Crowds and Party · 第 82 页

An eyewitness describes the crowd on March 18 as it defended the cannons from the troops sent in to take them:

The women and children were swarming up the hill-side in a compact mass; the artillerymen tried in vain to fight their way through the crowd, but the waves of people engulfed everything, surging over the cannon-mounts, over the ammunition wagons, under the wheels, under the horses’ feet, paralyzing the action of the riders who spurred on their mounts in vain. The horses reared and lunged forward, their sudden movement clearing the crowd, but the space was filled at once by a backwash created by the surging multitude.¹⁵

The collective people manifest as a force of nature. Like the sea, they engulf all that’s around them in waves.

Canetti describes the sea as a crowd symbol. He writes:

The dense coherence of the waves is something which men in a crowd know well. It entails a yielding to others as though they were oneself, as though there were no strict division between oneself and them. There is no escape from this compliance and thus the consequent impetus and feeling of strength is something engendered by all the units together.¹⁶

The impetus and feeling of strength, the will, arises out of the collective. Attempting to reduce it to the thoughts or decisions of individuals is as senseless as treating the sea in terms of aggregated drops of water. The press of bodies forward and back supersedes individual thought and decision. Sounds, smells, and combined reaction reinforce the sense of a new powerful collective.

The National Army yields to the crowd. The troops are absorbed in it, becoming non-troops as they shed the distinctions of place and rank: they fraternize and intermingle.¹⁷ The crowd offers wine and meat rolls, which are eagerly accepted by men who’d had no breakfast and had been standing in the cold for hours.¹⁸ The Times of London reported:

There was something intensely exciting in the scene. The uncertainty for a moment whether the men were meeting as friends or enemies, the wild enthusiasm of the shouts of fraternization, the waving of the upturned muskets, the bold reckless women laughing and exciting the men against their officers, all combined to produce a sensation of perplexity not unmingled with alarm at the strange and unexpected turn things were taking. 19

As the crowd increases and engulfs the troops, it intensifies. Through the addition of more, through the abolition of its outside, the crowd becomes stronger, more confident. When the general, Lecomte, arrives, he orders his troops to fire on the crowd. The troops refuse. He orders twice more. “Then the troops turned up the butts of their rifles, and amid the wild joy of relief, handed over them to the crowd in exchange for a mug of wine, a kind word, a fraternal embrace. ‘Long live the Republic!’ they shouted; and the crowd replied, ‘Long live the Line!’”²⁰ The eyewitness account I mention above similarly evokes the egalitarian power of the crowd as it concludes: “The General gave in. He realized the full meaning of the situation. His faith in military power, his contempt for the people, his hopes and ambitious dreams, all had vanished in the face of stark reality: he had been taken prisoner.”²¹

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