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.
