The Psychology of Revolution - Gustave le Bon (the beach read .txt) 📗

THE PART PLAYED BY THE PEOPLE IN REVOLUTIONS

1. The stability and malleability of the national mind.

The knowledge of a people at any given moment of its history involves an understanding of its environment and above all of its past. Theoretically one may deny that past, as did the men of the Revolution, as many men of the present day have done, but its influence remains indestructible.

In the past, built up by slow accumulations of centuries, was formed the aggregation of thoughts, sentiments, traditions, and prejudices constituting the national mind which makes the strength of a race. Without it no progress is possible. Each generation would necessitate a fresh beginning.

The aggregate composing the soul of a people is solidly established only if it possesses a certain rigidity, but this rigidity must not pass a certain limit, or there would be no such thing as malleability.

Without rigidity the ancestral soul would have no fixity, and without malleability it could not adapt itself to the changes of environment resulting from the progress of civilization.

Excessive malleability of the national mind impels a people to incessant revolutions. Excess of rigidity leads it to decadence. Living species, like the races of humanity, disappear when, too fixedly established by a long past, they become incapable of adapting themselves to new conditions of existence.

Few peoples have succeeded in effecting a just equilibrium between these two contrary qualities of stability and malleability. The Romans in antiquity and the English in modern times may be cited among those who have best attained it.

The peoples whose mind is most fixed and established often effect the most violent revolutions. Not having succeeded in evolving progressively, in adapting themselves to changes of environment, they are forced to adapt themselves violently when such adaptation becomes indispensable.

Stability is only acquired very slowly. The history of a race is above all the story of its long efforts to establish its mind. So long as it has not succeeded it forms a horde of barbarians without cohesion and strength. After the invasions of the end of the Roman Empire France took several centuries to form a national soul.

She finally achieved one; but in the course of centuries this soul finally became too rigid. With a little more malleability, the ancient monarchy would have been slowly transformed as it was elsewhere, and we should have avoided, together with the Revolution and its consequences, the heavy task of remaking a national soul.

The preceding considerations show us the part of race in the genesis of revolutions, and explain why the same revolutions will produce such different effects in different countries; why, for example, the ideas of the French Revolution, welcomed with such enthusiasm by some peoples, were rejected by others.

Certainly England, although a very stable country, has suffered two revolutions and slain a king; but the mould of her mental armour was at once stable enough to retain the acquisitions of the past and malleable enough to modify them only within the necessary limits. Never did England dream, as did the men of the French Revolution, of destroying the ancestral heritage in order to erect a new society in the name of reason.

“While the Frenchman,” writes M. A. Sorel, “despised his government, detested his clergy, hated the nobility, and revolted against the laws, the Englishman was proud of his religion, his constitution, his aristocracy, his House of Lords. These were like so many towers of the formidable Bastille in which he entrenched himself, under the British standard, to judge Europe and cover her with contempt. He admitted that the command was disputed inside the fort, but no stranger must approach.”

The influence of race in the destiny of the peoples appears plainly in the history of the perpetual revolutions of the Spanish republics of South America. Composed of half-castes, that is to say, of individuals whose diverse heredities have dissociated their ancestral characteristics, these populations have no national soul and therefore no stability. A people of half-castes is always ungovernable.

If we would learn more of the differences of political capacity which the racial factor creates we must examine the same nation as governed by two races successively.

The event is not rare in history. It has been manifested in a striking manner of late in Cuba and the Philippines, which passed suddenly from the rule of Spain to that of the United States.

We know in what anarchy and poverty Cuba existed under Spanish rule; we know, too, to what a degree of prosperity the island was brought in a few years when it fell into the hands of the United States.

The same experience was repeated in the Philippines, which for centuries had been governed by Spain. Finally the country was no more than a vast jungle, the home of epidemics of every kind, where a miserable population vegetated without commerce or industry. After a few years of American rule the country was entirely transformed: malaria, yellow fever, plague and cholera had entirely disappeared. The swamps were drained; the country was covered with railways, factories and schools. In thirteen years the mortality was reduced by two-thirds.

It is to such examples that we must refer the theorist who has not yet grasped the profound significance of the word race, and how far the ancestral soul of a people rules over its destiny.

2. How the people regards Revolution.

The part of the people has been the same in all revolutions. It is never the people that conceives them nor directs them. Its activity is released by means of leaders.

Only when the direct interests of the people are involved do we see, as recently in Champagne, any fraction of the people rising spontaneously. A movement thus localised constitutes a mere riot.

Revolution is easy when the leaders are very influential. Of this Portugal and Brazil have recently furnished proofs. But new ideas penetrate the people very slowly indeed. Generally it accepts a revolution without knowing why, and when by chance it does succeed in understanding why, the revolution is over long ago.

The people will create a revolution because it is persuaded to do so, but it does not understand very much of the ideas of its leaders; it interprets them in its own fashion, and this fashion is by no means that of the true authors of the revolution. The French Revolution furnished a striking example of this fact.

The Revolution of 1789 had as its real object the substitution of the power of the nobility by that of the bourgeoisie; that is, an old elite which had become incapable was to be replaced by a new elite which did possess capacity.

There was little question of the people in this first phase of the Revolution. The sovereignty of the people was proclaimed, but it amounted only to the right of electing its representatives.

Extremely illiterate, not hoping, like the middle classes, to ascend the social scale, not in any way feeling itself the equal of the nobles, and not aspiring ever to become their equal, the people had views and interests very different to those of the upper classes of society.

The struggles of the assembly with the royal power led it to call for the intervention of the people in these struggles. It intervened more and more, and the bourgeois revolution rapidly became a popular revolution.

An idea having no force of its own, and acting only by virtue of possessing an affective and mystic substratum which supports it, the theoretical ideas of the bourgeoisie, before they could act on the people, had to be transformed into a new and very definite faith, springing from obvious practical interests.

This transformation was rapidly effected when the people heard the men envisaged by it as the Government assuring it that it was the equal of its former masters. It began to regard itself as a victim, and proceeded to pillage, burn, and massacre, imagining that in so doing it was exercising a right.

The great strength of the revolutionary principles was that they gave a free course to the instincts of primitive barbarity which had been restrained by the secular and inhibitory action of environment, tradition, and law.

All the social bonds that formerly contained the multitude were day by day dissolving, so that it conceived a notion of unlimited power, and the joy of seeing its ancient masters ferreted out and despoiled. Having become the sovereign people, were not all things permissible to it?

The motto of Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, a true manifestation of hope and faith at the beginning of the Revolution, soon merely served to cover a legal justification of the sentiments of jealousy, cupidity, and hatred of superiors, the true motives of crowds unrestrained by discipline. This is why the Revolution so soon ended in disorder, violence, and anarchy.

From the moment when the Revolution descended from the middle to the lower classes of society, it ceased to be a domination of the instinctive by the rational, and became, on the contrary, the effort of the instinctive to overpower the rational.

This legal triumph of the atavistic instincts was terrible. The whole effort of societies an effort indispensable to their continued existence—had always been to restrain, thanks to the power of tradition, customs, and codes, certain natural instincts which man has inherited from his primitive animality. It is possible to dominate them—and the more a people does overcome them the more civilised it is—but they cannot be destroyed. The influence of various exciting