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 Gustave Le Bon, The Psychology of Revolution, 77
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.
Chapter II: The Psychological Foundations of the Ancien Régime.
1. The Absolute Monarchy and the Bases of the Ancien Régime.
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 Gustave Le Bon, The Psychology of Revolution, 78
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 régime was simply the weakening of the traditions which served as its foundations. When after repeated criticism it could find no more defenders, the ancien régime crumbled like a building whose foundations have been destroyed.
2. The Inconveniences of the Ancien Régime.
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 régime 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 régime had rigorously maintained that division. This became the principal Gustave Le Bon, The Psychology of Revolution, 79
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 bare-headed 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 rôle 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, etc. 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.
Gustave Le Bon, The Psychology of Revolution, 80
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 Régime.
It is difficult to form a very clear idea of life under the ancien régime, 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 régime 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. At the back of the landscape figures of which one cannot say whether they are corpses or persons starving are also stretched on the soil. As an example of the administration of the ancien régime the same author assures us that “a place in the police cost 300 livres and brought in 400,000.” Such figures surely indicate a great disinterestedness on the part of those who sold such productive employment! He also informs us “that it cost only 120 livres to get people arrested,” and that “under Louis XV more than 150,000 lettres de cachet were distributed.”
Gustave Le Bon, The Psychology of Revolution, 81
The majority of books dealing with the Revolution are conceived with as little impartiality and critical spirit, which is one reason why this period is really so little known to us.
Certainly there is no lack of documents, but they are absolutely contradictory.
To the celebrated description of La Bruyére we may oppose the enthusiastic picture drawn by the English traveller Young of the prosperous condition of the peasants of some of the French provinces.
Were they really crushed by taxation, and did they, as has been stated, pay four-fifths of their revenue instead of a fifth as to-day? Impossible to say with certainty. One capital fact, however, seems to prove that under the ancien régime the situation of the inhabitants of the rural districts could not have been so very wretched, since it seems established that more than a third of the soil had been bought by peasants.
We are better informed as to the financial system. It was very oppressive and extremely complicated. The budgets usually showed deficits, and the imposts of all kinds were raised by tyrannical farmers-general. At the very moment of the Revolution this condition of the finances became the cause of universal discontent, which is expressed in the cahiers of the States General. Let us remark that these cahiers did not represent a previous state of affairs, but an actual condition due to a crisis of poverty produced by the bad harvest of 1788
and the hard winter of 1789. What would these cahiers have told us had they been written ten years earlier?
Despite these unfavourable circumstances the cahiers contained no revolutionary ideas. The most advanced merely asked that taxes should be imposed only with the consent of the States General and paid by all alike. The same cahiers sometimes expressed a wish that the power of the king should be limited by a Constitution defining his rights and those of the nation. If these wishes had been granted a constitutional monarchy could very easily have been substituted for the absolute monarchy, and the Revolution would probably have been avoided.
Unhappily, the nobility and the clergy were too strong and Louis XVI too weak for such a solution to be possible.
Moreover, it would have been rendered extremely difficult by the demands of the bourgeoisie, who claimed to substitute themselves for the nobles, and were the real authors of the Revolution. The movement started by the middle classes Gustave Le Bon, The Psychology of Revolution, 82
rapidly exceeded their hopes, needs, and aspirations. They had claimed equality for their own profit, but the people also demanded equality. The Revolution thus finally became the popular government which it was not and had no intention of becoming at the outset.
4. Evolution of Monarchical Feeling during the Revolution.
Despite the slow evolution of the affective elements, it is certain that during the Revolution the sentiments, not of the people only, but also of the revolutionary Assemblies with regard to the monarchy, underwent a very rapid change. Between the moment when the legislators of the first Assembly surrounded Louis XVI with respect and the moment when his head was cut off a very few years had elapsed.
These changes, superficial rather than profound, were in reality a mere transposition of sentiments of the same order. The love which the men of this period professed for the king was transferred to the new Government which had inherited his power. The mechanism of such a transfer may easily be demonstrated.
Under the ancien régime, the sovereign, holding his power by Divine right, was for this reason invested with a kind of supernatural power. His people looked up to him from every corner of the country.
This mystic belief in the absolute power of royalty was shattered only when repeated experience proved that the power attributed to the adored being was fictitious. He then lost his prestige. Now, when prestige is lost the crowd will not forgive the fallen idol for deluding them, and seek anew the idol without which they cannot exist.
From the outset of the Revolution numerous facts, which were daily repeated, revealed to the most fervent believers the fact that royalty no longer possessed any power, and that there were other powers capable, not only of contending with royalty, but possessed of superior force.
What, for instance, was thought of the royal power by the multitudes who saw the king held in check by the Assembly, and incapable, in the heart of Paris, of defending his strongest fortress against the attacks of armed bands?
The royal weakness thus being obvious, the power of the Assembly was increasing. Now, in the eyes of the crowd weakness has no prestige; it turns always to force.
Gustave Le Bon, The Psychology of Revolution, 83
In the Assemblies feeling was very fluid, but did not evolve very rapidly, for which reason the monarchical faith survived the taking of the Bastille the flight of the king, and his understanding with foreign sovereigns.
The royalist faith was still so powerful that the Parisian riots and the events which led to the execution of Louis XVI were not enough finally to destroy, in the provinces, the species of secular piety which enveloped the old monarchy.8
It persisted in a great part of France during the whole of the Revolution, and was the origin of the royalist conspiracies and insurrections in various departments which the Convention had such trouble to suppress. The royalist faith had disappeared in Paris, where the weakness of the king was too plainly visible; but in the provinces the royal power, representing God on earth, still retained its prestige.
The royalist sentiments of the people must have been deeply rooted to survive the guillotine. The royalist movements persisted, indeed, during the whole of the Revolution, and were accentuated under the Directory, when forty-nine departments sent royalist deputies to Paris, which provoked the Directory to the coup d’État of Fructidor.
This monarchical-feeling, with difficulty repressed by the Revolution, contributed to the success of Bonaparte when he came to occupy the throne of the ancient kings, and in great measure to re-establish the ancien régime.
Chapter III: Mental Anarchy at the Time of the Revolution and the Influence Attributed to the Philosophers.
1. Origin and Propagation of Revolutionary Ideas.
The outward life of men in every age is moulded upon an inward life consisting of a framework of traditions, sentiments, and moral influences which direct their conduct and maintain certain fundamental notions which they accept without discussion.
Let the resistance of this social framework weaken, and ideas which could have had no force before will germinate and develop. Certain theories whose success was enormous at the time of the Revolution would have encountered an impregnable wall two centuries earlier.
The aim of these considerations is to recall to the reader the fact that the outward events of revolutions are always a consequence of invisible transfor-Gustave Le Bon, The Psychology of Revolution, 84
mations which have slowly gone forward in men’s minds. Any profound study of a revolution necessitates a study of the mental soil upon which the ideas that direct its course have to germinate.
Generally slow in the extreme, the evolution of ideas is often invisible for a whole generation. Its extent can only be grasped by comparing the mental condition of the same social classes at the two extremities of the curve which the mind has followed. To realise the different conceptions of royalty entertained by educated men under Louis XIV and Louis XVI, we must compare the political theories of Bossuet and Turgot.
Bossuet expressed the general conceptions of his time concerning the absolute monarchy when he based the authority of a Government upon the will of God,
“sole judge of the actions of kings, always irresponsible before men.” Religious faith was then as strong as the monarchical faith from which it seemed inseparable, and no philosopher could have shaken it.
The writings of the reforming ministers of Louis XVI, those of Turgot, for instance, are animated by quite another spirit. Of the Divine right of kings there is hardly a word, and the rights of the peoples begin to be clearly defined.
Many events had contributed to prepare for such an evolution — unfortunate wars, famines, imposts, general poverty at the end of the reign of Louis XV, etc. Slowly destroyed, respect for monarchical authority was replaced by a mental revolt which was ready to manifest itself as soon as occasion should arise.
When once the mental framework commences to crumble the end comes rapidly. This is why at the time of the Revolution ideas were so quickly propagated which were by no means new, but which until then had exerted no influence, as they had not fallen on fruitful ground.
Yet the ideas which were then so attractive and effectual had often been expressed. For a long time they had inspired the politics of England. Two thousand years earlier the Greek and Latin authors had written in defence of liberty, had cursed tyrants, and proclaimed the rights of popular sovereignty.
The middle classes who effected the Revolution, although, like their fathers, they had learned all these things in text-books, were not in any degree moved by them, because the moment when such ideas could move them had not arrived. How should the people have been impressed by them at a time when all men were accustomed to regard all hierarchies as natural necessities?
Gustave Le Bon, The Psychology of Revolution, 85
The actual influence of the philosophers in the genesis of the Revolution was not that which was attributed to them. They revealed nothing new, but they developed the critical spirit which no dogma can resist once the way is prepared for its downfall.
Under the influence of this developing critical spirit things which were no longer very greatly respected came to be respected less and less. When tradition and prestige had disappeared the social edifice suddenly fell.
This progressive disaggregation finally descended to the people, but was not commenced by the people. The people follows examples, but never sets them.
The philosophers, who could not have exerted any influence over the people, did exert a great influence over the enlightened portion of the nation. The unemployed nobility, who had long been ousted from their old functions, and who were consequently inclined to be censorious, followed their leadership.
Incapable of foresight, the nobles were the first to break with the traditions that were their only raison d’être. As steeped in humanitarianism and rationalism as the bourgeoisie of to-day, they continually sapped their own privileges by their criticisms. As to-day, the most ardent reformers were found among the favourites of fortune. The aristocracy encouraged dissertations on the social contract, the rights of man, and the equality of citizens. At the theatre it applauded plays which criticised privileges, the arbitrariness and the incapacity of men in high places, and abuses of all kinds.
As soon as men lose confidence in the foundations of the mental framework which guides their conduct they feel at first uneasy and then discontented. All classes felt their old motives of action gradually disappearing. Things that had seemed sacred for centuries were now sacred no longer.
The censorious spirit of the nobility and of the writers of the day would not have sufficed to move the heavy load of tradition, but that its action was added to that of other powerful influences. We have already stated, in citing Bossuet, that under the ancien régime the religious and civil governments, widely separated in our days, were intimately connected. To injure one was inevitably to injure the other. Now, even before the monarchical idea was shaken the force of religious tradition was greatly diminished among cultivated men. The constant progress of knowledge had sent an increasing number of minds from theology to science by opposing the truth observed to the truth revealed.
This mental evolution, although as yet very vague, was sufficient to show that Gustave Le Bon, The Psychology of Revolution, 86
the traditions which for so many centuries had guided men had not the value which had been attributed to them, and that it would soon be necessary to replace them.
But where discover the new elements which might; take the place of tradition?
Where seek the magic ring which would raise a new social edifice on the remains of that which no longer contented men?
Men were agreed in attributing to reason the power that tradition and the gods seemed to have lost. How could its force be doubted? Its discoveries having been innumerable, was it not legitimate to suppose that by applying it to the construction of societies it would entirely transform them? Its possible function increased very rapidly in the thoughts of the more enlightened, in proportion as tradition seemed more and more to be distrusted.
The sovereign power attributed to reason must be regarded as the culminating idea which not only engendered the Revolution but governed it throughout.
During the whole Revolution men gave themselves up to the most persevering efforts to break with the past, and to erect society upon a new plan dictated by logic.
Slowly filtering downward, the rationalistic theories of the philosophers meant to the people simply that all the things which had been regarded as worthy of respect were now no longer worthy. Men being declared equal, the old masters need no longer be obeyed.
The multitude easily succeeded in ceasing to respect what the upper classes themselves no longer respected. When the barrier of respect was down the Revolution was accomplished.
The first result of this new mentality was a general insubordination. Mme.
Vigée Lebrun relates that on the promenade at Longchamps men of the people leaped on the footboards of the carriages, saying, “Next year you will be behind and we shall be inside.”
The populace was not alone in manifesting insubordination and discontent.
These sentiments were general on the eve of the Revolution. “The lesser clergy,” says Taine, “are hostile to the prelates; the provincial gentry to the nobility of the court; the vassals to the seigneurs; the peasants to the towns-men,” etc.
This state of mind, which had been communicated from the nobles and clergy to the people, also invaded the army. At the moment the States General were Gustave Le Bon, The Psychology of Revolution, 87
opened Necker said: “We are not sure of the troops.” The officers were becoming humanitarian and philosophical. The soldiers, recruited from the lowest class of the population, did not philosophise, but they no longer obeyed.
In their feeble minds the ideas of equality meant simply the suppression of all leaders and masters, and therefore of all obedience. In 1790 more than twenty régiments threatened their officers, and sometimes, as at Nancy, threw them into prison.
The mental anarchy which, after spreading through all the classes of society, finally invaded the army was the principal cause of the disappearance of the ancien régime. “It was the defection of the army affected by the ideas of the Third Estate,” wrote Rivarol, “that destroyed royalty.” 2. The supposed Influence of the Philosophers of the Eighteenth Century upon the Genesis of the Revolution — Their dislike of Democracy.
Although the philosophers who have been supposed the inspirers of the French Revolution did attack certain privileges and abuses, we must not for that reason regard them as partisans of popular government. Democracy, whose rôle in Greek history was familiar to them, was generally highly antipathetic to them. They were not ignorant of the destruction and violence which are its invariable accompaniments, and knew that in the time of Aristotle it was already defined as “a State in which everything, even the law, depends on the multitude set up as a tyrant and governed by a few declamatory speakers.” Pierre Bayle, the true forerunner of Voltaire, recalled in the following terms the consequences of popular government in Athens: —
“If one considers this history, which displays at great length the tumult of the assemblies, the factions dividing the city, the seditious disturbing it, the most illustrious subjects persecuted, exiled, and punished by death at the will of a violent windbag, one would conclude that this people, which so prided itself on its liberty, was really the slave of a small number of caballers, whom they called demagogues, and who made it turn now in this direction, now in that, as their passions changed, almost as the sea heaps the waves now one way, now another, according to the winds which trouble it. You will seek in vain in Macedonia, which was a monarchy, for as many examples of tyranny as Athenian history will afford.”
Montesquieu had no greater admiration for the democracy. Having described Gustave Le Bon, The Psychology of Revolution, 88
the three forms of government — republican, monarchical, and despotic — he shows very clearly what popular government may lead to: —
“Men were free with laws; men would fain be free