3: The Influence Attributed to Philosophers
The behavior of men is the result of their thoughts - we choose what we do before we do it. And while our choices are superficially driven by the functional and practical necessities, they derive from a deeper level of traditions, sentiments, and morality of which we may not be completely aware.
(EN: This notion has only been considered in recent decades: we can fairly easily examine the decision, for example, to buy a product because the customer can speak to planning his menu, watching his budget, and considering the total cost of purchasing from a specific retailer. But why has he chosen to buy that product at all? He may struggle to answer and provide a partial explanation, but will not recognize all of the deeper motivations that make him desire the product he purchases, many of which are non-functional.)
Some of these reasons derive from a social framework: a person's behavior is limited to what they are legally permitted to do, what their religion encourages or discourages, and what they feel is appropriate to a person of their class. A man chooses to do what he does because he is the person he is in the context of a society that defines his role. This persists so long as he accepts the role to which he has been assigned by society
But "society" itself is an aggregation of forces - government, religion, family, profession, and other organizations each attempt to have input to defining the role of the individual - and when there is conflict among these demands, an individual chooses to be obedient to one force and defiant of another.
In terms of politics, government insists to each citizen "this is what you shall be" and so long as people are amenable to accepting that role, they abide a government that relegates them to it. But when a government's demands conflict with the demands of other forces - church, family, etc. - or with practical concerns, then the citizen must decide to accept or reject his government.
Seen in this way, Revolution represents an internal conflict long before it becomes and external one: the individual pressed by government into making adjustments that conflict with his roles as an individual, he decides whether it is acceptable - and when he feels government is making unreasonable demands, he is started on his path to rebellion.
Origin and Propagation of Revolutionary Ideas
Given that the path to rebellion is the result of an inner conflict in which a citizen feels his governments' demands are unreasonable, this generally means a change has taken place - he was once happy to comply with government's demands, at which time he supported his government, but something has changed. This change may have occurred in the government (it is making new demands that are incompatible with the existing demands of another influence, such as religion) or within the culture (that other force is making new demands that are incompatible with the demands of government)
The author mentioned that philosophers of the time were reconsidering the notion of the divine right of kings. The notion that the king was the representative of God eliminated conflicts that arose between the demands of the state and the demands of the church - to have faith in God was to be loyal to the king, and if the demands were inconsistent, then it is just another of the many inconsistencies of religion. Generally, the result was to accept the will of the king as the will of the gods, and sort out any inconsistencies given that the king must be obeyed.
The idea of the rights of the people rests upon the acceptance of the status of the individual within the state. Where the state represents God, man has no rights and must be servile to divine will. But once the divine right of the state has been disputed, man no longer must be servile - which means he can then consider aspects of his life in which he is permitted to value his own interests above those of the state, and negotiate when the state is permitted to take precedence over his individual rights.
This represents the origin of revolutionary ideas - for when men believe that their individual rights supersede the demands of the state, they disregard the state. And when the state insists on being obeyed, in violation of the rights of the people, there is then the right to ignore, resist, or overthrow a government that has overstepped its bounds.
From here, there can be an argument to define the exact nature of man's rights - but the premise on which any such argument is built is that man has rights at all.
This is not unique to the French Revolution - it can be seen from the writings of Greek and Latin authors, two thousand years earlier - that there was this idea of individual rights and an attempt to define which areas it was proper for the state to interfere with its citizens. The very notion of the proper function of government suggests that there are improper actions of government, and the very notion of tyranny suggests a situation where the rights of individuals are being wrongfully suppressed by state authority.
The common people of France were well aware of the writings of the ancient philosophers, but considered them to be irrelevant to their own time and age - the rulers of Greek and Roman societies were not appointed by god, or at least not any god that the eighteenth-century Frenchman respected and believed in.
The Influence of Philosophers
It must be said that philosophers have no direct influence over the majority of the people, as the great majority of people are illiterate or at the very least ignorant. They lack the mental ability to contemplate philosophy, or at least lack interest in applying their minds should they have the ability to do so.
Philosophy can only be influential to the enlightened portion of society, a rather small few who are willing and able to think for themselves. And it is through that core of intellectuals that philosophy can reach the common man - though it is very often permuted, as one intellectual communicates his ideas to another, then another, then another, before it eventually reaches a person who has influence in society.
(EN: Interesting point, and one that is seen in the present day. Few people have ever read philosophy, but if the ideas of a philosopher move an entertainment producer into repeating some fragment of them in a movie, song, or television program, then the general public who consume entertainment will get some small dose of philosophy, in a fragmented, distorted, and random manner. In that sense, the philosophy of the general public is an assemblage of bits of ideas received second-hand.)
While people gave blind obedience to the aristocracy as leaders of society, philosophers could hold no sway - except in their influence over the aristocrats, who were motivated to communicate to the rest of society only those ideas that supported the privileges and power of their class.
But when the aristocracy lost the mantle of divine power, the intellectuals of the time looked to other sources for leadership, namely the long-forgotten works of ancient philosophers, and through this chain of communication and permutation of ideas, the notion finally reached the commoners that they had a right to exist for their own sake.
Le Bon briefly mentions censorship as an attempt of the state to control the ideas of the people by limiting or eliminating their exposure to any other source of ideas - or at least, ideas that are contrary to the interests of the state. This effectively prevents people from thinking for themselves, or from coming to any conclusion other than that which the state desires.
Take for example the notion that all men are created equal. If this is accepted as a premise, then the commoners had no need to be subservient to the aristocracy. This then results in a period of "mental anarchy" in which the individual citizen must then sort things out in terms of his relationship with the state. And when this is done he becomes dissatisfied with the behavior of his government when it does not conform to what he reckons is right and proper.
Le Bon suggests that this mentality - and specifically the idea that government had gone beyond its proper role - was the start of the revolution and the uprising of the third estate against the nobility and the clergy. The early revolutionaries may have been branded as heretics, traitors, and criminals - but when the same ideas became too widespread for the church and state to control, the revolution achieved critical mass.
But again, the point of the present chapter is this: revolution takes place in the mind of a people, years or decades before the first stone is thrown at the institutions that presume to govern them.
The Political Philosophy of the Time and its Distaste for Democracy
Le Bon looks to the philosophers of the time, who were not particularly sanguine about democracy. While they railed against the abuse of power buy the monarchy, this did no mean they favored the dissolution of the state and the rise of popular government. They were entirely familiar with the Greek practice of democracy, and regarded it with antipathy.
That is to say that they were less concerned with the format of government as with its behavior - an angry mob is no better than a violent autocrat, nor is it any better for citizens to raise taxation to be squandered on bread and circuses than it is for an aristocracy to raise taxation to be squandered on personal luxuries. Voltaire, the most widely recognized figure among political philosophers of his time, was "by no means a partisan of democracy."
These philosophers upheld a standard of liberty, which required government to exercise restraint in the manner and degree to which it interfered with the freedom of individual citizens. Democracy does not guarantee that the mob will respect the right of all men and, as an institution, merely serves to enable the many to violate the liberty of the few.
In practical terms, philosophers recognize that a large body of "little tyrants" was more difficult to restrain than a small number of rulers, or even a single one. Even a monarch must respect the rights of his people for fear they will rise up against them. Against whom shall the people rebel if their rights are violated by the people? Particularly when voting is done anonymously, it cannot be known who is to blame for bad decisions and abuses of power.
It is much better for the sake of liberty to have a dictator who fears his people, and restrains himself to avoid incurring their wrath. The ideal depicted by many philosophers of the time was a monarchy that is governed by a parliament.
It's also observed that many "political" writers of the time were railing not against the monarchy, but against the abuses of the church. Most of them were quite happy with the institution of government, so long as it respected the rights of men.
At best, some argued in favor of republic - in which leaders were selected by the population, but then left to govern according to their own judgment. This format considers the will of the people, but prevents them from practicing tyranny in a direct and constant manner.
As to democracy, it is merely the aggregation of the vices and virtues of the people - and kike the people it is more prone to vice than virtue, ignorance and abuse, short-sightedness and lack of restrain in fulfilling the basest and most immediate appetites without moral governance.
In terms of preserving liberty, "there could be no greater mistake" than to institute a democracy.
The Ideas of the Bourgeoisie at the Time
First, it must be conceded that "the bourgeoisie" is an abstraction that represents a great many people, each of whom had his own ideas - and that in discussion the ideas of the collective, the historian is overlooking the diversity of ideas that existed: there was not, nor ever can there be, unanimous assent among a collective.
Second, it must be conceded that "at the time" requires us to consider historical evidence, which itself is incomplete, as all the ideas of all the people were not documented, and the surviving documents that any historian considers is but a fraction of the truth.
Those conditions accepted, we can speculate as to the ideas held by the majority, to the best that historical evidence permits us to estimate.
Thus, in a general sense, it could be said that the common people of the time were in favor of the main ideas of the revolution - liberty, equality, and fraternity - along with the notion of a popular government appointed and governed by the people.
While historians make much of the philosophers and intellectuals of that time, they were not very highly regarded by the people of that time. They are but rarely quoted in speeches, and garnered little respect until many years later when it was noticed that their ideas seemed to coincide with those of the people.
As an aside, this is likely true of all of history: intellectuals are little known and little appreciated during their lifetimes and are elevated to the status of prophets and messiahs years after their death when a historian discovers documentation of ideas that reflect the spirit of the age, even if the ideas and their originators were entirely unknown to the people of that age.
The ambitions of the rabble are invariably more base: the common man reacts to the government that oppresses him simply because he is being oppressed and knows or cares little of the reasons why. The starving man wants to eat, and the victim of perpetual robbery wishes to stop being robbed, and that is as far as he is able or willing to think.