The Psychology of Revolution | Page 6

me one by
one, although I had considered them unshakable.
To explain this period we must consider it as a whole, as many
historians have done. It is composed of phenomena simultaneous but
independent of one another.
Each of its phases reveals events engendered by psychological laws
working with the regularity of clockwork. The actors in this great
drama seem to move like the characters of a previously determined
drama. Each says what he must say, acts as he is bound to act.

To be sure, the actors in the revolutionary drama differed from those of
a written drama in that they had not studied their parts, but these were
dictated by invisible forces.
Precisely because they were subjected to the inevitable progression of
logics incomprehensible to them we see them as greatly astonished by
the events of which they were the heroes as are we ourselves. Never did
they suspect the invisible powers which forced them to act. They were
the masters neither of their fury nor their weakness. They spoke in the
name of reason, pretending to be guided by reason, but in reality it was
by no means reason that impelled them.
``The decisions for which we are so greatly reproached,'' wrote
Billaud-Varenne, ``were more often than otherwise not intended or
desired by us two days or even one day beforehand: the crisis alone
evoked them.''
Not that we must consider the events of the Revolution as dominated
by an imperious fatality. The readers of our works will know that we
recognise in the man of superior qualities the role of averting fatalities.
But he can dissociate himself only from a few of such, and is often
powerless before the sequence of events which even at their origin
could scarcely be ruled. The scientist knows how to destroy the
microbe before it has time to act, but he knows himself powerless to
prevent the evolution of the resulting malady.
When any question gives rise to violently contradictory opinions we
may be sure that it belongs to the province of beliefs and not to that of
knowledge.
We have shown in a preceding work that belief, of unconscious origin
and independent of all reason, can never be influenced by reason.
The Revolution, the work of believers, has seldom been judged by any
but believers. Execrated by some and praised by others, it has remained
one of those dogmas which are accepted or rejected as a whole, without
the intervention of rational logic.

Although in its beginnings a religious or political revolution may very
well be supported by rational elements, it is developed only by the aid
of mystic and affective elements which are absolutely foreign to reason.
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 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.
Now history shows us how irresistible is the might of a strong belief.
Invincible Rome herself had to bow before the armies of nomad
shepherds illuminated by the faith of Mahommed. For the same reason
the kings of Europe could not resist the tatterdemalion soldiers of the
Convention. Like all apostles, they were ready to immolate themselves
in the sole end of propagating their beliefs, which according to their
dream were to renew the world.
The religion thus founded had the force of other religions, if not their
duration. Yet it did not perish without leaving indelible traces, and its
influence is active still.
We shall not consider the Revolution as a clean sweep in history, as its
apostles believed it. 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