4: Illusions Respecting the French Revolution
Given that the common man has little interest in philosophy, and that the intellectuals of the time were largely ignored until they were revived and extolled by historians, it is not accurate to say that the French Revolution, or any revolution, has much to do with ideas, logic, and reason.
It is more accurate to state that political uprising has to do with conditions, desires, and illusions - as any belief about the cause of circumstances that is divorced from ideas and logic can only by an illusion even if it happens to agree with reality.
As such, in religious and political revolutions, men are motivated by the pursuit of these illusions, which may later be justified by philosophy and reason - but at the time action is taken, the motivation of the commoners remained as unproven and very superficially considered beliefs.
The accuracy, and even the plausibility, of these beliefs is of little importance, as people often place great credibility in the most nonsensical doctrines and their complete lack of basis in fact does not prevent men from being motivated by them.
(EN: This tends to be difficult to comprehend, but is largely analogous to making a sound decision based on incorrect information - the decision-maker accepted the information as reliable and included it in a sound and rational decision-making process. We say that the decision was sound but the information on which it was based was not. Similarly, there can be rational decisions based on irrational beliefs.)
The Romanticism of Primitive Man
One of the most prominent illusions of the Revolution was the notion of primitive man - which consists of the premise that mankind was perfected in his original state, as was his society, and has degenerated since. Those who accept this illusion are prone to believing that society would be better off it if reverted to a more primitive state.
One fundamental flaw with this way of thinking is that the state of primitive man and early society can be understood. What is "primitive" or "natural" can only be a romanticized historical account. It is based on anthropological or religious evidence that is often scant and incomplete, with a great deal of detail being supplied by the imagination to depict a former period in history as being perfect, or in any way better than the presence.
Le Bon suggests that modern science, which bases its analysis on a greater amount of evidence and more sophisticated methods of analysis, has shown that primitive man was "an ignorant and ferocious brute ... governed only by his instinctive impulses."
(EN: It should be noted that this, too, is based on fragmentary evidence and subjective interpretation. The simple fact is that we do not know much about primitive society and can represent it as being whatever suits our fancy - and depict it as being idyllic or hellish.)
The aim of civilization is to progress society, and is generally to escape from nature rather than to return to it. We may be critical of the situation such as it is in present times, but it is a dereliction of intellect to merely suggest that we "reset" society to a former state rather than perform a more diligent analysis of present issues and propose a specific solution.
And so, the notion of the virtue of primitive man and depicting him as existing in a state of grace is entirely ridiculous, but it was nonetheless accepted by men of the eighteenth century who were dissatisfied with the conditions of their time, and engaged in romanticizing a past state of society and advocating for a return to it.
The Power of Transformation Attributed to the Law
Another common illusion is that codifying something into a law has the power to transform reality: that by simply writing down a statement and voting upon it will cause a change to be effected without any further effort, of that the effort is at all possible to be performed.
This is obviously ludicrous should the law demand that each citizen be granted five loaves of bread per week during a famine in which there is no bread to be distributed. It is no less ludicrous, but less obviously so, when it is believed that crafting a law that demands people shall behave in a certain manner.
Both the legislation of the old regime and the designers of the new were hampered by their acceptance of the illusion. Both sides apparently assumed that anything that was written down would magically become so.
Those of the new regime were further removed from reality because they began tabula rasa, imagining an entirely new society that did not yet exist rather than suggesting amendments to the current state of things with full knowledge of the limitations of the resources of the state.
Many legislators were apparently moved by the notion that humanity was homogeneous and that a perfect plan could be laid for the ongoing conduct of an entire nation as if it were a simple matter of mathematics, in which all quantities were fixed and known.
Le Bon remarks on some of the more puerile statements of the legislators of the new regime, such as Gregoire's statement that "We could if we would change religion, but we do not want to." We know the truth of the matter: that they did, indeed, want to, but their attempts failed miserably - and to pretend otherwise is superficial posturing.
The Jacobins were particularly tenacious in attempting to maintain their illusion about the power of law. When their design for society failed to emerge immediately, there followed "the years of violence, of destruction and bringing and pillage and massacre and general upheaval" in an attempt to see their vision realized before they finally accepted their impotence to command reality to follow their visions.
This should have been sufficient lesson that simply writing things down will not make them so, but Le Bon marks that the socialist party of his present day, over a century later, is still behaving as if the word of law was a magical incantation with the ability to alter reality.
The Theoretical Value of Revolutionary Principles
The three principles of the French Revolution were liberty, equality, and fraternity - which became a mantra known to all yet understood by each in a vague and general sense. Each person imagines these qualities to be foundational to a proper society, yet is unable to articulate the precise kind of society they would produce - having only the vague sense that they would be better than their opposites.
Of the three, perhaps the only one to come to fruition was equality, by which it was interpreted that the rights of men are universal and that none are entitled to deference under the law.
But at the same time, inequities under the law continue to exist, and social customer itself still provides greater deference to some men than others. It survives, but perhaps in the sense that people revile anyone who considers himself to be more important than others.
Bit it invariably fails, in that men seek to distinguish themselves from others. There are distinct social classes, and men desire to increase their personal wealth, power, and influence - such that the dogma of equality must be reinterpreted to mean that men are equal in some ways, unequal in others, and the aspects in which equality or inequality are desirable are subject to change at a whim.
The other two qualities, fraternity and liberty, were never evident. Fraternity was never practiced among men on any significant scale. And as to liberty, Le Bon observes how men very quickly agree to the terms of labor unions and surrender their self-direction in favor of being directed by others.
In all, we can observe that liberty, equality, and fraternity are fine words "to decorate men's speeches" but which have never taken much hold in reality.