute illusion as to the
psychology of the Austrian and the French peoples. Seeing France
terrorised by a few energumens, she supposed that it would be
equally easy to terrify the Parisians, and by means of threats to
lead them back under the king's authority. Inspired by her,
Fersen undertook to publish the manifesto of the Duke of
Brunswick, threatening Paris with “total subversion if the
royal family were molested.”
The effect produced was diametrically opposite to that
intended. The manifesto aroused indignation against the monarch,
who was regarded as an accomplice, and increased his
unpopularity. From that day he was marked for the scaffold.
Carried away by Danton, the delegates of the sections
installed themselves at the Hôtel de Ville as an
insurrectionary Commune, which arrested the commandant of the
National Guard, who was devoted to the king, sounded the tocsin,
equipped the National Guard, and on the 10th of August hurled
them, with the populace, against the Tuileries. The regiments
called in by Louis disbanded themselves. Soon none were left to
defend him but his Swiss and a few gentlemen. Nearly all were
killed. Left alone, the king took refuge with the Assembly. The
crowds demanded his denouncement. The Legislative Assembly
decreed his suspension and left a future Assembly, the
Convention, to decide upon his fate.
2. Mental Characteristics of the Legislative
Assembly.
The Legislative Assembly, formed of new men, presented quite a
special interest from the psychological
point of view. Few assemblies have offered in such a degree the
characteristics of the political collectivity.
It comprised seven hundred and fifty deputies, divided
into pure royalists, constitutional royalists, republicans,
Girondists, and Montagnards. Advocates and men of letters formed
the majority. It also contained, but in smaller numbers,
superior officers, priests, and a very few scientists.
The philosophical conceptions of the members of this
Assembly seem rudimentary enough. Many were imbued with
Rousseau's idea of a return to a state of nature. But all, like
their predecessors, were dominated more especially by
recollections of Greek and Latin antiquity. Cato, Brutus,
Gracchus, Plutarch, Marcus Aurelius, and Plato, continually
evoked, furnished the images of their speech. When the orator
wished to insult Louis XVI. he called him Caligula.
In hoping to destroy tradition they were revolutionaries,
but in claiming to return to a remote past they showed themselves
extremely reactionary.
For the rest, all these theories had very little influence
on their conduct. Reason was continually figuring in their
speeches, but never in their actions. These were always
dominated by those affective and mystic elements whose potency we
have so often demonstrated.
The psychological characteristics of the Legislative
Assembly were those of the Constituent Assembly, but were greatly
accentuated. They may be summed up in four words:
impressionability, mobility, timidity, and weakness.
This mobility and impressionability are revealed in the
constant variability of their conduct. One day they exchange
noisy invective and blows. On the following day we see them
“throwing themselves into one another's arms with torrents of
tears.” They eagerly applaud an address demanding the
punishment of those who have petitioned for the king's
dethronement, and the same day accord the honours of the
session to a delegation which has come to demand his downfall.
The pusillanimity and weakness of the Assembly in the face
of threats was extreme. Although royalist it voted the
suspension of the king, and on the demand of the Commune
delivered him, with his family, to be imprisoned in the Temple,
Thanks to its weakness, it was as incapable as the
Constituent Assembly of exercising any power, and allowed itself
to be dominated by the Commune and the clubs, which were directed
by such influential leaders as Hébert, Tallien, Rossignol,
Marat, Robespierre, &c.
Until Thermidor, 1794, the insurrectionary Commune
constituted the chief power in the State, and behaved precisely
as if it had been charged with the government of Paris.
It was the Commune that demanded the imprisonment of Louis
XVI. in the tower of the Temple, when the Assembly wished to
imprison him in the palace of the Luxembourg. It was the Commune
again that filled the prisons with suspects, and then ordered
them to be killed.
We know with what refinements of cruelty a handful of some
150 bandits, paid at the rate of 24 livres a day,
and directed by a few members of the Commune, exterminated some
1,200 persons in four days. This crime was known as the massacre
of September. The mayor of Paris, Pétion, received the
band of assassins with respect, and gave them drink. A few
Girondists protested somewhat, but the Jacobins were silent.
The terrorised Assembly affected at first to ignore the
massacres, which were encouraged by several of its more
influential deputies, notably Couthon and Billaud-Varenne. When
at last it decided to condemn them it was without attempting to
prevent their continuation.
Conscious of its impotence, the Legislative Assembly
dissolved itself a fortnight later in order to give way to the
Convention.
Its work was obviously disastrous, not in intention but in
fact. Royalist, it abandoned the monarchy; humanitarian, it
allowed the massacres of September; pacific, it pushed France
into a formidable war, thus showing that a weak Government always
ends by bringing ruin upon its country.
The history of the two previous revolutionary Assemblies
proves once more to what point events carry within them their
inevitable consequences. They constitute a train of necessities
of which we can sometimes choose the first, but which then evolve
without consulting us. We are free to make a decision, but
powerless to avert its consequences.
The first measures of the Constituent Assembly were
rational and voluntary, but the results which followed were
beyond all will or reason or foresight.
Which of the men of 1789 would have ventured to desire or
predict the death of Louis XVI., the wars
of La Vendée, the Terror, the permanent guillotine and the
final anarchy, or the ensuing return to
tradition and order, guided by the iron hand of a soldier?
In the development of events which ensued from the early
actions of the revolutionary Assemblies the most striking,
perhaps, was the rise and development of the government of the
crowd—of mob rule.
Behind the facts which we have been considering—the
taking of the Bastille, the invasion of Versailles, the massacres
of September, the attack on the Tuileries, the murder of the
Swiss Guards, and the downfall and imprisonment of the king—we
can readily perceive the laws affecting the psychology of crowds
and their leaders.
We shall now see that the power of the multitude will
progressively increase, overcome all other powers, and finally
replace them.
