"The Napoleonic rule which followed within a decade after the French Revolution is generally conceded to be the prototype of modern dictatorships. It was the forerunner not only historically, but psychologically as well, for it demonstrated a principal function of dictatorship as a psychocultural emergent: a reversion to authoritarian rule after a too drastic attempt to impose democracy on an authoritarian culture. Napoleon's assumption of the role of dictator and then emperor, with the wholehearted support of significant segments of postrevolutionary French society, illustrates a fact that has been true of virtually every dictatorship since then: the inability of an authoritarian culture to absorb too much self-government too suddenly without reverting, at least temporarily, to some form of paternalistic-authoritarian rule. From the first French Republic to the German Weimar Republic, it has been proved again and again that, while the outward forms of democracy may be achieved overnight by revolution, the psychological changes necessary to sustain it cannot."
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G.M. Gilbert in The Psychology of Dictatorship (1950), pp. 4-5.
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Authoritarianism
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Authoritarianism
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