The Psychology of Revolution quotes

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 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.

We know that to demonstrate their intention of creating a world distinct from the old they initiated a new era and professed to break entirely with all vestiges of the past.

But the past never dies. It is even more truly within us than without us.

Against their will the reformers of the Revolution remained saturated with the past, and could only continue, under other names, the traditions of the monarchy, even exaggerating the autocracy and centralisation of the old system.

They form part of that patrimony of illusions left us by our fathers, whose power is often greater than that of reality.

The dream, the ideal, the legend—in a word, the unreal—it is that which shapes history.

We generally apply the term revolution to sudden political changes, but the expression may be employed to denote all sudden transformations, or transformations apparently sudden, whether of beliefs, ideas, or doctrines.

These legends will doubtless retain more life than history itself. Do not regret this too greatly.

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.

The sudden political revolutions which strike the historian most forcibly are often the least important. 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 history of the Russian Revolution shows us how a government, all of whose natural supports have crumbled in succession, can, with wisdom and firmness, triumph over the most formidable obstacles.

It has been very justly said that governments are not overthrown, but that they commit suicide.

3. Revolutions effected by Governments.—Examples: China, Turkey, &c.

France has thus come to be governed by heads of departments and government clerks. The more we study the history of revolutions the more we discover that they change practically nothing but the label.

To create a revolution is easy, but to change the soul of a people is difficult indeed.

1. The stability and malleability of the national mind.

This is why the liberation of popular passions is so dangerous. The torrent, once escaped from its bed, does not return until it has spread devastation far and wide. ``

Woe to him who stirs up the dregs of a nation,

'' said Rivarol at the beginning of the Revolution. ``There is no age of enlightenment for the populace.''

The torrent, once escaped from its bed, does not return until it has spread devastation far and wide. ``Woe to him who stirs up the dregs of a nation,'' said Rivarol at the beginning of the Revolution. ``

There is no age of enlightenment for the populace.

''

To the elements recruited from the lowest dregs of the populace are added, by way of contagion, a host of idle and indifferent persons who are simply drawn into the movement.

They shout because there are men shouting, and revolt because there is a revolt, without having the vaguest idea of the cause of shouting or revolution.

The suggestive power of their environment absolutely hypnotises them, and impels them to action.

. . . In time of revolution one can only say what one has done; it would not be wise to say that one could not have done otherwise. . . .

Men are difficult to understand if we want to be just. . . . Do they know themselves?

Do they account for themselves very clearly? There are virtues and vices of circumstance.''

``

Vanity made the Revolution; liberty was only the pretext.

''

Although it is not necessary that a nation should possess any large number of such spirits, it is very necessary that it should possess some.

Without them men would still be living in caves.

The revolutionary audacity which results in discoveries implies very rare faculties. It necessitates notably an independence of mind sufficient to escape from the influence of current opinions, and a judgement that can grasp, under superficial analogies, the hidden realities.

Personal characteristics vanish in the crowd, which exerts an extraordinary influence upon the individuals which form it.

The miser becomes generous, the sceptic a believer, the honest man a criminal, the coward a hero.

Examples of such transformations abounded during the great Revolution.

Yet if we wish to comprehend such acts we must be no more indignant than the naturalist before the spider slowly devouring a fly.

As soon as the reason is moved it is no longer reason, and can explain nothing.

The functions of the historian and the psychologist are not, as we see, identical, but of both we may demand the endeavour, by a wise interpretation of the facts, to discover, under the visible evidences, the invisible forces which determine them.

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. They were numerous;

With the influence of the past, the reformers of the Revolution were always clashing, without ever understanding it.

They wanted to annihilate it, but were annihilated by it instead.

The faith of law-makers in the absolute power of laws and institutions, rudely shaken by the end of the Revolution, was absolute at its outbreak. Gregoire said from the tribune of the Constituent Assembly, without provoking the least astonishment:

With the Jacobins of the Revolution, as with those of our days, the word ``equality'' simply involves a jealous hatred of all superiority. To efface superiority, such men pretend to unify manners, customs, and situations. All despotisms but that exercised by themselves seem odious.

Not being able to avoid the natural inequalities, they deny them.

The second Declaration of Rights, that of 1793, affirms, contrary to the evidence, that ``all men are equal by nature.''

2. Dissolution of the Ancien Regime. The assembling of the States General.

Before they are realised in action, revolutions are sketched out in men's thoughts.

Prepared by the causes already studied, the French Revolution commenced in reality with the reign of Louis XVI. More discontented and censorious every day, the middle classes added claim to claim. Everybody was calling for reform.

During the Revolution the same crowds attacked or defended the most contrary parties, according to the leaders who happened to be at their heads.

A crowd never has any opinion but that of its leaders.

Example constituting one of the most potent forms of suggestion, the taking of the Bastille was inevitably followed by the destruction of other fortresses.

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.

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 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.

The influence of great manipulators of men was displayed in a high degree during the Convention. It was constantly led by a violent minority of narrow minds, whose intense convictions lent them great strength.

A brutal and audacious minority will always lead a fearful and irresolute majority.

This explains the constant tendency toward extremes to be observed in all revolutionary assemblies. The history of the Convention verifies once more the law of acceleration studied in another chapter.

The men of the Plain voted for everything they were ordered to vote for—the creation of the Revolutionary Tribunal, the Terror, &c. It was with their assistance that the Mountain crushed the Gironde, and Robespierre destroyed the Hebertists and Dantonists.

Like all weak people, they followed the strong.

The gentle philanthropists who composed the Plain, and constituted the majority of the Assembly, contributed, by their pusillanimity, to bring about the frightful excesses of the Convention.

Like all weak people, they followed the strong. The gentle philanthropists who composed the Plain, and constituted the majority of the Assembly, contributed, by their pusillanimity, to bring about the frightful excesses of the Convention.

The psychological note always prevailing in the Convention was a horrible fear. It was more especially through fear that men cut off one another's heads, in the doubtful hope of keeping their own on their shoulders.

Such a fear was, of course, very comprehensible. The unhappy deputies deliberated amid the hootings and vociferations of the tribunes. At every moment veritable savages, armed with pikes, invaded the Assembly, and the majority of the members no longer dared to attend the sessions.

It has truly been said that a glance from the master made his colleagues shrink with fear. On their faces one read ``the pallor of fear and the abandon of despair.''

All feared Robespierre and Robespierre feared all.

It was because he feared conspiracies against him that he cut off men's heads, and it was also through fear that others allowed him to do so.

``We had only one feeling, that of self-preservation; only one desire, that of preserving our lives, which each of us believed to be threatened.

You had your neighbour's head cut off so that your neighbour should not have you yourself guillotined.

''

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.

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.

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.

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.

They were the more obliged to do so in that the Plain—that is, the great majority of the Assembly—which had allowed itself to be decimated by Robespierre, now rebelled furiously against the system it had so long acclaimed even while it abhorred it.

Nothing is more terrible than a body of men who have been afraid and are afraid no longer.

The Plain revenged itself for being terrorised by the Mountain, and terrorised that body in turn.

We can gather as much by reading the reports of various deputies inserted in the Moniteur of August 11, 15, and 29, 1794, and notably that on ``the conspiracy of the triumvirs, Robespierre, Couthon, and Saint-Just.''

Never did slaves heap such invectives on a fallen master.

We learn that ``these monsters had for some time been renewing the most horrible prescriptions of Marius and Sulla.'' Robespierre is represented as a most frightful scoundrel;

Without their extreme timidity the power of the dictator could not have lasted a single day.

Robespierre was one of the most odious tyrants of history, but he is distinguished from all others in that he made himself a tyrant without soldiers.

We may sum up his doctrines by saying that he was the most perfect incarnation, save perhaps Saint-Just, of the Jacobin faith, in all its narrow logic, its intense mysticism, and its inflexible rigidity. He has admirers even to-day. M.

… future Councillors of State, and beside them in the Convention there were, between the future Duke of Otranto to the future Count Regnault, no less than 50 democrats who fifteen years later possessed titles, coats of arms, plumes, carriages, endowments, entailed estates, hotels, and chateaux.

Fouche died worth L600,000.

''

His aim is to understand, and criticism vanishes before a complete comprehension.

The human mind is a very fragile mechanism, and the marionettes which dance upon the stage of history are rarely able to resist the imperious forces which impel them.

Heredity, environment, and circumstances are imperious masters. No one can say with certainty what would have been his conduct in the place of the men whose actions he endeavours to interpret.

Under the ancien regime Frenchmen had supported every species of tyranny, and the Republic had created a despotism even heavier than that of the monarchy. Despotism was then a normal condition, which aroused no protest save when it was accompanied by disorder.

A constant law of the psychology of crowds shows them as creating anarchy, and then seeking the master who will enable them to emerge therefrom.

Bonaparte was this master.

All these events are narrowly connected in their origin. They represent the price of that capital phenomenon in the evolution of a people, a change of ideal.

Man can never make the attempt to break suddenly with his ancestors without profoundly affecting the course of his own history.

1. The Psychological Causes of the continued Revolutionary Movements to which France has been subject.

Finally, as the supreme power is distributed among thousands of hands, responsibilities are so disseminated that it would be difficult to know where to begin.

A tyrant can be overthrown, but what can be done against a host of little anonymous tyrannies?

If we wished to sum up in a word the great transformations which have been effected in France by a century of riots and revolutions, we might say that individual tyranny, which was weak and therefore easily overthrown, has been replaced by collective tyrannies, which …

A doctrine may be compared to a living being. It subsists only by process of transformation.

The books are necessarily silent upon these variations, so that the phase of things which they establish belongs only to the past. They do not reflect the image of the living, but of the dead.

The written statement of a doctrine often represents the most negligible side of that doctrine.

I should have nothing to say against this if the selection were real. It would then constitute the application of the maxim of Napoleon: ``

The true method of government is to employ the aristocracy, but under the forms of democracy.

''

Unhappily the democracy of the ``intellectuals'' would simply lead to the substitution of the Divine right of kings by the Divine right of a petty oligarchy, which is too often narrow and tyrannical.

Liberty cannot be created by replacing a tyranny.

Popular democracy by no means aims at manufacturing rulers. Dominated entirely by the spirit of equality and the desire to ameliorate the lot of the workers, it rejects the idea of fraternity, and exhibits no anxiety in respect of liberty.

As a matter of fact,

Nature does not know such a thing as equality.

She distributes unevenly genius, beauty, health, vigour, intelligence, and all the qualities which confer on their possessors a superiority over their fellows.

No one yet seems to understand that individuals and their methods, not regulations, make the value of a people. The efficacious reforms are not the revolutionary reforms but the trifling ameliorations of every day accumulated in course of time.

The great social changes, like the great geological changes, are effected by the daily addition of minute causes.

The economic history of Germany during the last forty years proves in a striking manner the truth of this law.

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.

The difficulty is to do so without too much friction, and above all to resist the chimerical conceptions of dreamers. Always powerless to re-organise the world, they have often contrived to upset it.

The difficulty is to do so without too much friction, and above all to resist the chimerical conceptions of dreamers.

Always powerless to re-organise the world, they have often contrived to upset it.

Athens, Rome, Florence, and many other cities which formerly shone in history, were victims of these terrible theorists. The results of their influence has always been the same—anarchy, dictatorship, and decadence.

The struggle of the blind multitudes against the elect is one of the continuous facts of history, and the triumph of popular sovereignties without counterpoise has already marked the end of more than one civilisation.

The elect create, the plebs destroys.

As soon as the first lose their hold the latter begins its precious work.

The elect create, the plebs destroys. As soon as the first lose their hold the latter begins its precious work.

The great civilisations have only prospered by dominating their lower elements.

It is not only in Greece that anarchy, dictatorship, invasion, and, finally, the loss of independence has resulted from the despotism of a democracy. Individual tyranny is always born of collective tyranny. It ended the first cycle of the greatness of Rome;

The great civilisations have only prospered by dominating their lower elements. It is not only in Greece that anarchy, dictatorship, invasion, and, finally, the loss of independence has resulted from the despotism of a democracy.

Individual tyranny is always born of collective tyranny.

It ended the first cycle of the greatness of Rome; the Barbarians achieved the second.