One scholar has a plausible theory that certain banned books from Switzerland were partly the cause of the French Revolution. In those days, in France, no book could be published without the King's approval. People were eager to read banned books which fictionalized the affairs and debauchery of the nobility. That scholar feels that such banned fiction helped fuel the hatred for the nobility.
You are giving people too much credit. Most people are sheep and they are content in being sheep; average people do not plan revolutions and they seldom turn against their government. How would the average illiterate 18th century Frenchman who toiled all day in subhuman conditions have the ability, time or will to read? How could he even have the means to get banned books? He didn't, of course; but a few middle-class intellectuals (probably revolted because they weren't debauched nobility themselves, just petty merchants) could, and they had both the means to spread their ideas and the gift of rhetoric, which is all you need to lead the masses by the nose.
If you look at history, you'll see revolution and change has always come from a high class sect rebelling against the rest of the high class, with the low class being caught in the middle as a tool. As much as US history would like to convince the world of its beautiful fairy-tale origins, the Founding Fathers weren't ignorant farmers fighting for justice and freedom. They were engineers, architects, inventors, men of letters; and if they didn't live in a stinking colony they would have been high society in England
What happened is that they wanted to be high society in America, so they lead the rest of the colonies into war. In their case, things turned out almost alright, but the French Revolution ended with Napopleon.
We imprison authors and ban books because we are afraid to look at something critically which we hold to be unquestionable. There is something which we fear in the books that we ban..
The Holy Church and the Monarchy
used to imprison authors and ban books. Mind you, the authors (scientists, philosophers, poets, etc.) they imprisoned were erudite men whose ideas couldn't be understood by the masses, only by an elite at the service of the censors. These erudite men didn't question anything of big importance to a farmer. They spoke to a few other intellectuals.
But hardly any books are banned nowadays in the West: governments have caught up with the fact that if you keep quiet about something, the masses won't find about it. Institutions don't have to ban books anymore. The world is in such a chaos, prices are up, there's insecurity, people give away their freedom for the illusion of security, there are no jobs, workers have to give away their rights to keep them in the most precarious conditions, governments kidnap innocent people and torture them in secret bases all around the world, and you think institutions still have to ban books? People just couldn't care less about the 'unquestionable'! Average people do not question anything, do not revolt without a Leader and hardly think outside the sphere of their narrow lives. People are predisposed not to care about anything not concerning
them.
A book condemning Bush’s actions won’t reach anyone who is not already against Bush. A book in favour of abortion will only reach those who already consider abortion OK. Democrats speak to democrats, Republicans speak to republicans, pro-lifers speak to pro-lifers, Christers speak to Christers. Books, as much as this may hurt, don’t change people. People can change other people, but only those who are predisposed to be changed. That’s the irony of banning. It’s pretty useless at the end of the day. Most people decide what they will
be rather early in their life: liberal, conservative pro-abortion, Catholic, atheist, communist, socialist; and then they don’t change anymore. The books that question their ‘unquestionable’ beliefs seldom reach their ears, and so life goes on
