Stolen entire from JMSmith. Best thing I've read about how propaganda works.

How Napoleon Suckered the French Plebs (A Retrospective Guide to the Present)

“These men know not how to work upon the imagination of the French nation.”

Napoleon, quoted in Sir Walter Scott, The Life of Napoleon Buonaparte (1827)**

“The distress or privation which the French plebeian suffered in his own person, was made up to him in imagination by his interest in national glory.”

Sir Walter Scott, The Life of Napoleon Buonaparte (1827)*

To control the plebeian masses of a nation, the patrician elite must know how to work upon the imagination of those plebeian masses.  Napoleon said that working upon the imagination of the plebeian masses of the French nation was something that the Directors, his predecessors in power, did not know how to do.  This was why the Directors were no longer in power.  Napoleon himself proposed to remain in power by working upon that imagination, which is to say by suckering the Plebs.

As Scott observes, and Napoleon well knew, the French plebeian would suffer in his own person—would submit to gross tyranny, grinding taxation, and the conscription and slaughter of his sons—if these losses were made up to him in imagination by a spectacle of national glory.   The plebeian middle class is everywhere the moral class, and, in the eyes of the patricians above, and proletarians below, morality is the weakness by which the plebeian middle class is best controlled and exploited.   The proletarians want more stuff; the patricians want more power; the plebeians want to picture themselves as the good guys in a cosmic  morality play.

As ZZ Top might put it, patricians and proletarians “gotsta get paid.”  Plebeians, on the other hand, gotsta get a warm fuzzy feeling that they are somehow helping to roll the historical Juggernaut of Truth, Justice, and—I’ll go ahead and say it—the American Way.

Like French plebeians under Napoleon, American plebeians will suffer in their own person because their suffering is made up to them, in imagination, by the spectacle of American national glory.  Their actual hometowns may be a gimcrack bivouacs of zombies and strangers, very likely cracking, crumbling, and dilapidating before their very eyes; but American plebeians do not see this because they are fascinated by the spectacle of America playing White Knight to the world.    

Scott explains the political meaning of such a spectacle in this simple but vivid line.

“The people were like men inconveniently placed in a crowded theater, who think little of the personal inconveniences they are subjected to by the heat and the pressure, while their mind is engrossed by the splendors of the representation.”***

The theater may be crowded and shabby; the occupants of neighboring seats may be ripe and uncouth; but American plebeians do not think of these inconveniences because they are engrossed by the spectacle of sanctified violence that they see projected on the national screen.  On that screen, the Screaming Eagle is forever descending on some villainous and retrograde gang of sweaty and pockmarked miscreants in black hats, while in the crowded and shabby theater the American plebeians are forever glorying because they think the screen in the theater is a mirror.

This has all been done before, as Scott explains.

“He gave them public festivals, victories, and extended dominion; and in return, claimed the right of carrying their children in successive swarms to yet more distant and more extended conquests, and of governing, according to his own pleasure, the bulk of the nation which remained behind.”

“He,” of course, refers to Napoleon.

“He poured out to them, and shared with them, to drown all painful and degrading recollections, the intoxicating and fatal draught of military glory and universal domination.”††  

* * * * *

Those who exercise control by playing upon the plebeian imagination must, of course, control the images that are projected on the screen in that shabby and crowded national theater.  Under Napoleon, French public opinion was controlled by the press, and the press was controlled by the lead of the dominant newspaper, a government organ called the Moniteur.  The appearance of free expression was preserved by the existence of independent newspapers, but the continued existence of those independent newspaper depended on their close adherence to the official story as reported in the Moniteur.

As Scott explains,

“The public journals were prohibited from inserting any article of public news which had not first appeared in the Moniteur, the organ of government . . . . Nor were the inferior papers permitted to publish a word, whether in the way of explanation, criticism, or otherwise, which did not accurately correspond with the tone observed in the leading journal.”†††

The coordination of our media is perhaps not quite so perfect as this, but you will have noticed that our “inferior papers” seldom if ever deviate from “the tone observed in the leading journal,” to wit, The New York Times.  Our inferior papers are, of course, at liberty to echo the Times in more fervent language, because this makes the Times appear temperate, and sober, and not at all extreme.  But the substance of their news and analysis almost always adheres to the official story and the party line.

As Scott said of the “inferior papers” of France under Napoleon,

“They might, with the best graces of their eloquence, enhance the praise, or deepen the censure, which characterized the leading paragraph; but seizure of their paper, confiscation, imprisonment, and sometimes exile, were the unfailing reward of any attempt to correct, what was erroneous in point of fact, or sophistical in point of reasoning.”††

A truly independent inferior paper might not be seized and confiscated in today’s United States, but it would run a very real hazard of suffering a sudden and calamitous loss of advertising revenue.  Its editor, while perhaps not facing imprisonment or exile, would almost certainly learn what the phrase social ostracism means.

“The Moniteur, therefor, was the sole guide of public opinion: and by his constant attention to its contents, it is plain that Napoleon relied as much on its influence to direct the general mind of the people of France, as he did upon the power of his arms, military reputation, and extensive resources, to overawe the other nations of Europe.”†††

 Stories were suppressed when they detracted from the glory of the regime.  Scot tells us, for instance, that news of the battle of Trafalgar did not appear in French newspapers for several months after the disaster, and when the news did appear, it was in terms that did not hint at what a disaster Trafalgar had been.  What is more, Scott tells us,

“The hiding the truth is only one step to the invention of falsehood.”¡

Napoleon understood that invented falsehoods are effectively propagated if only they are repeated without contradiction.  If a plebian hears from all quarters, for instance, that a villainous and retrograde gang of sweaty and pockmarked miscreants is feeding screaming infants into a fiery furnace, and he never once hears this gruesome tale gainsaid (except, perhaps, by well-known cranks and retailers of disinformation), he will of course believe the gruesome tale.

“The ideas which are often repeated in all variety of language and expression, will at length produce an effect upon the public mind, especially if no contradiction is permitted to reach it.  A uniform which may look ridiculous on a single individual, has an imposing effect when worn by a large body of men; and the empiric, whose extravagant advertisement we ridicule upon the first perusal, often persuades us, by sheer dint of repeating his own praises, to make trial of his medicine.”¡¡

* * * * *

The purpose of a public protest is not to petition the government but is rather to publicize the fact of that dissent exists, and by so doing to trigger, if possible, a “preference cascade.”   The aim of protestors is therefore to make their dissent appear more popular and vehement than it actually is, and to thereby embolden timorous and isolated dissenters to come out of the closet, show their colors, and join the movement.  Public protests are outlawed or rendered highly dangerous to prevent “preference cascades,” and to keep isolated undercover dissenters isolated and undercover.  In this line Scott describes Napoleonic France in terms that are highly applicable to the modern West.

“In that nation, so lately agitated by the nightly assembly of thousands of political clubs, no class of citizens under any supposable circumstances, had the right of uniting in the expression of their opinions.”¡¡¡

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*) Walter Scott, The Life of Napoleon Buonaparte, Emperor of the French, nine vols. (Edinburgh: Longman, Rees, Orme, Brown & Green, 1927), vol. 1, p.  20.

**) Scott, Napoleon, vol. 6, p. 30.

***) Scott, Napoleon, vol. 1, p. 21.

†) Scott, Napoleon, vol. 6, p. 31.

††) Scott, Napoleon, vol. 9, p. 322.

†††) Scott, Napoleon, vol. 6, pp. 92-93.

¡) Scott, Napoleon, vol. 9, p. 324.

¡¡) Scott, Napoleon vol. 6, pp. 47-48.

¡¡¡) Scott, Napoleon vol. 9, p. 321.