1: Historians' Opinions of the French Revolution
The Historians of the Revolution
Le Bon remarks that at the time he wrote this volume, only a century had passed since the Revolution - and yet, historians seem to lack sufficient familiarity with the events and sufficient objectivity to evaluate them in a way that would lead to a common conclusion.
Foreigners who visit France come to learn that the opinions are so divided that the Revolution is a topic to be avoided in conversation. Some historians regard the Revolution as so destructive of society as to call it "a satanic piece of work" while others feel it was the glorious rebirth of the human race.
Many historians believe that they have attempted to assess the Revolution with an objective eye, but no single work on the subject seems acceptable to all. It may be a failure to be objective, but it is also likely that there is such a volume of information in the form of historical documents that it is impossible to read them all - and even if it were, they express irreconcilable differences in their depiction of events.
(EN: There's a long passage here in which Le Bon presents some of the major historians who have examined the Revolution, and notes the shortcomings of their works, all of which seems tedious and trivial.)
In all, the various historian tend to fall into factions, each of which takes a given perspective on this period in history. In so doing, they take on the manner of theologians, attempting to rectify the contradictions in a body of literature that is vague, ambiguous, and contradictory - each choosing to resolve these contradictions in a manner that support a given system of beliefs that reflects selective attentiveness at best, and intentional distortion at worst.
Fatalistic Interpretations of the Revolution
Le Bon cites a number of historians whose perspective was that the French Revolution was inevitable - hence the events and individuals involved in overthrowing the regime are regarded as incidentals.
Such theories are highly speculative. The statement that "If Bonaparte had died ... another general would have arisen" suggests, without proof, that there existed another individual who held exactly the same values and who would inevitably have done the exactly the same things.
Such theorists that the spirit of the age, or the will of society, or some other abstraction was the sole cause of historical events - and that it was only a matter of time. But neither society nor time is the cause of an action, and many fatalists confess that the environment was ripe for an uprising for nearly a century before the uprising actually happened.
That is to say that the Revolution occurred because specific individuals took specific actions at specific times - had they not, it seems more likely that the "spirit of the age" could have lasted another century - or that the culture in that time would have changed to become tolerant of the old regime.
This is not to say that culture or society take no part in revolutions, merely that they are not sufficient cause in themselves for a revolution to occur: they contribute to a context in which there is opportunity for a revolution to gain popular support - but it requires a specific person to take a specific action for such an opportunity to produce any outcome.
The Bias of Historians
History is itself a story, a narrative constructed of certain events of the past that conveniently explains certain events that are known to have occurred. This story is written by a person, who has a perspective and an agenda to tell a certain kind of story.
This agenda leads a historian to select which specific events to include in the narrative, generally those that support the plot of the story he wishes to tell. And to be regarded as a journalist rather than a writer of fantasy fiction, the historian must make a credible account.
This explain the reason that accounts of the past differ: some historians regard the revolution as destructive of human welfare, others supportive of it, on account of the details they have chosen to include in their narratives. For that reason, there are certain details that historians are hesitant to include in their narratives.
Le Bon suggests that, at his time, historians were moving toward a technique of portraying history with a more objective eye - to tell the course of events without attempting to influence how they are interpreted. But in so doing they often merely play with the language of the story so as to seem to be impartial, while continuing to present only those facts that would lead the reader to a given interpretation of those events.
It is interesting to see how psychologists are analyzing written documents to tell of the character of the writer: the values and desires of a person color the way in which they describe events. And what can be plainly seen in the language of historians is their individual biases in relating the story of the events of the Revolution - which are often quite blatant in the language of their tales.
Impartiality in History
Again, the historian attempts to present his narrative as objective - and in that way he is similar to the journalist. The most evident difference between the two is time: the journalist tells the story of what happened yesterday, whereas the historian tells the story of what happened a decade or a century ago.
Another critical difference in that, in some instances, a journalist may report on his personal observation of an incident at which he was present though a historian generally cannot. But more often, the historian relies on the account of a journalist, and the journalist relies upon the account of witnesses.
Each of these accounts may be skewed. Some are patent falsehoods, but even those that attempt to represent the truth often present an interpretation of the truth - they select certain details of an incident to include (and exclude others) and suggest causal connections where none may in fact have existed.
So even when the historian attempts to be objective, the information presented to him has been re-interpreted several times. The witness creates a narrative based on the limitations of his observation, filtered by his agenda. The journalist consolidates the accounts of these witnesses, filtered by his own. The historian consolidates the accounts of the journalists - and even if he is perfectly able to restrain his own bias (which no-one truly is), the facts have already been twice mutated from actual events.
As such, the historian is much like the fiction writer, who weaves a fantastic tale for which his audience must engage in the willing suspension of their disbelief to accept the story as being true, or at least plausible.
It is said that the point of studying history is to record the successes and mistakes of the past as a means to make better decisions in future. But if this is so, then the historian is also a moralists, who must first judge which events of the past are worth remembering, and to evaluate whether a given course of event was a success or a mistake. This is an inherently subjective practice.
The only objective history would be an assemblage of factual details of the past without interpretation - and a collection of all the details, rather than the selection of a few. Such a collection would be vast and unstructured, and even then the details must be called into question.