#297: “Great Numbers of Men [and Women]”

“The apostles of the Jacobin belief behaved as their fathers had done, and employed the same [terror] methods. If similar events occurred again we should see identical actions repeated. If a new belief—Socialism, for example—were to triumph to-morrow, it would be led to employ methods of propaganda like those of the Inquisition and the Terror.

“But were we to regard the Jacobin Terror solely as the result of a religious movement, we should not completely apprehend it. Around a triumphant religious belief, as we saw in the case of the Reformation, gather a host of individual interests which are dependent on that belief. The Terror was directed by a few fanatical apostles, but beside this small number of ardent proselytes, whose narrow minds dreamed of regenerating the world, were great numbers of men who lived only to enrich themselves. They rallied readily around the first victorious leader who promised to enable them to enjoy the results of their pillage.”*

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Le Bon, Gustave. The Psychology of Revolution (p. 141). Kindle Edition. (Bold emphasis added.)

Charles-Marie Gustave Le Bon (French: ... 7 May 1841 – 13 December 1931) was a leading French polymath [a person of encyclopedic learning] whose areas of interest included anthropology, psychology, sociology, medicine, invention, and physics. He is best known for his 1895 work The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind, which is considered one of the seminal works of crowd psychology. | From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gustave_Le_Bon
See also: https://dejavu-timestwo.blogspot.com/2021/12/when-pscience-becomes-god.html