The fear of punishment prevents many of them from becoming criminals at ordinary times, but they do become criminals as soon as they can exercise their evil instincts without danger.
To this sinister substratum are due the massacres which stain all revolutions.
It was this class which, guided by its leaders, continually invaded the great revolutionary Assemblies.These regiments of disorder had no other ideal than that of massacre, pillage, and incendiarism.Their indifference to theories and principles was complete.
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.
These noisy and maleficent crowds, the kernel of all insurrections, from antiquity to our own times, are the only crowds known to the orator.To the orator they are the sovereign people.As a matter of fact this sovereign people is principally composed of the lower populace of whom Thiers said:--``Since the time when Tacitus saw it applaud the crimes of the emperors the vile populace has not changed.These barbarians who swarm at the bottom of societies are always ready to stain the people with every crime, at the beck of every power, and to the dishonour of every cause.''
At no period of history was the role of the lowest elements of the population exercised in such a lasting fashion as in the French Revolution.
The massacres began as soon as the beast was unchained--that is, from 1789, long before the Convention.They were carried out with all possible refinements of cruelty.During the killing of September the prisoners were slowly chopped to bits by sabre-cuts in order to prolong their agonies and amuse the spectators, who experienced the greatest delight before the spectacle of the convulsions of the victims and their shrieks of agony.
Similar scenes were observed all over France, even in the early days of the Revolution, although the foreign war did not excuse them then, nor any other pretext.
From March to September a whole series of burnings, killings, and pillagings drenched all France in blood.Taine cites one hundred and twenty such cases.Rouen, Lyons, Strasbourg, &c., fell into the power of the populace.
The Mayor of Troyes, his eyes destroyed by blows of scissors, was murdered after hours of suffering.The Colonel of Dragoons Belzuce was cut to pieces while living.In many places the hearts of the victims were torn out and carried about the cities on the point of a pike.
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.If its violence is unlimited, so is its servility.All the despotisms have had it for their servant.The Caesars are certain of being acclaimed by it, whether they are named Caligula, Nero, Marat, Robespierre, or Boulanger.
Beside these destructive hordes whose action during revolution is capital, there exists, as we have already remarked, the mass of the true people, which asks only the right to labour.It sometimes benefits by revolutions, but never causes them.The revolutionary theorists know little of it and distrust it, aware of its traditional and conservative basis.The resistant nucleus of a country, it makes the strength and continuity of the latter.
Extremely docile through fear, easily influenced by its leaders, it will momentarily commit every excess while under their influence, but the ancestral inertia of the race will soon take charge again, which is the reason why it so quickly tires of revolution.Its traditional soul quickly incites it to oppose itself to anarchy when the latter goes too far.At such times it seeks the leader who will restore order.
This people, resigned and peaceable, has evidently no very lofty nor complicated political conceptions.Its governmental ideal is always very simple, is something very like dictatorship.This is why, from the times of the Greeks to our own, dictatorship has always followed anarchy.It followed it after the first Revolution, when Bonaparte was acclaimed, and again when, despite opposition, four successive plebiscites raised Louis Napoleon to the head of the republic, ratified his coup d'etat, re-established the Empire, and in 1870, before the war, approved of his rule.
Doubtless in these last instances the people was deceived.But without the revolutionary conspiracies which led to disorder, it would not have been impelled to seek the means of escape therefrom.
The facts recalled in this chapter must not be forgotten if we wish fully to comprehend the various roles of the people during revolution.Its action is considerable, but very unlike that imagined by the legends whose repetition alone constitutes their vitality.
