The power of conquerors and the strength of States is based on the popular imagination.It is more particularly by working upon this imagination that crowds are led.All great historical facts, the rise of Buddhism, of Christianity, of Islamism, the Reformation, the French Revolution, and, in our own time, the threatening invasion of Socialism are the direct or indirect consequences of strong impressions produced on the imagination of the crowd.
Moreover, all the great statesmen of every age and every country, including the most absolute despots, have regarded the popular imagination as the basis of their power, and they have never attempted to govern in opposition to it "It was by becoming a Catholic," said Napoleon to the Council of State, "that Iterminated the Vendeen war.By becoming a Mussulman that Iobtained a footing in Egypt.By becoming an Ultramontane that Iwon over the Italian priests, and had I to govern a nation of Jews I would rebuild Solomon's temple." Never perhaps since Alexander and Caesar has any great man better understood how the imagination of the crowd should be impressed.His constant preoccupation was to strike it.He bore it in mind in his victories, in his harangues, in his speeches, in all his acts.
On his deathbed it was still in his thoughts.
How is the imagination of crowds to be impressed? We shall soon see.Let us confine ourselves for the moment to saying that the feat is never to be achieved by attempting to work upon the intelligence or reasoning faculty, that is to say, by way of demonstration.It was not by means of cunning rhetoric that Antony succeeded in making the populace rise against the murderers of Caesar; it was by reading his will to the multitude and pointing to his corpse.
Whatever strikes the imagination of crowds presents itself under the shape of a startling and very clear image, freed from all accessory explanation, or merely having as accompaniment a few marvellous or mysterious facts: examples in point are a great victory, a great miracle, a great crime, or a great hope.Things must be laid before the crowd as a whole, and their genesis must never be indicated.A hundred petty crimes or petty accidents will not strike the imagination of crowds in the least, whereas a single great crime or a single great accident will profoundly impress them, even though the results be infinitely less disastrous than those of the hundred small accidents put together.The epidemic of influenza, which caused the death but a few years ago of five thousand persons in Paris alone, made very little impression on the popular imagination.The reason was that this veritable hecatomb was not embodied in any visible image, but was only learnt from statistical information furnished weekly.An accident which should have caused the death of only five hundred instead of five thousand persons, but on the same day and in public, as the outcome of an accident appealing strongly to the eye, by the fall, for instance, of the Eiffel Tower, would have produced, on the contrary, an immense impression on the imagination of the crowd.The probable loss of a transatlantic steamer that was supposed, in the absence of news, to have gone down in mid-ocean profoundly impressed the imagination of the crowd for a whole week.Yet official statistics show that 850 sailing vessels and 203 steamers were lost in the year 1894 alone.The crowd, however, was never for a moment concerned by these successive losses, much more important though they were as far as regards the destruction of life and property, than the loss of the Atlantic liner in question could possibly have been.
It is not, then, the facts in themselves that strike the popular imagination, but the way in which they take place and are brought under notice.It is necessary that by their condensation, if Imay thus express myself, they should produce a startling image which fills and besets the mind.To know the art of impressing the imagination of crowds is to know at the same time the art of governing them.
