Highlights From “The Psychology of Revolution” (Gustave Le Bon)

Published on April 2, 2024 (↻ February 11, 2025), filed under Everything Else (RSS feed for all categories).

Another part of my random, untargeted book highlight series, here are some snippets from Gustave Le Bon’s The Psychology of Revolution (1894).

Emphasis as it appears in the original work may be missing, and my own edits, though marked, may be broad (and unacademic). Then, important: By sharing these highlights I neither implicitly endorse nor recommend respective authors and their views. Assume that I know little of the authors, and that I have a nuanced view on the matter. (The only thing the highlights can tell is that—much like the books themselves—for some reason or other I found them of interest.) When a detailed understanding of my views is important, ask me.

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.

The fraternity and liberty which it proclaimed never greatly seduced the peoples, but equality became their gospel[.]

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.

Although the origin of a revolution may be perfectly rational, we must not forget that the reasons invoked in preparing for it do not influence the crowd until they have been transformed into sentiments.

Whatever its origin, a revolution is not productive of results until it has sunk into the soul of the multitude.

The multitude is, therefore, the agent of a revolution; but not its point of departure. The crowd represents an amorphous being which can do nothing, and will nothing, without a head to lead it. It will quickly exceed the impulse once received, but it never creates it.

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.”

Discontent must generally have been accumulating for a long time in order to produce its effects.

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.

The maximum of violence in these persecutions is attained when the triumphant party is defending a belief in addition to its material interests.

Despite [religious revolutions’] slight rational value they shape history, and prevent the peoples from remaining a mass of individuals without cohesion or strength. Man has needed them at all times to orientate his thought and guide his conduct. No philosophy has as yet succeeded in replacing them.

[…] the role of petty accessory circumstances in great events, and prove that one must not speak too readily of the general laws of history.

The majority of revolutions take place in the capitals, and by means of contagion spread through the country; but this is not a constant rule.

The Russian Revolution proved that a government which defends itself energetically may finally triumph.

All those who could be taken were killed. Such extermination is the only method discovered since the beginning of the world by which a society can be protected against the rebels who wish to destroy it.

[…] governments are not overthrown, but that they commit suicide.

[…] the peoples are always extremely conservative.

Whether effected by the upper classes or the lower, revolutions do not change the souls of peoples that have been a long time established.

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

Excessive malleability of the national mind impels a people to incessant revolutions. Excess of rigidity leads it to decadence. Living species, like the races of humanity, disappear when, too fixedly established by a long past, they become incapable of adapting themselves to new conditions of existence.

After the invasions of the end of the Roman Empire France took several centuries to form a national soul.

She finally achieved one; but in the course of centuries this soul finally became too rigid. With a little more malleability, the ancient monarchy would have been slowly transformed as it was elsewhere […].

[…] the people never acts without leaders, and that although it plays a considerable part in revolutions by following and exaggerating the impulses received, it never directs its own movements.

“I believe that in the whole history of the period included between 1789 and 1799 not a single person stands out who led or shaped events: neither Louis XVI. nor Mirabeau nor Danton nor Robespierre. Must we say that it was the French people that was the real hero of the French Revolution? Yes—provided we see the French people not as a multitude but as a number of organised groups.”

“In war more than at any other time there is no better inspiring force than hatred […].”

Fear plays almost as large a part in revolutions as hatred.

Ambition, for instance, is necessarily limited in a hierarchical form of society. Although the soldier does sometimes become a general, it is only after a long term of service. In time of revolution, on the other hand, there is no need to wait. Every one may reach the upper ranks almost immediately, so that all ambitions are violently aroused.

Buddhism, Christianity, Islamism, the Reformation, sorcery, Jacobinism, socialism, spiritualism, &c., seem very different forms of belief, but they have, I repeat, identical mystic and affective bases, and obey forms of logic which have no affinity with rational logic.

Passion supports convictions, but hardly ever creates them.

[…] revolutions do not produce their full effects until they have penetrated the soul of the multitude. They therefore represent a consequence of the psychology of crowds.

The people will always be convinced that superior beings—divinities, Governments, or great men—have the power to change things at will. This mystic side produces an intense need of adoration.

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 historians who, from Michelet to M. Aulard, have represented the revolutionary crowd as having acted on its own initiative, without leaders, do not comprehend its psychology.

The action of a group consists chiefly in fortifying hesitating opinions. All feeble individual convictions become confirmed upon becoming collective.

The function of the leader of a club, a homogeneous crowd, is far more difficult than that of a leader of a heterogeneous crowd. The latter may easily be led by harping on a small number of strings, but in a homogeneous group like a club, whose sentiments and interests are identical, the leader must know how to humour them and is often himself led.

As soon as men lose confidence in the foundations of the mental framework which guides their conduct they feel at first uneasy and then discontented.

“The fundamental principle of all morality, of which I have treated in my writings,” said Rousseau, “is that man is a being naturally good, loving justice and order.”

Of the three principles of the revolutionary device, equality was most fruitful of consequences. […] it is almost the only one which still survives, and is still productive of effects.

With the Jacobins of the Revolution, as with those of our days, the word “equality” simply involves a jealous hatred of all superiority.

Even a superficial study of the psychology of crowds would speedily have shown them that the mystic entity which they call the people was merely translating the will of a few leaders. It is not correct to say that the people took the Bastille, attacked the Tuileries, invaded the Convention, &c., but that certain leaders—generally by means of the clubs—united armed bands of the populace, which they led against the Bastille, the Tuileries, &c. 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.

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.

[…] the power of the multitude will progressively increase, overcome all other powers, and finally replace them.

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

The history of the Convention constitutes one of the most striking examples that could be given of the influence of leaders and of fear upon an assembly.

The Jacobins thought to remedy all these ills by creating a new Constitution. It was always a tradition with all the revolutionary assemblies to believe in the magic virtues of formula.

Never did any Government possess such formidable means of action, yet in spite of the permanent guillotine, despite the delegates sent with the guillotine into the provinces, despite its Draconian laws, the Convention had to struggle perpetually against riots, insurrections, and conspiracies. The cities, the departments, and the faubourgs of Paris were continually rising in revolt, although heads were falling by the thousand.

This Assembly, which thought itself sovereign, fought against the invincible forces which were fixed in men’s minds, and which material constraint was powerless to overcome.

How can one support error when one has the necessary strength to wipe it out?
Thus have reasoned the believers of all ages.

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.

This glowing record of devastation proves, not only the power of fanaticism: it shows us what becomes of men who are liberated from all social restraints, and of the country which falls into their hands.

Attacks were delivered simply by great masses of troops. Thanks to the numbers of the men at the disposal of their generals, the considerable gaps provoked by this efficacious but barbarous procedure could be rapidly filled.

The slow rate of fire in those days rendered the French tactics relatively easy of employment. It triumphed, but at the cost of enormous losses. It has been calculated that between 1792 and 1800 the French army left more than a third of its effective force on the battle-field (700,000 men out of 2,000,000).

Men judge with their intelligence, and are guided by their characters. To understand a man fully one must separate these two elements.

[…] by one of those fatalities which were a law of the Revolution, and which prove that the course of events is often superior to men’s wills, these deputies [of the Directory], like their predecessors, may be said always to have done the contrary of what they wished to do. They hoped to be moderate, and they were violent; they wanted to eliminate the influence of the Jacobins, and they allowed themselves to be led by them; they thought to repair the ruins of the country and they succeeded only in adding others to them; they aspired to religious peace, and they finally persecuted and massacred the priests with greater rigour than during the Terror.

Bonaparte replaced an unorganised collective despotism by a perfectly organised individual despotism. Everyone gained thereby, for his tyranny was infinitely less heavy than that which had been endured for ten long years.

Upon assuming power Bonaparte undertook a colossal task. All was in ruins; all was to be rebuilt.

Legislating always, politicians never realise that as institutions are effects, and not causes, they have no virtue in themselves.

[…] individual tyranny, which was weak and therefore easily overthrown, has been replaced by collective tyrannies, which are very strong and difficult to destroy.

The heritage of the Revolution is summed up in its entirety in the one phrase—Liberty, equality, and Fraternity. The principle of equality, as we have seen, has exerted a powerful influence, but the two others did not share its lot.

“Almost all the thinkers of the nineteenth century,” [Emile Faguet] says, “were not democrats.”

If the worker makes three times as much to-day as he did a hundred years ago, and enjoys commodities then unknown to great nobles, he owes it entirely to the elect.

“The causes of the evil are not peculiar to our day. The evil is more general, and bears a triple name: irresponsibility, indiscipline, and anarchy.”

“Plurality is the best way, because it is visible and has strength to make itself obeyed; it is, however, the advice of the less able.”

In France the democracy is practically non-existent save in speeches. A system of competitions and examinations, which must be worked through in youth, firmly closes the door upon the liberal professions, and creates inimical and separate classes.

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.

The French Revolution is an inexhaustible mine of psychological documents. No period of the life of humanity has presented such a mass of experience, accumulated in so short a time.

Every popular revolution which succeeds in triumphing is a temporary return to barbarism.

The present does not repeat the past, and the details of history are full of unforeseen consequences; but in their main lines events are conditioned by eternal laws.

Read the whole book: The Psychology of Revolution.

About Me

I’m Jens (long: Jens Oliver Meiert), and I’m a web developer, manager, and author. I’ve worked as a technical lead and engineering manager for small and large enterprises, I’m an occasional contributor to web standards (like HTML, CSS, WCAG), and I write and review books for O’Reilly and Frontend Dogma.

I love trying things, not only in web development and engineering management, but also in other areas like philosophy. Here on meiert.com I share some of my experiences and views. (I value you being critical, interpreting charitably, and giving feedback.)