"It would be without a parallel in the history of the world," he observes rightly, "that a form of government held in popular detestation should have lasted for five centuries....It would be inexplicable that the thirty legions of the Empire should have constrained a hundred million men to obedience." The reason of their obedience was that the Emperor, who personified the greatness of Rome, was worshipped like a divinity by unanimous consent.There were altars in honour of the Emperor in the smallest townships of his realm."From one end of the Empire to the other a new religion was seen to arise in those days which had for its divinities the emperors themselves.Some years before the Christian era the whole of Gaul, represented by sixty cities, built in common a temple near the town of Lyons in honour of Augustus....Its priests, elected by the united Gallic cities, were the principal personages in their country....It is impossible to attribute all this to fear and servility.Whole nations are not servile, and especially for three centuries.It was not the courtiers who worshipped the prince, it was Rome, and it was not Rome merely, but it was Gaul, it was Spain, it was Greece and Asia."To-day the majority of the great men who have swayed men's minds no longer have altars, but they have statues, or their portraits are in the hands of their admirers, and the cult of which they are the object is not notably different from that accorded to their predecessors.An understanding of the philosophy of history is only to be got by a thorough appreciation of this fundamental point of the psychology of crowds.The crowd demands a god before everything else.
It must not be supposed that these are the superstitions of a bygone age which reason has definitely banished.Sentiment has never been vanquished in its eternal conflict with reason.
Crowds will hear no more of the words divinity and religion, in whose name they were so long enslaved; but they have never possessed so many fetishes as in the last hundred years, and the old divinities have never had so many statues and altars raised in their honour.Those who in recent years have studied the popular movement known under the name of Boulangism have been able to see with what ease the religious instincts of crowds are ready to revive.There was not a country inn that did not possess the hero's portrait.He was credited with the power of remedying all injustices and all evils, and thousands of men would have given their lives for him.Great might have been his place in history had his character been at all on a level with his legendary reputation.
It is thus a very useless commonplace to assert that a religion is necessary for the masses, because all political, divine, and social creeds only take root among them on the condition of always assuming the religious shape--a shape which obviates the danger of discussion.Were it possible to induce the masses to adopt atheism, this belief would exhibit all the intolerant ardour of a religious sentiment, and in its exterior forms would soon become a cult.The evolution of the small Positivist sect furnishes us a curious proof in point.What happened to the Nihilist whose story is related by that profound thinker Dostoiewsky has quickly happened to the Positivists.Illumined one day by the light of reason he broke the images of divinities and saints that adorned the altar of a chapel, extinguished the candles, and, without losing a moment, replaced the destroyed objects by the works of atheistic philosophers such as Buchner and Moleschott, after which he piously relighted the candles.
The object of his religious beliefs had been transformed, but can it be truthfully said that his religious sentiments had changed?
Certain historical events--and they are precisely the most important--I again repeat, are not to be understood unless one has attained to an appreciation of the religious form which the convictions of crowds always assume in the long run.There are social phenomena that need to be studied far more from the point of view of the psychologist than from that of the naturalist.
The great historian Taine has only studied the Revolution as a naturalist, and on this account the real genesis of events has often escaped him.He has perfectly observed the facts, but from want of having studied the psychology of crowds he has not always been able to trace their causes.The facts having appalled him by their bloodthirsty, anarchic, and ferocious side, he has scarcely seen in the heroes of the great drama anything more than a horde of epileptic savages abandoning themselves without restraint to their instincts.The violence of the Revolution, its massacres, its need of propaganda, its declarations of war upon all things, are only to be properly explained by reflecting that the Revolution was merely the establishment of a new religious belief in the mind of the masses.The Reformation, the massacre of Saint Bartholomew, the French religious wars, the Inquisition, the Reign of Terror are phenomena of an identical kind, brought about by crowds animated by those religious sentiments which necessarily lead those imbued with them to pitilessly extirpate by fire and sword whoever is opposed to the establishment of the new faith.The methods of the Inquisition are those of all whose convictions are genuine and sturdy.Their convictions would not deserve these epithets did they resort to other methods.
Upheavals analogous to those I have just cited are only possible when it is the soul of the masses that brings them about.The most absolute despots could not cause them.When historians tell us that the massacre of Saint Bartholomew was the work of a king, they show themselves as ignorant of the psychology of crowds as of that of sovereigns.Manifestations of this order can only proceed from the soul of crowds.The most absolute power of the most despotic monarch can scarcely do more than hasten or retard the moment of their apparition.The massacre of Saint Bartholomew or the religious wars were no more the work of kings than the Reign of Terror was the work of Robespierre, Danton, or Saint Just.At the bottom of such events is always to be found the working of the soul of the masses, and never the power of potentates.