The Psychology of Revolution - Gustave le Bon (the beach read .txt) 📗
- Author: Gustave le Bon
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In reality the writer sees events as the painter sees a landscape—that is, through his own temperament; through his character and the mind of the race.
A number of artists, placed before the same landscape, would necessarily interpret it in as many different fashions. Some would lay stress upon details neglected by others. Each reproduction would thus be a personal work—that is to say, would be interpreted by a certain form of sensibility.
It is the same with the writer. We can no more speak of the impartiality of the historian than we can speak of the impartiality of the painter.
Certainly the historian may confine himself to the reproduction of documents, and this is the present tendency. But these documents, for periods as near us as the Revolution, are so abundant that a man’s whole life would not suffice to go through them. Therefore the historian must make a choice.
Consciously sometimes, but more often unconsciously, the author will select the material which best corresponds with his political, moral, and social opinions.
It is therefore impossible, unless he contents himself with simple chronologies summing up each event with a few words and a date, to produce a truly impartial volume of history. No author could be impartial; and it is not to be regretted. The claim to impartiality, so common to-day, results in those flat, gloomy, and prodigiously wearisome works which render the comprehension of a period completely impossible.
Should the historian, under a pretext of impartiality, abstain from judging men—that is, from speaking in tones of admiration or reprobation?
This question, I admit, allows of two very different solutions, each of which is perfectly correct, according to the point of view assumed—that of the moralist or that of the psychologist.
The moralist must think exclusively of the interest of society, and must judge men only according to that interest. By the very fact that it exists and wishes to continue to exist a society is obliged to admit a certain number of rules, to have an indestructible standard of good and evil, and consequently to create very definite distinctions between vice and virtue. It thus finally creates average types, to which the man of the period approaches more or less closely, and from which he cannot depart very widely without peril to society.
It is by such similar types and the rules derived from social necessities that the moralist must judge the men of the past. Praising those which were useful and blaming the rest, he thus helps to form the moral types which are indispensable to the progress of civilisation and which may serve others as models. Poets such as Corneille, for example, create heroes superior to the majority of men, and possibly inimitable; but they thereby help greatly to stimulate our efforts. The example of heroes must always be set before a people in order to ennoble its mind.
Such is the moralist’s point of view. That of the psychologist would be quite different. While a society has no right to be tolerant, because its first duty is to live, the psychologist may remain indifferent. Considering things as a scientist, he no longer asks their utilitarian value, but seeks merely to explain them.
His situation is that of the observer before any phenomenon. It is obviously difficult to read in cold blood that Carrier ordered his victims to be buried up to the neck so that they might then be blinded and subjected to horrible torments. Yet if we wish to comprehend such acts we must be no more indignant than the naturalist before the spider slowly devouring a fly. As soon as the reason is moved it is no longer reason, and can explain nothing.
The functions of the historian and the psychologist are not, as we see, identical, but of both we may demand the endeavour, by a wise interpretation of the facts, to discover, under the visible evidences, the invisible forces which determine them.
THE PSYCHOLOGICAL FOUNDATIONS OF THE ANCIEN REGIME
1. The Absolute Monarchy and the Bases of the Ancien Regime.
Many historians assure us that the Revolution was directed against the autocracy of the monarchy. In reality the kings of France had ceased to be absolute monarchs long before its outbreak.
Only very late in history—not until the reign of Louis XIV.—did they finally obtain incontestable power. All the preceding sovereigns, even the most powerful, such as Francis I., for example, had to sustain a constant struggle either against the seigneurs, or the clergy, or the parliaments, and they did not always win. Francis himself had not sufficient power to protect his most intimate friends against the Sorbonne and the Parliament. His friend and councillor Berquin, having offended the Sorbonne, was arrested upon the order of the latter body. The king ordered his release, which was refused. He was obliged to send archers to remove him from the Conciergerie, and could find no other means of protecting him than that of keeping him beside him in the Louvre. The Sorbonne by no means considered itself beaten. Profiting by the king’s absence, it arrested Berquin again and had him tried by Parliament. Condemned at ten in the morning, he was burned alive at noon.
Built up very gradually, the power of the kings of France was not absolute until the time of Louis XIV. It then rapidly declined, and it would be truly difficult to speak of the absolutism of Louis XVI.
This pretended master was the slave of his court, his ministers, the clergy, and the nobles. He did what they forced him to do and rarely what he wished. Perhaps no Frenchman was so little free as the king.
The great power of the monarchy resided originally in the Divine origin which was attributed to it, and in the traditions which had accumulated during the ages. These formed the real social framework of the country.
The true cause of the disappearance of the ancien regime was simply the weakening of the traditions which served as its foundations. When after repeated criticism it could find no more defenders, the ancien regime crumbled like a building whose foundations have been destroyed.
2. The Inconveniences of the Ancien Regime
A long-established system of government will always finally seem acceptable to the people governed. Habit masks its inconveniences, which appear only when men begin to think. Then they ask how they could ever have supported them. The truly unhappy man is the man who believes himself miserable.
It was precisely this belief which was gaining ground at the time of the Revolution, under the influence of the writers whose work we shall presently study. Then the imperfections of the ancien regime stared all men in the face. They were numerous; it is enough to mention a few.
Despite the apparent authority of the central power, the kingdom, formed by the successive conquest of independent provinces, was divided into territories each of which had its own laws and customs, and each of which paid different imposts. Internal customs-houses separated them. The unity of France was thus somewhat artificial. It represented an aggregate of various countries which the repeated efforts of the kings, including Louis XIV., had not succeeded in wholly unifying. The most useful effect of the Revolution was this very unification.
To such material divisions were added social divisions constituted by different classes—nobles, clergy, and the Third Estate, whose rigid barriers could only with the utmost difficulty be crossed.
Regarding the division of the classes as one of its sources of power, the ancien regime had rigorously maintained that division. This became the principal cause of the hatreds which the system inspired. Much of the violence of the triumphant bourgeoisie represented vengeance for a long past of disdain and oppression. The wounds of self-love are the most difficult of all to forget. The Third Estate had suffered many such wounds. At a meeting of the States General in 1614, at which its representatives were obliged to remain bareheaded on their knees, one member of the Third Estate having dared to say that the three orders were like three brothers, the spokesman of the nobles replied “that there was no fraternity between it and the Third; that the nobles did not wish the children of cobblers and tanners to call them their brothers.”
Despite the march of enlightenment the nobles and the clergy obstinately preserved their privileges and their demands, no longer justifiable now that these classes had ceased to render services.
Kept from the exercise of public functions by the royal power, which distrusted them, and progressively replaced by a bourgeoisie which was more and more learned and capable, the social role of nobility and clergy was only an empty show. This point has been luminously expounded by Taine:—
“Since the nobility, having lost its special capacity, and the Third Estate, having acquired general capacity, were now on a level in respect of education and aptitudes, the inequality which divided them had become hurtful and useless. Instituted by custom, it was no longer ratified by the consciousness, and the Third Estate was with reason angered by privileges which nothing justified, neither the capacity of the nobles nor the incapacity of the bourgeoisie.”
By reason of the rigidity of castes established by a long past we cannot see what could have persuaded the nobles and the clergy to renounce their privileges. Certainly they did finally abandon them one memorable evening, when events forced them to do so; but then it was too late, and the Revolution, unchained, was pursuing its course.
It is certain that modern progress would successively have established all that the Revolution effected—the equality of citizens before the law, the suppression of the privileges of birth, &c. Despite the conservative spirit of the Latins, these things would have been won, as they were by the majority of the peoples. We might in this manner have been saved twenty years of warfare and devastation; but we must have had a different mental constitution, and, above all, different statesmen.
The profound hostility of the bourgeoisie against the classes maintained above it by tradition was one of the great factors of the Revolution, and perfectly explains why, after its triumph, the first class despoiled the vanquished of their wealth. They behaved as conquerors—like William the Conqueror, who, after the conquest of England, distributed the soil among his soldiers.
But although the bourgeoisie detested the nobility they had no hatred for royalty, and did not regard it as revocable. The maladdress of the king and his appeals to foreign powers only very gradually made him unpopular.
The first Assembly never dreamed of founding a republic. Extremely royalist, in fact, it thought simply to substitute a constitutional for an absolute monarchy. Only the consciousness of its increasing power exasperated it against the resistance of the king; but it dared not overthrow him.
3. Life under the Ancien Regime.
It is difficult to form a very clear idea of life under the ancien regime, and, above all, of the real situation of the peasants.
The writers who defend the Revolution as theologians defend religious dogmas draw such gloomy pictures of the existence of the peasants under the ancien regime that we ask ourselves how it was that all these unhappy creatures had not died of hunger long before. A good example of this style of writing may be found in a book by M. A. Rambaud, formerly professor at the Sorbonne, published under the title History of the French Revolution. One notices especially an engraving bearing the legend, Poverty of Peasants under Louis XIV. In the foreground a man is fighting some dogs for some bones, which for that matter are already quite fleshless. Beside him a wretched fellow is twisting himself and compressing his stomach. Farther back a woman lying on the ground is eating grass.
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