I’m already 3 months
behind!
The book is quite unique and
interesting in that it employs psychoanalysis in the study of a particular
historical event specifically, the author uses crowd psychology in analyzing Revolutions
in general and The French Revolution in particular. To date, there is no other
history book that utilizes such methodology in its investigation of an event in
the past. The book was published in 1896 and during that time, both the Russian
Revolution and the Chinese Revolution are becoming to take its course, which is
probably one of the impetus for the author to write on such a subject matter. To
the modern reader, the book and by extension, the author sounded condescending,
patronizing, elitist, a royalist sympathizer, an ardent Napoleonic admirer/
apologist, a sham humanitarian, and a bigot. However, this is no fault of the
author but rather this is a reflection of his era or generation and the book do
represent the ideas prevalent of his generation. Nevertheless, these “attributes”
should not detract from the rather excellent observations of author regarding
the French Revolution for such observations are universally true and applicable
to any Revolution generations before and those of yet to happen. However, care
should be taken to discern between the authors observations and those of his
rather seemingly logical deduction which tends to be biased and speculative and
is not borne out of empirical observation. A careful reading of the book would
also expose some strands of thought akin to Sigmund Freud’s logic as expounded
in his seminal work, “Civilization and it’s Discontent” which beautifully link the
human psyche and the forces that creates the mosaic that we all know as “history”.
The last two chapters of the book is rather an oddity in the sense that there
seems to be no connection with the subject matter at hand but rather it looks
more like the author’s political rants and opinion of the political issues of
his days which is surprisingly or rather strangely sounded pretty much like the
present political discourse.
