Part 5 (1/2)

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 cla.s.ses 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 causes will readily result in their reappearance.

This is why the liberation of popular pa.s.sions is so dangerous. The torrent, once escaped from its bed, does not return until it has spread devastation far and wide. ”Woe to him who stirs up the dregs of a nation,” said Rivarol at the beginning of the Revolution. ”There is no age of enlightenment for the populace.”

3. The supposed Part of the People during Revolution.

The laws of the psychology of crowds show us that the people never acts without leaders, and that although it plays a considerable part in revolutions by following and exaggerating the impulses received, it never directs its own movements.

In all political revolutions we discover the action of leaders. They do not create the ideas which serve as the basis of revolutions, but they utilise them as a means of action. Ideas, leaders, armies, and crowds const.i.tute four elements which all have their part to play in revolutions.

The crowd, roused by the leaders, acts especially by means of its ma.s.s. Its action is comparable to that of the sh.e.l.l which perforates an armour-plate by the momentum of a force it did not create. Rarely does the crowd understand anything of the revolutions accomplished with its a.s.sistance. It obediently follows its leaders without even trying to find out what they want. It overthrew Charles X. because of his Ordinances without having any idea of the contents of the latter, and would have been greatly embarra.s.sed had it been asked at a later date why it overthrew Louis-Philippe.

Deceived by appearances, many authors, from Michelet to Aulard, have supposed that the people effected our great Revolution.

”The princ.i.p.al actor,” said Michelet, ”is the people.”

”It is an error to say,” writes M. Aulard, ”that the French Revolution was effected by a few distinguished people or a few heroes... . I believe that in the whole history of the period included between 1789 and 1799 not a single person stands out who led or shaped events: neither Louis XVI. nor Mirabeau nor Danton nor Robespierre. Must we say that it was the French people that was the real hero of the French Revolution? Yes-provided we see the French people not as a mult.i.tude but as a number of organised groups.”

And in a recent work M. A. Cochin insists on this conception of popular action.

”And here is the wonder: Michelet is right. In proportion as we know them better the facts seem to consecrate the fiction: this crowd, without chiefs and without laws, the very image of chaos, did for five years govern and command, speak and act, with a precision, a consistency, and an entirety that were marvellous. Anarchy gave lessons in order and discipline to the defeated party of order ... twenty-five millions of men, spread over an area of 30,000 square leagues, acted as one.”

Certainly if this simultaneous conduct of the people had been spontaneous, as the author supposes, it would have been marvellous. M. Aulard himself understands very well the impossibilities of such a phenomenon, for he is careful, in speaking of the people, to say that he is speaking of groups, and that these groups may have been guided by leaders:-

”And what, then, cemented the national unity? Who saved this nation, attacked by the king and rent by civil war? Was it Danton? Was it Robespierre? Was it Carnot? Certainly these individual men were of service: but unity was in fact maintained and independence a.s.sured by the grouping of the French into communes and popular societies-people's clubs. It was the munic.i.p.al and Jacobin organisation of France that forced the coalition of Europe to retreat. But in each group, if we look more closely, there were two or three individuals more capable than the rest, who, whether leaders or led, executed decisions and had the appearance of leaders, but who (if, for instance, we read the proceedings of the people's clubs) seem to us to have drawn their strength far more from their group than from themselves.

M. Aulard's mistake consists in supposing that all these groups were derived ”from a spontaneous movement of fraternity and reason.” France at that time was covered with thousands of little clubs, receiving a single impulsion from the great Jacobin Club of Paris, and obeying it with perfect docility. This is what reality teaches us, though the illusions of the Jacobins do not permit them to accept the fact.[3]

[3] In the historical manuals which M. Aulard has prepared for the use of cla.s.ses in collaboration with M. Debidour the role attributed to the people as an ent.i.ty is even more marked. We see it intervening continually and spontaneously; here are a few examples:-

The ”Day” of June the 20th: ”The king dismissed the Girondist members. The people of Paris, indignant, rose spontaneously and invaded the Tuileries.”

The ”Day” of August 10th: ”The Legislative a.s.sembly dared not overthrow it; it was the people of Paris, aided by the Federals of the Departments, who effected this revolution at the price of its blood.”

The conflict of the Girondists and the Mountain: ”This discord in the face of the enemy was dangerous. The people put an end to it on the days of the 31st of May and the 2nd of June, 1793, when it forced the Convention to expel the leaders of the Gironde from its midst and to decree their arrest.”

4. The Popular Ent.i.ty and its Const.i.tuent Elements.

In order to answer to certain theoretical conceptions the people was erected into a mystic ent.i.ty, endowed with all the powers and all the virtues, incessantly praised by the politicians, and overwhelmed with flattery. We shall see what we are to make of this conception of the part played by the people in the French Revolution.

To the Jacobins of this epoch, as to those of our own days, this popular ent.i.ty const.i.tutes a superior personality possessing the attributes, peculiar to divinities, of never having to answer for its actions and never making a mistake. Its wishes must be humbly acceded. The people may kill, burn, ravage, commit the most frightful cruelties, glorify its hero to-day and throw him into the gutter to-morrow; it is all one; the politicians will not cease to vaunt its virtues, its high wisdom, and to bow to its every decision.[4]

[4] These pretensions do at least seem to be growing untenable to the more advanced republicans.

”The rage with the socialists” writes M. Clemenceau, ”is to endow with all the virtues, as though by a superhuman reason, the crowd whose reason cannot be much to boast of.” The famous statesman might say more correctly that reason not only cannot be prominent in the crowd but is practically nonexistent.

Now in what does this ent.i.ty really consist, this mysterious fetich which revolutionists have revered for more than a century?