The Constituent Assembly, so proud and haughty towards the king, was, like all the revolutionary assemblies which followed it, extremely pusillanimous before the people.
Hoping to put an end to the disorders of the night of August 4th, it voted, on the proposition of a member of the nobility, the Comte de Noailles, the abolition of seigneurial rights. Although this measure suppressed at one stroke the privileges of the nobles, it was voted with tears and embracings. Such accesses of sentimental enthusiasm are readily explained when we recall how contagious emotion is in a crowd, above all in an assembly oppressed by fear.
If the renunciation of their rights had been effected by the nobility a few years earlier, the Revolution would doubtless have been avoided, but it was now too late. To give way only when one is forced to do so merely increases the demands of those to whom one yields. In politics one should always look ahead and give way long before one is forced to do so.
Louis XVI hesitated for two months to ratify the decisions voted by the Assembly on the night of the 4th of August. He had retired to Versailles. The leaders sent thither a band of 7,000 or 8,000 men and women of the people, assuring them that the royal residence contained great stores of bread. The railings of the palace were forced, some of the bodyguard were killed, and the king and all his family were led back to Paris in the midst of a shrieking crowd, many of whom bore on the ends of their pikes the heads of the soldiers massacred. The dreadful journey lasted six hours. These events constituted what are known as the “days” of October.
The popular power increased, and in reality the king, like the whole assembly, was henceforth in the hands of the people — that is, at the mercy of the clubs and their leaders. This popular power was to prevail for nearly ten years, and the Revolution was to be almost entirely its work.
While proclaiming that the people constituted the only sovereign, the Assembly was greatly embarrassed by riots which went far beyond its theoretical expectations. It had supposed that order would be restored while it fabricated a Constitution destined to assure the eternal happiness of mankind.
We know that during the whole duration of the Revolution one of the chief occupations of the assemblies was to make, unmake, and remake Constitutions. The theorists attributed to them then, as they do to-day, the power of Gustave Le Bon, The Psychology of Revolution, 102
transforming society; the Assembly, therefore, could not neglect its task. In the meantime it published a solemn Declaration of the Rights of Man which summarised its principles.
The Constitution, proclamations, declarations, and speeches had not the slightest effect on the popular movements, nor on the dissentients who daily increased in number in the heart of the Assembly. The latter became more and more subjected to the ascendancy of the advanced party, which was supported by the clubs. Danton, Camille Desmoulins, and later Marat and Hébert, violently excited the populace by their harangues and their journals. The Assembly was rapidly going down the slope that leads to extremes.
During all these disorders the finances of the country were not improving.
Finally convinced that philanthropic speeches would not alter their lamentable condition, and seeing that bankruptcy threatened, the Assembly decreed, on the 2nd of November, 1789, the confiscation of the goods of the Church. Their revenues, consisting of the tithes collected from the faithful, amounted to some
£8,000,000, and their value was estimated at about £120,000,000. They were divided among some hundreds of prelates, Court abbés, etc., who owned a quarter of all France. These goods, henceforth entitled is “national domains,” formed the guarantee of the assignats, the first issue of which was for 400,000,000 francs (£16,000,000 sterling). The public accepted them at the outset, but they multiplied so under the Directory and the Convention, which issued 45,000,000,000 francs in this form (£1,800,000,000 sterling), that an assignat of 100 livres was finally worth only a few halfpence.
Stimulated by his advisers, the feeble Louis attempted in vain to struggle against the decrees of the Assembly by refusing to sanction them.
Under the influence of the daily suggestions of the leaders and the power of mental contagion the revolutionary movement was spreading everywhere independently of the Assembly and often even against it.
In the towns and villages revolutionary municipalities were instituted, protected by the local National Guards. Those of neighbouring towns commenced to make mutual arrangements to defend themselves should need arise. Thus federations were formed, which were soon rolled into one; this sent 14,000 National Guards to Paris, who assembled on the Champ-de-Mars on the 14th of July, 1790. There the king swore to maintain the Constitution decreed by the National Assembly.
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Despite this vain oath it became more evident every day that no agreement was possible between the hereditary principles of the monarchy and those proclaimed by the Assembly.
Feeling himself completely powerless, the king thought only of flight. Arrested at Varennes and brought back a prisoner to Paris, he was shut up in the Tuileries. The Assembly, although still extremely royalist, suspended him from power, and decided to assume the sole charge of the government.
Never did sovereign find himself in a position so difficult as that of Louis at the time of his flight. The genius of a Richelieu would hardly have extricated him. The only element of defence on which he could have relied had from the beginning absolutely failed him.
During the whole duration of the Constituent Assembly the immense majority of Frenchmen and of the Assembly remained royalist, so that had the sovereign accepted a liberal monarchy he could perhaps have remained in power. It would seem that Louis had little to promise in order to come to an agreement with the Assembly.
Little, perhaps, but with his structure of mind that little was strictly impossible.
All the shades of his forbears would have risen up in front of him had he consented to modify the mechanism of the monarchy inherited from so many ancestors. And even had he attempted to do so, the opposition of his family, the clergy, the nobles, and the Court could never have been surmounted. The ancient castes on which the monarchy rested, the nobility and the clergy, were then almost as powerful as the monarch himself. Every time it seemed as though he might yield to the injunctions of the Assembly it was because he was constrained to do so by force, and to attempt to gain time. His appeals to alien Powers represented the resolution of a desperate man who had seen all his natural defences fail him.
He, and especially the queen, entertained the strangest illusions as to the possible assistance of Austria, for centuries the rival of France. If Austria indolently consented to come to his aid, it was only in the hope of receiving a great reward. Mercy gave him to understand that the payment expected consisted of Alsace, the Alps, and Navarre.
The leaders of the clubs, finding the Assembly too royalist, sent the people against it. A petition was signed, inviting the Assembly to convoke a new constituent power to proceed to the trial of Louis XVI.
Gustave Le Bon, The Psychology of Revolution, 104
Monarchical in spite of all, and finding that the Revolution was assuming a character far too demagogic, the Assembly resolved to defend itself against the actions of the people. A battalion of the National Guard, commanded by La Fayette, was sent to the Champ-de-Mars, where the crowd was assembled, to disperse it. Fifty of those present were killed.
The Assembly did not long persist in its feeble resistance. Extremely fearful of the people, it increased its arrogance towards the king, depriving him every day of some part of his prerogatives and authority. He was now scarcely more than a mere official obliged to execute the wishes of others.
The Assembly had imagined that it would be able to exercise the authority of which it had deprived the king, but such a task was infinitely above its resources. A power so divided is always weak. “I know nothing more terrible,” said Mirabeau, “than the sovereign authority of six hundred persons.” Having flattered itself that it could combine in itself all the powers of the State, and exercise them as Louis XVI had done, the Assembly very soon exercised none whatever.
As its authority failed anarchy increased. The popular leaders continually stirred up the people. Riot and insurrection became the sole power. Every day the Assembly was invaded by rowdy and imperious delegations which operated by means of threats and demands.
All these popular movements, which the Assembly, under the stress of fear, invariably obeyed, had nothing spontaneous about them. They simply represented the manifestations of new powers — the clubs and the Commune
— which had been set up beside the Assembly.
The most powerful of these clubs was the Jacobin, which had quickly created more than five hundred branches in the country, all of which were under the orders of the central body. Its influence remained preponderant during the whole duration of the Revolution. It was the master of the Assembly, and then of France, its only rival the insurrectionary Commune, whose power was exercised only in Paris.
The weakness of the national Assembly and all its failures had made it extremely unpopular. It became conscious of this, and, feeling that it was every day more powerless, decided to hasten the creation of the new Constitution in order that it might dissolve. Its last action, which was tactless enough, was to decree that no member of the Constituent Assembly should be elected to the Gustave Le Bon, The Psychology of Revolution, 105
Legislative Assembly. The members of the latter were thus deprived of the experience acquired by their predecessors.
The Constitution was completed on the 3rd of September, 1791, and accepted on the 13th by the king, to whom the Assembly had restored his powers.
This Constitution organised a representative Government, delegating the legislative power to deputies elected by the people, and the executive power to the king, whose right of veto over the decrees of the Assembly was recognised. New departmental divisions were substituted for the old provinces.
The imposts were abolished, and replaced by direct and indirect taxes, which are still in force.
The Assembly, which had just altered the territorial divisions and overthrown all the old social organisation, thought itself powerful enough to transform the religious organisation of the country also. It claimed notably that the members of the clergy should be elected by the people, and should be thus withdrawn from the influence of their supreme head, the Pope.
This civil constitution of the clergy was the origin of religious struggles and persecutions which lasted until the days of the Consulate. Two-thirds of the priests refused the oath demanded of them.
During the three years which represented the life of the Constituent Assembly the Revolution had produced considerable results. The principal result was perhaps the beginning of the transference to the Third Estate of the riches of the privileged classes. In this way while interests were created to be defended fervent adherents were raised up to the new régime. A Revolution supported by the gratification of acquired appetites is bound to be powerful. The Third Estate, which had supplanted the nobles, and the peasants, who had bought the national domains, would readily understand that the restoration of the ancien régime would despoil them of all their advantages. The energetic defence of the Revolution was merely the defence of their own fortunes.
This is why we see, during part of the Revolution, nearly half the departments vainly rising against the despotism that crushed them. The Republicans triumphed over all opposition. They were extremely powerful in that they had to defend, not only a new ideal, but new material interests. We shall see that the influence of these two factors lasted during the whole of the Revolution, and contributed powerfully to the establishment of the Empire.
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Chapter II: The Psychology of the Legislative Assembly.
1. Political Events during the Life of the Legislative Assembly.
Before examining the mental characteristics of the Legislative Assembly let us briefly sum up the considerable political events which marked its short year’s life. They naturally played an important part in respect of its psychological manifestations.
Extremely monarchical, the Legislative Assembly had no more idea than its predecessor of destroying the monarchy. The king appeared to it to be slightly suspect, but it still hoped to be able to retain him on the throne.
Unhappily for him, Louis was incessantly begging for intervention from abroad. Shut up in the Tuileries, defended only by his Swiss Guards, the timid sovereign was drifting among contrary influences. He subsidised journals intended to modify public opinion, but the obscure “penny-a-liners” who edited them knew nothing of acting on the mind of the crowd. Their only means of persuasion was to menace with the gallows all the partisans of the Revolution, and to predict the invasion of France by an army which would rescue the king.
Royalty no longer counted on anything but the foreign Courts. The nobles were emigrating. Prussia, Austria, and Russia were threatening France with a war of invasion. The Court favoured their lead. To the coalition of the three kings against France the Jacobin Club proposed to oppose a league of peoples. The Girondists were then, with the Jacobins, at the head of the revolutionary movement. They incited the masses to arm themselves — 600,000 volunteers were equipped. The Court accepted a Girondist minister. Dominated by him, Louis XVI was obliged to propose to the Assembly a war against Austria. It was immediately agreed to.
In declaring war the king was not sincere. The queen revealed the French plans of campaign and the secret deliberations of the Council to the Austrians.
The beginnings of the struggle were disastrous. Several columns of troops, attacked by panic, disbanded. Stimulated by the clubs, and persuaded — justly, for that matter — that the king was conspiring with the enemies of France, the population of the faubourgs rose in insurrection. Its leaders, the Jacobins, and above all Danton, sent to the Tuileries on the 20th of June a petition threatening the king with revocation. It then invaded the Tuileries, heaping invectives on the sovereign.
Gustave Le Bon, The Psychology of Revolution, 107
Fatality impelled Louis toward his tragic destiny. While the threats of the Jacobins against royalty had roused many of the departments to indignation, it was learned that a Prussian army had arrived on the frontiers of Lorraine.
The hope of the king and queen respecting the help to be obtained from abroad was highly chimerical. Marie-Antoinette suffered from an absolute illusion as to the psychology of the Austrian and the French peoples. Seeing France terrorised by a few energumens, she supposed that it would be equally easy to terrify the Parisians, and by means of threats to lead them back under the king’s authority. Inspired by her, Fersen undertook to publish the manifesto of the Duke of Brunswick, threatening Paris with “total subversion if the royal family were molested.”
The effect produced was diametrically opposite to that intended. The manifesto aroused indignation against the monarch, who was regarded as an accomplice, and increased his unpopularity. From that day he was marked for the scaffold.
Carried away by Danton, the delegates of the sections installed themselves at the Hôtel de Ville as an insurrectionary Commune, which arrested the commandant of the National Guard, who was devoted to the king, sounded the tocsin, equipped the National Guard, and on the 10th of August hurled them, with the populace, against the Tuileries. The regiments called in by Louis disbanded themselves. Soon none were left to defend him but his Swiss and a few gentlemen. Nearly all were killed. Left alone, the king took refuge with the Assembly. The crowds demanded his denouncement. The Legislative Assembly decreed his suspension and left a future Assembly, the Convention, to decide upon his fate.
2. Mental Characteristics of the Legislative Assembly.
The Legislative Assembly, formed of new men, presented quite a special interest from the psychological point of view. Few assemblies have offered in such a degree the characteristics of the political collectivity.
It comprised seven hundred and fifty deputies, divided into pure royalists, constitutional royalists, republicans, Girondists, and Montagnards. Advocates and men of letters formed the majority. It also contained, but in smaller numbers, superior officers, priests, and a very few scientists.
The philosophical conceptions of the members of this Assembly seem rudimentary enough. Many were imbued with Rousseau’s idea of a return to Gustave Le Bon, The Psychology of Revolution, 108
a state of nature. But all, like their predecessors, were dominated more especially by recollections of Greek and Latin antiquity. Cato, Brutus, Gracchus, Plutarch, Marcus Aurelius, and Plato, continually evoked, furnished the images of their speech. When the orator wished to insult Louis XVI he called him Caligula.
In hoping to destroy tradition they were revolutionaries, but in claiming to return to a remote past they showed themselves extremely reactionary.
For the rest, all these theories had very little influence on their conduct. Reason was continually figuring in their speeches, but never in their actions. These were always dominated by those affective and mystic elements whose potency we have so often demonstrated.
The psychological characteristics of the Legislative Assembly were those of the Constituent Assembly, but were greatly accentuated. They may be summed up in four words: impressionability, mobility, timidity, and weakness.
This mobility and impressionability are revealed in the constant variability of their conduct. One day they exchange noisy invective and blows. On the following day we see them “throwing themselves into one another’s arms with torrents of tears.” They eagerly applaud an address demanding the punishment of those who have petitioned for the king’s dethronement, and the same day accord the honours of the session to a delegation which has come to demand his downfall.
The pusillanimity and weakness of the Assembly in the face of threats was extreme. Although royalist it voted the suspension of the king, and on the demand of the Commune delivered him, with his family, to be imprisoned in the Temple, Thanks to its weakness, it was as incapable as the Constituent Assembly of exercising any power, and allowed itself to be dominated by the Commune and the clubs, which were directed by such influential leaders as Hébert, Tallien, Rossignol, Marat, Robespierre, etc.
Until Thermidor, 1794, the insurrectionary Commune constituted the chief power in the State, and behaved precisely as if it had been charged with the government of Paris.
It was the Commune that demanded the imprisonment of Louis XVI in the tower of the Temple, when the Assembly wished to imprison him in the palace of the Luxembourg. It was the Commune again that filled the prisons with suspects, and then ordered them to be killed.
Gustave Le Bon, The Psychology of Revolution, 109
We know with what refinements of cruelty a handful of some 150 bandits, paid at the rate of 24 livres a day, and directed by a few members of the Commune, exterminated some 1,200 persons in four days. This crime was known as the massacre of September. The mayor of Paris, Pétion, received the band of assassins with respect, and gave them drink. A few Girondists protested somewhat, but the Jacobins were silent.
The terrorised Assembly affected at first to ignore the massacres, which were encouraged by several of its more influential deputies, notably Couthon and Billaud-Varenne. When at last it decided to condemn them it was without attempting to prevent their continuation.
Conscious of its impotence, the Legislative Assembly dissolved itself a fortnight later in order to give way to the Convention.
Its work was obviously disastrous, not in intention but in fact. Royalist, it abandoned the monarchy; humanitarian, it allowed the massacres of September; pacific, it pushed France into a formidable war, thus showing that a weak Government always ends by bringing ruin upon its country.
The history of the two previous revolutionary Assemblies proves once more to what point events carry within them their inevitable consequences. They constitute a train of necessities of which we can sometimes choose the first, but which then evolve without consulting us. We are free to make a decision, but powerless to avert its consequences.
The first measures of the Constituent Assembly were rational and voluntary, but the results which followed were beyond all will or reason or foresight.
Which of the men of 1789 would have ventured to desire or predict the death of Louis XVI, the wars of La Vendée, the Terror, the permanent guillotine and the final anarchy, or the ensuing return to tradition and order, guided by the iron hand of a soldier?
In the development of events which ensued from the early actions of the revolutionary Assemblies the most striking, perhaps, was the rise and development of the government of the crowd — of mob rule.
Behind the facts which we have been considering — the taking of the Bastille, the invasion of Versailles, the massacres of September, the attack on the Tuileries, the murder of the Swiss Guards, and the downfall and imprisonment of the king — we can readily perceive the laws affecting the psychology of crowds and their leaders.
Gustave Le Bon, The Psychology of Revolution, 110
We shall now see that the power of the multitude will progressively increase, overcome all other powers, and finally replace them.
Chapter III: The Psychology of the Convention.
1. The Legend of the Convention.
The history of the Convention is not merely fertile in psychological documents. It also shows how powerless the witnesses of any period and even their immediate successors are to form an exact idea of the events which they have witnessed, and the men who have surrounded them.
More than a century has elapsed since the Revolution, and men are only just beginning to form judgments concerning this period which, if still often doubtful enough, are slightly more accurate than of old.
This happens, not only because new documents are being drawn from the archives, but because the legends which enveloped that sanguinary period in a magical cloud are gradually vanishing with the passage of time.
Perhaps the most tenacious legend of all was that which until formerly used to surround the personages to whom our fathers applied the glorious epithet, “the Giants of the Convention.”
The struggles of the Convention against France in insurrection and Europe in arms produced such an impression that the heroes of this formidable struggle seemed to belong to a race of supermen or Titans.
The epithet “giant” seemed justified so long as the events of the period were confused and massed together. Regarded as connected when it was simply simultaneous, the work of the armies was confounded with that of the Convention. The glory of the first recoiled upon the second, and served as an excuse for the hecatombs of the Terror, the ferocity of the civil war, and the devastation of France.
Under the penetrating scrutiny of modern criticism, the heterogeneous mass of events has been slowly disentangled. The armies of the Republic have retained their old prestige, but we have been forced to recognise that the men of the Convention, absorbed entirely by their intestine conflicts, had very little to do with their victories. At the most two or three members of the committees of the Assembly were concerned with the armies, and the fact that they were victorious was due, apart from their numbers and the talents of their young generals, to the enthusiasm with which a new faith had inspired them.
Gustave Le Bon, The Psychology of Revolution, 111
In a later chapter, devoted to the revolutionary armies, we shall see how they conquered Europe in arms. They set out inspired by the ideas of liberty and equality which constituted the new gospel, and once on the frontiers, which were to keep them so long, they retained a special mentality, very different from that of the Government, which they first knew nothing of and afterwards despised.
Having no part whatever in their victories, the men of the Convention contented themselves with legislating at hazard according to the injunctions of the leaders who directed them, and who claimed to be regenerating France by means of the guillotine.
But it was thanks to these valiant armies that the history of the Convention was transformed into an apotheosis which affected several generations with a religious respect which even to-day is hardly extinct.
Studying in detail the psychology of the “Giants” of the Convention, we find their magnitude shrink very rapidly. They were in general extremely mediocre.
Their most fervent defenders, such as M. Aulard, are obliged to admit as much.
This is how M. Aulard puts it in his History of the French Revolution: —
“It has been said that the generation which from 1789 to 1799 did such great and terrible things was a generation of giants, or, to put it more plainly, that it was a generation more distinguished than that which preceded it or that which followed. This is a retrospective illusion. The citizens who formed the municipal and Jacobin or nationalist groups by which the Revolution was effected do not seem to have been superior, either in enlightenment or in talents, to the Frenchmen of the time of Louis XV or of Louis Philippe. Were those exceptionally gifted whose names history has retained because they appeared on the stage of Paris, or because they were the most brilliant orators of the various revolutionary Assemblies? Mirabeau, up to a certain point, deserved the title of genius; but as to the rest — Robespierre, Danton, Vergniaud — had they truly more talent, for example, than our modern orators? In 1793, in the time of the supposed `giants,’ Mme. Roland wrote in her memoirs: `France was as though drained of men; their dearth during this revolution is truly surprising; there have scarcely been any but pigmies.’” If after considering the men of the Convention individually we consider them in a body, we may say that they did not shine either by intelligence or by virtue or by courage. Never did a body of men manifest such pusillanimity. They had Gustave Le Bon, The Psychology of Revolution, 112
no courage save in their speeches or in respect of remote dangers. This Assembly, so proud and threatening in its speech when addressing royalty, was perhaps the most timid and docile political collectivity that the world has ever known. We see it slavishly obedient to the orders of the clubs and the Commune, trembling before the popular delegations which invaded it daily, and obeying the injunctions of the rioters to the point of handing over to them its most brilliant members. The Convention affords the world a melancholy spectacle, voting, at the popular behest, laws so absurd that it is obliged to annul them as soon as the rioters have quitted the hall.
Few Assemblies have given proof of such weakness. When we wish to show how low a popular Government can fall we have only to point to the Convention.
2. Results of the Triumph of the Jacobin Religion.
Among the causes that gave the Convention its special physiognomy, one of the most important was the definite establishment of a revolutionary religion.
A dogma which was at first in process of formation was at last finally erected.
This dogma was composed of an aggregate of somewhat inconsistent elements.
Nature, the rights of man, liberty, equality, the social contract, hatred of tyrants, and popular sovereignty formed the articles of a gospel which, to its disciples, was above discussion. The new truths had found apostles who were certain of their power, and who finally, like believers all the world over, sought to impose them by force. No heed should be taken of the opinion of unbelievers; they all deserved to be exterminated.
The hatred of heretics having been always, as we have seen, in respect of the Reformation, an irreducible characteristic of great beliefs, we can readily comprehend the intolerance of the Jacobin religion.
The history of the Reformation proves also that the conflict between two allied beliefs is very bitter. We must not, therefore, be astonished that in the Convention the Jacobins fought furiously against the other republicans, whose faith hardly differed from their own.
The propaganda of the new apostles was very energetic. To convert the provinces they sent thither zealous disciples escorted by guillotines. The inquisitors of the new faith would have no paltering with error. As Robespierre said, “The republic is the destruction of everything that is opposed to it.” What Gustave Le Bon, The Psychology o