Gustave Le Bon

“ A crowd is in reality inaccessible to reason; the only ideas capable of influencing it will always be sentiments evoked in the form of images.
The history of the Revolution shows on every page how easily the multitude follows the most contradictory impulses given by its different leaders. We see it applaud just as vigorously at the triumph of the Girondists, the Hebertists, the Dantonists, and the Terrorists as at their successive downfalls. ”

“ But while liberty has become very doubtful and fraternity has completely vanished, the principle of equality has grown unchecked. It has been supreme in all the political upheavals of which France has been the stage during the last century, and has reached such a development that our political and social life, our laws, manners, and customs are at least in theory based on this principle. It constitutes the real legacy of the Revolution. The craving for equality, not only before the law, but in position and fortune, is the very pivot of the last product of democracy: Socialism. ”

“ The power of the Revolution did not reside in the principles—which for that matter were anything but novel—which it sought to propagate, nor in the institutions which it sought to found. The people cares very little for institutions and even less for doctrines. That the Revolution was potent indeed, that it made France accept the violence, the murders, the ruin and the horror of a frightful civil war, that finally it defended itself victoriously against a Europe in arms, was due to the fact that it had founded not a new system of government but a new religion. ”

“ The great revolutions are those of manners and thought. Changing the name of a government does not transform the mentality of a people. To overthrow the institutions of a people is not to re-shape its soul.
The true revolutions, those which transform the destinies of the peoples, are most frequently accomplished so slowly that the historians can hardly point to their beginnings. The term evolution is, therefore, far more appropriate than revolution.
The various elements we have enumerated as entering into the genesis of the majority of revolutions will not suffice to classify them. ”

“ Did ever feudal baron exert a comparable tyranny? Was there ever an American trust which served the rights which it holds from the law with such contempt of the general interest? The very degree of perfection to which we have brought our laws, our social organisation, the mutual relation between the various professions and industries, exposes us more than our predecessors in ruder ages to the grave peril which at present threatens society. ”

“ Jacobinism is born of social decomposition just as mushrooms are born of a fermenting soil. Consider the authentic monuments of its thought—the speeches of Robespierre and Saint-Just, the debates of the Legislative Assembly and the Convention, the harangues, addresses, and reports of Girondists and Montagnards. Never did men speak so much to say so little; the empty verbiage and swollen emphasis swamp any truth there may be beneath their monotony and their turgidity. The Jacobin is full of respect for the phantoms of his reasoning brain ”

“ Seen from a distance, this seems to be the whole upshot of the Revolution. There was nothing homogeneous about it. One must resort to analysis before one can understand and grasp the great drama and display the impulses which continually actuated its heroes. In normal times we are guided by the various forms of logic—rational, affective, collective, and mystic—which more or less perfectly balance one another. During seasons of upheaval they enter into conflict, and man is no longer himself. ”

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

“ The Inconveniences of the Ancien Regime
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 regime stared all men in the face. ”

“ The historians who have judged the events of the French Revolution in the name of rational logic could not comprehend them, since this form of logic did not dictate them. As the actors of these events themselves understood them but ill, we shall not be far from the truth in saying that our Revolution was a phenomenon equally misunderstood by those who caused it and by those who have described it. At no period of history did men so little grasp the present, so greatly ignore the past, and so poorly divine the future. ”

“ The history of the multitudes during the Revolution is eminently instructive. It shows the error of the politicians who attribute all the virtues to the popular soul.
The facts of the Revolution teach us, on the contrary, that a people freed from social constraints, the foundations of civilisation, and abandoned to its instinctive impulses, speedily relapses into its ancestral savagery. Every popular revolution which succeeds in triumphing is a temporary return to barbarism. ”

“ In the dregs of society the revolutionaries of all times are sure of finding recruits. Eager only to kill and to plunder, little matters to them the cause they are sworn to defend. If the chances of murder and pillage are better in the party attacked, they will promptly change their colours.
To these criminals, properly so called, the incurable plague of all societies, we must add the class of semi-criminals. Wrongdoers on occasion, they never rebel so long as the fear of the established order restrains them, but as soon as it weakens they enrol themselves in the army of revolution. ”

“ A military movement may overthrow a government—and in the Spanish republics the Government is hardly ever destroyed by any other means—but if the revolution is to be productive of great results it must always be based upon general discontent and general hopes.
Unless it is universal and excessive, discontent alone is not sufficient to bring about a revolution. It is easy to lead a handful of men to pillage, destroy, and massacre, but to raise a whole people, or any great portion of that people, calls for the continuous or repeated action of leaders. ”

“ All our revolutions would then have resulted in stripping the king of his powers and his throne in order to bestow them upon the irresponsible, anonymous and despotic class of Government clerks.
To foresee the issue of all the conflicts which threaten to cloud the future is impossible. We must steer clear of pessimism as of optimism; all we can say is that necessity will always finally bring things to an equilibrium. The world pursues its way without bothering itself with our speeches, and sooner or later we manage to adapt ourselves to the variations of our environment. ”

“ Such is the behaviour of the base populace so soon as imprudent hands have broken the network of constraints which binds its ancestral savagery. It meets with every indulgence because it is in the interests of the politicians to flatter it. But let us for a moment suppose the thousands of beings who constitute it condensed into one single being. The personality thus formed would appear as a cruel and narrow and abominable monster, more horrible than the bloodiest tyrants of history.
This impulsive and ferocious people has always been easily dominated so soon as a strong power has opposed it. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The Terror must not be considered simply as a means of defence, but as the general process of destruction to which triumphant believers have always treated their detested enemies. Men who can put up with the greatest divergence of ideas cannot tolerate differences of belief.
In religious or political warfare the vanquished can hope for no quarter. From Sulla, who cut the throats of two hundred senators and five or six thousand Romans, to the men who suppressed the Commune, and shot down more than twenty thousand after their victory, this bloody law has never failed. ”

“ 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. ”

“ This diminution of the power of democratic Governments can only develop. One of the most constant laws of history is that of which I have already spoken: Immediately any one class becomes preponderant—nobles, clergy, army, or the people—it speedily tends to enslave others. Such were the Roman armies, which finally appointed and overthrew the emperors; such were the clergy, against whom the kings of old could hardly struggle; such were the States General, which at the moment of Revolution speedily absorbed all the powers of government, and supplanted the monarchy. ”

“ It may interest a few philosophers to know the truth, but the peoples will always prefer dreams. Synthetising their ideal, such dreams will always constitute powerful motives of action. One would lose courage were it not sustained by false ideas, said Fontenelle. Joan of Arc, the Giants of the Convention, the Imperial epic—all these dazzling images of the past will always remain sources of hope in the gloomy hours that follow defeat. They form part of that patrimony of illusions left us by our fathers, whose power is often greater than that of reality. ”