The Crowd by Gustave le Bon (list of ebook readers txt) 📕

than the isolated individual. We shall soon have occasion to

revert to this point when we come to study the morality of

crowds.

Given to exaggeration in its feelings, a crowd is only impressed

by excessive sentiments. An orator wishing to move a crowd must

make an abusive use of violent affirmations. To exaggerate, to

affirm, to resort to repetitions, and never to attempt to prove

anything by reasoning are methods of argument well known to

speakers at public meetings.

Moreover, a crowd exacts a like exaggeration in the sentiments of

its heroes. Their apparent qualities and virtues must always be

amplified. It has been justly remarked that on the stage a crowd

demands from the hero of the piece a degree of courage, morality,

and virtue that is never to be found in real life.

Quite rightly importance has been laid on the special standpoint

from which matters are viewed in the theatre. Such a standpoint

exists no doubt, but its rules for the most part have nothing to

do with common sense and logic. The art of appealing to crowds

is no doubt of an inferior order, but it demands quite special

aptitudes. It is often impossible on reading plays to explain

their success. Managers of theatres when accepting pieces are

themselves, as a rule, very uncertain of their success, because

to judge the matter it would be necessary that they should be

able to transform themselves into a crowd.[6]

[6] It is understandable for this reason why it sometimes happens

that pieces refused by all theatrical managers obtain a

prodigious success when by a stroke of chance they are put on the

stage. The recent success of Francois Coppee’s play “Pour la

Couronne” is well known, and yet, in spite of the name of its

author, it was refused during ten years by the managers of the

principal Parisian theatres.

“Charley’s Aunt,” refused at every theatre, and finally staged at

the expense of a stockbroker, has had two hundred representations

in France, and more than a thousand in London. Without the

explanation given above of the impossibility for theatrical

managers to mentally substitute themselves for a crowd, such

mistakes in judgment on the part of competent individuals, who

are most interested not to commit such grave blunders, would be

inexplicable. This is a subject that I cannot deal with here,

but it might worthily tempt the pen of a writer acquainted with

theatrical matters, and at the same time a subtle

psychologist—of such a writer, for instance, as M. Francisque

Sarcey.

Here, once more, were we able to embark on more extensive

explanations, we should show the preponderating influence of

racial considerations. A play which provokes the enthusiasm of

the crowd in one country has sometimes no success in another, or

has only a partial and conventional success, because it does not

put in operation influences capable of working on an altered

public.

I need not add that the tendency to exaggeration in crowds is

only present in the case of sentiments and not at all in the

matter of intelligence. I have already shown that, by the mere

fact that an individual forms part of a crowd, his intellectual

standard is immediately and considerably lowered. A learned

magistrate, M. Tarde, has also verified this fact in his

researches on the crimes of crowds. It is only, then, with

respect to sentiment that crowds can rise to a very high or, on

the contrary, descend to a very low level.

4. THE INTOLERANCE, DICTATORIALNESS AND CONSERVATISM OF CROWDS.

Crowds are only cognisant of simple and extreme sentiments; the

opinions, ideas, and beliefs suggested to them are accepted or

rejected as a whole, and considered as absolute truths or as not

less absolute errors. This is always the case with beliefs

induced by a process of suggestion instead of engendered by

reasoning. Every one is aware of the intolerance that

accompanies religious beliefs, and of the despotic empire they

exercise on men’s minds.

Being in doubt as to what constitutes truth or error, and having,

on the other hand, a clear notion of its strength, a crowd is as

disposed to give authoritative effect to its inspirations as it

is intolerant. An individual may accept contradiction and

discussion; a crowd will never do so. At public meetings the

slightest contradiction on the part of an orator is immediately

received with howls of fury and violent invective, soon followed

by blows, and expulsion should the orator stick to his point.

Without the restraining presence of the representatives of

authority the contradictor, indeed, would often be done to death.

Dictatorialness and intolerance are common to all categories of

crowds, but they are met with in a varying degree of intensity.

Here, once more, reappears that fundamental notion of race which

dominates all the feelings and all the thoughts of men. It is

more especially in Latin crowds that authoritativeness and

intolerance are found developed in the highest measure. In fact,

their development is such in crowds of Latin origin that they

have entirely destroyed that sentiment of the independence of the

individual so powerful in the Anglo-Saxon. Latin crowds are only

concerned with the collective independence of the sect to which

they belong, and the characteristic feature of their conception

of independence is the need they experience of bringing those who

are in disagreement with themselves into immediate and violent

subjection to their beliefs. Among the Latin races the Jacobins

of every epoch, from those of the Inquisition downwards, have

never been able to attain to a different conception of liberty.

Authoritativeness and intolerance are sentiments of which crowds

have a very clear notion, which they easily conceive and which

they entertain as readily as they put them in practice when once

they are imposed upon them. Crowds exhibit a docile respect for

force, and are but slightly impressed by kindness, which for them

is scarcely other than a form of weakness. Their sympathies have

never been bestowed on easy-going masters, but on tyrants who

vigorously oppressed them. It is to these latter that they

always erect the loftiest statues. It is true that they

willingly trample on the despot whom they have stripped of his

power, but it is because, having lost his strength, he has

resumed his place among the feeble, who are to be despised

because they are not to be feared. The type of hero dear to

crowds will always have the semblance of a Caesar. His insignia

attracts them, his authority overawes them, and his sword instils

them with fear.

A crowd is always ready to revolt against a feeble, and to bow

down servilely before a strong authority. Should the strength of

an authority be intermittent, the crowd, always obedient to its

extreme sentiments, passes alternately from anarchy to servitude,

and from servitude to anarchy.

However, to believe in the predominance among crowds of

revolutionary instincts would be to entirely misconstrue their

psychology. It is merely their tendency to violence that

deceives us on this point. Their rebellious and destructive

outbursts are always very transitory. Crowds are too much

governed by unconscious considerations, and too much subject in

consequence to secular hereditary influences not to be extremely

conservative. Abandoned to themselves, they soon weary of

disorder, and instinctively turn to servitude. It was the

proudest and most untractable of the Jacobins who acclaimed

Bonaparte with greatest energy when he suppressed all liberty and

made his hand of iron severely felt.

It is difficult to understand history, and popular revolutions in

particular, if one does not take sufficiently into account the

profoundly conservative instincts of crowds. They may be

desirous, it is true, of changing the names of their

institutions, and to obtain these changes they accomplish at

times even violent revolutions, but the essence of these

institutions is too much the expression of the hereditary needs

of the race for them not invariably to abide by it. Their

incessant mobility only exerts its influence on quite superficial

matters. In fact they possess conservative instincts as

indestructible as those of all primitive beings. Their fetish-like respect for all traditions is absolute; their unconscious

horror of all novelty capable of changing the essential

conditions of their existence is very deeply rooted. Had

democracies possessed the power they wield to-day at the time of

the invention of mechanical looms or of the introduction of

steam-power and of railways, the realisation of these inventions

would have been impossible, or would have been achieved at the

cost of revolutions and repeated massacres. It is fortunate for

the progress of civilisation that the power of crowds only began

to exist when the great discoveries of science and industry had

already been effected.

5. THE MORALITY OF CROWDS.

Taking the word “morality” to mean constant respect for certain

social conventions, and the permanent repression of selfish

impulses, it is quite evident that crowds are too impulsive and

too mobile to be moral. If, however, we include in the term

morality the transitory display of certain qualities such as

abnegation, self-sacrifice, disinterestedness, devotion, and the

need of equity, we may say, on the contrary, that crowds may

exhibit at times a very lofty morality.

The few psychologists who have studied crowds have only

considered them from the point of view of their criminal acts,

and noticing how frequent these acts are, they have come to the

conclusion that the moral standard of crowds is very low.

Doubtless this is often the case; but why? Simply because our

savage, destructive instincts are the inheritance left dormant in

all of us from the primitive ages. In the life of the isolated

individual it would be dangerous for him to gratify these

instincts, while his absorption in an irresponsible crowd, in

which in consequence he is assured of impunity, gives him entire

liberty to follow them. Being unable, in the ordinary course of

events, to exercise these destructive instincts on our fellow-men, we confine ourselves to exercising them on animals. The

passion, so widespread, for the chase and the acts of ferocity of

crowds proceed from one and the same source. A crowd which

slowly slaughters a defenceless victim displays a very cowardly

ferocity; but for the philosopher this ferocity is very closely

related to that of the huntsmen who gather in dozens for the

pleasure of taking part in the pursuit and killing of a luckless

stag by their hounds.

A crowd may be guilty of murder, incendiarism, and every kind of

crime, but it is also capable of very lofty acts of devotion,

sacrifice, and disinterestedness, of acts much loftier indeed

than those of which the isolated individual is capable. Appeals

to sentiments of glory, honour, and patriotism are particularly

likely to influence the individual forming part of a crowd, and

often to the extent of obtaining from him the sacrifice of his

life. History is rich in examples analogous to those furnished

by the Crusaders and the volunteers of 1793. Collectivities

alone are capable of great disinterestedness and great devotion.

How numerous are the crowds that have heroically faced death for

beliefs, ideas, and phrases that they scarcely understood! The

crowds that go on strike do so far more in obedience to an order

than to obtain an increase of the slender salary with which they

make shift. Personal interest is very rarely a powerful motive

force with crowds, while it is almost the exclusive motive of the

conduct of the isolated individual. It is assuredly not

self-interest that has guided crowds in so many wars,

incomprehensible as a rule to their intelligence—wars in which

they have allowed themselves to be massacred as easily as the

larks hypnotised by the mirror of the hunter.

Even in the case of absolute scoundrels it often happens that the

mere fact of their being in a crowd endows them for