1. Psychological Causes of Revolutionary
Violence.
WE have shown in the course of the preceding chapters that the
revolutionary theories constituted a new faith.
Humanitarian and sentimental, they exalted liberty and
fraternity. But, as in many religions, we can observe a complete
contradiction between doctrine and action. In practice no
liberty was tolerated, and fraternity was quickly replaced by
frenzied massacres.
This opposition between principles and conduct results
from the intolerance which accompanies all beliefs. A religion
may be steeped in humanitarianism and forbearance, but its
sectaries will always want to impose it on others by force, so
that violence is the inevitable result.
The cruelties of the Revolution were thus the inherent
results of the propagation of the new dogmas. The Inquisition,
the religious wars of France, St. Bartholomew's Day, the
revocation of the Edict of Nantes, the “Dragonnades,” the
persecution of the Jansenists, &c., belonged to the same family
as the Terror and derived from the same psychological sources.
Louis XIV. was not a cruel king, yet under the
impulse of his faith he drove hundreds of thousands of
Protestants out of France, after first shooting down a
considerable number and sending others to the galleys.
The methods of persuasion adopted by all believers are by
no means a consequence of their fear of the dissentient
opposition. Protestants and Jansenists were anything but
dangerous under Louis XIV. Intolerance arises above all from the
indignation experienced by a mind which is convinced that it
possesses the most dazzling verities against the men who deny
those truths, and who are surely not acting in good faith. How
can one support error when one has the necessary strength to wipe
it out?
Thus have reasoned the believers of all ages. Thus
reasoned Louis XIV. and the men of the Terror. These latter also
were convinced that they were in possession of absolute truths,
which they believed to be obvious, and whose triumph was certain
to regenerate humanity. Could they be more tolerant toward their
adversaries than the Church and the kings of France had been
toward heretics?
We are forced to believe that terror is a method which all
believers regard as a necessity, since from the beginning of the
ages religious codes have always been based upon terror. To
force men to observe their prescriptions, believers have sought
to terrify them with threats of an eternal hell of torments.
The apostles of the Jacobin belief behaved as their
fathers had done, and employed the same methods. If similar
events occurred again we should see identical actions repeated.
If a new belief—Socialism, for example—were to triumph
tomorrow, it would be led
to employ methods of propaganda like those of the Inquisition and
the Terror.
But were we to regard the Jacobin Terror solely as the
result of a religious movement, we should not completely
apprehend it. Around a triumphant religious belief, as we saw in
the case of the Reformation, gather a host of individual
interests which are dependent on that belief. The Terror was
directed by a few fanatical apostles, but beside this small
number of ardent proselytes, whose narrow minds dreamed of
regenerating the world, were great numbers of men who lived only
to enrich themselves. They rallied readily around the first
victorious leader who promised to enable them to enjoy the
results of their pillage.
“The Terrorists of the Revolution,” writes Albert
Sorel, “resorted to the Terror because they wished to remain
in power, and were incapable of doing so by other means. They
employed it for their own salvation, and after the event they
stated that their motive was the salvation of the State. Before
it became a system it was a means of government, and the system
was only invented to justify the means.”
We may thus fully agree with the following verdict on the
Terror, written by Emile Ollivier in his work on the Revolution:
“The Terror was above all a Jacquerie, a regularised pillage,
the vastest enterprise of theft that any association of criminals
has ever organised.”
