The Crowd
Gustave Le Bon, 1895
Why do peaceful people in a crowd vote for executions, see a raft that is not there and believe a slogan nobody can explain? In 1895 Gustave Le Bon described how the “soul of the crowd” is born and which methods leaders use to lead it. You will learn his theory, its strong points and what has dated, and learn to notice the voice of the crowd in your own head.
Who it is for
For people who notice that at a rally, in a stadium or in the comments they think differently than they do alone, and who want to understand how words, pictures and leaders steer a crowd.
A man in a crowd is only a grain of sand among other grains of sand, which the wind lifts and carries wherever it likes.
Peaceful people who voted for executions
Picture a meeting of people who, in ordinary times, would be peaceful notaries and honest judges. Alone, not one of them would send an innocent man to death. Together they vote for the cruelest measures, send their own colleagues to the guillotine and in the end sign their own death sentence. That is how Gustave Le Bon describes the Convention, the assembly that ruled France during the revolution. One of its members, Billaud-Varenne, later recalled that nobody wanted the decisions they were blamed for, not even the day before the vote: the crisis itself had produced them.
Le Bon, a physician by training and a researcher of society, published this book in 1895. He was sure that the age of crowds had begun, when the opinion of the masses would decide more than kings and ministers. And he asked a question that sounds modern: why does a person in a crowd think and act differently than alone? His answer: a crowd does not add people up like figures in a column. It creates a new being with feelings of its own, and reason weakens in it.
This is a theory, not a report of experiments. Le Bon relies on the history of the French revolutions, newspaper reports and his own observations. Much in the book belongs to its time: he explains the behaviour of crowds by “race”, compares the crowd with women and “savages”, and writes about the masses with contempt. These views have long been rejected, and they are not repeated here. Later research argues with his central claim too: people in a crowd more often do not lose themselves, but begin to act on behalf of their group. Yet his account of the methods used to lead a crowd sounds like a description of today's news feed.
Where we talk about social media and meetings, that is an application of Le Bon's ideas to our own time, not his own advice. Let us start with the main transformation.
The grain of sand the wind lifts
On the night of 4 August 1789, French nobles sitting among the deputies gave up their privileges in one burst of feeling. For their class it was an enormous sacrifice. Le Bon is certain that none of these men would have agreed to it alone. In a crowd, he writes, the miser becomes generous, the sceptic starts to believe, the coward turns into a hero, and an honest man can become a criminal.
What happened? For Le Bon, a crowd in the psychological sense is not just any gathering of people. A thousand passers-by in a square are not yet a crowd. Half a dozen people can become one, and even a whole nation can, if a strong event turns everyone's feelings and thoughts in one direction. Then the conscious personality of each person recedes, and what he calls the collective soul is born: a temporary being with its own features.
He compares this to chemistry. An acid and a base, once combined, produce a substance with quite different properties. So in a crowd the minds do not average out. What becomes shared is what people have in common: instincts, passions, sympathies. What separates them, intellect and education, goes out. In a crowd, Le Bon writes, stupidity accumulates, not intelligence.
He names three causes of this transformation.
• Anonymity. A person feels the strength of numbers and stops answering for himself: the crowd is nameless, so nobody is to blame for anything.
• Contagion. Every feeling and every act passes to the neighbour, and a person easily sacrifices his own interest to the common surge.
• Suggestibility. Le Bon compares the person in a crowd with someone under hypnosis who carries out other people's commands. This is an image from the science of his time, not a proven mechanism.
Le Bon's verdict is harsh: in a crowd a person goes down several steps on the ladder of civilisation. But the same crowd can perform a feat that a lone person would never dare, and everything depends on what it has been told.
Application today: if in a chat, at a rally or under a post everything suddenly seems clear to you along with everyone else, put off the decision until you are alone with yourself.
About the author
Gustave Le Bon (1841–1931) was a French physician by training, a traveller and a researcher of society. “The Crowd” became his best-known book.
All books by this author: Gustave Le Bon
Terms from the book
- Napoleon
- Wallace
- suggestibility
- Tocqueville
- Pascal
- hypnosis
- Antony
- Convention: The National Convention, the assembly that ruled France in 1792–1795, in the most turbulent years of the revolution.
- Billaud-Varenne: Jacques-Nicolas Billaud-Varenne, a member of the Convention and of the Committee of Public Safety during the years of revolutionary terror.
- prestige: In Le Bon's usage, the special power of a person, an idea or a thing over people's minds, which stops them judging critically. This is his own concept, not a scientific term.
- Bellepoule: A French naval frigate. Le Bon takes the story of its crew from a book by a naval officer about ocean currents.
- Defosse: A French admiral who commanded the ship from which a boat was lowered towards the imaginary raft.
- Davey: An English investigator who showed “spiritualist” phenomena with simple tricks, to test how reliable the accounts of witnesses were.
- spiritualist séance: A meeting at which people try to communicate with the spirits of the dead. In the nineteenth century such séances were a fashionable pastime.
- Eiffel Tower: A metal tower in Paris about 300 metres high, built for the 1889 World's Fair, six years before the book appeared.
- Caesar: Gaius Julius Caesar, a Roman general and dictator, murdered by conspirators in 44 BC.
- federative republic: A state in which provinces or regions decide many matters themselves. In Spain in 1873 everyone understood this slogan in their own way.
- Consulate: The French regime of 1799–1804, when power belonged to three consuls, in fact to Napoleon Bonaparte. After it the Empire was proclaimed.
- taille: The main direct tax in old, pre-revolutionary France, paid mostly by peasants.
- gabelle: The salt tax in pre-revolutionary France, one of the most hated.
- Louvre: A former royal palace in Paris. During the siege of Paris in 1870–1871 the government sat there; today it is a museum.
- Bonaparte: Napoleon's family name. Early in his career, before he became emperor, he was known as General Bonaparte.
- Augereau: Pierre Augereau, a French general of the revolutionary years, later a marshal under Napoleon.
- Lesseps: Ferdinand de Lesseps, a French diplomat and entrepreneur who led the building of the Suez Canal. His attempt to build the Panama Canal ended in collapse and a notorious court case.
- Suez Canal: A sea canal in Egypt between the Mediterranean and Red Seas, opened in 1869.
- Panama Canal: A canal across the Isthmus of Panama between the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. Lesseps's company went bankrupt in 1889; Americans completed the canal in 1914.
- Robespierre: Maximilien Robespierre, one of the leaders of the French Revolution and head of the Jacobin terror. Executed in 1794.
All terms
Similar books
Read in Livria
