NEITHER GOD NOR DEVIL
219
Let no one venture to make use of the above lines to accuse such
and such a people of being afflicted with the racial peculiarity of a
taste for oppression. No people has ever given itself a dictator for
the simple pleasure of being oppressed. An analysis of the sado–
masochistic complex which develops in the masses during the advent
of a dictatorship would reveal a whole
in
which the wish for emanci–
pation, acceptance of submission through fear of responsibility and
liberty, the will to dominate, selfishness and the giving of oneself to
the community, are so intermingled that I defy anyone to give ascen–
dancy t'o a single one of these contradictory trends. In the whole
world there is no one people who cannot be brought to an adventure
of this sort by a long period of poverty, a strong enough dose of
humiliation, an all-prevailing despair. Its racial peculiarities or its
democratic traditions will make no difference. It would be impossible
to cite a people more enamoured of independence, more imbued
with democratic traditions and revolutionary experience than the
different men who go to make up the French nation, and yet it is
this very people wh01 had the sad privilege, in the nineteenth century
alone, of giving to the world the spectacle of three successive aberra–
tions : bonapartism, badinguism and boulangerism.
1
And it was not
only · the former revolutionary townsfolk of Etienne Marcel,
2
now
grown into the decadent middle-classes, who cheered and hung out
flags, but also the very people of the Jacqueries and the Commune.
Bonapartism has taken on very different shapes in spreading
through the world: sergeants' dictatorships, colonels' regimes, generals'
pronunciamentos, presidential power, solitary tyrannies; and its face
here
has become more hideously distorted than
there.
But observe
how immutable are some of its features. Except for the Mikado there
exists nowhere a leader descended from heaven by a more or less
ancient heredity. Nowadays we see: none but leaders who emerge
from the crowd,
to
rise
little by little towards divinity. The Archi–
medean buoyancy of popular idolatry hoists them to such a level that
they can be looked upon only as exceptional beings, therefore vaguely
divine, unless an emotional counter-current should come to interrupt
their ascension. And I envy, without sharing it, the optimism of those
who hope to circumvent the epidemic merely by Hitler's downfall.
1.
Badinguet, popular name of Napoleon III. General Georges Boulanger,
leader of the nationalist party and War Minister in 1886. His plot against the
Third Republic failed.
(Translator's note.)
2. Etienne Marcel, provost (mayor) of Paris, presented to the States General
in 1356 plans for democratic reforms. He stirred' up the Parisians to revolt against
the Dauphin, and imprisoned him in the Hotel de Ville.
(Translator's note.)
