The apostles of the Jacobin belief behaved as their fathers had done, and employed the same methods. If similar events occurred again we should see identical actions repeated. If a new belief — Socialism, for example — were to triumph tomorrow, it would be led to employ methods of propaganda like those of the Inquisition and the Terror.
But were we to regard the Jacobin Terror solely as the result of a religious movement, we should not completely apprehend it. Around a triumphant religious belief, as we saw in the case of the Reformation, gather a host of individual interests which are dependent on that belief. The Terror was directed by a few fanatical apostles, but beside this small number of ardent proselytes, whose narrow minds dreamed of regenerating the world, were great numbers of men who lived only to enrich themselves. They rallied readily around the first victorious leader who promised to enable them to enjoy the results of their pillage.
“The Terrorists of the Revolution,” writes Albert Sorel, “resorted to the Terror because they wished to remain in power, and were incapable of doing so by other means. They employed it for their own salvation, and after the event they stated that their motive was the salvation of the State. Before it became a system it was a means of government, and the system was only invented to justify the means.”
We may thus fully agree with the following verdict on the Terror, written by Emile Ollivier in his work on the Revolution: “The Terror was above all a Jacquerie, a regularised pillage, the vastest enterprise of theft that any association of criminals has ever organised.”
2. The Revolutionary Tribunals.
The Revolutionary Tribunals constituted the principal means of action of the Terror. Besides that of Paris, created at the instigation of Danton, and which a year afterwards sent its founder to the guillotine, France was covered with such tribunals.
Gustave Le Bon, The Psychology of Revolution, 126
“One hundred and seventy-eight tribunals,” says Taine, “of which 40 were perambulant, pronounced death sentences in all parts of the country, which were carried out instantly on the spot. Between the 16th of April, 1793, and the 9th of Thermidor in the year II that of Paris guillotined 2,625 persons, and the provincial judges worked as hard as those of Paris. In the little town of Orange alone 331 persons were guillotined. In the city of Arras 299 men and 93
women were guillotined.... In the city of Lyons alone the revolutionary commissioner admitted to 1,684 executions.... The total number of these murders has been put at 17,000, among whom were 1,200 women, of whom a number were octogenarians.”
Although the Revolutionary Tribunal of Paris claimed only 2,625 victims, it must not be forgotten that all the suspects had already been summarily massacred during the “days” of September.
The Revolutionary Tribunal of Paris, a mere instrument of the Committee of Public Safety, limited itself in reality, as Fouquier-Tinville justly remarked during his trial, to executing its orders. It surrounded itself at first with a few legal forms which did not long survive. Interrogatory, defence, witnesses —
all were finally suppressed. Moral proof — that is, mere suspicion — sufficed to procure condemnation. The president usually contented himself with putting a vague question to the accused. To work more rapidly still, Fouquier-Tinville proposed to have the guillotine installed on the same premises as the Tribunal.
This Tribunal sent indiscriminately to the scaffold all the accused persons arrested by reason of party hatred. and very soon, in the hands of Robespierre, it constituted an instrument of the bloodiest tyranny. When Danton, one of its founders, became its victim, he justly asked pardon of God and men, before mounting the scaffold for having assisted to create such a Tribunal.
Nothing found mercy before it: neither the genius of Lavoisier, nor the gentleness of Lucile Desmoulins, nor the merit of Malesherbes. “So much talent,” said Benjamin Constant, “massacred by the most cowardly and brutish of men!”
To find any excuse for the Revolutionary Tribunal, we must return to our conception of the religious mentality of the Jacobins, who founded and directed it. It was a piece of work comparable in its spirit and its aim to the Inquisition. The men who furnished its victims — Robespierre, Saint-Just, and Couthon — believed themselves the benefactors of the human race in Gustave Le Bon, The Psychology of Revolution, 127
suppressing all infidels, the enemies of the faith that was to regenerate the earth.
The executions during the Terror did not affect the members of the aristocracy only, since 4,000 peasants and 3,000 working-men were guillotined.
Given the emotion produced in Paris in our days by a capital execution, one might suppose that the execution of so many persons at one time would produce a very great emotion. But habit had so dulled sensibility that people paid but little attention to the matter at last. Mothers would take their children to see people guillotined as to-day they take them to the marionette theatre.
The daily spectacle of executions made the men of the time very indifferent to death. All mounted the scaffold with perfect tranquillity, the Girondists singing the Marseillaise as they climbed the steps.
This resignation resulted from the law of habitude, which very rapidly dulls emotion. To judge by the fact that royalist risings were taking place daily, the prospect of the guillotine no longer terrified men. Things happened as though the Terror terrorised no one. Terror is an efficacious psychological process so long as it does not last. The real terror resides far more in threats than in their realisation.
3. The Terror in the Provinces.
The executions of the Revolutionary Tribunals in the provinces represented only a portion of the massacres effected in the departments during the Terror.
The revolutionary army, composed of vagabonds and brigands, marched through France killing and pillaging. Its method of procedure is well indicated by the following passage from Taine: —
“At Bedouin, a town of 2,000 inhabitants, where unknown hands had cut down the tree of liberty, 433 houses were demolished or fired, 16 persons were guillotined, and 47 shot down; all the other inhabitants were expelled and reduced to living as vagabonds in the mountains, and to taking shelter in caverns which they hollowed out of the earth.”
The fate of the wretches sent before the Revolutionary Tribunals was no better.
The first mockery of trial was quickly suppressed. At Nantes, Carrier drowned and shot down according to his fancy nearly 5,000 persons — men, women, and children.
The details of these massacres figured in the Moniteur after the reaction of Gustave Le Bon, The Psychology of Revolution, 128
Thermidor. I cite a few lines: —
“I saw,” says Thomas, “after the taking of Noirmoutier, men and women and old people burned alive... women violated, girls of fourteen and fifteen, and massacred afterward, and tender babes thrown from bayonet to bayonet; children who were taken from beside their mothers stretched out on the ground.”
In the same number we read a deposition by one Julien, relating how Carrier forced his victims to dig their graves and to allow themselves to be buried alive. The issue of October 15, 1794, contained a report by Merlin de Thionville proving that the captain of the vessel le Destin had received orders to embark forty-one victims to be drowned — “among them a blind man of 78, twelve women, twelve girls, and fourteen children, of whom ten were from 10
to 6 and five at the breast.”
In the course of Carrier’s trial ( Moniteur, December 30, 1794) it was proved that he “had given orders to drown and shoot women and children, and had ordered General Haxo to exterminate all the inhabitants of La Vendée and to burn down their dwellings.”
Carrier, like all wholesale murderers, took an intense joy in seeing his victims suffer. “In the department in which I hunted the priests,” he said, “I have never laughed so much or experienced such pleasure as in watching their dying grimaces” ( Moniteur, December 22, 1794).
Carrier was tried to satisfy the reaction of Thermidor. But the massacres of Nantes were repeated in many other towns. Fouché slew more than 2,000
persons at Lyons, and so many were killed at Toulon that the population fell from 29,000 to 7,000 in a few months.
We must say in defence of Carrier, Fréron, Fouché and all these sinister persons, that they were incessantly stimulated by the Committee of Public Safety. Carrier gave proof of this during his trial.
“I admit,” said he ( Moniteur, December 24, 1794), “that 150 or 200 prisoners were shot every day, but it was by order of the commission. I informed the Convention that the brigands were being shot down by hundreds, and it applauded this letter, and ordered its insertion in the Bulletin. What were these deputies doing then who are so furious against me now? They were applaud-ing. Why did they still keep me òn mission’? Because I was then the saviour of the country, and now I am a bloodthirsty man.” Gustave Le Bon, The Psychology of Revolution, 129
Unhappily for him, Carrier did not know, as he remarked in the same speech, that only seven or eight persons led the Convention. But the terrorised Assembly approved of all that these seven or eight ordered, so that they could say nothing in reply to Carrier’s argument. He certainly deserved to be guillotined, but the whole Convention deserved to be guillotined with him, since it had approved of the massacres.
The defence of Carrier, justified by the letters of the Committee, by which the representatives “on mission” were incessantly stimulated, shows that the violence of the Terror resulted from a system, and not, as has sometimes been claimed, from the initiative of a few individuals.
The thirst for destruction during the Terror was by no means assuaged by the destruction of human beings only; there was an even greater destruction of inanimate things. The true believer is always an iconoclast. Once in power, he destroys with equal zeal the enemies of his faith and the images, temples, and symbols which recall the faith attacked.
We know that the first action of the Emperor Theodosius when converted to the Christian religion was to break down the majority of the temples which for six thousand years had been built beside the Nile. We must not, therefore, be surprised to see the leaders of the Revolution attacking the monuments and works of art which for them were the vestiges of an abhorred past.
Statues, manuscripts, stained glass windows, and plate were frenziedly broken.
When Fouché, the future Duke of Otranto under Napoleon, and minister under Louis XVIII, was sent as commissary of the Convention to the Nievre, he ordered the demolition of all the towers of the châteaux and the belfries of the churches “because they wounded equality.”
Revolutionary vandalism expended itself even on the tomb. Following a report read by Barrère to the Convention, the magnificent royal tombs at Saint-Denis, among which was the admirable mausoleum of Henri II, by Germain Pilon, were smashed to pieces, the coffins emptied, and the body of Turenne sent to the Museum as a curiosity, after one of the keepers had extracted the teeth in order to sell them as curiosities. The moustache and beard of Henri IV were also torn out.
It is impossible to witness such comparatively enlightened men consenting to the destruction of the artistic patriotism of France without a feeling of sadness.
To excuse them, we must remember that intense beliefs give rise to the worst Gustave Le Bon, The Psychology of Revolution, 130
excesses, and also that the Convention, almost daily invaded by rioters, always yielded to the popular will.
This glowing record of devastation proves, not only the power of fanaticism: it shows us what becomes of men who are liberated from all social restraints, and of the country which falls into their hands.
Chapter VI: The Armies of the Revolution.
1. The Revolutionary Assemblies and the Armies.
If nothing were known of the revolutionary Assemblies, and notably of the Convention, beyond their internal dissensions, their weakness, and their acts of violence, their memory would indeed be a gloomy one.
But even for its enemies this bloodstained epoch must always retain an undeniable glory, thanks to the success of its armies. When the Convention dissolved France was already the greater by Belgium and the territories on the left bank of the Rhine.
Regarding the Convention as a whole, it seems equitable to credit it with the victories of the armies of France, but if we analyse this whole in order to study each of its elements separately their independence will at once be obvious. It is at once apparent that the Convention had a very small share in the military events of the time. The armies on the frontier and the revolutionary Assemblies in Paris formed two separate worlds, which had very little influence over one another, and which regarded matters in a very different light.
We have seen that the Convention was a weak Government, which changed its ideas daily, according to popular impulse; it was really an example of the profoundest anarchy. It directed nothing, but was itself continually directed; how, then, could it have commanded armies?
Completely absorbed in its intestine quarrels, the Assembly had abandoned all military questions to a special committee, which was directed almost single-handed by Carnot, and whose real function was to furnish the troops with provisions and ammunition. The merit of Carnot consisted in the fact that besides directing over 752,000 men at the disposal of France, upon points which were strategically valuable, he also advised the generals of the armies to take the offensive, and to preserve a strict discipline.
The sole share of the Assembly in the defence of the country was the decree of the general levy. In the face of the numerous enemies then threatening Gustave Le Bon, The Psychology of Revolution, 131
France, no Government could have avoided such a measure. For some little time, too, the Assembly had sent representatives to the armies instructed to decapitate certain generals, but this policy was soon abandoned.
As a matter of fact the military activities of the Assembly were always extremely slight. The armies, thanks to their numbers, their enthusiasm, and the tactics devised by their youthful generals, achieved their victories unaided.
They fought and conquered independently of the Convention.
2. The Struggle of Europe against the Revolution.
Before enumerating the various psychological factors which contributed to the successes of the revolutionary armies, it will be useful briefly to recall the origin and the development of the war against Europe.
At the commencement of the Revolution the foreign sovereigns regarded with satisfaction the difficulties of the French monarchy, which they had long regarded as a rival power. The King of Prussia, believing France to be greatly enfeebled, thought to enrich himself at her expense, so he proposed to the Emperor of Austria to help Louis on condition of receiving Flanders and Alsace as an indemnity. The two sovereigns signed an alliance against France in February, 1792. The French anticipated attack by declaring war upon Austria, under the influence of the Girondists. The French army was at the outset subjected to several checks. The allies penetrated into Champagne, and came within 130 miles of Paris. Dumouriez’ victory at Valmy forced them to retire.
Although 300 French and 200 Prussians only were killed in this battle, it had very significant results. The fact that an army reputed invincible had been forced to retreat gave boldness to the young revolutionary troops, and everywhere they took the offensive. In a few weeks the soldiers of Valmy had chased the Austrians out of Belgium, where they were welcomed as liberators.
But it was under the Convention that the war assumed such importance. At the beginning of 1793 the Assembly declared that Belgium was united to France.
From this resulted a conflict with England which lasted for twenty-two years.
Assembled at Antwerp in April, 1793, the representatives of England, Prussia, and Austria resolved to dismember France. The Prussians were to seize Alsace and Lorraine; the Austrians, Flanders and Artois; the English, Dunkirk. The Austrian ambassador proposed to crush the Revolution by terror, “by Gustave Le Bon, The Psychology of Revolution, 132
exterminating practically the whole of the party directing the nation.” In the face of such declarations France had perforce to conquer or to perish.
During this first coalition, between 1793 and 1797, France had to fight on all her frontiers, from the Pyrenees to the north.
At the outset she lost her former conquests, and suffered several reverses. The Spaniards took Perpignan and Bayonne; the English, Toulon; and the Austrians, Valenciennes. It was then that the Convention, towards the end of 1793, ordered a general levy of all Frenchmen between the ages of eighteen and forty, and succeeded in sending to the frontiers a total of some 750,000
men. The old regiments of the royal army were combined with battalions of volunteers and conscripts.
The allies were repulsed, and Maubeuge was relieved after the victory of Wattigny, which was gained by Jourdan. Hoche rescued Lorraine. France took the offensive, reconquering Belgium and the left bank of the Rhine. Jourdan defeated the Austrians at Fleurus, drove them back upon the Rhine, and occupied Cologne and Coblentz. Holland was invaded. The allied sovereigns resigned themselves to suing for peace, and recognised the French conquests.
The successes of the French were favoured by the fact that the enemy never put their whole heart into the affair, as they were preoccupied by the partition of Poland, which they effected in 1793-5. Each Power wished to be on the spot in order to obtain more territory. This motive had already caused the King of Prussia to retire after the battle of Valmy in 1792.
The hesitations of the allies and their mutual distrust were extremely advantageous to the French. Had the Austrians marched upon Paris in the summer of 1793, “we should,” said General Thiébault, “have lost a hundred times for one. They alone saved us, by giving us time to make soldiers, officers, and generals.”
After the treaty of Basle, France had no important adversaries on the Continent, save the Austrians. It was then that the Directory attacked Austria in Italy. Bonaparte was entrusted with the charge of this campaign. After a year of fighting, from April, 1796, to April, 1797, he forced the last enemies of France to demand peace.
3. Psychological and Military Factors which determined the Success of the Revolutionary Armies.
Gustave Le Bon, The Psychology of Revolution, 133
To realise the causes of the success of the revolutionary armies we must remember the prodigious enthusiasm, endurance, and abnegation of these ragged and often barefoot troops. Thoroughly steeped in revolutionary principles, they felt that they were the apostles of a new religion, which was destined to regenerate the world.
The history of the armies of the Revolution recalls that of the nomads of Arabia, who, excited to fanaticism by the ideals of Mohammed, were transformed into formidable armies which rapidly conquered a portion of the old Roman world. An analogous faith endowed the Republican soldiers with a heroism and intrepidity which never failed them, and which no reverse could shake When the Convention gave place to the Directory they had liberated the country, and had carried a war of invasion into the enemy’s territory. At this period the soldiers were the only true Republicans left in France.
Faith is contagious, and the Revolution was regarded as a new era, so that several of the nations invaded, oppressed by the absolutism of their monarchs, welcomed the invaders as liberators. The inhabitants of Savoy ran out to meet the troops. At Mayence the crowd welcomed them with enthusiasm planted trees of liberty, and formed a Convention in imitation of that of Paris.
So long as the armies of the Revolution had to deal with peoples bent under the yoke of absolute monarchy, and having no personal ideal to defend, their success was relatively easy. But when they entered into conflict with peoples who had an ideal as strong as their own victory became far more difficult.
The new ideal of liberty and equality was capable of seducing peoples who had no precise convictions, and were suffering from the despotism of their masters, but it was naturally powerless against those who possessed a potent ideal of their own which had been long established in their minds. For this reason Bretons and Vendéeans, whose religious and monarchical sentiments were extremely powerful, successfully struggled for years against the armies of the Republic.
In March, 1793, the insurrections of the Vendée and Brittany had spread to ten departments. The Vendéeans in Poitou and the Chouans in Brittany put 80,000
men in the field.
The conflicts between contrary ideals — that is, between beliefs in which reason can play no part — are always pitiless, and the struggle with the Gustave Le Bon, The Psychology of Revolution, 134
Vendée immediately assumed the ferocious savagery always observable in religious wars. It lasted until the end of 1795, when Hoche finally “pacified” the country. This pacification was the simple result of the practical extermination of its defenders.
“After two years of civil war,” writes Molinari, “the Vendée was no more than a hideous heap of ruins. About 900,000 individuals — men, women, children, and aged people — had perished, and the small number of those who had escaped massacre could scarcely find food or shelter. The fields were devastated, the hedges and walls destroyed, and the houses burned.” Besides their faith, which so often rendered them invincible, the soldiers of the Revolution had usually the advantage of being led by remarkable generals, full of ardour and formed on the battle-field.
The majority of the former leaders of the army, being nobles, had emigrated so that a new body of officers had to be organised. The result was that those gifted with innate military aptitudes had a chance of showing them, and passed through all the grades of rank in a few months. Hoche, for instance, a corporal in 1789, was a general of division and commander of an army at the age of twenty-five. The extreme youth of these leaders resulted in a spirit of aggression to which the armies opposed to them were not accustomed.
Selected only according to merit, and hampered by no traditions, no routine, they quickly succeeded in working out a tactics suited to the new necessities.
Of soldiers without experience opposed to seasoned professional troops, drilled and trained according to the methods in use everywhere since the Seven Years’ War, one could not expect complicated manoeuvres.
Attacks were delivered simply by great masses of troops. Thanks to the numbers of the men at the disposal of their generals, the considerable gaps provoked by this efficacious but barbarous procedure could be rapidly filled.
Deep masses of men attacked the enemy with the bayonet, and quickly routed men accustomed to methods which were more careful of the lives of soldiers.
The slow rate of fire in those days rendered the French tactics relatively easy of employment. It triumphed, but at the cost of enormous losses. It has been calculated that between 1792 and 1800 the French army left more than a third of its effective force on the battle-field (700,000 men out of 2,000,000).
Examining events from a psychological point of view, we shall continue to elicit the consequences from the facts on which they are consequent.
Gustave Le Bon, The Psychology of Revolution, 135
A study of the revolutionary crowds in Paris and in the armies presents very different but readily interpreted pictures.
We have proved that crowds, unable to reason, obey simply their impulses, which are always changing, but we have also seen that they are readily capable of heroism, that their altruism is often highly developed, and that it is easy to find thousands of men ready to give their lives for a belief.
Psychological characteristics so diverse must naturally, according to the circumstances, lead to dissimilar and even absolutely contradictory actions.
The history of the Convention and its armies proves as much. It shows us crowds composed of similar elements acting so differently in Paris and on the frontiers that one can hardly believe the same people can be in question.
In Paris the crowds were disorderly, violent, murderous, and so changeable in their demands as to make all government impossible.
In the armies the picture was entirely different. The same multitudes of unaccustomed men, restrained by the orderly elements of a laborious peasant population, standardised by military discipline, and inspired by contagious enthusiasm, heroically supported privations, disdained perils, and contributed to form that fabulous strain which triumphed over the most redoubtable troops in Europe.
These facts are among those which should always be invoked to show the force of discipline. It transforms men. Liberated from its influence, peoples and armies become barbarian hordes.
This truth is daily and increasingly forgotten. Ignoring the fundamental laws of collective logic, we give way more and more to shifting popular impulses, instead of learning to direct them. The multitude must be shown the road to follow; it is not for them to choose it.
Chapter VII: Psychology of the Leaders of the Revolution.
1. Mentality of the Men of the Revolution. The respective Influence of Violent and Feeble Characters.
Men judge with their intelligence, and are guided by their characters. To understand a man fully one must separate these two elements.
During the great periods of activity — and the revolutionary movements naturally belong to such periods — character always takes the first rank.
Having in several chapters described the various mentalities which predomi-Gustave Le Bon, The Psychology of Revolution, 136
nate in times of disturbance, we need not return to the subject now. They constitute general types which are naturally modified by each man’s inherited and acquired personality.
We have seen what an important part was played by the mystic element in the Jacobin mentality, and the ferocious fanaticism to which it led the sectaries of the new faith.
We have also seen that all the members of the Assemblies were not fanatics.
These latter were even in the minority, since in the most sanguinary of the revolutionary assemblies the great majority was composed of timid and moderate men of neutral character. Before Thermidor the members of this group voted from fear with the violent and after Thermidor with the moderate deputies.
In time of revolution, as at other times, these neutral characters, obeying the most contrary impulses, are always the most numerous. They are also as dangerous in reality as the violent characters. The force of the latter is supported by the weakness of the former.
In all revolutions, and in particularly in the French Revolution, we observe a small minority of narrow but decided minds which imperiously dominate an immense majority of men who are often very intelligent but are lacking in character
Besides the fanatical apostles and the feeble characters, a revolution always produces individuals who merely think how to profit thereby. These were numerous during the French Revolution. Their aim was simply to utilise circumstances so as to enrich themselves. Such were Barras, Tallien, Fouché, Barrère, and many more. Their politics consisted simply in serving the strong against the weak.
From the outset of the Revolution these “arrivists,” as one would call them to-day, were numerous. Camille Desmoulins wrote in 1792: “Our Revolution has its roots only in the egotism and self-love of each individual, of the combination of which the general interest is composed.” If we add to these indications the observations contained in another chapter concerning the various forms of mentality to be observed in times of political upheaval, we shall obtain a general idea of the character of the men of the Revolution. We shall now apply the principles already expounded to the most remarkable personages of the revolutionary period.
Gustave Le Bon, The Psychology of Revolution, 137
2. Psychology of the Commissaries or Representatives “on Mission.” In Paris the conduct of the members of the Convention was always directed, restrained, or excited by the action of their colleagues, and that of their environment.
To judge them properly we should observe them when left to themselves and uncontrolled, when they possessed full liberty. Such were the representatives who were sent “on mission” into the departments by the Convention.
The power of these delegates was absolute. No censure embarrassed them. <