They are like the Terrorists of 1793, who slaughtered human beings for the love of humanity.”
Their instinct of destruction is a phenomena found in the apostles of all cults.
One of those mentioned by M. Hamon was anxious to destroy all monuments, and especially churches, convinced that their destruction “would effect the destruction of all the spiritualistic religions.” This ingenuous soul was only following illustrious examples. Not otherwise did the Christian Emperor Theodosius reason when in the year 389 he destroyed all the religious monuments that had been erected by the Egyptians on the banks of the Nile during six thousand years, leaving upright only the walls and columns too solid to be broken.
It would seem, then, that it is a psychological law, almost universal in all ages, that one cannot be an apostle without experiencing an intense craving to massacre some one or smash something.
The apostle who is concerned only with monuments belongs to a variety relatively inoffensive, but evidently a little lukewarm. The perfect apostle is Gustave Le Bon, The Psychology of Socialism, 75
not satisfied with these half-measures. He understands that when you have destroyed the temples of the false gods you must proceed to suppress their worshippers. What are hecatombs, what are massacres, when it is a question of regenerating humanity, establishing truth, and destroying error? Is it not plain that the best means of suppressing infidels is to kill all you may meet, and leave none standing but the apostles and their disciples? This is the programme for purists, for those who disdain the compromises of hypocritical and cowardly transactions with heresy.
Unhappily the heretics are still refractory, and while awaiting the possibility of exterminating them one must content oneself with isolated murders and with threats. The latter, by the way, are perfectly explicit, and leave the future victims no illusions. One of the vanguard of the Italian Socialists, quoted by Signor Garofalo, sums up his programme thus: “We shall slit the throats of all we find with arms in their hands; the old men, women, and children we shall pitch over the balconies or throw into the sea.” These proceedings of the new sectaries have nothing very novel about them; they recur in the same form at various historical periods. All the apostles have thundered at the impiety of their adversaries in the same terms, and as soon as they have obtained the power to do so they have employed the same tactics of swift and energetic destruction. Mohammed converted by the sabre, the men of the Inquisition by faggots, the men of the Convention by the guillotine, and our modern Socialists by dynamite. Only the implements have a little changed.
The most lamentable thing about these explosions of fanaticism, which societies must, periodically, suffer, is that among the converts the highest intelligence is powerless against the ferocious seductiveness of their faith. Our modern Socialists act and speak just as did Bossuet with regard to the heretics, when he began the campaign which was to end in their massacre and expulsion. In what sulphurous terms does the illustrious prelate thunder against the enemies of his faith! “who love better to rot in their ignorance than to avow it, and to nourish in their stubborn souls the liberty to think all that it pleases them to think, rather than to bow to the Divine authority.” One should read, in the writings of the time, the savage joy with which the clergy welcomed the Dragonnades and the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes. The bishops and pious Bossuet were delirious with enthusiasm. “You have exterminated the heretics,” said the latter to Louis Quatorze. “It is the great work of your reign; Gustave Le Bon, The Psychology of Socialism, 76
it is your crown.”
The extermination was really sufficiently thorough. This “great work” had as its consequence the emigration of 400,000 French, the elect of the nation, to say nothing of a considerable number of recalcitrant persons who were burned at the stake, hung, drawn, and quartered, or sent to the King’s galleys. Not less did the Inquisition decimate Spain; and the Convention, France. The Convention too possessed the absolute truth, and was anxious to extirpate error. It had always far more the air of an ecclesiastical council than of a political assembly.
We can easily account for the ravages committed by these terrible destroyers of men when we know how to read their souls. Torquemada, Bossuet, Marat, Robespierre considered themselves to be gentle philanthropists, dreaming of nothing but the happiness of humanity. Philanthropists, whether social, religious, or political, all belong to the same family. They regard themselves in all good faith as the friends of humanity, and have always been its most pernicious enemies. They are more dangerous than wild beasts.
Mental pathologists of the present day are generally of opinion that the sectaries of the vanguard of Socialism belong to a criminal type, to the type they call criminal born. But this qualification is far too summary, and more often than not very inexact, for it embraces individuals belonging to very different classes, for the most part without any kinship to the true criminal.
That there are a certain number of criminals among the propagandists of the new faith is indubitable; but the greater number of the criminals who qualify as Socialist Anarchists only do so to give a political gloss to crimes against the common law. The true apostle may commit acts which are justly qualified as crimes by the Code, but which have nothing criminal about them from a psychological point of view. Far from being the result of personal interest, which is the characteristic of true crime, their acts are most often contrary to their most obvious interests. They are ingenuous mystics, absolutely incapable of reasoning, and possessed by a religious sentiment which invades every corner of their understanding. They are certainly dangerous enough, and a society which does not desire to be destroyed by them must eliminate them carefully from its midst; but their mental state is a matter for the pathologist, not for the criminologist.
History is full of their exploits; for they constitute a psychologic species Gustave Le Bon, The Psychology of Socialism, 77
which has existed in every age.
“Insane persons and fanatics with altruistic tendencies have arisen in all ages,” writes Lombroso, “even in savage times, but then they draw their aliment from religious. Later, they throw themselves into the political factions and anti-monarchical conspiracies of the period. First crusaders; then rebels; then knights-errant; then martyrs of faith or atheism.
“In our days, and more especially among the Latin races, when one of these altruist fanatics arises he can only find food for his passions in the social and economic regions.
“They are almost always the least certain and most debated ideas that give a free rein to the enthusiasm of fanatics. You will find a hundred fanatics for a problem in theology or metaphysics; you will find none for a theorem in geometry. The more strange and absurd an idea is the more it will drag after it the alienated and the hysterical; above all, in the political world, in which every private triumph is a failure, or a public triumph; and this idea will often sustain these fanatics in death, and will serve as a compensation for the life they lose or the torments they endure.”
Besides the class of apostles we have described, the propagandists necessary to all religions, there are other less important varieties whose state of hypnosis is limited to a single point of the understanding. We constantly meet, in everyday life, people who are highly intelligent, and even eminent, yet become absolutely incapable of reasoning on approaching certain subjects, when they are dominated by their political or religious passion, and show a surprising intolerance or incomprehension. These are the occasional fanatics whose fanaticism grows dangerous as soon as it is sufficiently excited. They reason with clearness and moderation on all questions excepting those in which their ruling passion is their only guide. On this narrow ground they array themselves with all the persecuting fury of the true apostles, who find in them, at the hour of a crisis, auxiliaries full of blind zeal.
There is, finally, another category of Socialists, who are not attracted by ideas alone, and whose beliefs even are feeble. They belong to the great family of the degenerates. Maintained by their hereditary taints, their physical or mental deficiencies, in inferior positions, from which they cannot escape, they are the natural enemies of a society to which they are prevented from adapting themselves by their incurable incapacity, by the morbid heredities of which Gustave Le Bon, The Psychology of Socialism, 78
they are the victims. They are the spontaneous defenders of doctrines which promise them, together with a happier future, a kind of regeneration. These outcasts form an immense addition to the crowd of apostles. The part of our civilisations is precisely to create, and, by a sort of fantastic humanitarian irony, to conserve and protect, with the most short-sighted solicitude, an ever-increasing stock of social failures, under whose weight they will necessarily end by foundering.
The new religion of Socialism is now entering on the phase in which its propagation is undertaken by its apostles. To these apostles may already be added a few martyrs; they constitute a new element of success. After the last executions of Anarchists in Paris the intervention of the police was necessary to prevent pious pilgrimage to the tombs of the victims, and the sale of their images surrounded with all kinds of religious attributes. Fetichism is the most ancient of cults, and will be perhaps the last. A people must always have a few fetiches to embody their dreams, desires, and hates.
Thus do these dogmas disseminate themselves, and no reasoning can struggle against them. Their might is invincible, for it is based on the material inferiority of the masses, and on the external illusion of happiness, whose mirage is always alluring men, and preventing them from seeing the barriers which separate realities from dreams.
3. The Propagation of Beliefs among the Masses.
Having explained at length in my two last works the mechanism of the propagation of beliefs, I can only refer the reader to them. He will there see how every civilisation is based on a small number of fundamental beliefs, which, after a whole series of transformations, finally appear, in the form of religions, in the popular mind. This process of fixation is of great importance, for ideas do not play their part in society, whether for good or ill, until they have descended into the mind of the crowd. Then, and only then, they become general opinions, and then invulnerable beliefs; that is to say, the essential factors of religions, revolutions, and changes of civilisation.
It is into this deepest soil, the soul of the crowd, that all our metaphysical, political, social, and religious conceptions finally thrust their roots. It is of importance to understand this, and for this reason a study of the mechanism of the mental evolution of nations and of the psychology of the crowd appeared Gustave Le Bon, The Psychology of Socialism, 79
to be a necessary preface to a work on. This study was the more indispensable in that these important subjects, and the latter especially, were very little known. The few writers who have studied the subject of the crowd have arrived at conclusions which present, with sufficient precision, either the exact reverse of the reality,2 or at least one facet of a question which comprises many. They have hardly perceived in the crowd anything but “an insatiable wild beast, thirsting for blood and rapine.” When we sound the subject a little we find, on the contrary, that the worst excesses of crowds have often arisen from extremely generous and disinterested ideas, and that the crowd is as often victim as murderer. A book entitled The Virtuous Masses would be as justifiable as a book entitled The Criminal Masses. I have elsewhere insisted at length on this point. But one of the fundamental characteristics which most profoundly divide the isolated individual from the crowd is the fact that the first is almost always guided by his personal interest, while the masses are rarely swayed by egoistical motives, but most often by collective and disinterested interests.3 Heroism and self-forgetfulness are more frequently found in crowds than in individuals. Behind all collective cruelty there is more often than not a belief, an idea of justice, a desire for moral satisfaction, a complete forgetfulness of personal interest, or readiness to sacrifice to the general interest, which is precisely the opposite of egoism.
The crowd may become cruel, but it is above all altruistic, and is as easily led away to sacrifice itself as to destroy others. Dominated by the sub-consciousness, it has a morality and a generosity which are always tending towards activity, whilst those of the individual generally remain contemplative, and most frequently are limited to his speeches. Reflection and reasoning most frequently lead to egoism; and egoism, so deeply rooted in the isolated individual, is a sentiment unknown to the crowd, simply because the crowd cannot reason and reflect. No religions, no empires could ever have been founded had the armies of their disciples been able to reason and reflect. Very few soldiers of such armies would have sacrificed their lives for the triumph of any cause.
History can only be clearly understood if we bear always in mind that the morale and the conduct of the isolated man are very different to those of the same man when he has become part of a collectivity. The collective interests of a race, interests which always imply greater or less forgetfulness of personal Gustave Le Bon, The Psychology of Socialism, 80
interest, are maintained by the crowd. Profound altruism, the altruism of acts, and not of words, is a collective virtue. All work of general import, demanding for its accomplishment a minimum of egoism and a maximum of blind devotion, self -abnegation, and sacrifice, can scarcely be accomplished but by crowds.
Despite their momentary outbursts of violence, the masses have always shown themselves ready to suffer all things. The tyrants and fanatics of all ages have never had any difficulty in finding crowds ready to immolate themselves to defend whatever cause. To religious and political tyranny — the tyranny of the living and the dead — they have never shown themselves rebellious. To become their master a man must make himself loved or feared, and by prestige rather than by force.
A distinguished thinker, M. Mazel, in his recent work, La Synergie sociale, remarks, of the hecatombs of the Terror, massacres which affected all the classes of society, not excluding the most humble, that “nothing is more astonishing than to see the Jacobin staff come and go, without danger, in a city peopled with the relations or friends of their victims, or of their countless future victims.” One cannot but perceive, in the bloody ferocity of the men of the Terror on the one, and the submission of the victims on the other hand, those two so contrary qualities of the crowd, already mentioned: violence and resignation equally unlimited. The Jacobin crowd believed all things permitted, and committed deeds from which an isolated tyrant had recoiled. The victims formed another crowd, which proved itself capable of suffering all things, even death.
Occasional ephemeral violence, and more frequent blind submission, are two opposing characteristics, but two that we must not separate if we wish to understand the mind of the crowd. Their bursts of violence are like the tumultuous waves which the tempest raises on the surface of the ocean, but without troubling the serenity of its profounder waters. The agitations of the crowd have their being above immutable depths that the movements of the surface do not reach; and this depth consists of those hereditary instincts whose sum is the soul of a nation. This substratum is solid in proportion as the race is ancient, and in consequence possesses a greater fixity. To these hereditary instincts the crowd always returns. Such is the solid woof on which every civilisation has hitherto reposed.
Gustave Le Bon, The Psychology of Socialism, 81
The Socialists imagine that they will easily carry the masses with them. They are wrong; they will very quickly discover that they will find among the masses, not their allies, but their most implacable enemies. The crowd may, doubtless, in its anger of a day, shatter, furiously, the social edifice; but, on the morrow, it will acclaim the first-come Caesar of whose plume it shall catch a glimpse, and who shall promise to restore to it what it has broken. The actual dominating principle of crowds, among nations having a long past, is not mobility, not fickleness, but fixity. Their destructive and revolutionary instincts are ephemeral; their conservative instincts are of an extreme tenacity.
Their destructive instincts may, for a moment, suffer the triumph of Socialism, but their conservative instincts will not permit of its duration; at least, in its present form. In its triumph, as in its fall, the heavy arguments of theorists will play no part. The hour is yet to sound when logic and reason shall be called to guide the current of History.
Notes.
1. The advance of science showed at first how slight are the foundations of all religious beliefs, but in advancing further it has also demonstrated that they have been of immense utility, quite apart from the part they have played in history. In the time of Voltaire the pilgrimages to miraculous relies and waters might be regarded as utterly ridiculous. But the modern investigations of the effects of suggestion we know that the curative action of miraculous waters, relics, and Madonnas, is at least equal and often superior to that of the most potent remedies. From the point of view of pure reason it may seem altogether absurd to implore the aid of gods and saints who exist only in our imagination.
Science, however, has shown us that these prayers are not vain. The auto-suggestion produced by sufficiently fervent prayer has comforted innumerable minds, and has given them the necessary strength to bear up against the cruelest trials. It is prayer, again, that strengthens faith, the most powerful lever humanity has ever wielded. Far from despising the error, we must recognise that the part it has played in the history of humanity has always been preponderant, and that it has constituted a motive of action that has never yet been equalled.
2.I may cite, as an example of the total incomprehension of this subject, the compilation of an Italian writer, Signor Sighele, entitled The Criminal Masses.
Gustave Le Bon, The Psychology of Socialism, 82
The book contains scarcely a trace of personal thought, and is almost entirely composed of quotations intended to prop up the old theory that the masses must be considered as ferocious beasts, always ready for the most atrocious crimes. In order to make his book known to his compatriots, the author for several months inundated the small Italian papers with letters in which a number of French writers were accused, with all manners of invective, of having stolen his ideas from him. One must be indulgent towards the meridional exaggerations of a beginner; but this indulgence must have its limits. I have been well accustomed these twenty years to see my books regarded as a kind of public mine where any one may dig without scruple, and I do not complain, considering that an author must hold himself rewarded if his ideas make headway — even if they are hardly ever quoted. I am happy, therefore, to see Signor Sighele profit from the perusal of my books, and will confine myself to asking him to observe that before complaining so loudly of French writers who, for the greater part, do not know his name, he should have refrained from availing himself of so many loans, and above all of such dissimulated loans such as that which figures on page 38, lines 12 et seq., of his little work on The Psychology of Sects, in which, after a quotation between inverted commas, taken from one of my books, the author gives as being his own, changing only a few words, a passage copied directly out of my Psychology of Crowds, page 8 lines 4 et seq. (3rd edition). Otherwise I can say with pleasure that Signor Sighele’s last work is not nearly so mediocre as his preceding one.
3. This fundamental point does not appear to have been clearly seized by the critics, of my book on The Psychology of Crowds. I must, however, make exception of M. Pillon, who, in the Anneé Philosophique, has very clearly shown that it is by this demonstration that I stand entirely apart from other writers on the same subject.
Book 3: Socialism As Affected By Race.
Chapter 1: Socialism in Germany.
1. The Theoretical Bases of Socialism in Germany.
It is in Germany that Socialism has to-day made the greatest strides, above all among the middle and upper classes. The history of Socialism in Germany is altogether beyond the scope of this volume, and if I devote a few pages to it, I do so only because the evolution of Socialism in Germany might, at the first view, seem to contradict my theory of the strict relation which exists between the social conceptions of a nation and the mind of that nation.
Between the minds of France and of Germany there are assuredly profound differences, and yet the Socialists of the two countries arrive at identical conceptions.
Before inquiring why the theorists of two so different C races should arrive at conclusions so similar, let us first observe in what manner the German methods of reasoning differ from those of the Latin theorists.
The Germans, after having been for a long time inspired by French ideas, are now inspiring these ideas in their turn. Their provisional pontiff, for they change him often, is to-day Karl Marx. His task has principally consisted in attempting to give a scientific shape to very old and common ideas, borrowed, as a brilliant economist, M. Paul Deschanel, has very well shown, from French and English writers. This leaning towards a scientific spirit is a characteristic quality of the German Socialists, and entirely significant of the national mind.
Far from regarding Socialism, as do their Latin equivalents, as an arbitrary organisation, able to establish and enforce itself here, there, and everywhere, they see in it only the inevitable development of economic evolution, and they profess an utter disdain of the geometrical constructions of our revolutionary rationalism. They teach that there are no more permanent economic laws than permanent natural laws, but only transitory forms. “Economic ideas are by no means logical ideas, but historical ideas.” The value of social institutions is entirely relative, never absolute. Collectivism is a phase of evolution into which all societies, by the mere fact of modern economic evolution, must of Gustave Le Bon, The Psychology of Socialism, 84
necessity enter.
This evolutionist conception of the world is certainly as far removed as possible from the rationalism of the Latins, which, after the fashion of out fathers of the Revolution, wishes to destroy absolutely and absolutely to reconstruct society.
Although they have set out from different principles, in which may be found the fundamental characteristics of the two races, both German Socialists and Latin Socialists arrive exactly at the same conclusions — reconstruct society by making the State absorb it. The first desire to effect this reconstruction in the name of evolution, of which, they maintain, it is the consequence. The second wish to effect a demolition, in the name of reason. But the societies of the future appear to them in identical forms. Both profess the same hatred of private enterprise and capital, the same indifference towards liberty, the same craving for forming people into brigades, and for ruling them with an iron discipline. Both demand the destruction of the modern State; but both would reconstruct it, immediately, under another name, with an administration which would differ from the modern State only in its possession of more extensive powers.
2. The Modern Evolution of Socialism in Germany.
State Socialism is, among the Latin peoples, as I shall presently show, a consequence of their past; of century on century of centralisation, and the progressive development of the central power. Among the Germans it is not precisely this; they have been led to a conception of the duty of the State identical with that entertained by the Latin peoples by certain artificial factors.
With them, this conception is the result of the transformation of character and conditions of life which has been effected during a century by the extension of the universal military régime. This by the more enlightened of the German writers, notably by Ziegler, has been perfectly recognised. The only means by which the mind, or at least the customs and the conduct of a nation, can be modified, is a rigid military discipline. It is the only means against which the individual is powerless to struggle. It makes him part of an hierarchy, and prohibits all sentiments of enterprise and independence. He may severely criticise its dogmas, but how can he dispute the orders of a chief who has the right of life and death over his subalterns, and can reply to the most humble Gustave Le Bon, The Psychology of Socialism, 85
observation by imprisonment?
So long as it has not been universal, the military régime has constituted an admirable means of tyranny and conquest. It has been the strength of all the nations who have succeeded in developing it; none could have subsisted without it. But the present age has introduced universal military service.
Instead of acting, as formerly, on a very small portion of the nation, it acts on the entire mind of the nation. One may study best its effects in countries where, as in Germany, it has reached its highest development. No discipline, not even of the convent, more completely sacrifices the individual to the community; none more nearly approaches the social type dreamed of by the Socialists.
Prussian martinetry, in one century, has transformed Germany, and adapted her admirably to submit to State Socialism. I recommend those of our young professors who are in search of subjects a little less commonplace than those which too often content them to a study of the transformations effected, during the nineteenth century, in the social and political ideals of Germany, by the application of compulsory and universal military service.
Modern Germany, ruled by the Prussian monarchy, is not the product of the slow evolution of history; its present unity was affected only by force of arms, after the Prussian victories over France and Austria. A large number of small kingdoms, formerly very prosperous, were suddenly united by Prussia, under a power practically absolute. It established, on the ruins of local and provincial life, a powerful centralisation, recalling that in France under Louis Quatorze and Napoleon. Such régime of centralisation must infallibly produce, before long, the effects which it everywhere has produced; the destruction of local life, above all of intellectual life; the destruction of private enterprise; the progressive absorption of all functions by the State. History shows us that these great military monarchies prosper only when they have eminent men at their heads, and as these eminent men are rare they never prosper for very long.
The absorption of functions by the State has been the more easy in Germany, in that the Prussian monarchy, having acquired a great prestige by its successful wars, is able to exercise a power almost absolute, which is not the case in those countries whose Governments, destroyed by frequent revolutions, find many obstacles to the exercise of power. Germany to-day is the great centre of authoritativeness, and will not much longer be the home of any Gustave Le Bon, The Psychology of Socialism, 86
liberty whatever.
One readily understands how Socialism, which demands the wider and wider extension of the intervention of the State, should have found in Germany a soil excellently prepared. Its development could not have been displeasing to the government of a nation so hierarchical, so enregimented, as modern Germany.
For a long time, accordingly, the Socialists were regarded with a very benevolent eye. They were protégés of Bismarck at first, and might have continued so, had they not finally become troublesome to the Government by a very maladroit opposition.
Since then they have slot been considered; and as the German Empire is a military monarchy, very well able, despite its constitutional form, to become an absolute monarchy, the Socialists have been treated in an energetic and summary manner. In two years only, from 1894 to 1896, according to the Worwartz, the courts have inflicted on the Socialists, in press or political cases, penalties to the total sum of 226 years of imprisonment, and £112,000
in fines.
Whether it be that such radical proceedings have made the Socialists reflect, or simply that the gradual enslavement of the mind produced by a severe and universal military rule has made its imprint on the already very practical and highly disciplined mind of the German people, it is certain that to-day Socialism among the Germans is beginning to assume a very mild form. It is becoming opportunist, is establishing itself on an exclusively parliamentary footing, and renounces the immediate triumph of its principles.
The extinction of the capitalist classes and the suppression of monopoly no longer appears more than a theoretic ideal, whose realisation must be very distant. German Socialism teaches to-day that “as bourgeois society was not created in a day, it cannot be destroyed in a day.” More and more it is tending towards union with the democratic movement in favour of the amelioration of the work