第五章　议会

领袖的影响力只在很小的程度上是因为他们提出的论据，却在很大程度上来自他们的名望。这一点最好的证明是，一旦他们不知因为什么情况威信扫地，他们的影响力也随之消失。

提要：议会中的群体表现出异质性群体的大部分特征/他们的意见的简单化/易受暗示，但有局限性/他们难以改变的意见和易变的意见/议而不决的原因/领袖的作用/他们是议会的真正主人/演讲术的要点/没有名望者的演说劳而无功/议会成员的感情夸张/国民公会的实例/议会失去群体特征的情况/专家在技术性问题上的作用/议会制度的优点和危险/适应现代要求，但会造成财政浪费和对自由的限制/结论。

我们在议会中找到了一个有名称的异质性群体的范例。虽然议会成员的选举方式因时而异，各国之间也有所不同，不过它们都有着十分相似的特征。在这种场合，人们会感到种族的影响或者削弱，或者强化了群体的共同特征，但不会妨碍它们的表现。大不相同的国家，如希腊、意大利、葡萄牙、西班牙、法国和美国，它们的议会在辩论和投票上表现出很大的相似性，使各自的政府面对着同样的困难。

然而，议会制度却是一切现代文明民族的理想。这种制度是一种观念的反映，即在某个问题上，一大群人要比一小撮人更有可能作出明智而独立的决定。这种观念虽然从心理学上说是错误的，却得到普遍的赞同。

在议会中也可以看到群体的一般特征：头脑简单、多变、易受暗示、夸大感情以及少数领袖人物的主导作用。然而，由于其特殊的构成，它们也有一些独特的表现，我们现在就来作一简单的说明。

意见的简单化是他们最重要的特征之一。在所有党派中，尤其是在拉丁民族的党派中，无一例外地存在着一种倾向，即根据适用于一切情况的最简单的抽象原则和普遍规律来解决最复杂的社会问题。当然，原则因党派不同而各有不同，但是，仅仅因为个人是群体的一部分这个事实，他们便总是倾向于夸大自己原则的价值，非要把它贯彻到底不可。由此产生的结果是，议会更严重地代表着各种极端意见。

议会有着特别质朴的简单意见，法国大革命时期的雅各宾党人为此提供了一个最完美的典型。他们用教条和逻辑对待人，头脑里充满各种含糊不清的普遍观念，他们忙不迭地贯彻死板的原则，不关心事实如何。在谈到他们时，人们不无理由地认为，他们经历了一场革命，但并没有看到这场革命。在一些引导着他们的十分简单的教条的帮助下，他们以为自己能够把这个社会从上到下重新改造一遍，结果使一个高度精致的文明倒退到了社会进化更早期的阶段。他们为实现自己的梦想而采用的办法，与极端质朴的人有着同样的特点。实际上，他们不过是把拦在他们道路上的一切统统毁掉。他们不管是吉伦特派、山岳派还是热月派，全都受着同样的精神的激励。

议会中的群体很容易受暗示的影响，而且就像所有群体一样，暗示都是来自享有名望的领袖。不过，议会群体这种易受暗示的特点，又有着很明确的界限，指出这一点十分重要。

在有关地方或地区的一切问题上，议会中的每个成员都持有牢固而无法改变的意见，任何论证都无法使其动摇。例如在贸易保护或酿酒业特权这类与有势力的选民的利益有关的问题上，即使有狄摩西尼的天赋，也难以改变一位众议员的投票。这些选民在投票期到来之前就发出的暗示，足以压倒来自其他方面的一切取消的建议，使意见的绝对稳定得到了维护。

一涉及一般性问题——推翻一届内阁、开征一种新税等等——就不再有任何固定的意见了，领袖的建议能够发挥影响，虽然与普通群体中的方式有所不同。每个政党都有自己的领袖，他们的势力有时旗鼓相当。结果是，一个众议员有时发现自己被夹在两种对立的建议之间，因此难免迟疑不决。这解释了为什么经常会看到他在一刻钟之内就会作出相反的表决，或为一项法案增加一条使其失效的条款，例如剥夺雇主选择和解雇工人的权利，然后又来上一条几乎废除这一措施的修正案。

出于同样的理由，每届议会也有一些非常稳定的意见和一些十分易变的意见。大体上说，一般性问题数量更多，因此在议会中议而不决的现象司空见惯——所以议而不决，是因为永远存在着对选民的担心，从他们那里收到的建议总是姗姗来迟，这有可能制约领袖的影响力。不过，在无数的辩论中，当涉及的问题议员们没有强烈的先入之见时，处在主导地位的人依然是那些领袖。

这些领袖的必要性是显而易见的，因为在每个国家的议会中，都可以看到他们以团体首领的名义存在着。他们是议会的真正统治者。组成群体的人没了头头便一事无成，因此也可以说，议会中的表决通常只代表极少数人的意见。

领袖的影响力只在很小的程度上是因为他们提出的论据，却在很大程度上来自他们的名望。这一点最好的证明是，一旦他们不知因为什么情况威信扫地，他们的影响力也随之消失。

这些政治领袖的名望只属于他们个人，与头衔或名声无关。关于这个事实，西蒙先生在评论1848年国民议会——他也是其成员之一——的大人物时，为我们提供了一些非常具体的例子：

路易·拿破仑两个月以前还无所不能，如今却完全无足轻重了。

维克多·雨果登上了讲台。他无功而返。人们听他说话，就像听皮阿说话一样，但是他并没有博得多少掌声。“我不喜欢他那些想法”，谈到皮阿，沃拉贝勒对我说，“不过他是法国最了不起的作家之一，也是最伟大的演说家。”基内尽管聪明过人，智力超强，却一点也不受人尊敬。在召开议会之前，他还有些名气，但在议会里他却籍籍无名。

对才华横溢者无动于衷的地方，莫过于政治集会。它所留心的只是那些与时间地点相宜、有利于党派的滔滔辩才，并不在乎它是否对国家有利。若想享有1848年的拉马丁以及1871年的梯也尔得到的那种崇敬，需要有急迫而不可动摇的利益刺激才成。一旦危险消失，议会立刻就会忘记它的感激和受到的惊吓。

我引用上面这些话，是因为其中包含着一些事实，而不是因为它所提供的解释，其中的心理学知识贫乏得很。群体一旦效忠于领袖，不管是党的领袖还是国家的领袖，它便立刻失去了自己的个性。服从领袖的群体是处在他的名望的影响之下，并且这种服从不受利益或感激之情的支配。

因此，享有足够名望的领袖几乎掌握着绝对权力。一位著名众议员在多年时间里因其名望而拥有巨大的影响力，在上次大选中由于某些金融问题而被击败，此事广为人知。他只消做个手势，内阁便倒台了。有个作家用的下面一席话说明了他的影响程度：

这位X先生，让我们付出了三倍于我们为东京湾付出的惨痛代价，主要是因为他，我们在马达加斯加的地位长期岌岌可危，我们在南尼日尔被骗走了一个帝国，我们失去了在埃及的优势。X先生的谬论让我们丢失的领土，比拿破仑一世的灾难犹过之而无及。

对于这种领袖，我们不必过于苛责。不错，他使我们损失惨重，然而他的大部分影响力都是因为他顺应了民意，而这种民意在殖民地事务上，目前还远没有超越过去的水平。领袖很少超前于民意，他所做的一切几乎总是在顺应民意，因此也会助长其中的所有错误。

我们这里所讨论的领袖进行说服的手段，除了他们的名望之外，还包括一些我们多次提到过的因素。领袖若想巧妙地利用这些手段，他必须做到对群体心理了然于心，至少也要无意识地做到这一点；他还必须知道如何向他们说话。他尤其应当了解各种词汇、套话和形象的神奇力量。他应当具备特殊的辩才，这包括言之凿凿——卸去证明的重负——和生动的形象，并伴之以十分笼统的论证。这种辩才在所有集会中都可以看到，英国议会也不例外，虽然它是所有议会中最严肃的一家。英国哲人梅因说，

在下院的争吵中可以不断看到，整个辩论不过是些软弱无力的大话和盛怒的个人之间的交锋。这种一般公式对纯粹民主的想象有着巨大的影响。让一群人接受用惊人之语表达出来的笼统的断言，从来就不是什么难事，即使它从未得到过证实，大概也不可能得到证实。

以上引文中提到的“惊人之语”，不管说得多重要也不能算过分。我们多次谈到词语和套话的特殊力量。在措辞的选择上，必须以能够唤起生动的形象为准。下面这段话摘自我们一位议会领袖的演说，提供了一个极好的范例：

这艘船将驶向我们那片坐落着我们的刑事犯定居点的热病肆虐的殖民地，把名声可疑的政客和目无政府的杀人犯关在一起。这对难兄难弟可以促膝谈心，彼此视为一种社会状态中互助互利的两派。

如此唤起的形象极为鲜活，演说者的所有对手都会觉得自己受着它的威胁。他们的脑海里浮现出两幅画面：一片热病肆虐的国土，一艘可以把他们送走的船。他们不是也有可能被放在那些定义不明确的可怕政客中间吗？他们体验到的恐惧，与当年罗伯斯庇尔用断头台发出威胁的演说给国民公会的人的感觉是一样的。在这种恐惧的影响下，他们肯定会向他投降。

喋喋不休地说些最离谱的大话，永远对领袖有利。我刚才引用过的那位演说家能够断言——并且不会遇到强烈的抗议——金融家和僧侣在资助扔炸弹的人，因此大金融公司的总裁也应受到和无政府主义者一样的惩罚。这种断言永远会在人群中发生作用。再激烈的断言、再可怕的声明也不算过分。要想吓唬住听众，没有比这种辩术更有效的办法。在场的人会担心，假如他们表示抗议，他们也会被当作叛徒或其同伙打倒。

如我所说，这种特殊的辩论术在所有集会中都极为有效。危难时刻它的作用就更加明显。从这个角度看，法国大革命时期各种集会上的那些大演说家的讲话，读起来十分有趣。他们无时无刻不认为自己必须先谴责罪恶弘扬美德，然后再对暴君破口大骂，发誓不自由毋宁死。在场的人站起来热烈鼓掌，冷静下来后再回到自己的座位上。

偶尔也有智力高强、受过高等教育的领袖，但是具备这种品质通常对他不但无益反而有害。如果他想说明事情有多么复杂，同意作出解释和促进理解，他的智力就会使他变得宽宏大量，这会大大削弱使徒们所必需的信念的强度与粗暴。在所有的时代，尤其是在大革命时期，伟大的民众领袖头脑之狭隘令人瞠目；但影响力最大的，肯定也是头脑最褊狭的人。

其中最著名的演说，即罗伯斯庇尔的演说，经常有着令人吃惊的自相矛盾，只看这些演说实在搞不明白，这个大权在握的独裁者何以有如此大的影响：

教学法式的常识和废话，糊弄孩子头脑的稀松平常的拉丁文化，攻击和辩护所采用的观点不过是些小学生的歪理。没有思想，没有措辞上令人愉快的变化，也没有切中要害的讥讽。只有令我们生厌的疯狂断言。在经历过一次这种毫无乐趣的阅读之后，人们不免会与和蔼的德穆兰一起，长叹一声：“唉！”

想到与极端狭隘的头脑结合在一起的强烈信念能够给予一个有名望的人什么样的权力，有时真让人心惊肉跳。一个人要想无视各种障碍，表现出极高的意志力，就必须满足这些最起码的条件。群体本能地在精力旺盛信仰坚定的人中间寻找自己的主子，他们永远需要这种人物。

在议会里，一次演说要想取得成功，根本不取决于演说者提出的论证，而是几乎完全依靠他所具有的名望。这方面最好的证明是，如果一个演说者因为这样或那样的原因失去名望，他同时也就失去了一切影响，即他根据自己的意志影响表决的能力。

当一个籍籍无名的演说者拿着一篇论证充分的讲稿出场时，如果他只有论证，他充其量也只能让人听听而已。一位有心理学见识的众议员，德索布先生，最近用下面这段话描述了一个缺乏名望的众议员：

他走上讲台后，从公文包里拿出一份讲稿，煞有介事地摆在自己面前，十分自信地开始发言。

他曾自我吹嘘说，他能够让听众确信使他本人感到振奋的事情。他一而再再而三地强调自己的论证，对那些数字和证据信心十足。他坚信自己能够说服听众。面对他所引用的证据，任何反对都没用处。他一厢情愿地开讲，相信自己同事的眼力，认为他们理所当然地只会赞同真理。

他一开口便惊异地发现大厅里并不安静，人们发出的噪音让他多少有些恼怒。

为何不能保持安静呢？为何这么不留意他的发言呢？对于正在讲话的人，那些众议员在想些什么？有什么要紧的事情让这个或那个众议员离开了自己的座位？

他脸上掠过一丝不安的神情。他皱着眉头停了下来。在议长的鼓励下，他又提高嗓门开始发言，他加重语气，做出各种手势。周围的噪声越来越大，他连自己的话都听不见了。于是他又停了下来。最后，因为担心自己的沉默会招来可怕的叫喊：“闭嘴！”便又开始说起来。喧闹声变得难以忍受。

当议会极度亢奋时，它也会变得和普通的异质性群体没什么两样，这时它的感情就会表现出总爱走极端的特点。可以看到它或是做出最伟大的英雄主义举动，或是犯下最恶劣的过失。个人不再是他自己，他会完全失去自我，投票赞成最不符合他本人利益的措施。

法国大革命的历史说明了议会能够多么严重地丧失自我意识，让那些与自己的利益截然对立的建议牵着鼻子走。贵族放弃自己的特权是个巨大的牺牲，但是在国民公会期间那个著名的夜晚，他们毫不犹豫地这样做了。议会成员放弃自己不可侵犯的权利，便使自己永远处在死亡的威胁之下，而他们却迈出了这一步；他们也不害怕在自己的阶层中滥杀无辜，虽然他们很清楚，今天他们把自己的同伙送上断头台，明天这可能就是他们自己的命运。实际上，他们已经进入了我曾描述过的一个完全不由自主的状态，任何想法都无法阻止他们赞成那些已经把他们冲昏了头脑的建议。下面的话摘自他们中间的一个人，比劳凡尔纳的回忆录，极典型地记下了这种情况：“我们一直极力谴责的决定……”他说，“两天前、甚至一天前我们还不想作出的决定，居然就通过了；造成这种情况的是危机，再无其他原因。”再也没有比这更正确的说法了。

在所有情绪激昂的议会上，都可以看到同样的无意识现象。泰纳说：

他们批准并下令执行他们所痛恨的法令。这些法令不只愚蠢透顶，简直就是犯罪——杀害无辜，杀害他们的朋友。在右派的支持下，左派全体一致，在热烈的掌声中把丹东，他们的天然首领，这场革命的伟大发动者和领袖，送上了断头台。在左派的支持下，右派全部一致，在最响亮的掌声中表决通过了革命政府最恶劣的法令。议会全体一致，在一片热烈叫喊的赞扬声中，在对德布瓦、库东和罗伯斯庇尔等人热烈的赞扬声中，不由自主地一再举行改选，使杀人成性的政府留在台上；平原派憎恶它，是因为它嗜杀成性，山岳派憎恶它，是因为它草菅人命。平民派和山岳派，多数派和少数派，最后都落了个同意为他们的自杀出力的下场。牧月22日，整个议会把自己交给了刽子手；热月8日，在罗伯斯庇尔发言后的一刻钟内，同样的事情又被这个议会做了一次。

这幅画面看起来昏天黑地，但它十分准确。议会若是兴奋和头脑发昏到一定程度，就会表现出同样的特点。它会变成不稳定的流体，受制于一切刺激。下面这段有关1848年议会的描述，来自斯布勒尔先生，一位有着不容怀疑的民主信仰的议员。我从《文学报》上把这段十分典型的文字转引如下。它为我曾经说过的夸张感情这一群体特点、为它的极端多变性——这使它一刻不停地从一种感情转向另一种截然相反的感情——提供了一个例子。

共和派因为自己的分裂、嫉妒和猜疑，也因为它的盲信和无节制的愿望而坠入地狱。它的质朴和天真与它的普遍怀疑不相上下。与毫无法律意识、不知纪律为何物的表现相伴的，是放肆的恐怖和幻想。在这些方面乡下人和孩子也比他们强。他们的冷酷和他们的缺乏耐心一样严重，他们的残暴与驯顺不相上下。这种状态是性格不成熟以及缺乏教养的自然结果。没有什么事情能让这种人吃惊，但任何事情都会让他们慌乱。出于恐惧或出于大无畏的英雄气概，他们既能赴汤蹈火，也会胆小如鼠。

他们不管原因和后果，不在乎事物之间的关系。他们忽而灰心丧气，忽而斗志昂扬，他们很容易受惊慌情绪的影响，不是过于紧张就是过于沮丧，从来不会处在环境所要求的心境或状态中。他们比流水还易变，头脑混乱，行为无常。能指望他们提供什么样的政府基础？

幸运的是，上述这些在议会中看到的特点，并非经常出现。议会只是在某些时刻才会成为一个群体。在大多数情况下，组成议会的个人仍保持着自己的个性，这解释了议会为何能够制定出十分出色的法律。其实，这些法律的作者都是专家，他们是在自己安静的书房里拟定草稿的，因此，表决通过的法律，其实是个人而不是集体的产物。这些法律自然就是最好的法律。只有当一系列修正案把它们变成集体努力的产物时，它们才有可能产生灾难性的后果。群体的产品不管性质如何，与孤立的个人的产品相比，总是品质低劣。专家阻止着议会通过一些考虑不周全或行不通的政策。在这种情况下，专家是群体暂时的领袖。议会影响不到他，他却可以影响到议会。

议会的运作虽然面对所有这些困难，它仍然是人类迄今为止已经发现的最佳统治方式，尤其是人类已经找到的摆脱个人专制的最佳方式。不管是对于哲学家、思想家、作家、艺术家还是有教养的人，一句话，对于所有构成文明主流的人，议会无疑是理想的统治。

不过，在现实中它们也造成两种严重的危险，一是不可避免的财政浪费，二是对个人自由不断增加的限制。

第一个危险是各种紧迫问题和当选群体缺少远见的必然产物。如果有个议员提出一项显然符合民主理念的政策，譬如说，他在议案中建议保证使所有的工人能得到养老津贴，或建议为所有级别的国家雇员加薪，其他众议员因为害怕自己的选民，就会成为这一提议的牺牲品，他们似乎不敢无视后者的利益，反对这种提议中的政策。虽然他们清楚这是在为预算增加新的负担，必然造成新税种的设立。他们不可能在投票时迟疑不决。增加开支的后果属于遥远的未来，不会给他们自己带来不利的结果，如果投了反对票，当他们为连选连任而露面时，其后果就会清楚地展现在他们面前。

除了这第一个扩大开支的原因外，还有一个同样具有强制性的原因，即必须投票赞成一切为了地方目的的补助金。一名众议员没办法反对这种补助，因为它们同样反映着选民的迫切需要，也因为每个众议员只有同意自己同僚的类似要求，才有条件为自己的选民争取到这种补助金。

上面提到的第二个危险——议会对自由不可避免的限制——看起来不那么明显，却是十分真实的。这是大量的法律——它们总是一种限制性措施——造成的结果，议会认为自己有义务表决通过，但是由于眼光短浅，它在很大程度上对其结果茫然无知。

这种危险当然是不可避免的，因为即使在英国这个提供了最通行的议会体制、议员对其选民保持了最大独立性的国家，也没有逃脱这种危险。赫伯特·斯宾塞在一本很久以前的著作中就曾指出，表面自由的增加必然伴随着真正自由的减少。他在最近的《人与国家》一书中又谈到了这个问题。在讨论英国议会时，他表达了自己的观点：

自从这个时期以来，立法机构一直遵循着我指出的路线。迅速膨胀的独裁政策不断地倾向于限制个人自由，这表现在两个方面。每年都有大量的法律被制定出来，对一些过去公民行为完全自由的事务进行限制，强迫他做一些过去他可做可不做的事情。同时，日益沉重的公共负担，尤其是地方公共负担，通过减少他可以自由支配的收益份额，增加公共权力取之于他并根据自己的喜好花销的份额，进一步限制了他的自由。

这种对个人自由日益增加的限制，在每个国家都有斯宾塞没有明确指出的各种具体的表现形式。正是这些大量的立法措施——大体上全是些限制性法令——的通过，必然会大大增加负责实施它们的公务员的数量、权力和影响。沿着这个方向走下去，这些公务员有可能成为文明国家的真正主人。他们拥有更大的权力，是因为在政府不断更换的过程中，只有他们不会受到这种不断变化的触动，只有他们不承担责任，不需要个性，永久地存在。实行压迫性的专制，莫过于具备这三种特点的人。

不断制定一些限制性法规，用最复杂的条条框框把最微不足道的生活行为包围起来，难免会把公民自由活动的空间限制在越来越小的范围之内。各国被一种谬见所骗，认为保障自由与平等的最好办法就是多多地制定法律，因此它们每天都在批准进行一些越来越不堪忍受的束缚。它们已经习惯于给人上套，很快便会达到需要奴才的地步，失去一切自发精神与活力。那时他们不过是些虚幻的人影，消极、顺从、有气无力的行尸走肉。

若是到了这个地步，个人注定要去寻求那种他自己身上已经找不到的外在力量。政府各部门必然与公民的麻木和无望同步增长。因此它们必须表现出私人所没有的主动性、首创性和指导精神。这迫使它们要承担一切，领导一切，把一切都纳入自己的保护之下。于是国家变成了全能的上帝。而经验告诉我们，这种上帝既难以持久，也不十分强大。

在某些民族中，一切自由受到了越来越多的限制，尽管表面上的许可使它们产生一种幻觉，以为自己还拥有这些自由。它们的衰老在造成这种情况上所起的作用，至少和任何具体的制度一样大。这是直到今天任何文明都无法逃脱的衰落期的不祥先兆之一。

根据历史的教训以及各方面都触目惊心的那些先兆判断，我们的一些现代文明已经到达了衰败期之前那些历史上早已有之的时代。所有的民族似乎都不可避免地要经历同样的生存阶段，因为看起来历史是在不断地重复它的过程。

关于文明进化的这些共同阶段，很容易作个简单的说明，我将对它们作一概括，以此为本书作结。这种速记式的说明，也许能够对理解目前群众所掌握的权力的原因有所启发。

如果我们根据主要线索，对我们之前那些文明的伟大与衰败的原因加以评价，我们会发现什么呢？

在文明诞生之初，一群来源不同的人，因为移民、入侵或占领等原因聚集在一起。他们血缘不同，语言和信仰也不同。使这些人结为整体的唯一共同的纽带，是某个头领没有完全得到承认的法律。这些混乱的人群有着十分突出的群体特征。他们有短暂的团结，既表现出英雄主义，也有种种弱点，易冲动而性狂狷。没有什么东西把他们牢固地联系在一起。他们是野蛮人。

漫长的岁月造就了自己的作品。环境的一致、种族间不断出现的通婚和共同生活的必要性发挥了作用。不同的小群体开始融合成一个整体，形成了一个种族，即一个有着共同的特征和感情的群体，它们在遗传的作用下日益稳固。这群人变成了一个民族，这个民族又有能力摆脱它的野蛮状态。但是，只有在经过长期的努力、必然不断重复的斗争以及无数次的反复，从而使它获得了某种理想之后，它才能够完全形成一个民族。这个理想具有什么性质并不十分重要，不管是对罗马的崇拜、雅典的强盛还是真主安拉的胜利，都足以让一个种族中的每个人在感情和思想上形成完全的统一。

在这个阶段，一种包含着各种制度、信念和艺术的新文明便诞生了。这个种族在追求自己理想的过程中，会逐渐得到某些它建立丰功伟业所不可缺少的素质。无需怀疑，它有时仍然是乌合之众，但是在它变幻不定的特征背后，会形成一个稳定的基础，即一个种族的禀性，它决定着一个民族在狭小的范围内的变化，支配着机遇的作用。

时间在做完它的创造性工作之后，便开始了破坏的过程，不管是神灵还是人，一概无法逃脱它的手掌。一个文明在达到一定的强盛和复杂程度之后，便会止步不前，而一旦止步不前，它注定会进入衰落的过程。这时它的老年期便降临了。

这个不可避免的时刻，总是以作为种族支柱的理想的衰弱为特点。同这种理想的衰弱相对应，在它的激励下建立起的宗教、政治和社会结构也开始发生动摇。

随着这个种族的理想不断消亡，它也日益失去了使自己团结强盛的品质。个人的个性和智力可以增长，但是这个种族集体的自我意识却会被个人自我意识的过度发展所取代，同时会伴随着性格的弱化和行动能力的减少。本来是一个民族、一个联合体、一个整体的人群，最终会变成一群缺乏凝聚力的个人，他们在一段时间里，仅仅因为传统和制度而被人为地聚集在一起。正是在这个阶段，被个人利益和愿望搞得四分五裂的人，已失去了治理自己的能力，因此在最微不足道的事情上也需要领导，于是国家开始发挥引人注目的影响。

随着古老理想的丧失，这个种族的才华也完全消失了。它仅仅是一群独立的个人，因而回了自己的原始状态——即一群乌合之众。它既缺乏统一性，也没有未来，只有乌合之众那些一时的特性。它的文明现在已经失去了稳定性，只能随波逐流。民众就是至上的权力，野蛮风气盛行。文明也许仍然华丽，因为久远的历史赋予它的外表尚存，其实它已成了一座岌岌可危的大厦，它没有任何支撑，下次风暴一来，它便会立刻倾覆。

在追求理想的过程中，从野蛮状态发展到文明状态，然后，当这个理想失去优势时，走向衰落和死亡，这就是一个民族的生命循环过程。

英文版

Gustave Le Bon(1841——1931)

THE CROWD

A Study of the Popular Mind

THE VIKING PRESS, INC., 1960

625 Madison Avenue, New York 22, N. Y.

The Psychological Mechanisms of the Transition from Democracy to Dictatorship

A Preface by the Translator of Chinese version

Yan Jian

It’s heard that upright people exist even in the scenario of crooked officials, but it’s never heard that upright officials exist in the scenario of frenetic people.

HanFeizi

What seemed to be love for liberty turns out to be mere hatred of a despot.

Alexis de Tocqueville, The Old Regime and the Revolution

People are bewildered by the voice of utopia. They struggle to enter the gate of the heaven. But when the door behind them is closed, they would suddenly find they are actually in the hell. Such a scenario convinces me that history likes playing jokes.

Milan Kundera, The Joke

Whose role in history is more important, heroes or ordinary people? Although a questionthat the historians have been aspired to touch on, it is actually a hard one to answer. There is a Chinese saying “When a hero rises, there always a crowd of lackeys follow”. Its simplistic connotations hit the targets well and relieve us from the painful dialectical thinking on the question. The academic attention devoted respectively to the heroes (or the evil greats) and their followers in history, however, isunbalanced by number. For thousands of years, tremendous amounts of works have been written either to study the heroes or to provide them with suggestions. But before the advent of “mass society”, it is the emperors, generals, ministers and all sorts of powerful figures across the world that steered the history trajectory. The followers of heroes were seldom treated as meaningful subjects for studies. Thingsbegan to changeonly with the advent of the democracy era. In “Democracy as a Life Style”,an unfinished paper concerned with the process of secularization, written just before his death, Karl Mannheim deeply and vividly depicted the silent changes occurring in people’s life attitudes and esthetic tendenciesas a result of the changes of folklore, arts and architecture of late medieval age, which consisted of the determinants of upcoming political democratization process. According to Mannheim, one striking outcome of this process was the gradual erosion of secular monarchies, either based on cult or heredity, ondemands for equal human rights and broader participation. This heralded a big shift in the origin of political legitimacy. Hereditary claims, pine right or “Mandate of the Heaven” were all losing their glamour. On the contrary, any ambitious man for the thrones had to seek the “delegation of power” from the populace. Now, the masses started to dominate the central stage.

1.The Forgotten Gustav Le Bon

However, it turns out that the masses’ central role in enabling social changes doesn’t necessarily bring about positive outcomes as far as its impact on the changes of modern political institutions is concerned. As was proven by the history of both China and other nations, without appropriate constitutional restraints, the democratic power of the masses, like the power wielded by any inpidual, can easily turn to its flip side and become an abusing power.Starting from Edmund Burke, many thinkers worried about the negative impacts resulting from the hijacked public opinions by plebeianleaders. In this sense, the social psychological works by Gustave Le Bon in the late 19th century, especially his Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind (hereinafter, The Crowd), shouldn’t have been neglected by us.

Who is Le Bon? This Frenchman of geniuswouldn’t be a stranger to the Chinese readers. His The Crowdhas been translated into 17 foreign languages, including Chinese. However, facing strife at home and aggression threat from the west, the Chinese mind have been preoccupied with the task of “preserving the Chinese nation” since the modern era. So, it was collectivist ideologies such as nationalism and socialism that gained currency in China due to their relevance to China’s reality. No surprise that the Anti-collectivism works, like The Crowd, were put aside by the Chinese.

Starting from 1894, Le Bon wrote a series of social psychological works, which were enormous in scale and complicated in content. Apart from the aforementioned The Crowd, his other works included The Psychology of Peoples (1894), The Psychology of Socialism (1898), The French Revolution and the Psychology of Revolution (1912) as well as The Psychology of the Great War (1916). Among them, however, it turned out that TheCrowd was the most successful one. Since its first publication in 1895, TheCrowd hasbeen republished at a rate of less than one year once and it already had 29 editions by 1921. On several major online bookstores, we can still browse some webpages onThe Crowd as well as some fantastic comments from the readers (the full text of TheCrowd can be downloaded on two websites for free).

George Mead, the founder of social psychology at The University of Chicago, once examined Le Bon’s thoughts in one review article in American Journal of Sociology.Mead wrote, “He belongs to the group of Frenchmen who almost despair of their national and racial civilization, and find in the inpidualism of the Anglo-Saxon the only healthful and promising force for the future of society.” As was noticed by Mead, Le Bon was a marginalized “Pro-Britain” figure in the chaotic late 19th Century French academia. Hisappreciation for the psychological quality and political institutions of Anglo-Saxon can be easily detected in his works. In terms of comprehensiveness and depth, however, Le Bon’s relevant observation is eclipsed by his countrymen like Montesquieu, Tocqueville and even Hippolyte Taine, the latter was one generation older than Le Bon. So, Le Bon’s affection for Anglo-Saxon is far from enough to explain the peculiarity of his thoughts as well as their enduring influences. His influence must have other sources.

InHandbook of Social Psychology, Gordon W. Allport, a towering figure of social psychology in the United States, gave high credit to Le Bon, saying that “perhaps the most influential book ever written in social psychology is Le Bon’sTheCrowd.”And Robert Merton, in his lengthy preface toThe Crowd, argued that “Opponents could contradict what Le Bon had to say but they could not ignore it-- not, at least, without abandoning an interest in problems of social psychology that were evidently basic. For this is the decisive merit of Le Bon’s book: almost throughout, it exhibits a sense for the significant problem…Le Bon showed that he had that ‘instinct for the jugular’ which is found among the rare species of thinkers who repeatedly identify significant problems for inquiry. Almost without exception, the problems at the focus of Le Bon’s work were destined to become problems of major interest to social psychologists.”In his Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy,Joseph Schumpeter, a prudent and aloof man, gave special emphasis to the significance of Le Bon’s social psychological study, saying it“was a manifestation of the era”. According to Schumpeter, Le Bon was the first man who elaborated on the fact that “human behavior when under the influence of agglomeration—in particular the sudden disappearance, in a state of excitement, of moral restraints and civilized modes of thinking and feeling, the sudden eruption of primitive impulses, infantilisms and criminal propensities”. In Schumpeter’s words, this “dealt a serious blow to the picture of man’s nature which underlies the classical doctrine of democracy and democratic folklore about revolutions.”.These comments are more than words of praise. In fact, if we attempt to look for some psychological explanations on the succeeded or failed popular revolutions in the 20th Century and the catastrophes resulting from them, we can certainly learn a lot from Le Bon.

2 Two Starting points of Le Bon’s Research

It’s not difficult to understand why Le Bon’s study on “the mass mind” has lasting influences on the world: the social context, under which Le Bon proposed his ideas, not only persisted, but also has become the most important aspect of political life in the 20th Century. Le Bon might look like an “amateur” if judged by academic standards, nevertheless, he exhibited us his instinctive insights into this phenomenon.

According to Le Bon, two fundamental factors are at the base of the transformation from traditional society to a modern one. The first is the destruction of the religious, political, and social beliefs. The second is the dramatic changes in industrial production as the result of modern scientific andtechnical discoveries.With regard to the political life of the west, this transformation ushered in the emergence of “the masses” as a democratic force. Furthermore, in the evolution of western civilization, “emergence of the crowd” was largely a destiny. Le Bon predicted that the future society, no matter what its organizing principle is, must take into account of a new and overwhelming power, i.e. “the power of the crowds”. “While all our ancient beliefs are tottering and disappearing, while the old pillars of society are giving way one by one, the power of the crowds is the only force that nothing menaces, and of which the prestige is continually on the increase.” Based on this observation, Le Bon argued that “The age we are about to enter will in truth be the Era of the Crowds.” According to Le Bon, in terms of profound modification in the ideas of the peoples, the most striking characteristics of “the Era of Crowds” were the spreading of democracy and socialism, which scared Le Bon, a man favoring conservatism and elitism. We will touch on this point again in the rest of this preface.

The second starting point of Le Bon’s study on the popular mind might be unacceptable to the readers of today, but it was an important factor that evoked Le Bon to write numerous books on this subject. Moreover, it is still unsafelyto say that the factor has been discarded to the dustbin of history. Le Bon argued that the common characteristics with which heredity endows all the inpiduals of a race constitute the genius of the race.The preoccupation with “race endowments” not only is a prevailingphenomenon in the spiritual life ofWestern Europemore than a century ago, but also left its imprints on many peripheral areas of modernization process. Its impacts can be sensibly felt in Mr. Lu Xun’s reflection on “national character” (an analogue of the term “genius of race” by Le Bon) as well as our lingering memory of “survival of the nation”. Emanating from “scientific anthropology” in the 19th Century, racism yielded one of its extreme strands represented by Joseph Arthur de Gobineau, one of Le Bon’s fellow countrymen.Gobineauadvocated “the unity of soul and body”, attempting to find some linkages between anatomic features of human races and their modes of “life of the mind” and then stretch these linkages to explain the differences among races in culture, arts as well as political and social institutions. Under this circumstance, Le Bon was unsurprisingly influenced by racism. He accepted the racist anthropology of Gobineau and others and developed a mystic concept of race, which, in Le Bon’s view, determined the fate of every nation. He contended that “the whole of the common characteristics with which heredity endows the inpiduals of a race constitute the genius of the race.”So somescholars’criticism of Le Bon as a racist is not a groundless guess.

But to befair, Le Bon’s racism, which provided the bricks for his “popular mind theory”, keeps distance from the biology-obsessed “scientific anthropology”. For Le Bon, race was rather a historical and cultural concept.

In “The Ambivalences of Le Bon’s The Crowd”, Merton argued that Le Bon’s nihilistattitudetothe science of history turned out to be a lucky contradictory feature of his, since in practice he didn’t nullify the role of historical facts. After reading Le Bon’s books, however, we tend to believe that Le Bon’s racist-oriented cultural standpoint, which stimulated his study on thepsychology of the crowds, fits Merton’s observation better. In Psychology of Peoples, his first book on social psychology (published in 1894), Le Bon went to great lengths to explain why the ideastransferring among different races couldn’t hold their original configuration. For instance, since the British and French had different “genius of a race”, they tended to have different and even conflicting understandings on such ideas like “democracy” and “freedom”.It is the different fates of nations made by the different “genius of a race”, or put it more specifically,it is Le Bon’s strong concerns on the fate of the French nation, that prompted him to construct a general theory of the psychology of crowds.

3 Inferior Sentiments of the Crowds

Every race has its own distinctive genius.Based on his observation on several historical upheavals (especially the French Revolution), however, Le Bon found that when a certain number of inpiduals, no matter to what races they belong, gathered together in a crowd for purposes of action, “from the mere fact of their being assembled, there result certain new psychological characteristics, which are added to the racial characteristics and differ from them at times to a very considerable degree.”What Le Bon’s overarching contribution to social psychology just lay in his study on these differences?According to Le Bon, inpiduals in organized crowdswill experience some changes, the most interesting aspect of which is changes in inpidual’s way of behavior, which distinguishes itself from that when he is alone. Le Bon provided some evidences to support his observation although they were not based on the proofs of experimental psychology.But according to Freud, who later advanced Le Bon’s study, Le Bon’s extraordinary “problem awareness” shielded his arguments from being challenged even from an experimental perspective. Anyone who read The Crowd would definitely be impressed by the insightsLe Bon shown inthis small book, although it also contains lots of biases.

Le Bon often exaggerated the distinctive characteristics of group behavior as opposed to inpidual behavior. In Le Bon’s view, these characteristics were striking. An inpidual in the crowds will experience some fundamental psychological changes through the mechanism of “collective unconsciousness”. Just like “animals, idiots, opportunists, children and savages”, an inpidual in the crowds would unwittingly lose his self-consciousness and become a creature with inferior intelligence. Indeed, Le Bon was in no position to put forward such concepts as “authoritarian personality”, but he made it clear that an inpidual in the crowds would like to replace his own mentality with crowd mentality and be more prone to exhibit some hereditary primitive instincts even without any external coercion. These distinctive characteristics an inpidual exhibited in the crowds can be summarized as follows.

Firstly, inpiduals in the crowds tend to exhibit sensible tendency to conform to group sentiments which was summarized by Le Bon as “law of the mental unity of crowds”. The tendency towards mental unity renders some important outcomes, including dogmatism, paranoia, and a sense of invincibilityof crowd as well as forfeit of responsibility. In Le Bon’s words, “Crowds are only cognizant of simple and extreme sentiments; the opinions,ideas, and beliefs suggested to them are accepted or rejected as a whole, andconsidered as absolute truths or as not less absolute errors.”According to Le Bon, what he described was not a merely modern phenomenon. Staring from ancient times, “everyone is aware of the intolerance that accompanies religiousbeliefs, and of the despotic empire they exercise on men’s minds”. Le Bon argued that this is even the basic stimulus of any great civilization.

Due to this sort of simplistic way of thinking, the masses don’t believe that truth, especially “social truth”, can only “grow out of discussion”. On the contrary, they tend to turn very complicated issues into slogan-like simplistic ideas. An inpidual in frenzied crowds endows his ideal a certainty that grows strongerwith the crowd getting more numerous, so he tends to be intolerant of any criticism on his ideals and views:“An inpidual may accept contradictionand discussion; a crowd will never do so. At public meetings the slightestcontradiction on the part of an orator is immediately received with howls offury and violent invective, soon followed by blows, and expulsion should theorator stick to his point. Without the restraining presence of the representativesof authority the contradictor, indeed, would often be done to death.”Here, Le Bon found another law that regulates the psychology of the crowds: the morality and social mechanisms that restrict inpidual behaviors tend to becomeinvalid in frenzied crowds. “An isolated inpidual knows well enough that alone he cannot set fire to apalace or loot a shop, and should he be tempted to do so, he will easily resistthe temptation. Making part of a crowd, he is conscious of the power givenhim by number, and it is sufficient to suggest to him ideas of murder or pillagefor him to yield immediately to temptation. An unexpected obstacle will bedestroyed with frenzied rage.”From the perspective of rule of law, which is based on inpidual responsibilities, the one who lost his inpidual interests and objectives in the crowds would become “Mr. Anonymous”. His recognition that the law will not punish everybody reassures himself that he would not take responsibilities for his own behaviors. “The violence of the feelings of crowds is also increased, especially inheterogeneous crowds, by the absence of all sense of responsibility. Thecertainty of impunity, a certainty the stronger as the crowd is more numerous,and the notion of a considerable momentary force due to number, makepossible in the case of crowds sentiments and acts impossible for the isolatedinpidual. In crowds the foolish, ignorant, and envious persons are freed fromthe sense of their insignificance and powerlessness, and are possessed insteadby the notion of brutal and temporary but immense strength.”

In this sense, Le Bon’s thoughts represented the biggest challenge to the assumption of “rational person” in Enlightenment Philosophy of the 18th Century. In Le Bon’s view, “without a doubt human reason would not have availed to spur humanity along the path of civilization with the ardor and hardihood its illusions have done.”It is not by reason, but most often inspite of it that those sentiments are created that consistthe mainsprings of allcivilization --“sentiments such as honor, self-sacrifice, religious faith,patriotism, and the love of glory”.This is why those sophisticated philosophic or scientific ideas have to be vulgarized and simplified in front of the crowds (no matter on what level of intelligence inpiduals in the crowds might be). In this regard, Le Bon ought to be the teacher of George Orwell. He not only knew there are close linkages between “politics and the debasement of language”, but pointed out that “reason and arguments are incapable of combatting certain words andformulas”.According to Le Bon, this was not completely the fault of propagandists, because these things “were introduced along with the crowds”. The power of ideas is bound up with the images they evoke, and is quiteindependent of their real significance. Only those ideas that are immune from examination and criticism can be viewed by the crowds as akind of natural and even supernaturalpower. Assoon as they have been pronounced,“an expression of respect is visible on everycountenance, and all heads are bowed”.“They evoke grandiose and vague images inmen’s minds, but this very vagueness that wraps them in obscurity augmentstheir mysterious power. They are the mysterious pinities hidden behind thetabernacle, which the devout only approach in fear and trembling.” Such terms like democracy, socialism, equality, liberty, etc, whosemeaningsare so vague that bulky volumes do not suffice to precisely fix them,have truly magical power,just because they have become empty political slogans. They could be synthesisof the most perseunconscious aspirations and the hope of their realization.

Thus, it becomes easier for us to understand why great thinkers with political aspirations, likeMax Weber and Bertrand Russell, failed in the real world of politics. Thanks to the effects of idea simplification, anyone who is prone to a suspicious spirit, and believe “certainty of truth” is hard to be found in political and social issues, and especially gets used to analyzing questions through reasoning and discussion,has no place in the crowds. Facing fanatic crowds, he would feel especially powerless: he would encounter not only mistaken behavior, but also “the power of the majority” as well as intolerant people. So-called “professional elites”, no matter how intelligent they might be, would feel frustrated with their reasoning efforts. Facing the crowds imbued with empty ideas, they tend to thinkthemselves pedantic and boring. More lamentably, in front of the ridiculous and frenzied masses, wise people might not make the efforts to reasoning at all, but rather choose to join the crowds and follow suit, only to regret their foolishness and neglect of common sense afterwards. Focusing on the marginalized sensein social community and the internal anxiety as a result of it, Fromm once examined the phenomenon that the inpidual lose his independent judgment capability.The reason why people prefer to “escape from freedom”, according to Fromm, lies in the fact that they tend to give up their inpidual standpoints under the pressure of internal anxiety. As was examined by Le Bon, the uncertainty induced by skeptical spirit not only is hated by the crowds, but also invites furies that could kill.

4. Morality of the Crowds

Readers might tend to stereotype Le Bon, i.e. he disproportionately emphasized the negative image of the crowds. The effects of “the popular mind” on inpidual’s behavior, however, are more complicated than the “evils”in people’s daily life. In Le Bon’s words, “the transformation is soprofound as to change the miser into a spendthrift, the sceptic into a believer,the honest man into a criminal, and the coward into a hero”.As a result, it’s hard to define what we observed in the crowds only in terms of criminal law. Itisa much more complicated phenomenon.

Le Bon reiterated that his research was not about “the psychology of criminal crowds”, but the general psychological characteristics of all types of crowds, includingvirtuous and heroic crowds.Not only “intolerant and savage”, inpiduals in the crowds will probably not behave in line with their self-interests as what happens to most criminals, thanks to the inspirations by all sorts of “ideals” that they know little or don’t understand at all. Therefore, the behaviors of the crowds may bring about seemingly negative outcomes, but the motivations of the inpiduals in the crowds could be anything but inferior and wicked self-interests.

When the crowds are motivated by some lofty ideas, they will exhibit higher levels of “morality”. However, what kind of “morality” is this? Here, Le Bon made a very important distinction. Taking the word “morality” to mean constant respect for certain socialconventions and the permanent repression of selfish impulses, Le Bon argued, it is quiteevident that the crowds are too impulsive and too mobile to be moral. If, however,we include in the term “morality” the transitory display of certain qualities suchas abnegation, self-sacrifice, disinterestedness, devotion, and the pursuit ofequity, the crowds may exhibit at times a verylofty morality.Of cause, A crowd of “mobs” could commit appalling crimes that common people lamentsas the evils. Le Bon’s analysis, however, reminds us that the “human” here more often refers to member of the crowds than to isolated inpiduals. If a crowd, just like inpiduals, is motivated by illegal self-interests, then its behaviors must be treated as crimes. Nevertheless, such crowds as mafia or erratic mob groups can by no means be a force of shaping (let alonechanging) history. To be a major actor in historic changes, a crowd must more or less“fight for its faith”. In other words, a crowd must exist for some simple but clear beliefs. In an era when people have lost faith on monotheism, Le Bon argued, the most possible and effective motivations for inpiduals in the crowds are “a nation’s honor and fate as well as patriotism”. A crowd is capable of performing very lofty acts of devotion, sacrifice, and disinterestedness,of acts much loftier indeed than those of which the isolated inpidual iscapable. Irrelevant to inpidual’s self-interests, these beliefs motivate the crowds that “have heroically faced death”.

So, Le Bon asserted that all large-scale mass movements are similar to religious endeavors. Much discussion by scholars ofthe 20th Century about ideology as a substitute of religionis anold topic shared by Le Bon. According to him, “all political, pine, and social creeds only take root among them on the condition of always assuming the religious shape　--　a shape which obviates the danger of discussion. Were it possible to induce the masses to adopt atheism, this belief would exhibit all the intolerant ardor ofa religious sentiment and in its exterior forms would soon become a cult”.Looking like weirdsymphonic poems, those mass movements have two main themes, one is cruelty and the other is loftiness. The lofty objectives stir up unrealistic sentiments among the crowds, who attempt to pursue happiness by worship and deference. Mass movements can promote “moral purification”by that an inpidual tends to look at his or others’ death as a natural thing. Crowds are animated by those religious sentimentswhich necessarily lead those imbued with them to “pitilessly extirpate by fireand sword whoever is opposed to the establishment of the new faith”.Thus, the blood of the innocent is not a result of the evils of human nature, but of relentlessbeliefs and “the working of the soul of the masses”.

From the perspective of Kant's moral philosophy, intolerance and fanaticism of the crowds in Le Bon’s words is related to the fact that the morality of the crowdshas deviated from inpidual morality. And from the collectivism literature after Le Bon, we further see that one main reason behind temporary disappearance of personal interests and neglect of criminality lies in the replacement of perse inpidual objectives by a common collective objective. Under such circumstances, Le Bon’s claim that inpiduals in the crowds can lose their sense of responsibility might not be the case. On the contrary, apart from the effect of “anonymous crowds”, one more plausible reason why inpidual is less disposed to refrain himself from thesentiment ofresponsibility lies in the fact that he feels motivated by a “loftier objective” and should take responsibility for it. Imbued with such loftier responsibility, an inpidual in the crowds will unwittingly deny himself and negate his personal objective with the loftier objective of the crowds. Thus, he takes it for granted that personal objectives of others are similarly worthless.

From Le Bon’s aforementioned distinction of moralities, we can have a glimpse of the dilemma one faceswhen he attempts to judge whether the behavior of the crowds are “moral” or not. Unselfish sacrifice is definitely a virtue and we can’t criticize people’s enthusiasm for the fate of the nation and society. In this line, however, we would be embarrassed by the conclusion that “the crimes the crowd committed for love of motherland or nation are not crimes”. Friedrich von Hayek understands this dilemma well. According to him, “It would, however, be highly unjust to regard the masses of the totalitarian people asdevoid of moral fervor because they give unstinted support to a system which to usseems a denial of most moral values. For the great majority of them the opposite isprobably true: the intensity of the moral emotions behind a movement like that ofNational-Socialism or communism can probably be compared only to those of thegreat religious movements of history.”But the trouble is that an overarching common objective cannot live with the morality based on inpidual responsibilities. Once you admit that the inpidual is merely ameans to serve the ends of the higher entity called a society or a nation, “most of thosefeatures of totalitarian regimes which horrify us follow of necessity. From thecollectivist standpoint intolerance and brutal suppression of dissent, the completedisregard of the life and happiness of the inpidual, are essential and unavoidableconsequences of this basic premise”.

5Heroes and the Masses

Le Bon’s gun not merely aimed at the crowds that terrified him. In his Group Psychology and the Analysis of Ego, Freud has criticized “Le Bon not having sufficiently appreciated the importance of the leader in the psychology of the group.”But Le Bon’s scope was more than the behaviors of the crowds and Freud’s criticism may miss the target. He was very clear that a crowd without heroes would degenerate into the ephemeral riffraff in most cases.

The Heroes who are able to inject enormous energies into the crowds are definitely not such figuresasringleaders or chieftains. Consistent with the high-level morality the crowdsoften exhibit, the heroes are able to cater tothe masses by their courage to sacrifice, strong will and lofty altruism. Through analyzing the emotions of “audiences in theatres”– here Le Bon reminded us of the reactions of Chinese audiences to such films as White-haired Woman--Le Bon found that the masses instinctively expect the heroes could exhibit those virtues that theyare not provided with. The virtues, like precious commodities, are rarely seen in daily life, so if the hero can convince the masses that he is the embodiment of virtues,he will be loved and worshipped as a result. Thomas Carlyle’s assertion that the masses have the instinct for hero worship could find some support from the economics of scarcity.

Freud criticized that Le Bon’s study on the leaders had its drawbacks. He is somewhat right since Le Bon didn’t dig as deeper as Freud, who regarded fabricating mythsof the leaders as an effective way to release the psychological depression of inpiduals. But, following the even longer tradition of westernpolitical theories, Le Bon examined with his Machiavellian style the interactive relationship between the leaders and the masses, He argued that the leader plays an important role in reaching consensus in the crowds. “His will is the nucleusaround which the opinions of the crowd are grouped and attain to identity. Heconstitutes the first element towards the organization of heterogeneous crowds,and paves the way for their organization in sects”. “A crowd is a servile flock that is incapable of ever doing without amaster”. “It was the proudest and most intractable of the Jacobins who acclaimedBonaparte with greatest energy when he suppressed all liberty and made hishand of iron severely felt”.

The weaknesses of the crowds such ascredulousness, bigotry and moodiness predetermine the ceilings of the leader’s virtue on the one hand, and provide him with lots of opportunities to motivate the followers on the other. First, the leaders might be intelligent, but the quality of the crowds is inferior. To garner the support of the followers, the leaders couldn’t exhibit too much skeptical spirit, which, as a rule, does him more harm than good. “Byshowing how complex things are, by allowing of explanation and promotingcomprehension, intelligence always renders its owner indulgent, and blunts,in a large measure, that intensity and violence of conviction needful forapostles. The great leaders of crowds of all ages and those of the Revolutionin particular, have been of lamentably narrow intellect; while it is preciselythose whose intelligence has been the most restricted who have exercised thegreatest influence.”The overtone here is that the psychological processof the crowds is seldom in line with logics. Beyond their familiar living environments, the masses neither enjoy too much experience nor reasonable abilityto criticize, a fact that could be utilized by inpidualsor groups with ulterior motives aiming to win the trust of the masses. They could be ambitious people or sorts of idealists. What they advocate might not matter. If Le Bon’s depiction of human nature in politics is correct, then the leaders can to a larger extent change and even manufacture people’s will. As Schumpeterput it when he remarked of Le Bon, “often this artifact [people’s will] is all that in reality corresponds to the volontégénérale of the classical doctrine. So far as this is so, the will of the people is the product and not the motive power of the political process.”More importantly, what we encounter in the political arena might not be the genuine will of the people, although the masses think otherwise. They do believe that the things are not manufactured by the leader and hishenchmen, but originate from their hearts. Today, this phenomenon is called “brain-washing”, a big achievement of modern propaganda skillsin whichLe Bon also should ownhis place.

By listing three most important trickswhichthe leadersused in their attempts to motivate the followers, Le Bon reminds us of George Orwell’s 1984.When the leaders attempt to imbue the mind of a crowd with modern social doctrines, Le Bon argued, they haverecourse to affirmation, repetition and contagion.According to Le Bon, “Given to exaggeration in its feelings, a crowd is only impressed by excessivesentiments.An orator wishing to move a crowd must make an abusive use ofviolent affirmations.”To exaggerate, to affirm, and to resort to repetitions, andnever to attempt to prove anything by reasoning are methods of argumentation wellknown to speakers at public meetings.So, for most leaders that accomplished great undertakings, the most important quality is not knowledgeability, but “the persistent will-force they possess is an immensely rare and immensely powerful faculty to which everything yields…nothingresists it, neither nature, gods, nor man”. Thanks to the persistent will-force, the ideas and objectives the leaders advocate are applauded by the masses.Probablyleaders are correct at first, but even when great mistakes have been made and laid bare the absurdity of their ideas and goals, their convictions are so strong that all reasoning is lost uponthem.“Contempt and persecution do not affect them, or only serve to excitethem the more. They sacrifice their personal interest, their family—everything.The very instinct of self-preservation is entirely obliterated in them, andso much so that often the only recompense they solicit is that of martyrdom.”

InFear of Freedom, Fromm once mentioned a quotationof Hitler which, in my view, shed some lighton the relationship between the psychologically weak crowds and the intolerant leaders. It’s not very clear that whether Hitler once read Le Bon,however, he certainly not only owned“strong will and conviction”but knownwell the masses he wanted to agitated.According to Hitler, “the masses like a woman…are always subject to the influence of a vague emotional longing for the strength that completes her being, and who would rather bow to the strong man than dominate the weakling—in like manner the masses of the people prefer the ruler to the suppliant and are filled with a stronger sense of mental security by a teaching that brooks no rival than by a teaching which offers them a liberal choice. They have very little idea of how to make such a choice and thus they are prone to feel that they have been abandoned. They feel very little shame at being terrorized intellectually and they are scarcely conscious of the fact that their freedom as human beings is impudently abused; and thus they have not the slightest suspicion of the intrinsic fallacy of the whole doctrine.”Here Hitler almost repeated Le Bon’s arguments word by word. If Le Bon foresaw of this, he would have regretted for the Machiavellian mistakes he had made.But this also implied thatLe Bon’s analysis on the psychology of crowds have a lot of concerns with the political fate of human beings in the 20th Century. As Hannah Arendt later told us, “Totalitarian movements are possible wherever there are masses who for one reason or another have acquired the appetite for political organization.”The “masses” in Arendt’s words is evidently the same term used by Hitler and Le Bon. Since the French revolution, the new trinity of leader,ideology and crowd in Le Bon’s sensehad took the place of religions and hereditary monarchy as the cornerstone of all struggles for the political legitimacywith absence of democratic and constitutional frameworks. And in the century after Le Bon, this new trinity hasgiven rise to a series of grandiose but bloody tragedies.

6 Concluding Remarks: the Era of Crowds and Democracy

The above discussions on Le Bon’s thoughts, including that of his not-too-malicious racism,show us that he have an astonishing foresight hard to deny.The Twentieth Century is a century that the public yearning for political participation surged and democracy slogans persisted,but it is also the bloodiest century in the history of human being.In fact, the mass movements of 19th Century Le Bon described in his book are dwarfedby what happened in the following Century. Thus it may be safely said that the dissemination of democratic ideas, while reflecting people’s long aspiration to tame the political power;however, engenders the huge risk that the striving people could be lured and trapped by the political power. As Tocqueville put it more than a century ago, “When I think that this revolution…had it been carried out by a despot, it might have left us less unprepared to become a free nation someday than we were after it had been carried out by the people in the name of their own sovereignty.” Le Bon’s fright at the emerging masses in the modernization process is actually a continuation of Tocqueville’s concerns.

Like many contemporary thinkers (e.g. Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche), Le Bonwas desperate atthe western civilization at the turn of the century. He seemed to have detected some omens of certain historical circle from the emerging crowds. In Le Bon’s view, any civilization cannot escape from the circle of rise and fall. When in decline, destroy of this atrophied civilization will become the designated task of the masses. Only at this moment, the overarching mission of the crowds becomes discernible and “that for a whilethe philosophy of number seems the only philosophy of history”. One could put these fatalist ideas aside, but wehave reason to believe that Le Bon musthope to end such chaos generated by crisis of authority. His preferred solution is undoubtedly the British model established in the EighteenthCentury. That’s why he was so concerned by the fact that Latin peoples, unlike Anglo-Saxon, lack the geniusof inpidual independence. In Le Bon’s view, without such kinds of “genius ofthe race”the crowds would only care about the collective independenceof the sect to which they belong. “Among the Latin races the Jacobins of every epoch, from thoseof the Inquisition downwards, have never been able to attain to a differentconception of liberty.”Due to the collectivism tendencies exhibited by such collective egoism, the Frenchmentends to understand democracy in a manner that advocatesthe subordination of inpidual will and autonomy to thesocial will and autonomyrepresented bythe state. “To the State it is that all parties without exception, radicals,socialists, or monarchists, constantly appeal”.This observation is important for Le Bon to detect the dangerous link between the mass democracy and despotism in the drastic changes the masses bring about on the legitimacy of political power.

Apart from the racism and British conservatism, Le Bon was alsodefinitely influenced by anti-rationalism, a strand of thought increasingly prevalentin Europe since the mid-19th Century. However, it didn’t push him to romanticism but instead strengthen his traditionalist position. As mentioned above, Le Bon cast deep doubt on the basic assumption of Enlightenment philosophy, i.e. human are rational animals. Akin to Hayek’s viewpoint, Le Bon believed that “the most attentive observation of the facts of history hasinvariably demonstrated to me that social organisms being every whit ascomplicated as those of all beings,it is in no wise in our power to force themto undergo on a sudden far-reaching transformations”. So, Le Bon objected to radical political and social changes. In hisview, any reforms, however excellent they may appear in theory, will not change instantaneously the genius of nations (this power is only possessed by time). To radically implement a blueprint of social transformation by abstract principles would “cause a highly refined civilization to return to a veryanterior phase of the social evolution”.

That’s why Le Bon was so averse to the masses, the leaders,emotional ideas as well as democracy and socialism based on them. Due to hisexamination on the “era of the crowds”, Le Bonmistakenly reached a conclusion similar to that of his contemporary Osward Spengler: hebelievedthat he was witnessing the declineof Western civilization. Nobody would deny, however, the significance of Le Bon’s study on the psychology of crowds outweigheshis mistake.If we only focus on his shrouded racist tendency and the arguments that are not in line with “academic standards” (though such criticism is absolutely necessary), then we would have tomiss some invaluable thoughts of Le Bon.

At least it may be assumed that the question that Le Bon’s study of the crowd psychology touches oncannotbe avoided by anyone who think about democracy, whether before or after him. Being an important source of political legitimacy, the popular democracy contains the risk of dictatorship, as discussed by Aristotleearly in classic age.Thereafter, thinkers like Edmund Burke, Montesquieu, John S. Milland Tocqueville further examined this topic, with which we are all pretty familiar. Democracy based on the citizen’s direct participation disappeared for more than two thousand years since the classic Athens and there must be the deeperreason of human nature behind this. It would be too simplistic and absurd to blame the period as“the reactionary dark era”. Living at the era of reemergence of the masses, Le Bon astutely felt the dangers hidden in this trend and he candidly spokethem out in psychological terms. In this sense, Le Bon’s thoughts transcend ideologies;otherwise we will not be able to understand why various thinkers on the relationship between democracy and autocracy--from the rightistHayek, the neutral Schumpeter to somewhat leftist Arendt and Fromm--are all influenced by Le Bon’s thoughts. This convergence of thoughtshighlights a fact that all of them noticed an irrefutable phenomenon, i.e. what distinguishes the cruel and gigantic autocratic systems emerged in the 20th Century from erstwhile autocracy lies in the fact that they all based their legitimacy on certain mass movement.

Max Weber, a politicalthinker with a stern mind, is well-known for his theory of types of authority.One type, according to Weber, is the “plebiscitary democracy”. In his words, “it is recognition on the part of those subject to authority which is decisive to the validity of charisma” and it is those “ancient and modern revolutionary dictators” that represent this type of authority in real life. Here Weber seemed to believe that“revolutionary dictators” could also establish “democracy”. His wordingswould have confused those who don’t know the original meanings of democracy. Relatively speaking, Le Bon is more straightforward in this regard. Using almost the same words as Weber’s, Le Bon directly pointed out that the nature of this type of democracy lies in its destruction of inpidual freedoms: “Popular democracy by no means aims at manufacturing rulers. Dominated entirely by the spirit of equality…and exhibits no anxiety in respect of liberty.No government is conceivable to popular democracy except in the form of an autocracy.”It’s self-evident that such democracy without respect for liberty will ultimately frustrate those who originally plan to tame the political power through democracy.

After reading Le Bon, shouldn’t we become more vigilant when somebody is talking about “representing the interests of the people or of the most”? Lord Acton’s admonition “power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely” has been widely accepted in China (at least the quotation per se). However, few people got the undertone of Lord Acton that any type of political power, no matter whether it’s held inpidually and collectively, needs to be constrained. As to the question of how to achieve this constraint, we will naturally think of the sophisticated constitutional democratic frameworks like check and balance of powers and electoral system etc. After all, Le Bon was not good at answering this question and it is just beyond the scope of this preface.

The Ambivalences of Le Bon's The Crowd

Robert K. Merton

In the authoritative Handbook of Social Psychology (edited by Gardner Lindzey and published in 1954),Gordon W.Allport,the dean of American social psychologists,hazards the judgment that “perhaps the most influential book ever written in social psychology is Le Ben's The Crowd.” Whether the book rightly occupies this position of eminence is a matter that can be and has been debated. But there can be no question that it has exerted a powerful influence upon the thought of men aiming to understand the workings of collective behavior and of social psychology.Nor can we doubt its pertinence for an age when “the lonely crowd” and “faces in the crowd” are adopted by crowds of Americans as apt phrasings of their own condition and experience.

The enduring influence of Le Ben's little book presents us with something of a riddle.When first published in 1895,it might have been fairly described as a vogue book,yet there must be something singular about a vogue that endures for two thirds of a century.And the riddle deepens as we consider the character of the book.Probably no single truth in it has not been stated elsewhere more cogently than Le Bon managed to state it,sometimes before he wrote it down,and particularly,of course,since. And still the book continues to exert a considerable intellectual influence.To make all this more perplexing,some conceptions set forth in the book are now known to be misdirected,misleading,or mistaken.And yet it remains indispensable reading for all of us who are students of mass behavior.Finally,it is a book containing ill assorted ideologies,and yet one that has been taken seriously by authors of most varied ideological commitments.By trying to unravel this tangled skein of seeming contradictions,perhaps we shall better understand the meaning of the book for us today.

One fact in the life and fortunes of The Crowd may help solve the riddle.Le Bun's ideas have made themselves felt almost as much among those who disagreed with them — Freud,for example,in his capacity as social psychologist,and the sociologist Robert Park — as among those — for example,the Populist sociologist E.A.Ross and the psychologist William McDougall — who took them up substantially intact.Opponents could contradict what Le Bon had to say but they could not ignore it — not,at least,without abandoning an interest in problems of social psychology that were evidently basic.

For this is the decisive merit of Le Bon's book：almost throughout,it exhibits a sense for the significant problem. To adopt Mr.Justice Holmes's remark,in this book Le Bon showed that he had that “instinct for the jugular” which is found among the rare species of thinkers who repeatedly identify significant problems for inquiry.Almost without exception,the problems at the focus of Le Bon's work were destined to become problems of major interest to social psychologists and,indeed,to all men who think about the social world they live in.For despite its deceptively restrictive title this book treats of much that one does not ordinarily associate with “the crowd.” Elliptically and sometimes anachronistically it can be said that,at one place or another in the book,Le Bon touches upon such present day concerns as social conformity and overconformity,the leveling of taste,the revolt of the masses,popular culture,the other directed self,mass movements,the self alienation of man,the process of bureaucratization,the escape from freedom into the arms of a Leader,and the role of the unconscious in social behavior.In short,he examines an array of social concerns,subject matters,and conceptions that hold socially enforced interest for men in the modern age.This multiplicity of relevance in one slender book gives it,I believe,a durable significance.

The contemporary meaning of The Crowd resides,then,in its function of problem finding rather than in the function of problem solving.That this is so,and that these two functions of the intellect are distinct,although of course related,can be glimpsed by seeing what the book meant to Freud,who provided one of the main conduits through which Le Bon's intellectual influence has flowed into the contemporary mind.When,in the 1920s,Freud turned his attention to group psychology(as it is customary to translate his term Massenpsychologie) and published his first monograph on the subject,Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego,he began by devoting a chapter to Le Bon's book.He begins that chapter by making one judgment — “Le Bon's deservedly famous work,Psychologie des foules” — and ends it with another judgment of like kind — “his brilliantly executed picture of the group mind.”Sandwiched between these Judgments are long passages quoted from The Crowd,long enough,with Freud's short gloss upon them,to constitute almost a sixth of the entire monograph.

Yet it soon turns out that Freud does not hold fast to an unequivocally favorable judgment of Le Bon's work. For he begins his next chapter by promptly expunging his earlier tribute to Le Bon's ideas：“...we must now add,”he says,“that as a matter of fact none of that author's statements bring forward anything new.... What is more,the description and estimate of the group mind as they have been given by Le Bon and the rest have not by any means been left undisputed.”

This devastating verdict appears a bit ungracious and a little at odds with what Freud had had to say only a few pages before. Yet this double rejection may have been a conscientious rather than an ungracious extravagance of language； hyperbole has long been employed as a device for making a point succinctly.Suppose then we disengage the substance of Freud's judgment from the strong language in which it is expressed,and ask：if nothing that Le Bon wrote is new or true,why devote so much attention to it? Why does Freud,as many other severe critics have done in their turn,regard The Crowd with manifest intellectual respect? Why does he take it as a point of departure for his own excursion into social psychology? Freud answers our question with engaging candor：“We have made use of Le Bon's description by way of introduction,because it fits so well with our own Psychology in the emphasis which it lays upon unconscious mental life.”

Cogent as it may first seem,Freud's short explanation of his attachment to Le Bon's ideas is of course incomplete.It explains why he finds merit in Le Bon's work,but it does not begin to explain why he denigrates Le Bon's ideas as neither new nor true.More is needed to understand Freud's ambivalence.And that Freud was ambivalent toward Le Bon is beyond reasonable dispute.If he rejects Le Bon on one page,he reverts to such characterizations as Le Bon's “brilliant psychological character sketch of the group mind” on a later page.

The intellectual,not the psychological,explanation of that ambivalence can be found in Freud's chapter on Le Bon in which,almost in the manner of a cat and mouse Socratic dialogue,he writes the script for both actors.The basis for the ambivalence boils down to this：Le Bon was only the problem finder and Freud was the would be problem solver,uncertain whether Le Bon was professing to be both problem finder and problem solver.In the first capacity,Le Bon merits praise and Freud lavishly bestows it；in the second,Le Bon is at best inept and at worst thoroughly mistaken,with Freud insisting upon both his ineptitude and his mistakes.As these roles are alternately assigned to Le Bon,Freud oscillates between the poles of his ambivalence.In the end,Freud developed a clear image of all this (though one that requires a violent shift in figure)：Le Bon planted but Freud both watered and gave the increase.

In Freud's view,Le Bon,as problem finder,identified salient aspects of crowd and group life,but did not explain them.

Le Bon spotted the “fundamental” fact of group psychology by dwelling on the “intensification of the emotions” and “the inhibition of the intellect.”But,says Freud,he did not see the explanation in the psychological processes that establish emotional ties between the members of groups.

As problem finder,too,Le Bon saw the great role of “emotional contagion” and suggestibility in the crowd and in the organized group.But he did not see,argues Freud,how this results from the libidinal ties of members of the group to the leader and to the rest of the group.

Le Bon sensed that a “mere collection of people is not a group” so long as there are no ties among them,but he failed to see how these ties become established.

Le Bon particularly noticed the rapid alternation of feelings in the group,the vacillation between love and hate,solidarity and hostility,but he did not understand the psychological dynamics of ambivalence and of idealization (in which the overestimated loved figure is for a time exempt from criticism).

Le Bon “impressively described” the“lack of emotional restraint” in the crowd,and its “incapacity for moderation and delay.” But he had no theory that would allow him to see this as regression to an earlier stage. (Even the worthy Freud sometimes nods.He is of course correct in saying that Le Bon had no clear concept of regression.But Le Bon repeatedly compares the impulsiveness,“incapacity to reason,absence of judgment,and exaggeration of the sentiments” that characterize crowds,to the same tendencies “belonging in inferior forms of evolution — in women,savages and children,for instance.” He thus anticipates Freud's own error when he in turn writes of regression to “an earlier stage such as we are not surprised to find among savages [sic] or children,” women,evidently,being exempted from this stage.)

Le Bon,says Freud incorrectly and hence unfairly,failed to “appreciate the importance of the leader in the psychology of the group,” while Freud is able to show the indispensable role of the leader in the psychological processes of group behavior.Le Bon,Freud neglects to notice,attached great significance to the myth of the hero,just as Freud himself,after discussions with Otto Rank,saw the hero myth as a means for inpiduals to emancipate themselves from the unremitting rule of the group.

Le Bon saw and emphasized the tendency toward “leveling” in the crowd,the demand for full equality on the depressed level of mediocrity.But,in Freud's judgment,he did not see that this was the outward and visible result of an underlying process in which crowd members “identify themselves with one another by means of a similar love for the same object,” the “object,” in Freud's technical vocabulary,being in this instance the leader.

Le Bon took dramatic account,in his own phrase,of the “thirst for obedience” that marks the crowd and the crowd man. But he stopped short of recognizing that this takes place by substituting the group ideal,as personified in the leader,for the ego ideal.

Finally,notes Freud in an instructive error,Le Bon,by confining himself to the ephemeral or transitory groups characterized by crowds,had in effect hit upon a most useful subject for study,for it is in temporary aggregations that one can best see how the independence and autonomy of inpiduals come to be freely abandoned,as they slavishly conform to the requirements of the crowd.That Freud is mistaken in so restricting Le Bon's concept of the crowd can be seen by the simple expedient of reading the pages that follow.But even mistakes by minds of the first rank have a way of being fruitful．Freud's error of interpretation is a felix culpa,a lucky error that inadvertently leads to a new truth．For although it is manifestly untrue,despite Freud's claim,that Le Bon's assertions “relate to groups of a short lived character,” this error leads Freud to praise Le Bon for having elected to study “these noisy ephemeral groups,which are as it were superimposed upon the others,and [in which] we are met by the prodigy of the complete,even though only temporary,disappearance of exactly what we have recognized as inpidual acquirements.” In this remark,Freud has exemplified a principle that is basic to scientific investigation generally,and one that needs particular emphasis in social science,where it is but seldom recognized．This is the principle of what might be called the quest for the “strategic research site”： that is,the search for those objects — in the present case,the ephemeral crowd—which enable one to investigate a scientific problem to particularly good advantage．

Le Bon in part did what Freud supposed him to be doing,but did so unwittingly．He centered on the study of transitory groups but did not confine himself to them．In his usage,“the crowd” is a concept loosely denoting both temporary aggregations of people and the more nearly enduring permanent groups and social strata made up,for example,of parliaments,sects,and classes． But in devoting much attention to the short lived aggregations that form political mobs as well as to longer lived publics and even more enduring social classes．Le Bon in effect seized upon strategic occasions for studying processes of collective behavior by studying them where they are highly visible．There is reason to suppose that Freud was ascribing to Le Bon a rationale of method that he did not explicitly have.Nor does Freud conclude this favorable estimate of Le Bon by noting that he was doing,in a particular case,what scientists all over seek to do；namely,to search out those strategic research materials that effectively exhibit the interplay of variables of broader bearing than the cases under study.

The upshot of Freud's ambivalence toward Le Bon amounts,then,to this：Le Bon had a remarkably apt sense of hitting upon salient aspects of crowd and of group behavior,but he did not satisfactorily account for them.On this estimate,Le Bon emerges as a human counterpart to the truffle dog,who somehow pauses at just those places on the surface of social psychology beneath which lie the theoretically significant truffles,unseen by others.And Freud,in projecting his self image in contrast to this image of Le Bon,sees himself as the master who can dig below the surface,find the truffles of social psychology,and serve them up as a piquant intellectual dish. Neither image does full justice to either man or either man's work,but,again,neither is entirely unjust.Le Bon is primarily a problem finder in the social psychology of groups,and Freud,in one of his phases,is an imaginative problem finder and sometimes a successful problem solver in the same field.By examining the ambivalence of Freud toward Le Bon,we are led to see both the contributions and the limitations of ideas that can be simultaneously described as new and important (but anticipated by others and therefore dispensable) and ideas that are true and significant (yet not profoundly enough true and therefore only suggestive). Ambivalence toward Le Bon's The Crowd is a thoroughly apt orientation.

Freud's experience with this book is far from unique.It has been singled out here,not because any occasion for noting the work of a mind as subtle and creative as Freud's is a source of pleasure for the rest of us,but because his understandings and fruitful misunderstandings of Le Bon can help orient us to the book.If Freud found in it a multiplicity of relevance to his own developing ideas about the behavior of man in society,so,in small degree,can we. It is a lesson for all of us that in it he found much in composite although no single thing he found there seemed rigorously true or entirely new. Le Bon's formulations were far from final；they were propaedeutic,providing an essential introduction to more advanced versions of the same subject.

The same combination of relevancies that gave point to Freud's reading of the book can give point also to our own reading of it.This requires us to make more of the book than is literally there.By attending not only to what Le Bon says in so many words but also to what he deliberately hints and to what he sometimes implies without seeming intent,the reader can become sensitized to aspects of man's behavior in society that have escaped him before.As with many another book,it is essential to read between the lines,if the reader is to get from this one what is there for the getting.Not least is this true for an understanding of the tendencies toward compliance and conformity that move all of us who make up one crowd or another,particularly the crowds who noisily profess their (in fact strictly governed) nonconformity.

The multiplicity of relevance,much of it hidden between the lines,does not alone account for the enduring influence of this book. That influence comes also from its main theses being a part of the complex of ideas,still very much with us,that puts emphasis on the irrational and nonrational character of man's behavior.This end of the century portrait of man pictures him as readily susceptible to manipulative control,as a strangely willing victim of deception by others.But this is a manifestly unfinished portrait.For if some men are controlled,other men must control.In the background,then,are those who treat men as means to their own private ends.Along with this is the further assumption that men have an infinite capacity for self deception,enabling them to rationalize evil into good and to reject good for evil. From this portrait of human character,there emerges a social philosophy,as well as a sociology,that makes man out as peculiarly subject to socially induced stupidity in which his native wit is either blunted into mediocrity by his effort to follow the crowd or is put to wicked use by imposing fraud upon his fellows as a supplement to the not altogether effective use of violence and coercion.

This image of man as irrational and selfish,as heavily subject to impulse and caprice or to wicked rationality,as agent and victim of unthinking violence and pious fraud,is not,of course,new to the time in which Le Bon wrote.From at least the age of The Prince — when the title significantly focused on the controller — to the age of The Crowd — when the title shifts to the controlled — this image has been recurrently projected by the machiavellian authors of each century.But it is also true that,coming into prominence in the last half of the last century,it has persisted to the present day,counteracting if not wholly displacing an earlier image of man as the superbly rational animal.

Le Bon's The Crowd was only one of scores of books and more fugitive pieces put into print by psychologists,sociologists,social philosophers,political theorists,political journalists,and unhappy creative novelists that centered on these unlovely aspects of man and his behavior. That the book should have appeared in the same year,1895,in which Breuer and Freud published their pathbreaking Studies in Hysteria is an accident of pinpointed timing.That it should have appeared at about the same time is anything but an accident.For the same social conditions that made for a plethora of works emphasizing the irrational in man made it entirely probable that works having this kinship of ideas should appear at almost the same time.

Some would deny this,arguing that every age,with its own time of troubles,manages to persuade itself that it represents the twilight of reason or the dawn of unreason. Yet the argument is false,and it does not,in any event,account for the rapidity with which this self image of an era caught hold during the last half of the nineteenth century in France.Back in the 1850s,that two man literary committee,the Goncourt brothers,who never settled for less than a unanimous committee opinion,jointly prophesied a savage assault on an anemic European civilization,not by barbarians who were no longer to be found in Europe but by the — to them — uncivilized workers who,they said,would describe the job as “the social revolution.” The contemporary humanist intellects of France — Taine,Sainte Beuve,the satirist “Gavarni,” Renan,and others of the circle in which the Goncourts lived and worked — also deplored the “moral hygiene” of their day and expressed their misgivings about the days that lay ahead. In many respects,their prophecies were not unlike those that Le Bon was to put in his book — Taine's prophecy,for example,that men of the twentieth century would exhibit much activity and little sensibility.

There is more than these vaguely similar forebodings about the imminent rule of the crowd to show that Le Bon's ideas were sociologically destined to find expression,even if Le Bon himself had never lived.For this,there is the best of proof：essentially the same ideas were in fact set forth at the same time by another social psychologist,the Italian Scipio Sighele,just as many of them were stated by the Frenchman Gabriel Tarde.And,as is often the case when two or more men arrive almost simultaneously at the same ideas,this gave rise to a dispute over priority of conception.This prolonged and bitter dispute explains the otherwise cryptic insistence,in Le Bon's book,on repeating what he said on the subject of “imitation” or “emotional contagion” in crowds fifteen years before.He is carrying out a continued public and — characteristically for Le Bon — a between the lines debate with Sighele who,in his Psychologie des sectes, forthrightly and angrily claims priority and describes Le Bon's The Crowd “as,in large part,a clever reconstruction of my book,” and who,warming to the occasion,in the second edition of La foule criminelle goes on to complain that Le Bon “uses my observations on the psychology of crowds without citing me” and adds,“that without any trace of irony,I believe that no higher,or least suspect,praise can be given than by this adoption of my ideas without citing me.” Our interest is not,of course,in adjudicating these once lively claims to priority； such posthumous judgments are the office of those status judges of intellectual accomplishment,the historians of thought.The squabble between Sighele,Le Bon,and,to some extent,Tarde holds interest for us only as a case of the multiple and at least partly independent appearance of essentially the same ideas at about the same time,this testifying that the ideas have become almost inevitable as prerequisite kinds of knowledge have accumulated in the cultural heritage and as socially induced interests have directed the attention of thinkers to the problems and phenomena that give rise to the ideas.

Fairly strict evidence,then,and not a ready made figure of speech,directs the opinion that Le Bon's book expressed in part the cultural atmosphere of his time. To revert to Joseph Glanvill's meteorological metaphor of the seventeenth century which lay inert until A.N. Whitehead reactivated it in the twentieth century,the ideas that make up a climate of opinion do not prove congenial only by chance.They are generally brought about by changes in the underlying social structure,by the creaking stresses and strains in it or by the severe jolts and transformations that give point to the ideas which are taken up and make inapt currently irrelevant ideas (which persist in turning up,since not everything in culture is strictly determined by the social structure and since the same structural stresses have different meanings for people variously located in that structure).In general,the same social conditions make for creativity of thought and for the popular diffusion of that thought. In particular,the consequential historical events that made Le Bon's observations and ideas immediately and immensely popular were,I suggest,the same events that largely led him to those ideas.It is these events,also,that produced the resonance between Le Bon and his public.

Even a few allusions to the historical context in which Le Bon lived out his long life may be enough to suggest why his image of the crowd man might make sense to him and to his many readers,and why he never found occasion for substantially modifying that image.Le Bon was born in 1841.The presumably revolutionary king,Louis Philippe,was turning thoroughly conservative and so stirring up renewed radicalism and the spread of utopian socialism.Le Bon was only a boy of seven when the barricades went up in Paris and the king quickly abdicated,to be replaced,after the bloody street fighting of the June insurrection,by Prince Louis Napoleon as the President of the Second Republic.Nor could he have yet understood Louis Napoleon's tricky use of plebiscites to transform the President into an Emperor,ruling proudly as Napoleon III over the Second Empire.But later,in the eighteen sixties,Le Bon evidently approved the Emperor's decade of conciliation — designed to ward off a popular revolt,only to have the Paris populace,after the thorough defeat at Sedan,sweep the Empire into oblivion.Le Bon worried over the rise into short lived power of the radicals in the Commune of 1871,with its miscellany of republicans,Proudhonists,and Blanquists,that rebellion which Marx ambivalently described both as a massive political blunder and as the first prophetic symbol of the uprising of the workers in their own right as a prelude to ultimate emancipation.As a mature but not always perspicacious observer,Le Bon witnessed the trials of the Third Republic,from its beginnings in 1870,with governments rising and falling every little while,and with its complement of demagogues trying (and sometimes succeeding in their effort)to rule the masses.Above all,for the purposes of the book he was soon to write,Le Bon witnessed the swift rise into potential power of that indecisive and jingoist demagogue,General Georges Ernest Jean Marie Boulanger when,on the fourteenth of July,1886,he rode into history on his black charger,Tunis,as the Man on Horseback.

Le Bon makes only two references to Boulanger in the whole of his book,one by name and the other so oblique an allusion that the translator,uncertain of the reader's historical memory,finds it necessary to append an identifying footnote.The latter allusion suggests the extent to which Le Bon's conception of the crowd and its social psychology,was based upon what he,as a dismayed if not hopelessly frightened conservative,saw going on before him.Le Bon puts it this way：

“A crowd may easily enact the part of an executioner,but not less easily that of a martyr. [This notation of ambivalence is the sort of observation that endeared Le Bon to Freud.] It is crowds that have furnished the torrents of blood requisite for the triumph of every belief. [And then,Le Bon adds,instructively for our purposes] It is not necessary to go back to the heroic ages to see what crowds are capable of.They are never sparing of their lives in an insurrection,and only a few years ago,a general,suddenly become popular,might easily have found a hundred thousand men ready to sacrifice their lives for his cause had he demanded it.”

The unnamed general is of course Boulanger.Among Americans if not Frenchmen,the Boulanger episode is now half forgotten,just as other threatening,but shortlived,periods of powerful demagoguery that did not result in the eventually legitimatized taking over of political power are usually forgotten in the popularly retained historiography of every country.But at the time of his ascendancy with the political crowds of France during the last five years of the 1880s,General Georges Boulanger and the movement called Boulangism usurped the political stage of France in about the same measure that Senator Joseph McCarthy and the movement called McCarthyism usurped the stage in the United States during the first five years of the 1950s.(And to make the parallel complete in absurdly precise details,just as McCarthy died self destructively three years after his political ruin,so Boulanger died,by manifest suicide,three years after he fled from France when threatened with trial for treason.)

This quick allusion to men and movements,generations apart in time and remote in social space,may not be quite the idle historical analogizing it may at first seem.After all,Le Bon was not writing history in The Crowd.He was drawing upon history in an effort to discover those uniformities in the character and behavior of crowds that turn up repeatedly,with differences only of detail.And although there is no evidence in Le Bon's intellectual biography that he turned primarily to the Boulanger episode in order to trace out inductively the social psychology of crowds,it is true that the episode attracted his notice,just as it did that of the more unthinking Frenchmen of his time.

The short inglorious history of the idolized Boulanger reads as though it were the acting out of a socio psychological drama written by Le Bon,reflecting on the relations between the Leader and the Crowd.But since the events came first,it seems a little more reasonable to assume that Le Bon generalized the events rather than that Boulanger,and his followers,prophetically anticipated the book. As both source and supposed confirmation of Le Bon's ideas about the dynamics of crowd behavior,Boulangism is worth our notice.

Having steadily advanced to become the most youthful general in the French Army,Boulanger was moved into the Ministry of War,upon the behind the doors decision of Clemenceau,then the leader of the Radicals.He first gained popular support by conspicuously improving the living conditions of the troops,now no longer a professional army,inured to hardship,but one based upon the universal service of civilians temporarily turned into soldiers. Soon after,he became many things to many men,as the discontented multitudes of the Third Republic looked upon him as a leader who could undo the principal source of their discontent：the regime.Lacking any political commitments of his own,Boulanger could and did promise to satisfy the opposed interests of many political sects.He promised Déroulède's League of Patriots,with bully boys wielding heavy canes to enforce their chauvinistic opinions,to erase the nation's humiliation by pushing the Germans back across the Rhine；the Bonapartists,he promised to restore the Empire,and the wellheeled royalists,who kept him financially solvent,to restore the monarchy；just as he became identified as “their man” by each of the motley political crowds of Socialists,Opportunists,moderate Republicans and dissident Radicals.Held loosely together by their common opposition to the regime,each of these crowds saw in the General the leader of their cause although he himself actually stood for no cause but that of the General.The contradictions of the national crowd were unified in the person of the Leader.

The fast moving drama of political events — the multitudes of Paris at Longchamps on Bastille Day 1886,shouting their preference for the General at the expense of the President；the electoral triumphs of the General followed by the Parisian crowd's clamoring for him to march on the Elysée；the compliant behavior of the newspapers,first Rochefort's L'Intransigeant,later Veuillot's Univers,and still later,some of the rest,falling into line to become publicity sheets for the General and his movement,waiting only to hear “what they are saying in the streets” before coming out with a reaffirmation of what had been said；the quickly enlarged repertoire of popular hymns to “Not' brav' Général Boulanger,” “ Général Revanche,” and “le Général Espoir,” songs that both expressed and governed the sentiments of the crowd；the toys,mechanical gadgets,and,idiomatically enough,the liquor that eponymously celebrated the beloved Leader； in short,the brief,intense reign of Boulangist charisma that almost triumphed in a new 18th Brumaire—all this needs no retelling in detail.It is all a leaf out of Le Bon's book.(It is also what lies hidden between the lines of Le Bon's allusion to that anonymous general who “might easily have found a hundred thousand men ready to sacrifice their lives for his cause had he demanded it.”)

The rest of the Boulanger story is also in the book,suitably disguised by generalization.Recorded with particular aptness are the rapidly shifting imbalances resulting from the ambivalence of the crowd — in Paris particularly,but in the provinces too — that worshiped Boulanger one day and condemned him the next.Le Bon may have seen in the swift rise of Boulanger evidence of the maxim he employs in the book,which states that in the genesis of prestige nothing succeeds like success,just as he may have seen in Boulanger's sudden fall the correlative but unspoken maxim that in the precipitous decline of prestige nothing fails like failure.For when the astute politicians of France,chiefly but not only that old pro of politics,the Minister of the Interior,Ernest Constans,went to work on the many vulnerabilities of the popular hero,he was as quick to fall as he had been quick to rise.Frightened by the impending trial for treason,Boulanger fled,with Marguerite de Bonnemains,his beloved mistress of many years,first to Brussels and then,after temporary deportation,to London,later to Jersey,and finally back again to Brussels,where,still navely optimistic in exile,he issued unread manifestoes until he was forced to recognize that the political crowds of France,once more securely in the hands of wily politicians,no longer saw him as their man of destiny.When,in 1891,the blow of political defeat was compounded by the death from tuberculosis of his Marguerite,Boulanger,after two months of unbroken mourning,took his own life in the cemetery at Ixelles where she lay buried.

All this,Le Bon,like his contemporaries,witnessed from a distance,but unlike most of them,he reflected upon what he saw.Midway in the drama,he observed the fickle crowds of Paris promptly forgetting their Hero on Horseback when,in June of 1889,soon after Boulanger had fled,the Universal Exposition opened its gates,its numerous distractions dominated by the great tower of Eiffel,with its open iron work rising three hundred meters into the sky to announce a new age,in which cities of iron would replace cities of stone.And reflecting on the suggestibility,credulity,and instability of the crowd,Le Bon might have seen in its vengeful attack on the fallen hero evidence for the thesis that the crowd takes “its revenge for having submitted to a superiority whose existence it no longer admits.”

All this Le Bon witnessed,noted,and ultimately put,in generalized form,into his book on The Crowd.If the Boulanger episode were not enough to provide him with grist for his psycho social mill,current history conveniently supplied him amply with more.Soon after Boulangism had been played out,there occurred the final act in the drama of Ferdinand de Lesseps,that mover of mountains and“piercer of isthmuses,” who,long after the momentous success of Suez,tumbled into the scandal ridden failure of Panama and,at the age of eighty eight,while proudly wearing his insignia as a Grand Officer of the Legion of Honor,found himself sentenced to five years in prison.Toward this event,Le Bon could preserve neither the appearance nor the substance of scholarly detachment. And so we find,in the pages of this book,an indignant analysis of how it was that the crowd turned upon this one of “the most famous heroes in history.”

Climaxing this series of apposite events — and perhaps precipitating the writing of the book；we don't really know — was what the French,down to the present day,describe,with full understanding of what is meant,as l'Affaire.In the very year that Le Bon was writing his book,occurred the indictment,swift trial in camera,conviction for treason,degradation,and sentencing to lifelong imprisonment on Devil's Island of Captain Alfred Dreyfus,the first Jew,and an Alsatian at that,to have been admitted to the General Staff of the Army.Although the behavior of the French crowds,largely initiated and partly controlled by the terrified,shakily authoritative,politically minded,and altogether inept General Staff,was to reach its full climax only later and,as one of its many minor consequences,give renewed intellectual resonance to Le Bon's book,the trial,conviction,and degradation of the outsider in 1894 was enough to release the irresponsible suggestibility of crowds throughout the nation to a degree that could not escape the notice of the most apolitical Frenchman (if this be not a contradiction in terms),let alone the observant eye of a Le Bon.

Perhaps we can now see why it is only customary,rather than entirely correct,to say that Le Bon's book is a social psychology of crowd behavior based primarily on his reading of events in the French Revolution.The prevalent interpretation is only partly true.To be sure,of the fifty or so historically concrete episodes that Le Bon uses to illustrate one or another of his ideas in this book,some twenty refer to the days of the French Revolution,and another handful to Napoleon.But for the rest,and these make up about half of them all,Le Bon draws upon events,almost entirely in France,that occurred under his very eyes.What is more,the references to the Revolution may owe something to the episodes in Le Bon's own time. Like so many other Frenchmen,Le Bon was haunted by the Great Revolution,but there are numerous intimations in his work that he was alerted to apposite events in the Revolution by the crowd behavior he was observing about him.His social psychology of the French Revolution was often retroactive,prompted by insights into the crowd life swarming in late nineteenth century France. He was,in short,often analyzing the behavior of crowds in the Third Republic under the guise of examining the behavior of crowds during the Revolution.

As we know,Le Bon sometimes reads as though he had himself lived through the French Revolution only to have his hopes betrayed by the Second Empire and completely shattered by the Third Republic.But it was not really so.He lived for only ninety years and this book,for which he is best known,was published in his fifty fifth year.But in his time he saw enough of the behavior of crowds in France to form the basis for his social psychology. Had he been so minded,Le Bon might have paraphrased the inscription in honor of Christopher Wren at the entrance to the choir in St.Paul's,saying to his contemporaries,“If you need the evidence for my opinions,look about you.”

That this is so,that the historical events of a past age were neither the exclusive source nor the major empirical confirmation of Le Bon's theories of crowd behavior,is at least suggested by his thoroughly ambivalent feelings about the use of history for scholarly purposes. In this book,he finds it possible to dismiss history,or more precisely historiography,as an authentic record of the complex contemporaneities,and sequences of man's experience in society.In this aspect,Le Bon,in stated principle,although not at all in recorded practice,adopted the opinion,later made notorious (it is said) by Henry Ford,that “history is bunk.” If Ford actually propounded this mot, he only said succinctly and ignorantly what Le Bon had said at greater length and not quite as ignorantly.In this one of his moods,Le Bon believed that“works of history must be considered as works of pure imagination.They are fanciful accounts of ill observed facts,accompanied by explanations [that are]the result of reflection.To write such books is the most absolute waste of time.” To arrive at this nihilistic judgment,Le Bon began by seeing historiography as twice cursed：first,by the absence or by the loss of the evidence needed to write an authentic account of historical happenings,and,second,by the tendentious selection from the documents that prove haphazardly available which he believed to be inevitable for historians.

In another of his moods,this one evidently lasting long enough for him to waste his time by writing a small library of allegedly historical works,Le Bon found that he could not write about the behavior of crowds(or any other kinds of human behavior) without drawing heavily upon history.By 1912,when he published La révolution franaise et la psychologie des révolutions,Le Bon had only changed his practice without changing his opinion about the absurdity of claiming to write authentic history.

Like most men struggling with ambivalence,Le Bon evolved a reconciliatory doctrine.This enabled him to live with history while denying the fact of this intellectual cohabitation.The rationalizing doctrine was engagingly simple.True,we are not “in possession of a single word of truth concerning the lives of the great men who have played preponderating parts in the history of humanity—men such as Hercules [no doubt,Le Bon is gently spoofing us here],Buddha,or Mahomet.” But,says Le Bon,the “real lives” of men such as these are of only little importance to us.“Our interest is to know what our great men were as they are presented by popular legend.It is legendary heroes,and not for a moment real heroes,who have impressed the minds of crowds.”

We may question the cogency of this seeming reconciliation between history as it essentially was and history as effective legend,but we must sympathize with Le Bon's predicament as he alternated between the opposed tendencies of his ambivalence toward history.He is groping toward the idea,later developed with somewhat more rigor and veridicality,that it is not so much what men “really” were as it is how they are perceived and experienced by others that determines their place in history. And the two,the actuality (presumably as it is flawlessly seen by the creator of it all) and the outward appearance,need not,although they sometimes do,coincide. In wrestling with his mixed feelings about history,Le Bon was pushing himself toward what might be called the Thomas Theorem (the eponym being derived from the onetime dean of twentieth century American sociologists,William Isaac Thomas)that “if men define situations as real,they are real in their consequences.” He was reaching out toward a conception of what has since come to be known as the “public image” of men and the role of this imagery in affecting the behavior of the “crowds” who adopt it.Worried into thought by his incompatible attitudes toward history,Le Bon almost,but not quite,worked through to a sound insight about the ways in which history as legend helps shape subsequent history as social reality.

Although he marshaled all his intellectual forces (and these were far from negligible),Le Bon could not achieve a comparable near victory over the scholars who denied that,in the notoriously vague last analysis,history provided the basic materials for the discovery of uniformities in the life of man in society.Like so many of his contemporaries and regrettably like so many of his successors,Le Bon held,in a phrase ambiguous enough to seem true,that history is the occurrence and historiography the record of unique events.If this is strictly so,if historical data can provide no sufficient basis for detecting uniformities in the development of man's behavior and in the development of his social institutions and social structure,then,of course,Le Bon has been wasting his time and ours.For this crude and mistaken opinion,he can be blamed only by those who enjoy the unearned increment of posterity：wisdom through hindsight.［A half dozen years after the publication of The Crowd,the distinguished German philosophers Heinrich Rickert and Wilhelm Windelband were still explaining why historical science could achieve only inpidualized depictions,unlike the uniformities that could be detected in the physical and biological sciences.It remained for a later day to reject the mock distinction between the nomothetic (or generalizing) sciences and the idiographic (or inpidualizing) sciences,as for example,in the observation by Pareto：“That‘history never repeats itself’ identically is just as certain as it is that history is‘always repeating itself’in certain respects that we may call the main respects.”］

Fortunately,Le Bon continued to deny in practice what he affirmed in principle.He made use of history to arrive at hypothetical uniformities in the behavior of men by abstracting from the indubitably unique concretions of history those aspects that are,in some degree,repeated. In noting this,however,we must not do Le Bon the injustice of ascribing more intellectual prescience to him than he actually displayed.As can be seen from a reading of this book,Le Bon's was not a conspicuously methodical mind.His work remains unencumbered by systematically assembled evidence,sufficient to put his ideas to fair (that is to say,unbiased) test.His is the method of social philosophers,social psychologists,and social observers,prevalent in his own day and far from absent in ours：the method of using historical anecdotes as a source of ideas under the illusion that the source somehow authenticates the interpretation stemming from them.Yet,although his method is faulty,some of his ideas,as we have seen,are sound,albeit crude and requiring much pedestrian hard work by those social scientists of a later time who do not leap from one ideational peak to another,but trudge through the intervening valleys of methodical inquiry before considering themselves ready to climb again.

The proliferation of ideas,without their author's supplying a sufficient basis for choosing among those that are sound and those that are merely noisy,comes easily to minds such as Le Bon's.The criterion that distinguishes the spuriously from the authentically creative mind,in the realm of social ideas as in the realm of other ideas,is of course the proportion of these ideas that turns out to be viable and approximately (rather than precisely) true. In this respect,and that too may help explain the persisting influence of the book,Le Bon seems to have a fairly high batting average.On occasion,as Freud has intimated,he strikes out ingloriously at the very times that he is convinced he has won the game.But,not infrequently,he makes his mark in the sport of social philosophers and delivers a home run in the pinch.

To describe Le Bon as at once the hero of a distinct intellectual sport and as a sociological prophet would seem to be compounding a new sin：mixing figures of speech and indulging in anachronism (for baseball was surely no part of Le Bon's world).Yet the mixture of figures can be defended.Le Bon walked up to a series of baffling problems,tried his hand at solving each of them,and ended by a series of sociological assertions that helped his successors do better with these difficult problems than was possible for Le Bon himself.Moreover,some of Le Bon's successors among those who study the behavior of man in the mass have independently adopted this profane analogy between sport and science,the sociologist Paul F.Lazarsfeld and the social philosopher Ortega y Gasset having independently done so,each in complete innocence that the other had misbehaved in comparable fashion.In the Language of Social Research,Lazarsfeld attributes the continual bettering of sports records in Olympic games,not to Darwinian or Lamarckian changes in the capacities of homo athleticus,but to the historically improved training of those capacities,such that each generation witnesses improved performance among men whose native capacities are no better than the capacities of their predecessors.And in The Revolt of the Masses,one of the books that improve upon Le Bon by having learned from him.Ortega y Gasset makes the same observation about the cumulative improvement of sports records,and notes that something similar happens in the case of science.In all domains of human culture,except possibly the fine arts and morality,reality catches up with this once old fashioned idea of “progress,” in the severely limited sense of cumulative knowledge and enlarged capacities for instrumental thought and action.So it happens that Le Bon's observations in The Crowd have been improved upon by minds not necessarily better than his and sometimes not as good,but advantaged by having come after.

For some readers,Le Bon's ideas will seem prescient ones. When he writes prophetically that “the age we are about to enter will in truth be the era of crowds” he is noting the entrance of the masses into history in such a way that their opinion begins to count whereas once it scarcely counted at all,a conception greatly developed by a later array of writers on mass society of such varied ideological provenience as Enrico Corradini,Emil Lederer,Ortega y Gasset,Franz Neumann,Erich Fromm,and Hannah Arendt.

Reasonably prophetic,too,is Le Bon's image of crowd man as progressively engulfed in popular culture that installs mediocrity and vulgarity as the measure of topmost worth.And his portrait of crowd man as one peculiarly susceptible to the judgments and tastes of others around him,more than was the case(Le Bon believed)in an earlier society,is more than a little reminiscent of present day concern with the alleged loss of autonomous judgment by contemporary man.

Le Bon foresaw our time of mass movements,as the sociologists Robert E.Park and Ernest W.Burgess recognize,and depicted some of the essential features of these movements in a fashion taken up and substantially developed by sociological investigations of the subject.

As one last instance of Le Ben's prescience,take his conception of the growing importance of the dispersed “crowd,” the unaggregated people who separately attend to the same social stimuli and,in some measure,exhibit the same psychosocial behavior as the aggregated crowd standing face to back in the same area.Le Bon could not of course foresee the new influential mass media of communication in radio and television (for he was not really a prophet).But he did take note of the influence exerted upon mass opinion by editors of newspapers who first catered to the sentiments of the masses and then tried to canalize those sentiments into particular channels of action.

All these “insights,” to use the appropriate cant term,show that even crudely fashioned ideas that identify recurrent aspects of man's behavior in society can catch up aspects of events still to come.It was not,as some would have it,that Le Bon was a prophet.A prophet is one who claims to foretell concrete events,in much if not all of their concreteness.If he is a good prophet，he will tell just when and where these events are to happen.He describes them in unmistakable detail.In contrast,the student of society,the analyst of its workings,the sociological investigator,does not elect to take up this difficult charge.He is not a prophet,although he is often mistaken for one or is judged as though he were claiming to be one. He undertakes only — and this is difficult enough — to find out so far as he can the conditions under which we may reasonably expect certain aspects of social behavior and social change to occur.When he has a particular problem well in hand,he gingerly tries contingent predictions of limited and specified aspects of future events.These predictions are contingent not only because the social scientist is less assured than the social prophet (who,after all,has the substantial benefit of knowing that he has private access to future history shared by few others or even by no others at all).It is not merely ritualized caution and uncertainty that leads the social scientist to make his predictions — say,about the impending consequences of vast increases in human populations — contingent.It is,rather,that although he is sometimes prepared to say what might be reasonably expected to occur under specified conditions,he is often not in a position to say when,or even whether,these conditions,indispensable to the predicted outcome,will themselves occur.

The social scientist engaged in prediction differs from his distant and only seeming counterpart,the social prophet,in yet another respect.He tries to learn from his failures.If the anticipated outcome does not occur when the social scientist had reason to suppose it would,and if investigation shows that the posited conditions had in fact occurred but without the expected outcome,he sits down to re examine his evidence and to overhaul his ideas,just as much as seems indicated.The prophet,of course,treats his unfulfilled prophecy more humanely.He does not throw it into the discard nor rearrange his basic conceptions of how things work.Instead,he habitually explains away the discrepancy between the prophesied and actual outcome,so that the prophecy,immune from countervailing evidence,remains undamaged.The successful prophet will do this effectively；he will,as the ancient phrase has it,“save the appearances of the phenomena” with such masterly rationalizations that his followers are often quick to see in each seeming failure of prophecy only that much more proof of his profound powers of seership.

This quick comparison of the social prophet and the social scientist is less of a digression than it may seem. The point is that in rereading Le Bon's The Crowd today some of us might be tempted to see in what he had to say in 1895 a prophetic account of much that has happened since.This would not only be a mistake；it would be a distinct disservice to Le Bon.It would mean casting him in thc role of a prophet,a role that he only occasionally coveted and then put aside as unfitting.In his fashion,and in the fashion that prevailed toward the end of the last century.he was trying to be a social scientist.To be sure,unlike his younger French contemporaries — mile Durkheim,for example,who ushered in a new era of sociological thought and investigation — Le Bon had never learned how to assemble and analyze sociological data methodically and in a way that allowed the data to deny the truth of his ideas,if they were in fact untrue. This phase of sociological study was still largely to come (and is,of course,only in its early stages even now).Le Bon had the purposes of a sociologist but had not acquired the intellectually ascetic ways of work required to make his inquiry methodical and reasonably compelling. He was sociological in intent and essayistic in fact.Nevertheless,since he had an instinct for the sociological jugular,he managed to say many things that,as we have since learned,were worth saying.

Le Bon also managed to say many things that were not worth saying. As we have seen,the book is an uneven one,uneven in quality of observation and in quality of inference form observation. It is full of ideas：some of these sound and fruitful；some sound but still to bear fruit；some decidedly unsound but provocative of other ideas that have proved valid；and,finally,some in the unhappy condition of being both unsound and fruitless. So far as we can tell,Le Bon,like many of the rest of us,was unable to distinguish the status of the ideas he put forward. They were all his brainchildren and so,apparently,he loved them all equally. The good ideas and the bad ones,the fruitful ones and the sterile ones,arc all accorded pretty much the same loving care by their progenitor. In fact,he acts almost as the parable of the prodigal son would have us all act. If he favors any of the intellectual offspring he brings forth in this book,he favors those sinful ones that we now know to be unsound at the core,and by Le Bon's own sense of values,dangerous. (We shall see some examples of this in a moment.) Yet even here his good sense prevails in the end.

Possibly because Le Bon was writing a social psychology,rather than a chronological history,of crowds,his book contains much that is anything but alien to our own time.

Strewn throughout this little book are evidences of Le Bon's curious admixture of ideological images and commitments. He is an apprehensive conservative,worried by the growth of the proletariat with its socialist orientation. Yet the recurrent traces of political conservatism,an unremitting hostility to every aspect of socialism,a distinct kind of racial imagery,and a picture of woman as weak and acquiescent,unreasoning and unreasonable,given to impulse and therefore thoroughly unstable and capricious,deprived of morality,and altogether but not unpleasantly inferior to man—aIl these ideas lie only on the surface of the book.Once these are cleared away as so much ideological debris,Le Bon's fundamental conceptions of crowd behavior remain reasonably intact,though incomplete.

Consider only one of these ideological notions.Le Bon shared with many others of his time what he called “the fundamental notion of race” as one of the “mysterious master causes that rule our destiny.” Yet,as it turns out,this is anything but the kind of racism that a mid century Gobineau made basic to the permanent ethnocentrism that furnishes the rationale for exploiting the “inferior races.” “Race,” for Le Bon,was an ill conceived idea corresponding loosely to what has since been described as “national character structure.” We see this,for example,when Le Bon refers to the “hereditary instincts of the Spanish race” or when he casually remarks on the “feminine characteristics” of crowds everywhere,but finds “Latin crowds to be the most feminine of all.” “Race” is a loosely defined tag hung on nations and peoples,reflecting Le Bon's anthropological ignorance rather than his ethnocentric malevolence.

A vogue book,repeatedly germane to Le Bon's time and ours,never entirely new nor strictly true but in composite endlessly perceptive,better at its best and worse at its worst than the author had any way of knowing,written between the lines almost as much as in them,alternately provincial and cosmopolitan in outlook,alternately prophetic and backward looking,using history effectively in practice while rejecting its truth and utility in principle,crystallizing into uniformities of human behavior the dramatic events of his time that exhibited these uniformities,and cluttered with ideological curiosities that do not affect its substance,Le Bon's The Crowd is still a book worth reading.

Columbia University January 1960

Preface.

Crowds, doubtless, are always unconscious, but this very unconsciousness is perhaps one of the secrets of their strength.

The following work is devoted to an account of the characteristics ofcrowds.

The whole of the common characteristics with which heredity endows the inpiduals of a race constitute the genius of the race. When, however, a certain number of these inpiduals are gathered together in a crowd for purposes of action, observation proves that, from the mere fact of their being assembled, there result certain new psychological characteristics, which are added to the racial characteristics and differ from them at times to a very considerable degree.

Organised crowds have always played an important part in the life of peoples, but this part has never been of such moment as at present. The substitution of the unconscious action of crowds for the conscious activity of inpiduals is one of the principal characteristics of the present age.

I have endeavoured to examine the difficult problem presented by crowds in a purely scientific manner — that is, by making an effort to proceed with method, and without being influenced by opinions, theories, and doctrines. This, I believe, is the only mode of arriving at the discovery of some few particles of truth, especially when dealing, as is the case here, with a question that is the subject of impassioned controversy. A man of science bent on verifying a phenomenon is not called upon to concern himself with the interests his verifications may hurt. In a recent publication an eminent thinker,M. Goblet d’Alviela, made the remark that, belonging to none of the contemporary schools, I am occasionally found in opposition of sundry of the conclusions of all of them. I hope this new work will merit a similar observa-tion. To belong to a school is necessarily to espouse its prejudices and preconceived opinions.

Still I should explain to the reader why he will find me draw conclusions from my investigations which it might be thought at first sight they do not bear; why, for instance, after noting the extreme mental inferiority of crowds, picked assemblies included, I yet affirmit would be dangerous to meddle with their organisation, notwithstanding this inferiority.

The reason is, that the most attentive observation of the facts of history has invariably demonstrated to me that social organisms being every whit as complicated as those of all beings, it is in no wise in our power to force them to undergo on a sudden far-reaching transformations. Nature has recourse at times to radical measures, but never after our fashion, which explains how it is that nothing is more fatal to a people than the mania for great reforms, however excellent these reforms may appear theoretically. They would only be useful were it possible to change instantaneouslythe genius of nations. This power, however, is onlypossessed bytime. Men are ruled by ideas, sentiments, and customs — matters which are of the essence of ourselves. Institutions and laws are the outward manifestation of our character, the expression of its needs. Being its outcome, institutions and laws cannot change this character.

The study of social phenomena cannot be separated from that of the peoples among whom they have come into existence. From the philosophic point of view these phenomena may have an absolute value; in practice they have only a relative value.

It is necessary, in consequence, when studying a social phenomenon, to consider it successively under two very different aspects. It will then be seen that the teachings of pure reason are very often contrary to those of practical reason. There are scarcely any data, even physical, to which this distinction is not applicable. From the point of view of absolute truth a cube or a circle are invariable geometrical figures, rigorously defined by certain formulas. From the point of view of the impression they make on our eye these geometrical figures may assume very varied shapes. By perspective the cube may be transformed into a pyramid or a square, the circle into an ellipse or a straight line. Moreover, the consideration of these fictitious shapes is far more important than that of the real shapes, for it is they and they alone that we see and that can be reproduced by photography or in pictures. In certain cases there is more truth in the unreal than in the real. To present objects with their exact geometrical forms would be to distort nature and render it unrecognisable. If we imagine a world whose inhabitants could only copy or photograph objects, but were unable to touch them, it would be very difficult for such persons to attain to an exact idea of their form. Moreover, the knowledge of this form, accessible only to a small number of learned men, would present but a very minor interest.

The philosopher who studies social phenomena should bear in mind that side by side with their theoretical value they possess a practical value, and that this latter, so far as the evolution of civilisation is concerned, is alone of impor-tance. The recognition of this fact should render him very circumspect with regard to the conclusions that logic would seem at first to enforce upon him.

There are other motives that dictate to him a like reserve. The complexity of social facts is such, that it is impossible to grasp them as a whole and to foresee the effects of their reciprocal influence. It seems, too, that behind the visible facts are hidden at times thousands of invisible causes. Visible social phenomena appear to be the result of an immense, unconscious working, that as a rule is beyond the reach of our analysis. Perceptible phenomena may be compared to the waves, which are the expression on the surface of the ocean of deep-lying disturbances of which we know nothing. So far as the majority of their acts are considered, crowds display a singularly inferior mentality; yet there are other acts in which they appear to be guided by those mysterious forces which the ancients denominated destiny, nature, or providence, which we call the voices of the dead, and whose power it is impossible to overlook, although we ignore their essence. It would seem, at times, as if there were latent forces in the inner being of nations which serve to guide them. What, for instance, can be more complicated, more logical, more marvellous than a language? Yet whence can this admirably organised production have arisen, except it be the outcome of the unconscious genius of crowds? The most learned academics, the most esteemed grammarians can do no more than note down the laws that govern languages; they would be utterly incapable of creating them. Even with respect to the ideas of great men are we certain that they are exclusively the offspring of their brains? No doubt such ideas are always created by solitary minds, but is it not the genius of crowds that has furnished the thousands of grains of dust forming the soil in which they have sprung up?

Crowds, doubtless, are always unconscious, but this very unconsciousness is perhaps one of the secrets of their strength. In the natural world beings exclusively governed by instinct accomplish acts whose marvellous complexity astounds us. Reason is an attribute of humanity of too recent date and still too imperfect to reveal to us the laws of the unconscious, and still more to take its place. The part played by the unconscious in all our acts is immense, and that played by reason very small. The unconscious acts like a force still unknown.

If we wish, then, to remain within the narrow but safe limits within which science can attain to knowledge, and not to wander in the domain of vague conjecture and vain hypothesis, all we must do is simply to take note of such phenomena as are accessible to us, and confine ourselves to their consider-ation. Every conclusion drawn from our observation is, as a rule, premature, for behind the phenomena which we see clearly are other phenomena that we see indistinctly, and perhaps behind these latter, yet others which we do not see at all.

Introduction: The Era of Crowds.

Up to now these thoroughgoing destructions of a worn-out civilisation have constituted the most obvious task of the masses. It is not indeed to-day merely that this can be traced. History tells us, that from the moment when the moral forces on which a civilisation rested have lost their strength, its final dissolution is brought about by those unconscious and brutal crowds known, justifiably enough, as barbarians.

Abstract:The evolution of the present age—The great changes in civilisation are the consequence of changes in National thought—Modern belief in the power of crowds—It transforms the traditional policy of the European states—How the rise of the popular classes comes about, and the manner in which they exercise their power—The necessary consequences of the power of the crowd—Crowds unable to play a part other than destructive—The dissolution of worn-out civilisations is the work of the crowd—General ignorance of the psychology of crowds—Importance of the study of crowds for legislators and statesmen.

The great upheavals which precede changes of civilisations such as the fall of the Roman Empire and the foundation of the Arabian Empire, seem at first sight determined more especially by political transformations, foreign invasion, or the overthrow of dynasties. But a more attentive study of these events shows that behind their apparent causes the real cause is generally seen to be a profound modification in the ideas of the peoples. The true historical upheavals are not those which astonish us by their grandeur and violence. The only important changes whence the renewal of civilisations results, affect ideas, conceptions, and beliefs. The memorable events of history are the visible effects of the invisible changes of human thought. The reason these great events are so rare is that there is nothing so stable in a race as the inherited groundwork of its thoughts.

The present epoch is one of these critical moments in which the thought of mankind is undergoing a process of transformation.

Two fundamental factors are at the base of this transformation. The first is the destruction of those religious, political, and social beliefs in which all the elements of our civilisation are rooted. The second is the creation of entirely new conditions of existence and thought as the result of modern scientific and industrial discoveries.

The ideas of the past, although half destroyed, being still very powerful, and the ideas which are to replace them being still in process of formation, the modern age represents a period of transition and anarchy.

It is not easy to say as yet what will one day be evolved from this necessarily somewhat chaotic period. What will be the fundamental ideas on which the societies that are to succeed our own will be built up? We do not at present know. Still it is already clear that on whatever lines the societies of the future are organised, they will have to count with a new power, with the last surviving sovereign force of modern times, the power of crowds. On the ruins of so many ideas formerly considered beyond discussion, and to-day decayed or decaying, of so many sources of authority that successive revolutions have destroyed, this power, which alone has arisen in their stead, seems soon destined to absorb the others. While all our ancient beliefs are tottering and disappearing, while the old pillars of society are giving way one by one, the power of the crowd is the only force that nothing menaces, and of which the prestige is continually on the increase. The age we are about to enter will in truth be the Era of Crowds.

Scarcely a century ago the traditional policy of European states and the rivalries of sovereigns were the principal factors that shaped events. The opinion of the masses scarcely counted, and most frequently indeed did not count at all. To-day it is the traditions which used to obtain in politics, and the inpidual tendencies and rivalries of rulers which do not count; while, on the contrary, the voice of the masses has become preponderant. It is this voice that dictates their conduct to kings, whose endeavour is to take note of its utterances. The destinies of nations are elaborated at present in the heart of the masses, and no longer in the councils of princes.

The entry of the popular classes into political life — that is to say, in reality, their progressive transformation into governing classes — is one of the most striking characteristics of our epoch of transition. The introduction of universal suffrage, which exercised for a long time but little influence, is not, as might be thought, the distinguishing feature of this transference of political power. The progressive growth of the power of the masses took place at first by the propagation of certain ideas, which have slowly implanted themselves in men’s minds, and afterwards by the gradual association of inpiduals bent on bringing about the realisation of theoretical conceptions. It is by association that crowds have come to procure ideas with respect to their interests which are very clearly defined ifnot particularlyjust, and have arrived at a conscious-ness of their strength. The masses are founding syndicates before which the authorities capitulate one after the other; theyare also founding labour unions, which in spite of all economic laws tend to regulate the conditions of labour and wages. They return to assemblies in which the Government is vested, representatives utterly lacking initiative and independence, and reduced most often to nothing else than the spokesmen of the committees that have chosen them.

To-day the claims of the masses are becoming more and more sharply defined, and amount to nothing less than a determination to utterly destroy society as it now exists, with a view to making it hark back to that primitive communism which was the normal condition of all human groups before the dawn of civilisation. Limitations of the hours of labour, the nationalisation of mines, railways, factories, and the soil, the equal distribution of all products, the elimination of all the upper classes for the benefit of the popular classes, &c., such are these claims.

Little adapted to reasoning, crowds, on the contrary, are quick to act. As the result of their present organisation their strength has become immense. The dogmas whose birth we are witnessing will soon have the force of the old dogmas; that is to say, the tyrannical and sovereign force of being above discussion. The pine right of the masses is about to replace the pine right of kings.

The writers who enjoy the favour of our middle classes, those who best represent their rather narrow ideas, their somewhat prescribed views, their rather superficial scepticism, and their at times somewhat excessive egoism, display profound alarm at this new power which they see growing; and to combat the disorder in men’s minds they are addressing despairing appeals to those moral forces of the Church for which they formerly professed so much disdain. They talk to us of the bankruptcy of science, go back in penitence to Rome, and remind us of the teachings of revealed truth. These new converts forget that it is too late. Had they been really touched by grace, a like operation could not have the same influence on minds less concerned with the preoccu-pations which beset these recent adherents to religion. The masses repudiate to-day the gods which their admonishers repudiated yesterday and helped to destroy. There is no power, Divine or human, that can oblige a stream to flow back to its source.

There has been no bankruptcy of science, and science has had no share in the present intellectual anarchy, nor in the making of the new power which is springing up in the midst of this anarchy. Science promised us truth, or at least a knowledge of such relations as our intelligence can seize: it never promised us peace or happiness. Sovereignly indifferent to our feelings, it is deaf to our lamentations. It is for us to endeavour to live with science, since nothing can bring back the illusions it has destroyed.

Universal symptoms, visible in all nations, show us the rapid growth of the power of crowds, and do not admit of our supposing that it is destined to cease growing at an early date. Whatever fate it may reserve for us, we shall have to submit to it. All reasoning against it is a mere vain war of words. Certainly it is possible that the advent to power of the masses marks one of the last stages ofWestern civilisation, a complete return to those periods ofconfused anarchy which seem always destined to precede the birth ofeverynew society. But may this result be prevented?

Up to now these thoroughgoing destructions of a worn-out civilisation have constituted the most obvious task of the masses. It is not indeed to-day merely that this can be traced. History tells us, that from the moment when the moral forces on which a civilisation rested have lost their strength, its final dissolution is brought about by those unconscious and brutal crowds known, justifiably enough, as barbarians. Civilisations as yet have only been created and directed by a small intellectual aristocracy, never by crowds. Crowds are only powerful for destruction. Their rule is always tantamount to a barbarian phase. A civilisation involves fixed rules, discipline, a passing from the instinctive to the rational state, forethought for the future, an elevated degree of culture — all of them conditions that crowds, left to themselves, have invariably shown themselves incapable of realising. In consequence of the purely destructive nature of their power crowds act like those microbes which hasten the dissolution of enfeebled or dead bodies. When the structure of a civilisation is rotten, it is always the masses that bring about its downfall. It is at such a juncture that their chiefmission is plainlyvisible, and that for a while the philosophy of number seems the only philosophy of history.

Is the same fate in store for our civilisation? There is ground to fear that this is the case, but we are not as yet in a position to be certain of it.

However this may be, we are bound to resign ourselves to the reign of the masses, since want of foresight has in succession overthrown all the barriers that might have kept the crowd in check.

We have a very slight knowledge of these crowds which are beginning to be the object of so much discussion. Professional students of psychology, having lived far from them, have always ignored them, and when, as of late, theyhave turned their attention in this direction it has only been to consider the crimes crowds are capable of committing. Without a doubt criminal crowds exist, but virtuous and heroic crowds, and crowds of many other kinds, are also to be met with. The crimes of crowds only constitute a particular phase of their psychology. The mental constitution of crowds is not to be learnt merely by a studyof their crimes, any more than that of an inpidual by a mere description of his vices.

However, in point of fact, all the world’s masters, all the founders of religions or empires, the apostles of all beliefs, eminent statesmen, and, in a more modest sphere, the mere chiefs of small groups of men have always been unconscious psychologists, possessed of an instinctive and often very sure knowledge of the character of crowds, and it is their accurate knowledge of this character that has enabled them to so easily establish their mastery. Napoleon had a marvellous insight into the psychology of the masses of the country over which he reigned, but he, at times, completelymisunderstood the psychology of crowds belonging to other races;1 and it is because he thus misunderstood it that he engaged in Spain, and notably in Russia, in conflicts in which his power received blows which were destined within a brief space of time to ruin it. A knowledge of the psychology of crowds is to-day the last resource of the statesman who wishes not to govern them — that is becoming a very difficult matter — but at any rate not to be too much governed by them.

It is only by obtaining some sort of insight into the psychology of crowds that it can be understood how slight is the action upon them of laws and institu-tions, how powerless they are to hold any opinions other than those which are imposed upon them, and that it is not with rules based on theories of pure equity that they are to be led, but by seeking what produces an impression on them and what seduces them. For instance, should a legislator, wishing to impose a new tax, choose that which would be theoretically the most just? By no means. In practice the most unjust may be the best for the masses. Should it at the same time be the least obvious, and apparently the least burdensome, it will be the most easily tolerated. It is for this reason that an indirect tax, however exorbitant it be, will always be accepted bythe crowd, because, being paid daily in fractions of a farthing on objects of consumption, it will not interfere with the habits of the crowd, and will pass unperceived. Replace it by a proportional tax on wages or income of any other kind, to be paid in a lump sum, and were this new imposition theoretically ten times less burdensome than the other, it would give rise to unanimous protest. This arises from the fact that a sum relatively high, which will appear immense, and will in consequence strike the imagination, has been substituted for the unperceived fractions of a farthing. The new tax would only appear light had it been saved farthing by farthing, but this economic proceeding involves an amount of foresight of which the masses are incapable.

The example which precedes is ofthe simplest. Its appositeness will be easily perceived. It did not escape the attention of such a psychologist as Napoleon, but our modern legislators, ignorant as they are of the characteristics of a crowd, are unable to appreciate it. Experience has not taught them as yet to a sufficient degree that men never shape their conduct upon the teaching of pure reason.

Many other practical applications might be made of the psychology of crowds. A knowledge of this science throws the most vivid light on a great number of historical and economic phenomena totally incomprehensible without it. I shall have occasion to show that the reason why the most remarkable of modern historians, Taine, has at times so imperfectly understood the events of the great French Revolution is, that it never occurred to him to study the genius of crowds. He took as his guide in the study of this compli-cated period the descriptive method resorted to by naturalists; but the moral forces are almost absent in the case of the phenomena which naturalists have to study. Yet it is precisely these forces that constitute the true mainsprings of history.

In consequence, merely looked at from its practical side, the study of the psychology of crowds deserved to be attempted. Were its interest that resulting from pure curiosity only, it would still merit attention. It is as interesting to decipher the motives of the actions of men as to determine the characteristics of a mineral or a plant. Our study of the genius of crowds can merely be a brief synthesis, a simple summary of our investigations. Nothing more must be demanded of it than a few suggestive views. Others will work the ground more thoroughly. To-day we only touch the surface of a still almost virgin soil.

Book I. The Mind of Crowds.

Chapter I. General Characteristics of Crowds. — Psychological Lawof Their Mental Unity.

A thousand inpiduals accidentally gathered in a public place without any determined object in no way constitute a crowd from the psychological point of view.

Abstract:What constitutes a crowd from the psychological point of view—A numerically strong agglomeration of inpiduals does not suffice to form a crowd—Special characteristics of psychological crowds—The turning in a fixed direction of the ideas and sentiments of inpiduals composing such a crowd, and the disappearance of their personality—The crowd is always dominated by considerations of which it is unconscious—The disappearance of brain activity and the predominance of medullar activity—The lowering of the intelligence and the complete transformation of the sentiments—The transformed sentiments may be better or worse than those of the inpiduals of which the crowd is composed—A crowd is as easily heroic as criminal.

In its ordinary sense the word “crowd” means a gathering of inpiduals of whatever nationality, profession, or sex, and whatever be the chances that have brought them together. From the psychological point of view the expression “crowd” assumes quite a different signification. Under certain given circumstances, and only under those circumstances, an agglomeration of men presents new characteristics very different from those of the inpiduals composing it. The sentiments and ideas of all the persons in the gathering take one and the same direction, and their conscious personality vanishes. A collective mind is formed, doubtless transitory, but presenting very clearly defined characteristics. The gathering has thus become what, in the absence of a better expression, I will call an organised crowd, or, if the term is considered preferable, a psychological crowd. It forms a single being, and is subjected to the law of the mental unity of crowds.

It is evident that it is not by the mere fact of a number of inpiduals finding themselves accidentally side by side that they acquire the character of an organised crowd. A thousand inpiduals accidentally gathered in a public place without any determined object in no way constitute a crowd from the psychological point of view. To acquire the special characteristics of such a crowd, the influence is necessary of certain predisposing causes of which we shall have to determine the nature.

The disappearance of conscious personality and the turning of feelings and thoughts in a definite direction, which are the primary characteristics of a crowd about to become organised, do not always involve the simultaneous presence of a number of inpiduals on one spot. Thousands of isolated inpiduals may acquire at certain moments, and under the influence of certain violent emotions — such, for example, as a great national event — the characteristics of a psychological crowd. It will be sufficient in that case that a mere chance should bring them together for their acts to at once assume the characteristics peculiar to the acts of a crowd. At certain moments half a dozen men might constitute a psychological crowd, which may not happen in the case of hundreds of men gathered together by accident. On the other hand, an entire nation, though there may be no visible agglomeration, may become a crowd under the action of certain influences.

A psychological crowd once constituted, it acquires certain provisional but determinable general characteristics. To these general characteristics there are adjoined particular characteristics which vary according to the elements of which the crowd is composed, and may modify its mental constitution. Psychological crowds, then, are susceptible of classification; and when we come to occupy ourselves with this matter, we shall see that a heterogeneous crowd — that is, a crowd composed of dissimilar elements — presents certain characteristics in common with homogeneous crowds — that is, with crowds composed ofelements more or less akin (sects, castes, and classes) — and side by side with these common characteristics particularities which permit of the two kinds of crowds being differentiated.

But before occupying ourselves with the different categories of crowds, we must first of all examine the characteristics common to them all. We shall set to work like the naturalist, who begins by describing the general characteristics common to all the members of a family before concerning himself with the particular characteristics which allow the differentiation of the genera and species that the family includes.

It is not easy to describe the mind of crowds with exactness, because its organisation varies not only according to race and composition, but also according to the nature and intensity of the exciting causes to which crowds are subjected. The same difficulty, however, presents itself in the psychologi-cal study of an inpidual. It is only in novels that inpiduals are found to traverse their whole life with an unvarying character. It is only the uniformity of the environment that creates the apparent uniformity of characters. I have shown elsewhere that all mental constitutions contain possibilities of character which may be manifested in consequence of a sudden change of environment. This explains how it was that among the most savage members of the French Convention were to be found inoffensive citizens who, under ordinary circumstances, would have been peaceable notaries or virtuous magistrates. The storm past, they resumed their normal character of quiet, law-abiding citizens. Napoleon found amongst them his most docile servants.

It being impossible to study here all the successive degrees of organisation of crowds, we shall concern ourselves more especially with such crowds as have attained to the phase of complete organisation. In this way we shall see what crowds may become, but not what they invariably are. It is only in this advanced phase oforganisation that certain new and special characteristics are superposed on the unvarying and dominant character of the race; then takes place that turning already alluded to of all the feelings and thoughts of the collectivity in an identical direction. It is only under such circumstances, too, that what I have called above the psychological law of the mental unity of crowds comes into play.

Among the psychological characteristics of crowds there are some that they may present in common with isolated inpiduals, and others, on the contrary, which are absolutely peculiar to them and are only to be met with in collectivi-ties. It is these special characteristics that we shall study, first of all, in order to show their importance.

The most striking peculiarity presented by a psychological crowd is the following: Whoever be the inpiduals that compose it, however like or unlike be their mode of life, their occupations, their character, or their intelligence, the fact that they have been transformed into a crowd puts them in possession of a sort of collective mind which makes them feel, think, and act in a manner quite different from that in which each inpidual of them would feel, think, and act were he in a state of isolation. There are certain ideas and feelings which do not come into being, or do not transform themselves into acts except in the case of inpiduals forming a crowd. The psychological crowd is a provisional being formed of heterogeneous elements, which for a moment are combined, exactly as the cells which constitute a living body form by their reunion a new being which displays characteristics very different from those possessed by each of the cells singly.

Contrary to an opinion which one is astonished to find coming from the pen of so acute a philosopher as Herbert Spencer, in the aggregate which constitutes a crowd there is in no sort a summing-up of or an average struck between its elements. What reallytakes place is a combination followed by the creation of new characteristics, just as in chemistry certain elements, when brought into contact — bases and acids, for example — combine to form a new body possessing properties quite different from those of the bodies that have served to form it.

It is easy to prove how much the inpidual forming part of a crowd differs from the isolated inpidual, but it is less easy to discover the causes of this difference.

To obtain at any rate a glimpse of them it is necessary in the first place to call to mind the truth established by modern psychology, that unconscious phenomena play an altogether preponderating part not only in organic life, but also in the operations of the intelligence. The conscious life of the mind is of small importance in comparison with its unconscious life. The most subtle analyst, the most acute observer, is scarcely successful in discovering more than a very small number of the unconscious motives that determine his conduct. Our conscious acts are the outcome of an unconscious substratum created in the mind in the main by hereditary influences. This substratum consists of the innumerable common characteristics handed down from generation to generation, which constitute the genius of a race. Behind the avowed causes of our acts there undoubtedly lie secret causes that we do not avow, but behind these secret causes there are many others more secret still which we ourselves ignore. The greater part of our daily actions are the result of hidden motives which escape our observation.

It is more especially with respect to those unconscious elements which constitute the genius of a race that all the inpiduals belonging to it resemble each other, while it is principally in respect to the conscious elements of their character — the fruit of education, and yet more of exceptional hereditary conditions — that they differ from each other. Men the most unlike in the matter of their intelligence possess instincts, passions, and feelings that are very similar. In the case of every thing that belongs to the realm of sentiment— religion, politics, morality, the affections and antipathies, &c. — the most eminent men seldom surpass the standard of the most ordinary inpiduals. From the intellectual point of view an abyss may exist between a great mathematician and his boot maker, but from the point of view of character the difference is most often slight or non-existent.

It is precisely these general qualities of character, governed by forces of which we are unconscious, and possessed by the majority of the normal inpiduals of a race in much the same degree — it is precisely these qualities, I say, that in crowds become common property. In the collective mind the intellectual aptitudes of the inpiduals, and in consequence their inpiduality, are weakened. The heterogeneous is swamped by the homogeneous, and the unconscious qualities obtain the upper hand.

This very fact that crowds possess in common ordinary qualities explains why they can never accomplish acts demanding a high degree of intelligence. The decisions affecting matters of general interest come to by an assembly of men of distinction, but specialists in different walks of life, are not sensibly superior to the decisions that would be adopted by a gathering of imbeciles. The truth is, they can only bring to bear in common on the work in hand those mediocre qualities which are the birthright of every average inpidual. In crowds it is stupidity and not mother-wit that is accumulated. It is not all the world, as is so often repeated, that has more wit than Voltaire, but assuredly Voltaire that has more wit than all the world, if by “all the world” crowds are to be understood.

If the inpiduals of a crowd confined themselves to putting in common the ordinary qualities of which each of them has his share, there would merely result the striking of an average, and not, as we have said is actually the case, the creation of new characteristics. How is it that these new characteristics are created? This is what we are now to investigate.

Different causes determine the appearance of these characteristics peculiar to crowds, and not possessed by isolated inpiduals. The first is that the inpidual forming part of a crowd acquires, solely from numerical consider-ations, a sentiment of invincible power which allows him to yield to instincts which, had he been alone, he would perforce have kept under restraint. He will be the less disposed to check himself from the consideration that, a crowd being anonymous, and in consequence irresponsible, the sentiment of responsibility which always controls inpiduals disappears entirely.

The second cause, which is contagion, also intervenes to determine the manifestation in crowds of their special characteristics, and at the same time the trend they are to take. Contagion is a phenomenon of which it is easy to establish the presence, but that it is not easy to explain. It must be classed among those phenomena of a hypnotic order, which we shall shortly study. In a crowd every sentiment and act is contagious, and contagious to such a degree that an inpidual readily sacrifices his personal interest to the collective interest. This is an aptitude very contrary to his nature, and of which a man is scarcely capable, except when he makes part of a crowd.

A third cause, and by far the most important, determines in the inpiduals of a crowd special characteristics which are quite contrary at times to those presented by the isolated inpidual. I allude to that suggestibility of which, moreover, the contagion mentioned above is neither more nor less than an effect.

To understand this phenomenon it is necessary to bear in mind certain recent physiological discoveries. We know to-day that by various processes an inpidual may be brought into such a condition that, having entirely lost his conscious personality, he obeys all the suggestions of the operator who has deprived him of it, and commits acts in utter contradiction with his character and habits. The most careful observations seem to prove that an inpidual immerged for some length of time in a crowd in action soon finds himself — either in consequence of the magnetic influence given out by the crowd, or from some other cause of which we are ignorant — in a special state, which much resembles the state of fascination in which the hypnotised inpidual finds himself in the hands of the hypnotiser. The activity of the brain being paralysed in the case of the hypnotised subject, the latter becomes the slave of all the unconscious activities of his spinal cord, which the hypnotiser directs at will. The conscious personality has entirely vanished; will and discernment are lost. All feelings and thoughts are bent in the direction determined by the hypnotiser.

Such also is approximately the state of the inpidual forming part of a psychological crowd. He is no longer conscious of his acts. In his case, as in the case of the hypnotised subject, at the same time that certain faculties are destroyed, others may be brought to a high degree of exaltation. Under the influence of a suggestion, he will undertake the accomplishment ofcertain acts with irresistible impetuosity. This impetuosity is the more irresistible in the case of crowds than in that of the hypnotised subject, from the fact that, the suggestion being the same for all the inpiduals of the crowd, it gains in strength by reciprocity. The inpidualities in the crowd who might possess a personality sufficiently strong to resist the suggestion are too few in number to struggle against the current. At the utmost, they may be able to attempt a persion by means of different suggestions. It is in this way, for instance, that a happy expression, an image opportunely evoked, have occasionally deterred crowds from the most bloodthirsty acts.

We see, then, that the disappearance of the conscious personality, the predominance of the unconscious personality, the turning by means of suggestion and contagion of feelings and ideas in an identical direction, the tendency to immediately transform the suggested ideas into acts; these, we see, are the principal characteristics of the inpidual forming part of a crowd. He is no longer himself, but has become an automaton who has ceased to be guided by his will.

Moreover, by the mere fact that he forms part of an organised crowd, a man descends several rungs in the ladder of civilisation. Isolated, he may be a cultivated inpidual; in a crowd, he is a barbarian — that is, a creature acting by instinct. He possesses the spontaneity, the violence, the ferocity, and also the enthusiasm and heroism of primitive beings, whom he further tends to resemble by the facility with which he allows himself to be impressed by words and images — which would be entirely without action on each of the isolated inpiduals composing the crowd — and to be induced to commit acts contrary to his most obvious interests and his best-known habits. An inpidual in a crowd is a grain of sand amid other grains of sand, which the wind stirs up at will.

It is for these reasons that juries are seen to deliver verdicts of which each inpidual juror would disapprove, that parliamentary assemblies adopt laws and measures of which each of their members would disapprove in his own person. Taken separately, the men of the Convention were enlightened citizens of peaceful habits. United in a crowd, they did not hesitate to give their adhesion to the most savage proposals, to guillotine inpiduals most clearly innocent, and, contrary to their interests, to renounce their inviolability and to decimate themselves.

It is not only by his acts that the inpidual in a crowd differs essentially from himself. Even before he has entirely lost his independence, his ideas and feelings have undergone a transformation, and the transformation is so profound as to change the miser into a spendthrift, the sceptic into a believer, the honest man into a criminal, and the coward into a hero. The renunciation of all its privileges which the nobility voted in a moment of enthusiasm during the celebrated night of August 4, 1789, would certainly never have been consented to by any of its members taken singly.

The conclusion to be drawn from what precedes is, that the crowd is always intellectually inferior to the isolated inpidual, but that, from the point of view of feelings and of the acts these feelings provoke, the crowd may, according to circumstances, he better or worse than the inpidual. All depends on the nature of the suggestion to which the crowd is exposed. This is the point that has been completely misunderstood by writers who have only studied crowds from the criminal point of view. Doubtless a crowd is often criminal, but also it is often heroic. It is crowds rather than isolated inpiduals that may be induced to run the risk of death to secure the triumph of a creed or an idea, that may be fired with enthusiasm for glory and honour, that are led on — almost without bread and without arms, as in the age of the Crusades — to deliver the tomb of Christ from the infidel, or, as in ‘93, to defend the fatherland. Such heroism is without doubt somewhat unconscious, but it is of such heroism that history is made. Were peoples only to be credited with the great actions performed in cold blood, the annals of the world would register but few of them.

Chapter II. The Sentiments and 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.

Abstract:1.Impulsiveness,mobility,and irritability of crowds. The crowd is at the mercy of all exterior exciting causes,and reflects their incessant variations — The impulses which the crowd obeys are so imperious as to annihilate the feeling of personal interest — Premeditation is absent from crowds — Racial influence. 2. Crowds are credulous and readily influenced by suggestion. The obedience of crowds to suggestions — The images evoked in the mind of crowds are accepted by them as realities — Why these images are identical for all the inpiduals composing a crowd — The equality of the educated and the ignorant man in a crowd — Various examples of the illusions to which the inpiduals in a crowd are subject — The impossibility of according belief to the testimony of crowds — The unanimity of numerous witnesses is one of the worst proofs that can be invoked to establish a fact — The slight value of works of history. 3. The exaggeration and ingenuousness of the sentiments of crowds. Crowds do not admit doubt or uncertainty,and always go to extremes — Their sentiments always excessive. 4. The intolerance,dictatorialness,and conservatism of crowds. The reasons of these sentiments — The servility of crowds in the face of a strong authority — The momentary revolutionary instincts of crowds do not prevent them from being extremely conservative — Crowds instinctively hostile to changes and progress. 5. The morality of crowds. The morality of crowds,according to the suggestions under which they act,may be much lower or much higher than that of the inpiduals composing them — Explanation and examples — Crowds rarely guided by those considerations of interest which are most often the exclusive motives of the isolated inpidual — The moralising role of crowds.

Having indicated in a general way the principal characteristics of crowds,it remains to study these characteristics in detail.

It will be remarked that among the special characteristics of crowds there are several — such as impulsiveness,irritability,incapacity to reason,the absence of judgment and of the critical spirit,the exaggeration of the sentiments,and others besides — which are almost always observed in beings belonging to inferior forms of evolution — in women,savages,and children,for instance. However,I merely indicate this analogy in passing; its demonstration is outside the scope of this work. It would,moreover,be useless for persons acquainted with the psychology of primitive beings,and would scarcely carry conviction to those in ignorance of this matter.

I now proceed to the successive consideration of the different characteristics that may be observed in the majority of crowds.

1. Impulsiveness,Mobility,and Irritability of Crowds

When studying the fundamental characteristics of a crowd we stated that it is guided almost exclusively by unconscious motives. Its acts are far more under the influence of the spinal cord than of the brain. In this respect a crowd is closely akin to quite primitive beings. The acts performed may be perfect so far as their execution is concerned,but as they are not directed by the brain,the inpidual conducts himself according as the exciting causes to which he is submitted may happen to decide. A crowd is at the mercy of all external exciting causes,and reflects their incessant variations. It is the slave of the impulses which it receives. The isolated inpidual may be submitted to the same exciting causes as the man in a crowd,but as his brain shows him the inadvisability of yielding to them,he refrains from yielding. This truth may be physiologically expressed by saying that the isolated inpidual possesses the capacity of dominating his reflex actions,while a crowd is devoid of this capacity.

The varying impulses to which crowds obey may be,according to their exciting causes,generous or cruel,heroic or cowardly,but they will always be so imperious that the interest of the inpidual,even the interest of selfpreservation,will not dominate them. The exciting causes that may act on crowds being so varied,and crowds always obeying them,crowds are in consequence extremely mobile. This explains how it is that we see them pass in a moment from the most bloodthirsty ferocity to the most extreme generosity and heroism. A crowd may easily enact the part of an executioner,but not less easily that of a martyr. It is crowds that have furnished the torrents of blood requisite for the triumph of every belief. It is not necessary to go back to the heroic ages to see what crowds are capable of in this latter direction. They are never sparing of their life in an insurrection,and not long since a general,becoming suddenly popular,might easily have found a hundred thousand men ready to sacrifice their lives for his cause had he demanded it.

Any display of premeditation by crowds is in consequence out of the question. They may be animated in succession by the most contrary sentiments,but they will always be under the influence of the exciting causes of the moment. They are like the leaves which a tempest whirls up and scatters in every direction and then allows to fall. When studying later on certain revolutionary crowds we shall give some examples of the variability of their sentiments.

This mobility of crowds renders them very difficult to govern,especially when a measure of public authority has fallen into their hands. Did not the necessities of everyday life constitute a sort of invisible regulator of existence,it would scarcely be possible for democracies to last. Still,though the wishes of crowds are frenzied they are not durable. Crowds are as incapable of willing as of thinking for any length of time.

A crowd is not merely impulsive and mobile. Like a savage,it is not prepared to admit that anything can come between its desire and the realisation of its desire. It is the less capable of understanding such an intervention,in consequence of the feeling of irresistible power given it by its numerical strength. The notion of impossibility disappears for the inpidual in a crowd. An isolated inpidual knows well enough that alone he cannot set fire to a palace or loot a shop,and should he be tempted to do so,he will easily resist the temptation. Making part of a crowd,he is conscious of the power given him by number,and it is sufficient to suggest to him ideas of murder or pillage for him to yield immediately to temptation. An unexpected obstacle will be destroyed with frenzied rage. Did the human organism allow of the perpetuity of furious passion,it might be said that the normal condition of a crowd baulked in its wishes is just such a state of furious passion.

The fundamental characteristics of the race,which constitute the unvarying source from which all our sentiments spring,always exert an influence on the irritability of crowds,their impulsiveness and their mobility,as on all the popular sentiments we shall have to study. All crowds are doubtless always irritable and impulsive,but with great variations of degree. For instance,the difference between a Latin and an AngloSaxon crowd is striking. The most recent facts in French history throw a vivid light on this point. The mere publication,twentyfive years ago,of a telegram,relating an insult supposed to have been offered an ambassador,was sufficient to determine an explosion of fury,whence followed immediately a terrible war. Some years later the telegraphic announcement of an insignificant reverse at Langson provoked a fresh explosion which brought about the instantaneous overthrow of the government. At the same moment a much more serious reverse undergone by the English expedition to Khartoum produced only a slight emotion in England,and no ministry was overturned. Crowds are everywhere distinguished by feminine characteristics,but Latin crowds are the most feminine of all. Whoever trusts in them may rapidly attain a lofty destiny,but to do so is to be perpetually skirting the brink of a Tarpeian rock,with the certainty of one day being precipitated from it.

2. The Suggestibility and Credulity of Crowds

When defining crowds,we said that one of their general characteristics was an excessive suggestibility,and we have shown to what an extent suggestions are contagious in every human agglomeration; a fact which explains the rapid turning of the sentiments of a crowd in a definite direction. However indifferent it may be supposed,a crowd,as a rule,is in a state of expectant attention,which renders suggestion easy. The first suggestion formulated which arises implants itself immediately by a process of contagion in the brains of all assembled,and the identical bent of the sentiments of the crowd is immediately an accomplished fact.

As is the case with all persons under the influence of suggestion,the idea which has entered the brain tends to transform itself into an act. Whether the act is that of setting fire to a palace,or involves selfsacrifice,a crowd lends itself to it with equal facility. All will depend on the nature of the exciting cause,and no longer,as in the case of the isolated inpidual,on the relations existing between the act suggested and the sum total of the reasons which may be urged against its realisation.

In consequence,a crowd perpetually hovering on the borderland of unconsciousness,readily yielding to all suggestions,having all the violence of feeling peculiar to beings who cannot appeal to the influence of reason,deprived of all critical faculty,cannot be otherwise than excessively credulous. The improbable does not exist for a crowd,and it is necessary to bear this circumstance well in mind to understand the facility with which are created and propagated the most improbable legends and stories.

The creation of the legends which so easily obtain circulation in crowds is not solely the consequence of their extreme credulity. It is also the result of the prodigious perversions that events undergo in the imagination of a throng. The simplest event that comes under the observation of a crowd is soon totally transformed. A crowd thinks in images,and the image itself immediately calls up a series of other images,having no logical connection with the first. We can easily conceive this state by thinking of the fantastic succession of ideas to which we are sometimes led by calling up in our minds any fact. Our reason shows us the incoherence there is in these images,but a crowd is almost blind to this truth,and confuses with the real event what the deforming action of its imagination has superimposed thereon. A crowd scarcely distinguishes between the subjective and the objective. It accepts as real the images evoked in its mind,though they most often have only a very distant relation with the observed fact.

The ways in which a crowd perverts any event of which it is a witness ought,it would seem,to be innumerable and unlike each other,since the inpiduals composing the gathering are of very different temperaments. But this is not the case. As the result of contagion the perversions are of the same kind,and take the same shape in the case of all the assembled inpiduals.

The first perversion of the truth effected by one of the inpiduals of the gathering is the startingpoint of the contagious suggestion. Before St. George appeared on the walls of Jerusalem to all the Crusaders he was certainly perceived in the first instance by one of those present. By dint of suggestion and contagion the miracle signalised by a single person was immediately accepted by all.

Such is always the mechanism of the collective hallucinations so frequent in history — hallucinations which seem to have all the recognised characteristics of authenticity,since they are phenomena observed by thousands of persons.

To combat what precedes,the mental quality of the inpiduals composing a crowd must not be brought into consideration. This quality is without importance. From the moment that they form part of a crowd the learned man and the ignoramus are equally incapable of observation.

This thesis may seem paradoxical. To demonstrate it beyond doubt it would be necessary to investigate a great number of historical facts,and several volumes would be insufficient for the purpose.

Still,as I do not wish to leave the reader under the impression of unproved assertions,I shall give him some examples taken at hazard from the immense number of those that might be quoted.

The following fact is one of the most typical,because chosen from among collective hallucinations of which a crowd is the victim,in which are to be found inpiduals of every kind,from the most ignorant to the most highly educated. It is related incidentally by Julian Felix,a naval lieutenant,in his book on “Sea Currents,” and has been previously cited by the Revue Scientique.

The frigate,the Belle Poule,was cruising in the open sea for the purpose of finding the cruiser Le Berceau,from which she had been separated by a violent storm. It was broad daylight and in full sunshine. Suddenly the watch signalled a disabled vessel; the crew looked in the direction signalled,and every one,officers and sailors,clearly perceived a raft covered with men towed by boats which were displaying signals of distress. Yet this was nothing more than a collective hallucination. Admiral Desfosses lowered a boat to go to the rescue of the wrecked sailors. On nearing the object sighted,the sailors and officers on board the boat saw “masses of men in motion,stretching out their hands,and heard the dull and confused noise of a great number of voices.” When the object was reached those in the boat found themselves simply and solely in the presence of a few branches of trees covered with leaves that had been swept out from the neighbouring coast. Before evidence so palpable the hallucination vanished.

The mechanism of a collective hallucination of the kind we have explained is clearly seen at work in this example. On the one hand we have a crowd in a state of expectant attention,on the other a suggestion made by the watch signalling a disabled vessel at sea,a suggestion which,by a process of contagion,was accepted by all those present,both officers and sailors.

It is not necessary that a crowd should be numerous for the faculty of seeing what is taking place before its eyes to be destroyed and for the real facts to be replaced by hallucinations unrelated to them. As soon as a few inpiduals are gathered together they constitute a crowd,and,though they should be distinguished men of learning,they assume all the characteristics of crowds with regard to matters outside their speciality. The faculty of observation and the critical spirit possessed by each of them inpidually at once disappears. An ingenious psychologist,Mr. Davey,supplies us with a very curious example in point,recently cited in the Annales des Sciences Psychiques,and deserving of relation here. Mr. Davey,having convoked a gathering of distinguished observers,among them one of the most prominent of English scientific men,Mr. Wallace,executed in their presence,and after having allowed them to examine the objects and to place seals where they wished,all the regulation spiritualistic phenomena,the materialisation of spirits,writing on slates,& c. Having subsequently obtained from these distinguished observers written reports admitting that the phenomena observed could only have been obtained by supernatural means,he revealed to them that they were the result of very simple tricks. “The most astonishing feature of Monsieur Davey's investigation,” writes the author of this account,“is not the marvellousness of the tricks themselves,but the extreme weakness of the reports made with respect to them by the noninitiated witnesses. It is clear,then,” he says,“that witnesses even in number may give circumstantial relations which are completely erroneous,but whose result is that,if their descriptions are accepted as exact,the phenomena they describe are inexplicable by trickery. The methods invented by Mr. Davey were so simple that one is astonished that he should have had the boldness to employ them; but he had such a power over the mind of the crowd that he could persuade it that it saw what it did not see.” Here,as always,we have the power of the hypnotiser over the hypnotised. Moreover,when this power is seen in action on minds of a superior order and previously invited to be suspicious,it is understandable how easy it is to deceive ordinary crowds.

Analogous examples are innumerable. As I write these lines the papers are full of the story of two little girls found drowned in the Seine. These children,to begin with,were recognised in the most unmistakable manner by half a dozen witnesses. All the affirmations were in such entire concordance that no doubt remained in the mind of the juge d'instruction. He had the certificate of death drawn up,but just as the burial of the children was to have been proceeded with,a mere chance brought about the discovery that the supposed victims were alive,and had,moreover,but a remote resemblance to the drowned girls. As in several of the examples previously cited,the affirmation of the first witness,himself a victim of illusion,had sufficed to influence the other witnesses.

In parallel cases the startingpoint of the suggestion is always the illusion produced in an inpidual by more or less vague reminiscences,contagion following as the result of the affirmation of this initial illusion. If the first observer be very impressionable,it will often be sufficient that the corpse he believes he recognises should present — apart from all real resemblance — some peculiarity,a scar,or some detail of toilet which may evoke the idea of another person. The idea evoked may then become the nucleus of a sort of crystallisation which invades the understanding and paralyses all critical faculty. What the observer then sees is no longer the object itself,but the imageevoked in his mind. In this way are to be explained erroneous recognitions of the dead bodies of children by their own mother,as occurred in the following case,already old,but which has been recently recalled by the newspapers. In it are to be traced precisely the two kinds of suggestion of which I have just pointed out the mechanism.

“The child was recognised by another child,who was mistaken. The series of unwarranted recognitions then began.

“An extraordinary thing occurred. The day after a schoolboy had recognised the corpse a woman exclaimed,‘Good Heavens,it is my child!’

“She was taken up to the corpse; she examined the clothing,and noted a scar on the forehead. ‘It is certainly,’ she said,‘my son who disappeared last July. He has been stolen from me and murdered.’

“The woman was concierge in the Rue du Four; her name was Chavandret. Her brotherinlaw was summoned,and when questioned he said,‘That is the little Filibert.’ Several persons living in the street recognised the child found at La Villette as Filibert Chavandret,among them being the boy's schoolmaster,who based his opinion on a medal worn by the lad.

“Nevertheless,the neighbours,the brotherinlaw,the schoolmaster,and the mother were mistaken. Six weeks later the identity of the child was established. The boy,belonging to Bordeaux,had been murdered there and brought by a carrying company to Paris.”

It will be remarked that these recognitions are most often made by women and children — that is to say,by precisely the most impressionable persons. They show us at the same time what is the worth in law courts of such witnesses. As far as children,more especially,are concerned,their statements ought never to be invoked. Magistrates are in the habit of repeating that children do not lie. Did they possess a psychological culture a little less rudimentary than is the case they would know that,on the contrary,children invariably lie; the lie is doubtless innocent,but it is none the less a lie. It would be better to decide the fate of an accused person by the toss of a coin than,as has been so often done,by the evidence of a child.

To return to the faculty of observation possessed by crowds,our conclusion is that their collective observations are as erroneous as possible,and that most often they merely represent the illusion of an inpidual who,by a process of contagion,has suggestioned his fellows. Facts proving that the most utter mistrust of the evidence of crowds is advisable might be multiplied to any extent. Thousands of men were present twentyfive years ago at the celebrated cavalry charge during the battle of Sedan,and yet it is impossible,in the face of the most contradictory ocular testimony,to decide by whom it was commanded. The English general,Lord Wolseley,has proved in a recent book that up to now the gravest errors of fact have been committed with regard to the most important incidents of the battle of Waterloo — facts that hundreds of witnesses had nevertheless attested.

Such facts show us what is the value of the testimony of crowds. Treatises on logic include the unanimity of numerous witnesses in the category of the strongest proofs that can be invoked in support of the exactness of a fact. Yet what we know of the psychology of crowds shows that treatises on logic need on this point to be rewritten. The events with regard to which there exists the most doubt are certainly those which have been observed by the greatest number of persons. To say that a fact has been simultaneously verified by thousands of witnesses is to say,as a rule,that the real fact is very different from the accepted account of it.

It clearly results from what precedes that works of history must be considered as works of pure imagination. They are fanciful accounts of illobserved facts,accompanied by explanations the result of reflection. To write such books is the most absolute waste of time. Had not the past left us its literary,artistic,and monumental works,we should know absolutely nothing in reality with regard to bygone times. Are we in possession of a single word of truth concerning the lives of the great men who have played preponderating parts in the history of humanity — men such as Hercules,Buddha,or Mahomet? In all probability we are not. In point of fact,moreover,their real lives are of slight importance to us. Our interest is to know what our great men were as they are presented by popular legend. It is legendary heroes,and not for a moment real heroes,who have impressed the minds of crowds.

Unfortunately,legends — even although they have been definitely put on record by books — have in themselves no stability. The imagination of the crowd continually transforms them as the result of the lapse of time and especially in consequence of racial causes. There is a great gulf fixed between the sanguinary Jehovah of the Old Testament and the God of Love of Sainte Thérèse,and the Buddha worshipped in China has no traits in common with that venerated in India.

It is not even necessary that heroes should be separated from us by centuries for their legend to be transformed by the imagination of the crowd. The transformation occasionally takes place within a few years. In our own day we have seen the legend of one of the greatest heroes of history modified several times in less than fifty years. Under the Bourbons Napoleon became a sort of idyllic and liberal philanthropist,a friend of the humble who,according to the poets,was destined to be long remembered in the cottage. Thirty years afterwards this easygoing hero had become a sanguinary despot,who,after having usurped power and destroyed liberty,caused the slaughter of three million men solely to satisfy his ambition. At present we are witnessing a fresh transformation of the legend. When it has undergone the influence of some dozens of centuries the learned men of the future,face to face with these contradictory accounts,will perhaps doubt the very existence of the hero,as some of them now doubt that of Buddha,and will see in him nothing more than a solar myth or a development of the legend of Hercules. They will doubtless console themselves easily for this uncertainty,for,better initiated than we are today in the characteristics and psychology of crowds,they will know that history is scarcely capable of preserving the memory of anything except myths.

3. The Exaggeration and Ingenuousness of the Sentiments of Crowds

Whether the feelings exhibited by a crowd be good or bad,they present the double character of being very simple and very exaggerated. On this point,as on so many others,an inpidual in a crowd resembles primitive beings. Inaccessible to fine distinctions,he sees things as a whole,and is blind to their intermediate phases. The exaggeration of the sentiments of a crowd is heightened by the fact that any feeling when once it is exhibited communicating itself very quickly by a process of suggestion and contagion,the evident approbation of which it is the object considerably increases its force.

The simplicity and exaggeration of the sentiments of crowds have for result that a throng knows neither doubt nor uncertainty. Like women,it goes at once to extremes. A suspicion transforms itself as soon as announced into incontrovertible evidence. A commencement of antipathy or disapprobation,which in the case of an isolated inpidual would not gain strength,becomes at once furious hatred in the case of an inpidual in a crowd.

The violence of the feelings of crowds is also increased,especially in heterogeneous crowds,by the absence of all sense of responsibility. The certainty of impunity,a certainty the stronger as the crowd is more numerous,and the notion of a considerable momentary force due to number,make possible in the case of crowds sentiments and acts impossible for the isolated inpidual. In crowds the foolish,ignorant,and envious persons are freed from the sense of their insignificance and powerlessness,and are possessed instead by the notion of brutal and temporary but immense strength.

Unfortunately,this tendency of crowds towards exaggeration is often brought to bear upon bad sentiments. These sentiments are atavistic residuum of the instincts of the primitive man,which the fear of punishment obliges the isolated and responsible inpidual to curb. Thus it is that crowds are so easily led into the worst excesses.

Still this does not mean that crowds,skilfully influenced,are not capable of heroism and devotion and of evincing the loftiest virtues; they are even more capable of showing these qualities than the isolated inpidual. 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.

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 inpidual 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 cognizant 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 inpidual 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 inpidual 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 inpidual 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 inpidual is capable. Appeals to sentiments of glory,honour,and patriotism are particularly likely to influence the inpidual 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 inpidual. 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 the moment with very strict principles of morality. Taine calls attention to the fact that the perpetrators of the September massacres deposited on the table of the committees the pocketbooks and jewels they had found on their victims,and with which they could easily have been able to make away. The howling,swarming,ragged crowd which invaded the Tuileries during the revolution of 1848 did not lay hands on any of the objects that excited its astonishment,and one of which would have meant bread for many days.

This moralisation of the inpidual by the crowd is not certainly a constant rule,but it is a rule frequently observed. It is even observed in circumstances much less grave than those I have just cited. I have remarked that in the theatre a crowd exacts from the hero of the piece exaggerated virtues,and it is a commonplace observation that an assembly,even though composed of inferior elements,shows itself as a rule very prudish. The debauchee,the souteneur,the rough often break out into murmurs at a slightly risky scene or expression,though they be very harmless in comparison with their customary conversation.

If,then,crowds often abandon themselves to low instincts,they also set the example at times of acts of lofty morality. If disinterestedness,resignation,and absolute devotion to a real or chimerical ideal are moral virtues,it may be said that crowds often possess these virtues to a degree rarely attained by the wisest philosophers. Doubtless they practice them unconsciously,but that is of small import. We should not complain too much that crowds are more especially guided by unconscious considerations and are not given to reasoning. Had they,in certain cases,reasoned and consulted their immediate interests,it is possible that no civilisation would have grown up on our planet and humanity would have had no history.

Chapter III. The Ideas,Reasoning Power,and Imagination of Crowds

It is not, then, the facts in themselves that strike the popular imagination, but the way in which they take place and are brought under notice.

Abstract:1. The ideas of crowds. Fundamental and accessory ideas — How contradictory ideas may exist simultaneously — The transformation that must be undergone by lofty ideas before they are accessible to crowds — The social influence of ideas is independent of the degree of truth they may contain. 2. The reasoning power of crowds. Crowds are not to be influenced by reasoning — The reasoning of crowds is always of a very inferior order — There is only the appearance of analogy or succession in the ideas they associate. 3. The imagination of crowds. Strength of the imagination of crowds — Crowds think in images,and these images succeed each other without any connecting link — Crowds are especially impressed by the marvellous — Legends and the marvellous are the real pillars of civilisation — The popular imagination has always been the basis of the power of statesmen — The manner in which facts capable of striking the imagination of crowds present themselves for observation.

1. The Ideas of Crowds

When studying in a preceding work the part played by ideas in the evolution of nations,we showed that every civilisation is the outcome of a small number of fundamental ideas that are very rarely renewed. We showed how these ideas are implanted in the minds of crowds,with what difficulty the process is effected,and the power possessed by the ideas in question when once it has been accomplished. Finally we saw that great historical perturbations are the result,as a rule,of changes in these fundamental ideas.

Having treated this subject at sufficient length,I shall not return to it now,but shall confine myself to saying a few words on the subject of such ideas as are accessible to crowds,and of the forms under which they conceive them.

They may be pided into two classes. In one we shall place accidental and passing ideas created by the influences of the moment: infatuation for an inpidual or a doctrine,for instance. In the other will be classed the fundamental ideas,to which the environment,the laws of heredity and public opinion give a very great stability; such ideas are the religious beliefs of the past and the social and democratic ideas of today.

These fundamental ideas resemble the volume of the water of a stream slowly pursuing its course; the transitory ideas are like the small waves,for ever changing,which agitate its surface,and are more visible than the progress of the stream itself although without real importance.

At the present day the great fundamental ideas which were the mainstay of our fathers are tottering more and more. They have lost all solidity,and at the same time the institutions resting upon them are severely shaken. Every day there are formed a great many of those transitory minor ideas of which I have just been speaking; but very few of them to all appearance seem endowed with vitality and destined to acquire a preponderating influence.

Whatever be the ideas suggested to crowds they can only exercise effective influence on condition that they assume a very absolute,uncompromising,and simple shape. They present themselves then in the guise of images,and are only accessible to the masses under this form. These imagelike ideas are not connected by any logical bond of analogy or succession,and may take each other's place like the slides of a magiclantern which the operator withdraws from the groove in which they were placed one above the other. This explains how it is that the most contradictory ideas may be seen to be simultaneously current in crowds. According to the chances of the moment,a crowd will come under the influence of one of the various ideas stored up in its understanding,and is capable,in consequence,of committing the most dissimilar acts. Its complete lack of the critical spirit does not allow of its perceiving these contradictions.

This phenomenon is not peculiar to crowds. It is to be observed in many isolated inpiduals,not only among primitive beings,but in the case of all those — the fervent sectaries of a religious faith,for instance — who by one side or another of their intelligence are akin to primitive beings. I have observed its presence to a curious extent in the case of educated Hindoos brought up at our European universities and having taken their degree. A number of Western ideas had been superposed on their unchangeable and fundamental hereditary or social ideas. According to the chances of the moment,the one or the other set of ideas showed themselves each with their special accompaniment of acts or utterances,the same inpidual presenting in this way the most flagrant contradictions. These contradictions are more apparent than real,for it is only hereditary ideas that have sufficient influence over the isolated inpidual to become motives of conduct. It is only when,as the result of the intermingling of different races,a man is placed between different hereditary tendencies that his acts from one moment to another may be really entirely contradictory. It would be useless to insist here on these phenomena,although their psychological importance is capital. I am of opinion that at least ten years of travel and observation would be necessary to arrive at a comprehension of them.

Ideas being only accessible to crowds after having assumed a very simple shape must often undergo the most thoroughgoing transformations to become popular. It is especially when we are dealing with somewhat lofty philosophic or scientific ideas that we see how farreaching are the modifications they require in order to lower them to the level of the intelligence of crowds. These modifications are dependent on the nature of the crowds,or of the race to which the crowds belong,but their tendency is always belittling and in the direction of simplification. This explains the fact that,from the social point of view,there is in reality scarcely any such thing as a hierarchy of ideas — that is to say,as ideas of greater or less elevation. However great or true an idea may have been to begin with,it is deprived of almost all that which constituted its elevation and its greatness by the mere fact that it has come within the intellectual range of crowds and exerts an influence upon them.

Moreover,from the social point of view the hierarchical value of an idea,its intrinsic worth,is without importance. The necessary point to consider is the effects it produces. The Christian ideas of the Middle Ages,the democratic ideas of the last century,or the social ideas of today are assuredly not very elevated. Philosophically considered,they can only be regarded as somewhat sorry errors,and yet their power has been and will be immense,and they will count for a long time to come among the most essential factors that determine the conduct of States.

Even when an idea has undergone the transformations which render it accessible to crowds,it only exerts influence when,by various processes which we shall examine elsewhere,it has entered the domain of the unconscious,when indeed it has become a sentiment,for which much time is required.

For it must not be supposed that merely because the justness of an idea has been proved it can be productive of effective action even on cultivated minds. This fact may be quickly appreciated by noting how slight is the influence of the clearest demonstration on the majority of men. Evidence,if it be very plain,may be accepted by an educated person,but the convert will be quickly brought back by his unconscious self to his original conceptions. See him again after the lapse of a few days and he will put forward afresh his old arguments in exactly the same terms. He is in reality under the influence of anterior ideas,that have become sentiments,and it is such ideas alone that influence the more recondite motives of our acts and utterances. It cannot be otherwise in the case of crowds.

When by various processes an idea has ended by penetrating into the minds of crowds,it possesses an irresistible power,and brings about a series of effects,opposition to which is bootless. The philosophical ideas which resulted in the French Revolution took nearly a century to implant themselves in the mind of the crowd. Their irresistible force,when once they had taken root,is known. The striving of an entire nation towards the conquest of social equality,and the realisation of abstract rights and ideal liberties,caused the tottering of all thrones and profoundly disturbed the Western world. During twenty years the nations were engaged in internecine conflict,and Europe witnessed hecatombs that would have terrified Ghengis Khan and Tamerlane. The world had never seen on such a scale what may result from the promulgation of an idea.

A long time is necessary for ideas to establish themselves in the minds of crowds,but just as long a time is needed for them to be eradicated. For this reason crowds,as far as ideas are concerned,are always several generations behind learned men and philosophers. All statesmen are well aware today of the admixture of error contained in the fundamental ideas I referred to a short while back,but as the influence of these ideas is still very powerful they are obliged to govern in accordance with principles in the truth of which they have ceased to believe.

2. The Reasoning Power of Crowds

It cannot absolutely be said that crowds do not reason and are not to be influenced by reasoning.

However,the arguments they employ and those which are capable of influencing them are,from a logical point of view,of such an inferior kind that it is only by way of analogy that they can be described as reasoning.

The inferior reasoning of crowds is based,just as is reasoning of a high order,on the association of ideas,but between the ideas associated by crowds there are only apparent bonds of analogy or succession. The mode of reasoning of crowds resembles that of the Esquimaux who,knowing from experience that ice,a transparent body,melts in the mouth,concludes that glass,also a transparent body,should also melt in the mouth; or that of the savage who imagines that by eating the heart of a courageous foe he acquires his bravery; or of the workman who,having been exploited by one employer of labour,immediately concludes that all employers exploit their men.

The characteristics of the reasoning of crowds are the association of dissimilar things possessing a merely apparent connection between each other,and the immediate generalisation of particular cases. It is arguments of this kind that are always presented to crowds by those who know how to manage them. They are the only arguments by which crowds are to be influenced. A chain of logical argumentation is totally incomprehensible to crowds,and for this reason it is permissible to say that they do not reason or that they reason falsely and are not to be influenced by reasoning. Astonishment is felt at times on reading certain speeches at their weakness,and yet they had an enormous influence on the crowds which listened to them,but it is forgotten that they were intended to persuade collectivities and not to be read by philosophers. An orator in intimate communication with a crowd can evoke images by which it will be seduced. If he is successful his object has been attained,and twenty volumes of harangues — always the outcome of reflection — are not worth the few phrases which appealed to the brains it was required to convince.

It would be superfluous to add that the powerlessness of crowds to reason aright prevents them displaying any trace of the critical spirit,prevents them,that is,from being capable of discerning truth from error,or of forming a precise judgment on any matter. Judgments accepted by crowds are merely judgments forced upon them and never judgments adopted after discussion. In regard to this matter the inpiduals who do not rise above the level of a crowd are numerous. The ease with which certain opinions obtain general acceptance results more especially from the impossibility experienced by the majority of men of forming an opinion peculiar to themselves and based on reasoning of their own.

3. The Imagination of Crowds

Just as is the case with respect to persons in whom the reasoning power is absent,the figurative imagination of crowds is very powerful,very active and very susceptible of being keenly impressed. The images evoked in their mind by a personage,an event,an accident,are almost as lifelike as the reality. Crowds are to some extent in the position of the sleeper whose reason,suspended for the time being,allows the arousing in his mind of images of extreme intensity which would quickly be dissipated could they be submitted to the action of reflection. Crowds,being incapable both of reflection and of reasoning,are devoid of the notion of improbability; and it is to be noted that in a general way it is the most improbable things that are the most striking.

This is why it happens that it is always the marvellous and legendary side of events that more specially strike crowds. When a civilisation is analysed it is seen that,in reality,it is the marvellous and the legendary that are its true supports. Appearances have always played a much more important part than reality in history,where the unreal is always of greater moment than the real.

Crowds being only capable of thinking in images are only to be impressed by images. It is only images that terrify or attract them and become motives of action.

For this reason theatrical representations,in which the image is shown in its most clearly visible shape,always have an enormous influence on crowds. Bread and spectacular shows constituted for the plebeians of ancient Rome the ideal of happiness,and they asked for nothing more. Throughout the successive ages this ideal has scarcely varied. Nothing has a greater effect on the imagination of crowds of every category than theatrical representations. The entire audience experiences at the same time the same emotions,and if these emotions are not at once transformed into acts,it is because the most unconscious spectator cannot ignore that he is the victim of illusions,and that he has laughed or wept over imaginary adventures. Sometimes,however,the sentiments suggested by the images are so strong that they tend,like habitual suggestions,to transform themselves into acts. The story has often been told of the manager of a popular theatre who,in consequence of his only playing sombre dramas,was obliged to have the actor who took the part of the traitor protected on his leaving the theatre,to defend him against the violence of the spectators,indignant at the crimes,imaginary though they were,which the traitor had committed. We have here,in my opinion,one of the most remarkable indications of the mental state of crowds,and especially of the facility with which they are suggestioned. The unreal has almost as much influence on them as the real. They have an evident tendency not to distinguish between the two.

The power of conquerors and the strength of States is based on the popular imagination. It is more particularly by working upon this imagination that crowds are led. All great historical facts,the rise of Buddhism,of Christianity,of Islamism,the Reformation,the French Revolution,and,in our own time,the threatening invasion of Socialism are the direct or indirect consequences of strong impressions produced on the imagination of the crowd.

Moreover,all the great statesmen of every age and every country,including the most absolute despots,have regarded the popular imagination as the basis of their power,and they have never attempted to govern in opposition to it “It was by becoming a Catholic,” said Napoleon to the Council of State,“that I terminated the Vendéen war. By becoming a Mussulman that I obtained a footing in Egypt. By becoming an Ultramontane that I won over the Italian priests,and had I to govern a nation of Jews I would rebuild Solomon's temple.” Never perhaps since Alexander and Caesar has any great man better understood how the imagination of the crowd should be impressed. His constant preoccupation was to strike it. He bore it in mind in his victories,in his harangues,in his speeches,in all his acts. On his deathbed it was still in his thoughts.

How is the imagination of crowds to be impressed? We shall soon see. Let us confine ourselves for the moment to saying that the feat is never to be achieved by attempting to work upon the intelligence or reasoning faculty,that is to say,by way of demonstration. It was not by means of cunning rhetoric that Antony succeeded in making the populace rise against the murderers of Csar; it was by reading his will to the multitude and pointing to his corpse.

Whatever strikes the imagination of crowds presents itself under the shape of a startling and very clear image,freed from all accessory explanation,or merely having as accompaniment a few marvellous or mysterious facts: examples in point are a great victory,a great miracle,a great crime,or a great hope. Things must be laid before the crowd as a whole,and their genesis must never be indicated. A hundred petty crimes or petty accidents will not strike the imagination of crowds in the least,whereas a single great crime or a single great accident will profoundly impress them,even though the results be infinitely less disastrous than those of the hundred small accidents put together. The epidemic of influenza,which caused the death but a few years ago of five thousand persons in Paris alone,made very little impression on the popular imagination. The reason was that this veritable hecatomb was not embodied in any visible image,but was only learnt from statistical information furnished weekly. An accident which should have caused the death of only five hundred instead of five thousand persons,but on the same day and in public,as the outcome of an accident appealing strongly to the eye,by the fall,for instance,of the Eiffel Tower,would have produced,on the contrary,an immense impression on the imagination of the crowd. The probable loss of a transatlantic steamer that was supposed,in the absence of news,to have gone down in midocean profoundly impressed the imagination of the crowd for a whole week. Yet official statistics show that 850 sailing vessels and 203 steamers were lost in the year 1894 alone. The crowd,however,was never for a moment concerned by these successive losses,much more important though they were as far as regards the destruction of life and property,than the loss of the Atlantic liner in question could possibly have been.

It is not,then,the facts in themselves that strike the popular imagination,but the way in which they take place and are brought under notice. It is necessary that by their condensation,if I may thus express myself,they should produce a startling image which fills and besets the mind. To know the art of impressing the imagination of crowds is to know at the same time the art of governing them.

Chapter IV. A Religious Shape Assumed by All the Convictions of Crowds

All political, pine, and social creeds only take root among them on the condition of always assuming the religious shape — a shape which obviates the danger of discussion. Were it possible to induce the masses to adopt atheism, this belief would exhibit all the intolerant ardour of a religious sentiment, and in its exterior forms would soon become a cult.

Abstract:What is meant by the religious sentiment — It is independent of the worship of a pinity — Its characteristics — The strength of convictions assuming a religious shape — Various examples — Popular gods have never disappeared — New forms under which they are revived — Religious forms of atheism — Importance of these notions from the historical point of view — The Reformation,Saint Bartholomew,the Terror,and all analogous events are the result of the religious sentiments of crowds and not of the will of isolated inpiduals.

We have shown that crowds do not reason,that they accept or reject ideas as a whole,that they tolerate neither discussion nor contradiction,and that the suggestions brought to bear on them invade the entire field of their understanding and tend at once to transform themselves into acts. We have shown that crowds suitably influenced are ready to sacrifice themselves for the ideal with which they have been inspired. We have also seen that they only entertain violent and extreme sentiments,that in their case sympathy quickly becomes adoration,and antipathy almost as soon as it is aroused is transformed into hatred. These general indications furnish us already with a presentiment of the nature of the convictions of crowds.

When these convictions are closely examined,whether at epochs marked by fervent religious faith,or by great political upheavals such as those of the last century,it is apparent that they always assume a peculiar form which I cannot better define than by giving it the name of a religious sentiment.

This sentiment has very simple characteristics,such as worship of a being supposed superior,fear of the power with which the being is credited,blind submission to its commands,inability to discuss its dogmas,the desire to spread them,and a tendency to consider as enemies all by whom they are not accepted. Whether such a sentiment apply to an invisible God,to a wooden or stone idol,to a hero or to a political conception,provided that it presents the preceding characteristics,its essence always remains religious. The supernatural and the miraculous are found to be present to the same extent. Crowds unconsciously accord a mysterious power to the political formula or the victorious leader that for the moment arouses their enthusiasm.

A person is not religious solely when he worships a pinity,but when he puts all the resources of his mind,the complete submission of his will,and the wholesouled ardour of fanaticism at the service of a cause or an inpidual who becomes the goal and guide of his thoughts and actions.

Intolerance and fanaticism are the necessary accompaniments of the religious sentiment. They are inevitably displayed by those who believe themselves in the possession of the secret of earthly or eternal happiness. These two characteristics are to be found in all men grouped together when they are inspired by a conviction of any kind. The Jacobins of the Reign of Terror were at bottom as religious as the Catholics of the Inquisition,and their cruel ardour proceeded from the same source.

The convictions of crowds assume those characteristics of blind submission,fierce intolerance,and the need of violent propaganda which are inherent in the religious sentiment,and it is for this reason that it may be said that all their beliefs have a religious form. The hero acclaimed by a crowd is a veritable god for that crowd. Napoleon was such a god for fifteen years,and a pinity never had more fervent worshippers or sent men to their death with greater ease. The Christian and Pagan Gods never exercised a more absolute empire over the minds that had fallen under their sway.

All founders of religious or political creeds have established them solely because they were successful in inspiring crowds with those fanatical sentiments which have as result that men find their happiness in worship and obedience and are ready to lay down their lives for their idol. This has been the case at all epochs. Fustel de Coulanges,in his excellent work on Roman Gaul,justly remarks that the Roman Empire was in no wise maintained by force,but by the religious admiration it inspired. “It would be without a parallel in the history of the world,” he observes rightly,“that a form of government held in popular detestation should have lasted for five centuries.... It would be inexplicable that the thirty legions of the Empire should have constrained a hundred million men to obedience.” The reason of their obedience was that the Emperor,who personified the greatness of Rome,was worshipped like a pinity by unanimous consent. There were altars in honour of the Emperor in the smallest townships of his realm. “From one end of the Empire to the other a new religion was seen to arise in those days which had for its pinities the emperors themselves. Some years before the Christian era the whole of Gaul,represented by sixty cities,built in common a temple near the town of Lyons in honour of Augustus.... Its priests,elected by the united Gallic cities,were the principal personages in their country.... It is impossible to attribute all this to fear and servility. Whole nations are not servile,and especially for three centuries. It was not the courtiers who worshipped the prince,it was Rome,and it was not Rome merely,but it was Gaul,it was Spain,it was Greece and Asia.”

Today the majority of the great men who have swayed men's minds no longer have altars,but they have statues,or their portraits are in the hands of their admirers,and the cult of which they are the object is not notably different from that accorded to their predecessors. An understanding of the philosophy of history is only to be got by a thorough appreciation of this fundamental point of the psychology of crowds. The crowd demands a god before everything else.

It must not be supposed that these are the superstitions of a bygone age which reason has definitely banished. Sentiment has never been vanquished in its eternal conflict with reason. Crowds will hear no more of the words pinity and religion,in whose name they were so long enslaved; but they have never possessed so many fetishes as in the last hundred years,and the old pinities have never had so many statues and altars raised in their honour. Those who in recent years have studied the popular movement known under the name of Boulangism have been able to see with what ease the religious instincts of crowds are ready to revive. There was not a country inn that did not possess the hero's portrait. He was credited with the power of remedying all injustices and all evils,and thousands of men would have given their lives for him. Great might have been his place in history had his character been at all on a level with his legendary reputation.

It is thus a very useless commonplace to assert that a religion is necessary for the masses,because all political,pine,and social creeds only take root among them on the condition of always assuming the religious shape — a shape which obviates the danger of discussion. Were it possible to induce the masses to adopt atheism,this belief would exhibit all the intolerant ardour of a religious sentiment,and in its exterior forms would soon become a cult. The evolution of the small Positivist sect furnishes us a curious proof in point. What happened to the Nihilist whose story is related by that profound thinker Dostoewsky has quickly happened to the Positivists. Illumined one day by the light of reason he broke the images of pinities and saints that adorned the altar of a chapel,extinguished the candles,and,without losing a moment,replaced the destroyed objects by the works of atheistic philosophers such as Büchner and Moleschott,after which he piously relighted the candles. The object of his religious beliefs had been transformed,but can it be truthfully said that his religious sentiments had changed?

Certain historical events — and they are precisely the most important — I again repeat,are not to be understood unless one has attained to an appreciation of the religious form which the convictions of crowds always assume in the long run. There are social phenomena that need to be studied far more from the point of view of the psychologist than from that of the naturalist. The great historian Taine has only studied the Revolution as a naturalist,and on this account the real genesis of events has often escaped him. He has perfectly observed the facts,but from want of having studied the psychology of crowds he has not always been able to trace their causes. The facts having appalled him by their bloodthirsty,anarchic,and ferocious side,he has scarcely seen in the heroes of the great drama anything more than a horde of epileptic savages abandoning themselves without restraint to their instincts. The violence of the Revolution,its massacres,its need of propaganda,its declarations of war upon all things,are only to be properly explained by reflecting that the Revolution was merely the establishment of a new religious belief in the mind of the masses. The Reformation,the massacre of Saint Bartholomew,the French religious wars,the Inquisition,the Reign of Terror are phenomena of an identical kind,brought about by crowds animated by those religious sentiments which necessarily lead those imbued with them to pitilessly extirpate by fire and sword whoever is opposed to the establishment of the new faith. The methods of the Inquisition are those of all whose convictions are genuine and sturdy. Their convictions would not deserve these epithets did they resort to other methods.

Upheavals analogous to those I have just cited are only possible when it is the soul of the masses that brings them about. The most absolute despots could not cause them. When historians tell us that the massacre of Saint Bartholomew was the work of a king,they show themselves as ignorant of the psychology of crowds as of that of sovereigns. Manifestations of this order can only proceed from the soul of crowds. The most absolute power of the most despotic monarch can scarcely do more than hasten or retard the moment of their apparition. The massacre of Saint Bartholomew or the religious wars were no more the work of kings than the Reign of Terror was the work of Robespierre,Danton,or Saint Just. At the bottom of such events is always to be found the working of the soul of the masses,and never the power of potentates.

Book II. The Opinions and Beliefs of Crowds

Chapter I. Remote Factors of the Opinions and Beliefs of Crowds

There have had no difficulty in showing that instruction neither renders a man more moral nor happier, that it changes neither his instincts nor his hereditary passions, and that at times — for this to happen it need only be badly directed — it is much more pernicious than useful.

Abstract:Preparatory factors of the beliefs of crowds — The origin of the beliefs of crowds is the consequence of a preliminary process of elaboration — Study of the different factors of these beliefs. 1. Race. The predominating influence it exercises — It represents the suggestions of ancestors. 2. Traditions. They are the synthesis of the soul of the race — Social importance of traditions — How,after having been necessary,they become harmful — Crowds are the most obstinate maintainers of traditional ideas. 3. Time. It prepares in succession the establishment of beliefs and then their destruction. It is by the aid of this factor that order may proceed from chaos. 4. Political and Social Institutions. Erroneous idea of their part — Their influence extremely weak — They are effects,not causes — Nations are incapable of choosing what appear to them the best institutions — Institutions are labels which shelter the most dissimilar things under the same title — How institutions may come to be created — Certain institutions theoretically bad,such as centralization obligatory for certain nations. 5. Institutions and education. Falsity of prevalent ideas as to the influence of instruction on crowds — Statistical indications — Demoralising effect of Latin system of education — Part instruction might play — Examples furnished by various peoples.

Having studied the mental constitution of crowds and become acquainted with their modes of feeling,thinking,and reasoning,we shall now proceed to examine how their opinions and beliefs arise and become established.

The factors which determine these opinions and beliefs are of two kinds: remote factors and immediate factors.

The remote factors are those which render crowds capable of adopting certain convictions and absolutely refractory to the acceptance of others. These factors prepare the ground in which are suddenly seen to germinate certain new ideas whose force and consequences are a cause of astonishment,though they are only spontaneous in appearance. The outburst and putting in practice of certain ideas among crowds present at times a startling suddenness. This is only a superficial effect,behind which must be sought a preliminary and preparatory action of long duration.

The immediate factors are those which,coming on the top of this long,preparatory working,in whose absence they would remain without effect,serve as the source of active persuasion on crowds; that is,they are the factors which cause the idea to take shape and set it loose with all its consequences. The resolutions by which collectivities are suddenly carried away arise out of these immediate factors; it is due to them that a riot breaks out or a strike is decided upon,and to them that enormous majorities invest one man with power to overthrow a government.

The successive action of these two kinds of factors is to be traced in all great historical events. The French Revolution — to cite but one of the most striking of such events — had among its remote factors the writings of the philosophers,the exactions of the nobility,and the progress of scientific thought. The mind of the masses,thus prepared,was then easily roused by such immediate factors as the speeches of orators,and the resistance of the court party to insignificant reforms.

Among the remote factors there are some of a general nature,which are found to underlie all the beliefs and opinions of crowds. They are race,traditions,time,institutions,and education.

We now proceed to study the influence of these different factors.

1. Race

This factor,race,must be placed in the first rank,for in itself it far surpasses in importance all the others. We have sufficiently studied it in another work; it is therefore needless to deal with it again.

We showed,in a previous volume,what an historical race is,and how,its character once formed,it possesses,as the result of the laws of heredity such power that its beliefs,institutions,and arts — in a word,all the elements of its civilisation — are merely the outward expression of its genius. We showed that the power of the race is such that no element can pass from one people to another without undergoing the most profound transformations.

Environment,circumstances,and events represent the social suggestions of the moment. They may have a considerable influence,but this influence is always momentary if it be contrary to the suggestions of the race; that is,to those which are inherited by a nation from the entire series of its ancestors.

We shall have occasion in several of the chapters of this work to touch again upon racial influence,and to show that this influence is so great that it dominates the characteristics peculiar to the genius of crowds. It follows from this fact that the crowds of different countries offer very considerable differences of beliefs and conduct and are not to be influenced in the same manner.

2. Traditions

Traditions represent the ideas,the needs,and the sentiments of the past. They are the synthesis of the race,and weigh upon us with immense force.

The biological sciences have been transformed since embryology has shown the immense influence of the past on the evolution of living beings; and the historical sciences will not undergo a less change when this conception has become more widespread. As yet it is not sufficiently general,and many statesmen are still no further advanced than the theorists of the last century,who believed that a society could break off with its past and be entirely recast on lines suggested solely by the light of reason.

A people is an organism created by the past,and,like every other organism,it can only be modified by slow hereditary accumulations.

It is tradition that guides men,and more especially so when they are in a crowd. The changes they can effect in their traditions with any ease,merely bear,as I have often repeated,upon names and outward forms.

This circumstance is not to be regretted. Neither a national genius nor civilisation would be possible without traditions. In consequence man's two great concerns since he has existed have been to create a network of traditions which he afterwards endeavours to destroy when their beneficial effects have worn themselves out. Civilisation is impossible without traditions,and progress impossible without the destruction of those traditions. The difficulty,and it is an immense difficulty,is to find a proper equilibrium between stability and variability. Should a people allow its customs to become too firmly rooted,it can no longer change,and becomes,like China,incapable of improvement. Violent revolutions are in this case of no avail; for what happens is that either the broken fragments of the chain are pieced together again and the past resumes its empire without change,or the fragments remain apart and decadence soon succeeds anarchy.

The ideal for a people is in consequence to preserve the institutions of the past,merely changing them insensibly and little by little. This ideal is difficult to realise. The Romans in ancient and the English in modern times are almost alone in having realised it.

It is precisely crowds that cling the most tenaciously to traditional ideas and oppose their being changed with the most obstinacy. This is notably the case with the category of crowds constituting castes. I have already insisted upon the conservative spirit of crowds,and shown that the most violent rebellions merely end in a changing of words and terms. At the end of the last century,in the presence of destroyed churches,of priests expelled the country or guillotined,it might have been thought that the old religious ideas had lost all their strength,and yet a few years had barely lapsed before the abolished system of public worship had to be re-established in deference to universal demands.

Blotted out for a moment,the old traditions had resumed their sway.

No example could better display the power of tradition on the mind of crowds. The most redoubtable idols do not dwell in temples,nor the most despotic tyrants in palaces; both the one and the other can be broken in an instant. But the invisible masters that reign in our innermost selves are safe from every effort at revolt,and only yield to the slow wearing away of centuries.

3. Time

In social as in biological problems time is one of the most energetic factors. It is the sole real creator and the sole great destroyer. It is time that has made mountains with grains of sand and raised the obscure cell of geological eras to human dignity. The action of centuries is sufficient to transform any given phenomenon. It has been justly observed that an ant with enough time at its disposal could level Mount Blanc. A being possessed of the magical force of varying time at his will would have the power attributed by believers to God.

In this place,however,we have only to concern ourselves with the influence of time on the genesis of the opinions of crowds. Its action from this point of view is still immense. Dependent upon it are the great forces such as race,which cannot form themselves without it. It causes the birth,the growth,and the death of all beliefs. It is by the aid of time that they acquire their strength and also by its aid that they lose it.

It is time in particular that prepares the opinions and beliefs of crowds,or at least the soil on which they will germinate. This is why certain ideas are realisable at one epoch and not at another. It is time that accumulates that immense detritus of beliefs and thoughts on which the ideas of a given period spring up. They do not grow at hazard and by chance; the roots of each of them strike down into a long past. When they blossom it is time that has prepared their blooming; and to arrive at a notion of their genesis it is always back in the past that it is necessary to search. They are the daughters of the past and the mothers of the future,but throughout the slaves of time.

Time,in consequence,is our veritable master,and it suffices to leave it free to act to see all things transformed. At the present day we are very uneasy with regard to the threatening aspirations of the masses and the destructions and upheavals foreboded thereby. Time,without other aid,will see to the restoration of equilibrium. “No form of government,” M.Lavisse very properly writes,“was founded in a day. Political and social organisations are works that demand centuries. The feudal system existed for centuries in a shapeless,chaotic state before it found its laws; absolute monarchy also existed for centuries before arriving at regular methods of government,and these periods of expectancy were extremely troubled.”

4. Political and Social Institutions

The idea that institutions can remedy the defects of societies,that national progress is the consequence of the improvement of institutions and governments,and that social changes can be effected by decrees — this idea,I say,is still generally accepted. It was the starting-point of the French Revolution,and the social theories of the present day are based upon it.

The most continuous experience has been unsuccessful in shaking this grave delusion. Philosophers and historians have endeavoured in vain to prove its absurdity,but yet they have had no difficulty in demonstrating that institutions are the outcome of ideas,sentiments,and customs,and that ideas,sentiments,and customs are not to be recast by recasting legislative codes. A nation does not choose its institutions at will any more than it chooses the colour of its hair or its eyes. Institutions and governments are the product of the race. They are not the creators of an epoch,but are created by it. Peoples are not governed in accordance with their caprices of the moment,but as their character determines that they shall be governed. Centuries are required to form a political system and centuries needed to change it. Institutions have no intrinsic virtue: in themselves they are neither good nor bad. Those which are good at a given moment for a given people may be harmful in the extreme for another nation.

Moreover,it is in no way in the power of a people to really change its institutions. Undoubtedly,at the cost of violent revolutions,it can change their name,but in their essence they remain unmodified. The names are mere futile labels with which an historian who goes to the bottom of things need scarcely concern himself. It is in this way,for instance,that England,the most democratic country in the world,lives,nevertheless,under a monarchical régime,whereas the countries in which the most oppressive despotism is rampant are the Spanish-American Republics,in spite of their republican constitutions. The destinies of peoples are determined by their character and not by their government. I have endeavoured to establish this view in my previous volume by setting forth categorical examples.

To lose time in the manufacture of cut-and-dried constitutions is,in consequence,a puerile task,the useless labour of an ignorant rhetorician. Necessity and time undertake the charge of elaborating constitutions when we are wise enough to allow these two factors to act. This is the plan the Anglo-Saxons have adopted,as their great historian,Macaulay,teaches us in a passage that the politicians of all Latin countries ought to learn by heart. After having shown all the good that can be accomplished by laws which appear from the point of view of pure reason a chaos of absurdities and contradictions,he compares the scores of constitutions that have been engulphed in the convulsions of the Latin peoples with that of England,and points out that the latter has only been very slowly changed part by part,under the influence of immediate necessities and never of speculative reasoning.

“To think nothing of symmetry and much of convenience; never to remove an anomaly merely because it is an anomaly; never to innovate except when some grievance is felt; never to innovate except so far as to get rid of the grievance; never to lay down any proposition of wider extent than the particular case for which it is necessary to provide; these are the rules which have,from the age of John to the age of Victoria,generally guided the deliberations of our two hundred and fifty Parliaments.”

It would be necessary to take one by one the laws and institutions of each people to show to what extent they are the expression of the needs of each race and are incapable,for that reason,of being violently transformed. It is possible,for instance,to indulge in philosophical dissertations on the advantages and disadvantages of centralisation; but when we see a people composed of very different races devote a thousand years of efforts to attaining to this centralisation; when we observe that a great revolution,having for object the destruction of all the institutions of the past,has been forced to respect this centralisation,and has even strengthened it; under these circumstances we should admit that it is the outcome of imperious needs,that it is a condition of the existence of the nation in question,and we should pity the poor mental range of politicians who talk of destroying it. Could they by chance succeed in this attempt,their success would at once be the signal for a frightful civil war,which,moreover,would immediately bring back a new system of centralisation much more oppressive than the old.

The conclusion to be drawn from what precedes is,that it is not in institutions that the means is to be sought of profoundly influencing the genius of the masses. When we see certain countries,such as the United States,reach a high degree of prosperity under democratic institutions,while others,such as the Spanish-American Republics,are found existing in a pitiable state of anarchy under absolutely similar institutions,we should admit that these institutions are as foreign to the greatness of the one as to the decadence of the others. Peoples are governed by their character,and all institutions which are not intimately modelled on that character merely represent a borrowed garment,a transitory disguise. No doubt sanguinary wars and violent revolutions have been undertaken,and will continue to be undertaken,to impose institutions to which is attributed,as to the relics of saints,the supernatural power of creating welfare. It may be said,then,in one sense,that institutions react on the mind of the crowd inasmuch as they engender such upheavals. But in reality it is not the institutions that react in this manner,since we know that,whether triumphant or vanquished,they possess in themselves no virtue. It is illusions and words that have influenced the mind of the crowd,and especially words — words which are as powerful as they are chimerical,and whose astonishing sway we shall shortly demonstrate.

5. Instruction and Education

Foremost among the dominant ideas of the present epoch is to be found the notion that instruction is capable of considerably changing men,and has for its unfailing consequence to improve them and even to make them equal. By the mere fact of its being constantly repeated,this assertion has ended by becoming one of the most steadfast democratic dogmas. It would be as difficult now to attack it as it would have been formerly to have attacked the dogmas of the Church.

On this point,however,as on many others,democratic ideas are in profound disagreement with the results of psychology and experience. Many eminent philosophers,among them Herbert Spencer,have had no difficulty in showing that instruction neither renders a man more moral nor happier,that it changes neither his instincts nor his hereditary passions,and that at times — for this to happen it need only be badly directed — it is much more pernicious than useful. Statisticians have brought confirmation of these views by telling us that criminality increases with the generalisation of instruction,or at any rate of a certain kind of instruction,and that the worst enemies of society,the anarchists,are recruited among the prize-winners of schools; while in a recent work a distinguished magistrate,M.Adolphe Guillot,made the observation that at present 3,000 educated criminals are met with for every 1,000 illiterate delinquents,and that in fifty years the criminal percentage of the population has passed from 227 to 552 for every 100,000 inhabitants,an increase of 133 percent. He has also noted in common with his colleagues that criminality is particularly on the increase among young persons,for whom,as is known,gratuitous and obligatory schooling has — in France — replaced apprenticeship.

It is not assuredly — and nobody has ever maintained this proposition — that well-directed instruction may not give very useful practical results,if not in the sense of raising the standard of morality,at least in that of developing professional capacity. Unfortunately the Latin peoples,especially in the last twenty-five years,have based their systems of instruction on very erroneous principles,and in spite of the observations of the most eminent minds,such as Bréal,Fustel de Coulanges,Taine,and many others,they persist in their lamentable mistakes. I have myself shown,in a work published some time ago,that the French system of education transforms the majority of those who have undergone it into enemies of society,and recruits numerous disciples for the worst forms of socialism.

The primary danger of this system of education — very properly qualified as Latin — consists in the fact that it is based on the fundamental psychological error that the intelligence is developed by the learning by heart of text-books. Adopting this view,the endeavour has been made to enforce a knowledge of as many hand-books as possible. From the primary school till he leaves the university a young man does nothing but acquire books by heart without his judgment or personal initiative being ever called into play. Education consists for him in reciting by heart and obeying.

“Learning lessons,knowing by heart a grammar or a compendium,repeating well and imitating well — that,” writes a former Minister of Public Instruction,M.Jules Simon,“is a ludicrous form of education whose every effort is an act of faith tacitly admitting the infallibility of the master,and whose only results are a belittling of ourselves and a rendering of us impotent.”

Were this education merely useless,one might confine one's self to expressing compassion for the unhappy children who,instead of making needful studies at the primary school,are instructed in the genealogy of the sons of Clotaire,the conflicts between Neustria and Austrasia,or zoological classifications. But the system presents a far more serious danger. It gives those who have been submitted to it a violent dislike to the state of life in which they were born,and an intense desire to escape from it. The working man no longer wishes to remain a working man,or the peasant to continue a peasant,while the most humble members of the middle classes admit of no possible career for their sons except that of State-paid functionaries. Instead of preparing men for life French schools solely prepare them to occupy public functions,in which success can be attained without any necessity for self-direction or the exhibition of the least glimmer of personal initiative. At the bottom of the social ladder the system creates an army of proletarians discontented with their lot and always ready to revolt,while at the summit it brings into being a frivolous bourgeoisie,at once sceptical and credulous,having a superstitious confidence in the State,whom it regards as a sort of Providence,but without forgetting to display towards it a ceaseless hostility,always laying its own faults to the door of the Government,and incapable of the least enterprise without the intervention of the authorities.

The State,which manufactures by dint of textbooks all these persons possessing diplomas,can only utilise a small number of them,and is forced to leave the others without employment. It is obliged in consequence to resign itself to feeding the first mentioned and to having the others as its enemies. From the top to the bottom of the social pyramid,from the humblest clerk to the professor and the prefect,the immense mass of persons boasting diplomas besiege the professions. While a business man has the greatest difficulty in finding an agent to represent him in the colonies,thousands of candidates solicit the most modest official posts. There are 20,000 schoolmasters and mistresses without employment in the department of the Seine alone,all of them persons who,disdaining the fields or the workshops,look to the State for their livelihood. The number of the chosen being restricted,that of the discontented is perforce immense. The latter are ready for any revolution,whoever be its chiefs and whatever the goal they aim at. The acquisition of knowledge for which no use can be found is a sure method of driving a man to revolt.

It is evidently too late to retrace our steps. Experience alone,that supreme educator of peoples,will be at pains to show us our mistake. It alone will be powerful enough to prove the necessity of replacing our odious text-books and our pitiable examinations by industrial instruction capable of inducing our young men to return to the fields,to the workshop,and to the colonial enterprise which they avoid to-day at all costs.

The professional instruction which all enlightened minds are now demanding was the instruction received in the past by our forefathers. It is still in vigour at the present day among the nations who rule the world by their force of will,their initiative,and their spirit of enterprise. In a series of remarkable pages,whose principal passages I reproduce further on,a great thinker,M.Taine,has clearly shown that our former system of education was approximately that in vogue today in England and America,and in a remarkable parallel between the Latin and Anglo-Saxon systems he has plainly pointed out the consequences of the two methods.

One might consent,perhaps,at a pinch,to continue to accept all the disadvantages of our classical education,although it produced nothing but discontented men,and men unfitted for their station in life,did the superficial acquisition of so much knowledge,the faultless repeating by heart of so many text-books,raise the level of intelligence. But does it really raise this level? Alas,no! The conditions of success in life are the possession of judgment,experience,initiative,and character — qualities which are not bestowed by books. Books are dictionaries,which it is useful to consult,but of which it is perfectly useless to have lengthy portions in one's head.

How is it possible for professional instruction to develop the intelligence in a measure quite beyond the reach of classical instruction? This has been well shown by M.Taine.

“Ideas,he says,are only formed in their natural and normal surroundings; the promotion of the growth is effected by the innumerable impressions appealing to the senses which a young man receives daily in the workshop,the mine,the law court,the study,the builder's yard,the hospital; at the sight of tools,materials,and operations; in the presence of customers,workers,and labour,of work well or ill done,costly or lucrative. In such a way are obtained those trifling perceptions of detail of the eyes,the ear,the hands,and even the sense of smell,which,picked up involuntarily,and silently elaborated,take shape within the learner,and suggest to him sooner or,later this or that new combination,simplification,economy,improvement,or invention. The young Frenchman is deprived,and precisely at the age when they are most fruitful,of all these precious contacts,of all these indispensable elements of assimilation. For seven or eight years on end he is shut up in a school,and is cut off from that direct personal experience which would give him a keen and exact notion of men and things and of the various ways of handling them.”

“... At least nine out of ten have wasted their time and pains during several years of their life — telling,important,even decisive years. Among such are to be counted,first of all,the half or two-thirds of those who present themselves for examination — I refer to those who are rejected; and then among those who are successful,who obtain a degree,a certificate,a diploma,there is still a half or two-thirds — I refer to the overworked. Too much has been demanded of them by exacting that on a given day,on a chair or before a board,they should,for two hours in succession,and with respect to a group of sciences,be living repertories of all human knowledge. In point of fact they were that,or nearly so,for two hours on that particular day,but a month later they are so no longer. They could not go through the examination again. Their too numerous and too burdensome acquisitions slip incessantly from their mind,and are not replaced. Their mental vigour has declined,their fertile capacity for growth has dried up,the fully-developed man appears,and he is often a used up man. Settled down,married,resigned to turning in a circle,and indefinitely in the same circle,he shuts himself up in his confined function,which he fulfils adequately,but nothing more. Such is the average yield: assuredly the receipts do not balance the expenditure. In England or America,where,as in France previous to 1789,the contrary proceeding is adopted,the outcome obtained is equal or superior.”

The illustrious psychologist subsequently shows us the difference between our system and that of the Anglo-Saxons. The latter do not possess our innumerable special schools. With them instruction is not based on book-learning,but on object lessons. The engineer,for example,is trained in a workshop,and never at a school; a method which allows of each inpidual reaching the level his intelligence permits of. He becomes a workman or a foreman if he can get no further,an engineer if his aptitudes take him as far. This manner of proceeding is much more democratic and of much greater benefit to society than that of making the whole career of an inpidual depend on an examination,lasting a few hours,and undergone at the age of nineteen or twenty.

“In the hospital,the mine,the factory,in the architect's or the lawyer's office,the student,who makes a start while very young,goes through his apprenticeship,stage by stage,much as does with us a law clerk in his office,or an artist in his studio. Previously,and before making a practical beginning,he has had an opportunity of following some general and summary course of instruction,so as to have a framework ready prepared in which to store the observations he is shortly to make. Furthermore he is able,as a rule,to avail himself of sundry technical courses which he can follow in his leisure hours,so as to coordinate step by step the daily experience he is gathering. Under such a system the practical capabilities increase and develop of themselves in exact proportion to the faculties of the student,and in the direction requisite for his future task and the special work for which from now onwards he desires to fit himself. By this means in England or the United States a young man is quickly in a position to develop his capacity to the utmost. At twenty-five years of age,and much sooner if the material and the parts are there,he is not merely a useful performer,he is capable also of spontaneous enterprise; he is not only a part of a machine,but also a motor. In France,where the contrary system prevails — in France,which with each succeeding generation is falling more and more into line with China — the sum total of the wasted forces is enormous.”

The great philosopher arrives at the following conclusion with respect to the growing incongruity between our Latin system of education and the requirements of practical life: —

“In the three stages of instruction,those of childhood,adolescence and youth,the theoretical and pedagogic preparation by books on the school benches has lengthened out and become overcharged in view of the examination,the degree,the diploma,and the certificate,and solely in this view,and by the worst methods,by the application of an unnatural and anti-social régime,by the excessive postponement of the practical apprenticeship,by our boarding-school system,by artificial training and mechanical cramming,by overwork,without thought for the time that is to follow,for the adult age and the functions of the man,without regard for the real world on which the young man will shortly be thrown,for the society in which we move and to which he must be adapted or be taught to resign himself in advance,for the struggle in which humanity is engaged,and in which to defend himself and to keep his footing he ought previously to have been equipped,armed,trained,and hardened. This indispensable equipment,this acquisition of more importance than any other,this sturdy common sense and nerve and will-power our schools do not procure the young Frenchman; on the contrary,far from qualifying him for his approaching and definite state,they disqualify him. In consequence,his entry into the world and his first steps in the field of action are most often merely a succession of painful falls,whose effect is that he long remains wounded and bruised,and sometimes disabled for life. The test is severe and dangerous. In the course of it the mental and moral equilibrium is affected,and runs the risk of not being re-established. Too sudden and complete disillusion has supervened. The deceptions have been too great,the disappointments too keen.”

Have we digressed in what precedes from the psychology of crowds? Assuredly not. If we desire to understand the ideas and beliefs that are germinating to-day in the masses,and will spring up tomorrow,it is necessary to know how the ground has been prepared. The instruction given the youth of a country allows of a knowledge of what that country will one day be. The education accorded the present generation justifies the most gloomy previ-sions. It is in part by instruction and education that the mind of the masses is improved or deteriorated. It was necessary in consequence to show how this mind has been fashioned by the system in vogue,and how the mass of the indifferent and the neutral has become progressively an army of the discontented ready to obey all the suggestions of utopians and rhetoricians. It is in the schoolroom that socialists and anarchists are found nowadays,and that the way is being paved for the approaching period of decadence for the Latin peoples.

Chapter II. The Immediate Factors of the Opinions of Crowds

When studying the imagination of crowds we saw that it is particularly open to the impressions produced by images. These images do not always lie ready to hand, but it is possible to evoke them by the judicious employment of words and formulas.

Abstract:1. Images,words,and formulas. The magical power of words and formulas — The power of words bound up with the images they evoke,and independent of their real sense — These images vary from age to age,and from race to race — The wear and tear of words — Examples of the considerable variations of sense of much-used words — The political utility of baptizing old things with new names when the words by which they were designated produced an unfavourable impression on the masses — Variations of the sense of words in consequence of race differences — The different meanings of the word “democracy” in Europe and America. 2. Illusions. Their importance — They are to be found at the root of all civilisations — The social necessity of illusions — Crowds always prefer them to truths. 3. Experience. Experience alone can fix in the mind of crowds truths become necessary and destroy illusions grown dangerous — Experience is only effective on the condition that it be frequently repeated — The cost of the experiences requisite to persuade crowds. 4. Reason. The nullity of its influence on crowds — Crowds only to be influenced by their unconscious sentiments — The role of logic in history — The secret causes of improbable events.

We have just investigated the remote and preparatory factors which give the mind of crowds a special receptivity,and make possible therein the growth of certain sentiments and certain ideas. It now remains for us to study the factors capable of acting in a direct manner. We shall see in a forthcoming chapter how these factors should be put in force in order that they may produce their full effect.

In the first part of this work we studied the sentiments,ideas,and methods of reasoning of collective bodies,and from the knowledge thus acquired it would evidently be possible to deduce in a general way the means of making an impression on their mind. We already know what strikes the imagination of crowds,and are acquainted with the power and contagiousness of suggestions,of those especially that are presented under the form of images. However,as suggestions may proceed from very different sources,the factors capable of acting on the minds of crowds may differ considerably. It is necessary,then,to study them separately. This is not a useless study. Crowds are somewhat like the sphinx of ancient fable: it is necessary to arrive at a solution of the problems offered by their psychology or to resign ourselves to being devoured by them.

1. Images,Words,and Formulas

When studying the imagination of crowds we saw that it is particularly open to the impressions produced by images. These images do not always lie ready to hand,but it is possible to evoke them by the judicious employment of words and formulas. Handled with art,they possess in sober truth the mysterious power formerly attributed to them by the adepts of magic. They cause the birth in the minds of crowds of the most formidable tempests,which in turn they are capable of stilling. A pyramid far loftier than that of old Cheops could be raised merely with the bones of men who have been victims of the power of words and formulas.

The power of words is bound up with the images they evoke,and is quite independent of their real significance. Words whose sense is the most ill-defined are sometimes those that possess the most influence. Such,for example,are the terms democracy,socialism,equality,liberty,& c.,whose meaning is so vague that bulky volumes do not suffice to precisely fix it. Yet it is certain that a truly magical power is attached to those short syllables,as if they contained the solution of all problems. They synthesise the most perse unconscious aspirations and the hope of their realisation.

Reason and arguments are incapable of combatting certain words and formulas. They are uttered with solemnity in the presence of crowds,and as soon as they have been pronounced an expression of respect is visible on every countenance,and all heads are bowed. By many they are considered as natural forces,as supernatural powers. They evoke grandiose and vague images in men's minds,but this very vagueness that wraps them in obscurity augments their mysterious power. They are the mysterious pinities hidden behind the tabernacle,which the devout only approach in fear and trembling.

The images evoked by words being independent of their sense,they vary from age to age and from people to people,the formulas remaining identical. Certain transitory images are attached to certain words: the word is merely as it were the button of an electric bell that calls them up.

All words and all formulas do not possess the power of evoking images,while there are some which have once had this power,but lose it in the course of use,and cease to waken any response in the mind. They then become vain sounds,whose principal utility is to relieve the person who employs them of the obligation of thinking. Armed with a small stock of formulas and commonplaces learnt while we are young,we possess all that is needed to traverse life without the tiring necessity of having to reflect on anything whatever.

If any particular language be studied,it is seen that the words of which it is composed change rather slowly in the course of ages,while the images these words evoke or the meaning attached to them changes ceaselessly. This is the reason why,in another work,I have arrived at the conclusion that the absolute translation of a language,especially of a dead language,is totally impossible. What do we do in reality when we substitute a French for a Latin,Greek,or Sanscrit expression,or even when we endeavour to understand a book written in our own tongue two or three centuries back? We merely put the images and ideas with which modern life has endowed our intelligence in the place of absolutely distinct notions and images which ancient life had brought into being in the mind of races submitted to conditions of existence having no analogy with our own. When the men of the Revolution imagined they were copying the Greeks and Romans,what were they doing except giving to ancient words a sense the latter had never had? What resemblance can possibly exist between the institutions of the Greeks and those designated today by corresponding words? A republic at that epoch was an essentially aristocratic institution,formed of a reunion of petty despots ruling over a crowd of slaves kept in the most absolute subjection. These communal aristocracies,based on slavery,could not have existed for a moment without it.

The word “liberty,” again,what signification could it have in any way resembling that we attribute to it today at a period when the possibility of the liberty of thought was not even suspected,and when there was no greater and more exceptional crime than that of discussing the gods,the laws and the customs of the city? What did such a word as “fatherland” signify to an Athenian or Spartan unless it were the cult of Athens or Sparta,and in no wise that of Greece,composed of rival cities always at war with each other? What meaning had the same word “fatherland” among the ancient Gauls,pided into rival tribes and races,and possessing different languages and religions,and who were easily vanquished by Caesar because he always found allies among them? It was Rome that made a country of Gaul by endowing it with political and religious unity. Without going back so far,scarcely two centuries ago,is it to be believed that this same notion of a fatherland was conceived to have the same meaning as at present by French princes like the great Condé,who allied themselves with the foreigner against their sovereign? And yet again,the same word had it not a sense very different from the modern for the French royalist emigrants,who thought they obeyed the laws of honour in fighting against France,and who from their point of view did indeed obey them,since the feudal law bound the vassal to the lord and not to the soil,so that where the sovereign was there was the true fatherland?

Numerous are the words whose meaning has thus profoundly changed from age to age — words which we can only arrive at understanding in the sense in which they were formerly understood after a long effort. It has been said with truth that much study is necessary merely to arrive at conceiving what was signified to our great grandfathers by such words as the “king” and the “royal family.” What,then,is likely to be the case with terms still more complex?

Words,then,have only mobile and transitory significations which change from age to age and people to people; and when we desire to exert an influence by their means on the crowd what it is requisite to know is the meaning given them by the crowd at a given moment,and not the meaning which they formerly had or may yet have for inpiduals of a different mental constitution.

Thus,when crowds have come,as the result of political upheavals or changes of belief,to acquire a profound antipathy for the images evoked by certain words,the first duty of the true statesman is to change the words without,of course,laying hands on the things themselves,the latter being too intimately bound up with the inherited constitution to be transformed. The judicious Tocqueville long ago made the remark that the work of the consulate and the empire consisted more particularly in the clothing with new words of the greater part of the institutions of the past — that is to say,in replacing words evoking disagreeable images in the imagination of the crowd by other words of which the novelty prevented such evocations. The “taille” or tallage has become the land tax; the “gabelle,” the tax on salt; the “aids,” the indirect contributions and the consolidated duties; the tax on trade companies and guilds,the license,& c.

One of the most essential functions of statesmen consists,then,in baptizing with popular or,at any rate,indifferent words things the crowd cannot endure under their old names. The power of words is so great that it suffices to designate in well-chosen terms the most odious things to make them acceptable to crowds. Taine justly observes that it was by invoking liberty and fraternity — words very popular at the time — that the Jacobins were able “to install a despotism worthy of Dahomey,a tribunal similar to that of the Inquisition,and to accomplish human hecatombs akin to those of ancient Mexico.” The art of those who govern,as is the case with the art of advocates,consists above all in the science of employing words. One of the greatest difficulties of this art is,that in one and the same society the same words most often have very different meanings for the different social classes,who employ in appearance the same words,but never speak the same language.

In the preceding examples it is especially time that has been made to intervene as the principal factor in the changing of the meaning of words. If,however,we also make race intervene,we shall then see that,at the same period,among peoples equally civilised but of different race,the same words very often correspond to extremely dissimilar ideas. It is impossible to understand these differences without having travelled much,and for this reason I shall not insist upon them. I shall confine myself to observing that it is precisely the words most often employed by the masses which among different peoples possess the most different meanings. Such is the case,for instance,with the words “democracy” and “socialism” in such frequent use nowadays.

In reality they correspond to quite contrary ideas and images in the Latin and Anglo-Saxon mind. For the Latin peoples the word “democracy” signifies more especially the subordination of the will and the initiative of the inpidual to the will and the initiative of the community represented by the State. It is the State that is charged,to a greater and greater degree,with the direction of everything,the centralisation,the monopolisation,and the manufacture of everything. To the State it is that all parties without exception,radicals,socialists,or monarchists,constantly appeal. Among the Anglo-Saxons and notably in America this same word “democracy” signifies,on the contrary,the intense development of the will of the inpidual,and as complete a subordination as possible of the State,which,with the exception of the police,the army,and diplomatic relations,is not allowed the direction of anything,not even of public instruction. It is seen,then,that the same word which signifies for one people the subordination of the will and the initiative of the inpidual and the preponderance of the State,signifies for another the excessive development of the will and the initiative of the inpidual and the complete subordination of the State.

2. Illusions

From the dawn of civilisation onwards crowds have always undergone the influence of illusions. It is to the creators of illusions that they have raised more temples,statues,and altars than to any other class of men. Whether it be the religious illusions of the past or the philosophic and social illusions of the present,these formidable sovereign powers are always found at the head of all the civilisations that have successively flourished on our planet. It is in their name that were built the temples of Chaldea and Egypt and the religious edifices of the Middle Ages,and that a vast upheaval shook the whole of Europe a century ago,and there is not one of our political,artistic,or social conceptions that is free from their powerful impress. Occasionally,at the cost of terrible disturbances,man overthrows them,but he seems condemned to always set them up again. Without them he would never have emerged from his primitive barbarian state,and without them again he would soon return to it. Doubtless they are futile shadows; but these children of our dreams have forced the nations to create whatever the arts may boast of splendour or civilisation of greatness.

“If one destroyed in museums and libraries,if one hurled down on the flagstones before the churches all the works and all the monuments of art that religions have inspired,what would remain of the great dreams of humanity? To give to men that portion of hope and illusion without which they cannot live,such is the reason for the existence of gods,heroes,and poets. During fifty years science appeared to undertake this task. But science has been compromised in hearts hungering after the ideal,because it does not dare to be lavish enough of promises,because it cannot lie.”

The philosophers of the last century devoted themselves with fervour to the destruction of the religious,political,and social illusions on which our forefathers had lived for a long tale of centuries. By destroying them they have dried up the springs of hope and resignation. Behind the immolated chimeras they came face to face with the blind and silent forces of nature,which are inexorable to weakness and ignore pity.

Notwithstanding all its progress,philosophy has been unable as yet to offer the masses any ideal that can charm them; but,as they must have their illusions at all cost,they turn instinctively,as the insect seeks the light,to the rhetoricians who accord them what they want. Not truth,but error has always been the chief factor in the evolution of nations,and the reason why socialism is so powerful today is that it constitutes the last illusion that is still vital. In spite of all scientific demonstrations it continues on the increase. Its principal strength lies in the fact that it is championed by minds sufficiently ignorant of things as they are in reality to venture boldly to promise mankind happiness. The social illusion reigns today upon all the heaped-up ruins of the past,and to it belongs the future. The masses have never thirsted after truth. They turn aside from evidence that is not to their taste,preferring to deify error,if error seduce them. Whoever can supply them with illusions is easily their master; whoever attempts to destroy their illusions is always their victim.

3. Experience

Experience constitutes almost the only effective process by which a truth may be solidly established in the mind of the masses,and illusions grown too dangerous be destroyed. To this end,however,it is necessary that the experience should take place on a very large scale,and be very frequently repeated. The experiences undergone by one generation are useless,as a rule,for the generation that follows,which is the reason why historical facts,cited with a view to demonstration,serve no purpose. Their only utility is to prove to what an extent experiences need to be repeated from age to age to exert any influence,or to be successful in merely shaking an erroneous opinion when it is solidly implanted in the mind of the masses.

Our century and that which preceded it will doubtless be alluded to by historians as an era of curious experiments,which in no other age have been tried in such number.

The most gigantic of these experiments was the French Revolution. To find out that a society is not to be refashioned from top to bottom in accordance with the dictates of pure reason,it was necessary that several millions of men should be massacred and that Europe should be profoundly disturbed for a period of twenty years. To prove to us experimentally that dictators cost the nations who acclaim them dear,two ruinous experiences have been required in fifty years,and in spite of their clearness they do not seem to have been sufficiently convincing. The first,nevertheless,cost three millions of men and an invasion,the second involved a loss of territory,and carried in its wake the necessity for permanent armies. A third was almost attempted not long since,and will assuredly be attempted one day. To bring an entire nation to admit that the huge German army was not,as was currently alleged thirty years ago,a sort of harmless national guard,the terrible war which cost us so dear had to take place. To bring about the recognition that Protection ruins the nations who adopt it,at least twenty years of disastrous experience will be needful. These examples might be indefinitely multiplied.

4. Reason

In enumerating the factors capable of making an impression on the minds of crowds all mention of reason might be dispensed with,were it not necessary to point out the negative value of its influence.

We have already shown that crowds are not to be influenced by reasoning,and can only comprehend rough-and-ready associations of ideas. The orators who know how to make an impression upon them always appeal in consequence to their sentiments and never to their reason. The laws of logic have no action on crowds.To bring home conviction to crowds it is necessary first of all to thoroughly comprehend the sentiments by which they are animated,to pretend to share these sentiments,then to endeavour to modify them by calling up,by means of rudimentary associations,certain eminently suggestive notions,to be capable,if need be,of going back to the point of view from which a start was made,and,above all,to pine from instant to instant the sentiments to which one's discourse is giving birth. This necessity of ceaselessly varying one's language in accordance with the effect produced at the moment of speaking deprives from the outset a prepared and studied harangue of all efficaciousness. In such a speech the orator follows his own line of thought,not that of his hearers,and from this fact alone his influence is annihilated.

Logical minds,accustomed to be convinced by a chain of somewhat close reasoning,cannot avoid having recourse to this mode of persuasion when addressing crowds,and the inability of their arguments always surprises them. “The usual mathematical consequences based on the syllogism — that is,on associations of identities — are imperative ...” writes a logician. “This imperativeness would enforce the assent even of an inorganic mass were it capable of following associations of identities.” This is doubtless true,but a crowd is no more capable than an inorganic mass of following such associations,nor even of understanding them. If the attempt be made to convince by reasoning primitive minds — savages or children,for instance — the slight value possessed by this method of arguing will be understood.

It is not even necessary to descend so low as primitive beings to obtain an insight into the utter powerlessness of reasoning when it has to fight against sentiment. Let us merely call to mind how tenacious,for centuries long,have been religious superstitions in contradiction with the simplest logic. For nearly two thousand years the most luminous geniuses have bowed before their laws,and modern times have to be reached for their veracity to be merely contested. The Middle Ages and the Renaissance possessed many enlightened men,but not a single man who attained by reasoning to an appreciation of the childish side of his superstitions,or who promulgated even a slight doubt as to the misdeeds of the devil or the necessity of burning sorcerers.

Should it be regretted that crowds are never guided by reason?We would not venture to affirm it. Without a doubt human reason would not have availed to spur humanity along the path of civilisation with the ardour and hardihood its illusions have done. These illusions,the offspring of those unconscious forces by which we are led,were doubtless necessary. Every race carries in its mental constitution the laws of its destiny,and it is,perhaps,these laws that it obeys with a resistless impulse,even in the case of those of its impulses which apparently are the most unreasoned. It seems at times as if nations were submitted to secret forces analogous to those which compel the acorn to transform itself into an oak or a comet to follow its orbit.

What little insight we can get into these forces must be sought for in the general course of the evolution of a people,and not in the isolated facts from which this evolution appears at times to proceed. Were these facts alone to be taken into consideration,history would seem to be the result of a series of improbable chances. It was improbable that a Galilean carpenter should become for two thousand years an all-powerful God in whose name the most important civilisations were founded; improbable,too,that a few bands of Arabs,emerging from their deserts,should conquer the greater part of the old Graco-Roman world,and establish an empire greater than that of Alexander; improbable,again,that in Europe,at an advanced period of its development,and when authority throughout it had been systematically hierarchised,an obscure lieutenant of artillery should have succeeded in reigning over a multitude of peoples and kings.

Let us leave reason,then,to philosophers,and not insist too strongly on its intervention in the governing of men. It is not by reason,but most often in spite of it,that are created those sentiments that are the mainsprings of all civilisation — sentiments such as honour,self-sacrifice,religious faith,patriotism,and the love of glory.

Chapter III. The Leaders of Crowds and Their Means of Persuasion

Affirmation pure and simple, kept free of all reasoning and all proof, is one of the surest means of making an idea enter the mind of crowds. The conciser an affirmation is, the more destitute of every appearance of proof and demonstration, the more weight it carries.

Abstract:1. The leaders of crowds. The instinctive need of all beings forming a crowd to obey a leader — The psychology of the leaders of crowds — They alone can endow crowds with faith and organise them — The leaders forcibly despotic — Classification of the leaders — The part played by the will.2. The means of action of the leaders. Affirmation,repetition,contagion — The respective part of these different factors — The way in which contagion may spread from the lower to the upper classes in a society — A popular opinion soon becomes a general opinion. 3. Prestige. Definition of prestige and classification of its different kinds — Acquired prestige and personal prestige — Various examples — The way in which prestige is destroyed.

We are now acquainted with the mental constitution of crowds,and we also know what are the motives capable of making an impression on their mind. It remains to investigate how these motives may be set in action,and by whom they may usefully be turned to practical account.

1. The Leaders of Crowds

As soon as a certain number of living beings are gathered together,whether they be animals or men,they place themselves instinctively under the authority of a chief.

In the case of human crowds the chief is often nothing more than a ringleader or agitator,but as such he plays a considerable part. His will is the nucleus around which the opinions of the crowd are grouped and attain to identity. He constitutes the first element towards the organisation of heterogeneous crowds,and paves the way for their organisation in sects; in the meantime he directs them. A crowd is a servile flock that is incapable of ever doing without a master.

The leader has most often started as one of the led. He has himself been hypnotised by the idea,whose apostle he has since become. It has taken possession of himto such a degree that everything outside it vanishes,and that every contrary opinion appears to him an error or a superstition. An example in point is Robespierre,hypnotised by the philosophical ideas of Rousseau,and employing the methods of the Inquisition to propagate them.

The leaders we speak of are more frequently men of action than thinkers. They are not gifted with keen foresight,nor could they be,as this quality generally conduces to doubt and inactivity. They are especially recruited from the ranks of those morbidly nervous,excitable,half-deranged persons who are bordering on madness. However absurd may be the idea they uphold or the goal they pursue,their convictions are so strong that all reasoning is lost upon them. Contempt and persecution do not affect them,or only serve to excite them the more. They sacrifice their personal interest,their family — everything. The very instinct of self-preservation is entirely obliterated in them,and so much so that often the only recompense they solicit is that of martyrdom. The intensity of their faith gives great power of suggestion to their words. The multitude is always ready to listen to the strong-willed man,who knows how to impose himself upon it. Men gathered in a crowd lose all force of will,and turn instinctively to the person who possesses the quality they lack.

Nations have never lacked leaders,but all of the latter have by no means been animated by those strong convictions proper to apostles. These leaders are often subtle rhetoricians,seeking only their own personal interest,and endeavouring to persuade by flattering base instincts. The influence they can assert in this manner may be very great,but it is always ephemeral. The men of ardent convictions who have stirred the soul of crowds,the Peter the Hermits,the Luthers,the Savonarolas,the men of the French Revolution,have only exercised their fascination after having been themselves fascinated first of all by a creed. They are then able to call up in the souls of their fellows that formidable force known as faith,which renders a man the absolute slave of his dream.

The arousing of faith — whether religious,political,or social,whether faith in a work,in a person,or an idea — has always been the function of the great leaders of crowds,and it is on this account that their influence is always very great. Of all the forces at the disposal of humanity,faith has always been one of the most tremendous,and the gospel rightly attributes to it the power of moving mountains. To endow a man with faith is to multiply his strength tenfold. The great events of history have been brought about by obscure believers,who have had little beyond their faith in their favour. It is not by the aid of the learned or of philosophers,and still less of sceptics,that have been built up the great religions which have swayed the world,or the vast empires which have spread from one hemisphere to the other.

In the cases just cited,however,we are dealing with great leaders,and they are so few in number that history can easily reckon them up. They form the summit of a continuous series,which extends from these powerful masters of men down to the workman who,in the smoky atmosphere of an inn,slowly fascinates his comrades by ceaselessly drumming into their ears a few set phrases,whose purport he scarcely comprehends,but the application of which,according to him,must surely bring about the realisation of all dreams and of every hope.

In every social sphere,from the highest to the lowest,as soon as a man ceases to be isolated he speedily falls under the influence of a leader. The majority of men,especially among the masses,do not possess clear and reasoned ideas on any subject whatever outside their own speciality. The leader serves them as guide. It is just possible that he may be replaced,though very inefficiently,by the periodical publications which manufacture opinions for their readers and supply them with ready-made phrases which dispense them of the trouble of reasoning.

The leaders of crowds wield a very despotic authority,and this despotism indeed is a condition of their obtaining a following. It has often been remarked how easily they extort obedience,although without any means of backing up their authority,from the most turbulent section of the working classes. They fix the hours of labour and the rate of wages,and they decree strikes,which are begun and ended at the hour they ordain.

At the present day these leaders and agitators tend more and more to usurp the place of the public authorities in proportion as the latter allow themselves to be called in question and shorn of their strength. The tyranny of these new masters has for result that the crowds obey them much more docilely than they have obeyed any government. If in consequence of some accident or other the leaders should be removed from the scene the crowd returns to its original state of a collectivity without cohesion or force of resistance. During the last strike of the Parisian omnibus employés the arrest of the two leaders who were directing it was at once sufficient to bring it to an end. It is the need not of liberty but of servitude that is always predominant in the soul of crowds. They are so bent on obedience that they instinctively submit to whoever declares himself their master.

These ringleaders and agitators may be pided into two clearly defined classes. The one includes the men who are energetic and possess,but only intermittently,much strength of will,the other the men,far rarer than the preceding,whose strength of will is enduring. The first mentioned are violent,brave,and audacious. They are more especially useful to direct a violent enterprise suddenly decided on,to carry the masses with them in spite of danger,and to transform into heroes the men who but yesterday were recruits. Men of this kind were Ney and Murat under the First Empire,and such a man in our own time was Garibaldi,a talentless but energetic adventurer who succeeded with a handful of men in laying hands on the ancient kingdom of Naples,defended though it was by a disciplined army.

Still,though the energy of leaders of this class is a force to be reckoned with,it is transitory,and scarcely outlasts the exciting cause that has brought it into play. When they have returned to their ordinary course of life the heroes animated by energy of this description often evince,as was the case with those I have just cited,the most astonishing weakness of character. They seem incapable of reflection and of conducting themselves under the simplest circumstances,although they had been able to lead others. These men are leaders who cannot exercise their function except on the condition that they be led themselves and continually stimulated,that they have always as their beacon a man or an idea,that they follow a line of conduct clearly traced. The second category of leaders,that of men of enduring strength of will,have,in spite of a less brilliant aspect,a much more considerable influence. In this category are to be found the true founders of religions and great undertakings: St. Paul,Mahomet,Christopher Columbus,and de Lesseps,for example. Whether they be intelligent or narrow-minded is of no importance: the world belongs to them. The persistent will-force they possess is an immensely rare and immensely powerful faculty to which everything yields. What a strong and continuous will is capable of is not always properly appreciated. Nothing resists it; neither nature,gods,nor man.

The most recent example of what can be effected by a strong and continuous will is afforded us by the illustrious man who separated the Eastern and Western worlds,and accomplished a task that during three thousand years had been attempted in vain by the greatest sovereigns. He failed later in an identical enterprise,but then had intervened old age,to which everything,even the will,succumbs.

When it is desired to show what may be done by mere strength of will,all that is necessary is to relate in detail the history of the difficulties that had to be surmounted in connection with the cutting of the Suez Canal. An ocular witness,Dr. Cazalis,has summed up in a few striking lines the entire story of this great work,recounted by its immortal author.

“From day to day,episode by episode,he told the stupendous story of the canal. He told of all he had had to vanquish,of the impossible he had made possible,of all the opposition he encountered,of the coalition against him,and the disappointments,the reverses,the defeats which had been unavailing to discourage or depress him. He recalled how England had combatted him,attacking him without cessation,how Egypt and France had hesitated,how the French Consul had been foremost in his opposition to the early stages of the work,and the nature of the opposition he had met with,the attempt to force his workmen to desert from thirst by refusing them fresh water; how the Minister of Marine and the engineers,all responsible men of experienced and scientific training,had naturally all been hostile,were all certain on scientific grounds that disaster was at hand,had calculated its coming,foretelling it for such a day and hour as an eclipse is foretold.”

The book which relates the lives of all these great leaders would not contain many names,but these names have been bound up with the most important events in the history of civilisation.

2. The Means of Action of the Leaders: Affirmation,Repetition,Contagion

When it is wanted to stir up a crowd for a short space of time,to induce it to commit an act of any nature — to pillage a palace,or to die in defence of a stronghold or a barricade,for instance — the crowd must be acted upon by rapid suggestion,among which example is the most powerful in its effect. To attain this end,however,it is necessary that the crowd should have been previously prepared by certain circumstances,and,above all,that he who wishes to work upon it should possess the quality to be studied farther on,to which I give the name of prestige.

When,however,it is proposed to imbue the mind of a crowd with ideas and beliefs — with modern social theories,for instance — the leaders have recourse to different expedients. The principal of them are three in number and clearly defined — affirmation,repetition,and contagion. Their action is somewhat slow,but its effects,once produced,are very lasting.

Affirmation pure and simple,kept free of all reasoning and all proof,is one of the surest means of making an idea enter the mind of crowds. The conciser an affirmation is,the more destitute of every appearance of proof and demonstration,the more weight it carries. The religious books and the legal codes of all ages have always resorted to simple affirmation. Statesmen called upon to defend a political cause,and commercial men pushing the sale of their products by means of advertising are acquainted with the value of affirmation.

Affirmation,however,has no real influence unless it be constantly repeated,and so far as possible in the same terms. It was Napoleon,I believe,who said that there is only one figure in rhetoric of serious importance,namely,repetition. The thing affirmed comes by repetition to fix itself in the mind in such a way that it is accepted in the end as a demonstrated truth.

The influence of repetition on crowds is comprehensible when the power is seen which it exercises on the most enlightened minds. This power is due to the fact that the repeated statement is embedded in the long run in those profound regions of our unconscious selves in which the motives of our actions are forged. At the end of a certain time we have forgotten who is the author of the repeated assertion,and we finish by believing it. To this circumstance is due the astonishing power of advertisements. When we have read a hundred,a thousand,times that X's chocolate is the best,we imagine we have heard it said in many quarters,and we end by acquiring the certitude that such is the fact. When we have read a thousand times that Y's flour has cured the most illustrious persons of the most obstinate maladies,we are tempted at last to try it when suffering from an illness of a similar kind. If we always read in the same papers that A is an arrant scamp and B a most honest man we finish by being convinced that this is the truth,unless,indeed,we are given to reading another paper of the contrary opinion,in which the two qualifications are reversed. Affirmation and repetition are alone powerful enough to combat each other. When an affirmation has been sufficiently repeated and there is unanimity in this repetition — as has occurred in the case of certain famous financial undertakings rich enough to purchase every assistance — what is called a current of opinion is formed and the powerful mechanism of contagion intervenes. Ideas,sentiments,emotions,and beliefs possess in crowds a contagious power as intense as that of microbes. This phenomenon is very natural,since it is observed even in animals when they are together in number. Should a horse in a stable take to biting his manger the other horses in the stable will imitate him. A panic that has seized on a few sheep will soon extend to the whole flock. In the case of men collected in a crowd all emotions are very rapidly contagious,which explains the suddenness of panics. Brain disorders,like madness,are themselves contagious. The frequency of madness among doctors who are specialists for the mad is notorious. Indeed,forms of madness have recently been cited — agoraphobia,for instance — which are communicable from men to animals.

For inpiduals to succumb to contagion their simultaneous presence on the same spot is not indispensable. The action of contagion may be felt from a distance under the influence of events which give all minds an inpidual trend and the characteristics peculiar to crowds. This is especially the case when men's minds have been prepared to undergo the influence in question by those remote factors of which I have made a study above. An example in point is the revolutionary movement of 1848,which,after breaking out in Paris,spread rapidly over a great part of Europe and shook a number of thrones.

Imitation,to which so much influence is attributed in social phenomena,is in reality a mere effect of contagion. Having shown its influence elsewhere,I shall confine myself to reproducing what I said on the subject fifteen years ago. My remarks have since been developed by other writers in recent publications.

“Man,like animals,has a natural tendency to imitation. Imitation is a necessity for him,provided always that the imitation is quite easy. It is this necessity that makes the influence of what is called fashion so powerful. Whether in the matter of opinions,ideas,literary manifestations,or merely of dress,how many persons are bold enough to run counter to the fashion? It is by examples not by arguments that crowds are guided. At every period there exists a small number of inpidualities which react upon the remainder and are imitated by the unconscious mass. It is needful however,that these inpidualities should not be in too pronounced disagreement with received ideas. Were they so,to imitate them would be too difficult and their influence would be nil. For this very reason men who are too superior to their epoch are generally without influence upon it. The line of separation is too strongly marked. For the same reason too Europeans,in spite of all the advantages of their civilisation,have so insignificant an influence on Eastern people; they differ from them to too great an extent.

“The dual action of the past and of reciprocal imitation renders,in the long run,all the men of the same country and the same period so alike that even in the case of inpiduals who would seem destined to escape this double influence,such as philosophers,learned men,and men of letters,thought and style have a family air which enables the age to which they belong to be immediately recognised. It is not necessary to talk for long with an inpidual to attain to a thorough knowledge of what he reads,of his habitual occupations,and of the surroundings amid which he lives.

Contagion is so powerful that it forces upon inpiduals not only certain opinions,but certain modes of feeling as well. Contagion is the cause of the contempt in which,at a given period,certain works are held — the example of “Tannhaüser” may be cited — which,a few years later,for the same reason are admired by those who were foremost in criticising them.

The opinions and beliefs of crowds are specially propagated by contagion,but never by reasoning. The conceptions at present rife among the working classes have been acquired at the public-house as the result of affirmation,repetition,and contagion,and indeed the mode of creation of the beliefs of crowds of every age has scarcely been different. Renan justly institutes a comparison between the first founders of Christianity and “the socialist working men spreading their ideas from public-house to public-house”; while Voltaire had already observed in connection with the Christian religion that “for more than a hundred years it was only embraced by the vilest riff-raff.”

It will be noted that in cases analogous to those I have just cited,contagion,after having been at work among the popular classes,has spread to the higher classes of society. This is what we see happening at the present day with regard to the socialist doctrines which are beginning to be held by those who will yet be their first victims. Contagion is so powerful a force that even the sentiment of personal interest disappears under its action.

This is the explanation of the fact that every opinion adopted by the populace always ends in implanting itself with great vigour in the highest social strata,however obvious be the absurdity of the triumphant opinion. This reaction of the lower upon the higher social classes is the more curious,owing to the circumstance that the beliefs of the crowd always have their origin to a greater or less extent in some higher idea,which has often remained without influence in the sphere in which it was evolved. Leaders and agitators,subjugated by this higher idea,take hold of it,distort it and create a sect which distorts it afresh,and then propagates it amongst the masses,who carry the process of deformation still further. Become a popular truth the idea returns,as it were,to its source and exerts an influence on the upper classes of a nation. In the long run it is intelligence that shapes the destiny of the world,but very indirectly. The philosophers who evolve ideas have long since returned to dust,when,as the result of the process I have just described,the fruit of their reflection ends by triumphing.

3. Prestige

Great power is given to ideas propagated by affirmation,repetition,and contagion by the circumstance that they acquire in time that mysterious force known as prestige.

Whatever has been a ruling power in the world,whether it be ideas or men,has in the main enforced its authority by means of that irresistible force expressed by the word “prestige.” The term is one whose meaning is grasped by everybody,but the word is employed in ways too different for it to be easy to define it. Prestige may involve such sentiments as admiration or fear. Occasionally even these sentiments are its basis,but it can perfectly well exist without them. The greatest measure of prestige is possessed by the dead,by beings,that is,of whom we do not stand in fear — by Alexander,Csar,Mahomet,and Buddha,for example. On the other hand,there are fictive beings whom we do not admire — the monstrous pinities of the subterranean temples of India,for instance — but who strike us nevertheless as endowed with a great prestige.

Prestige in reality is a sort of domination exercised on our mind by an inpidual,a work,or an idea. This domination entirely paralyses our critical faculty,and fills our soul with astonishment and respect. The sentiment provoked is inexplicable,like all sentiments,but it would appear to be of the same kind as the fascination to which a magnetised person is subjected. Prestige is the mainspring of all authority. Neither gods,kings,nor women have ever reigned without it.

The various kinds of prestige may be grouped under two principal heads: acquired prestige and personal prestige. Acquired prestige is that resulting from name,fortune,and reputation. It may be independent of personal prestige. Personal prestige,on the contrary,is something essentially peculiar to the inpidual; it may coexist with reputation,glory,and fortune,or be strengthened by them,but it is perfectly capable of existing in their absence.

Acquired or artificial prestige is much the most common. The mere fact that an inpidual occupies a certain position,possesses a certain fortune,or bears certain titles,endows him with prestige,however slight his own personal worth. A soldier in uniform,a judge in his robes,always enjoys prestige. Pascal has very properly noted the necessity for judges of robes and wigs. Without them they would be stripped of half their authority. The most unbending socialist is always somewhat impressed by the sight of a prince or a marquis; and the assumption of such titles makes the robbing of tradesmen an easy matter.

The prestige of which I have just spoken is exercised by persons; side by side with it may be placed that exercised by opinions,literary and artistic works,& c. Prestige of the latter kind is most often merely the result of accumulated repetitions. History,literary and artistic history especially,being nothing more than the repetition of identical judgments,which nobody endeavours to verify,every one ends by repeating what he learnt at school,till there come to be names and things which nobody would venture to meddle with. For a modern reader the perusal of Homer results incontestably in immense boredom; but who would venture to say so? The Parthenon,in its present state,is a wretched ruin,utterly destitute of interest,but it is endowed with such prestige that it does not appear to us as it really is,but with all its accompaniment of historic memories. The special characteristic of prestige is to prevent us seeing things as they are and to entirely paralyse our judgment. Crowds always,and inpiduals as a rule,stand in need of ready-made opinions on all subjects. The popularity of these opinions is independent of the measure of truth or error they contain,and is solely regulated by their prestige.

I now come to personal prestige. Its nature is very different from that of artificial or acquired prestige,with which I have just been concerned. It is a faculty independent of all titles,of all authority,and possessed by a small number of persons whom it enables to exercise a veritably magnetic fascination on those around them,although they are socially their equals,and lack all ordinary means of domination. They force the acceptance of their ideas and sentiments on those about them,and they are obeyed as is the tamer of wild beasts by the animal that could easily devour him.

The great leaders of crowds,such as Buddha,Jesus,Mahomet,Joan of Arc,and Napoleon,have possessed this form of prestige in a high degree,and to this endowment is more particularly due the position they attained. Gods,heroes,and dogmas win their way in the world of their own inward strength. They are not to be discussed: they disappear,indeed,as soon as discussed.

The great personages I have just cited were in possession of their power of fascination long before they became illustrious,and would never have become so without it. It is evident,for instance,that Napoleon at the zenith of his glory enjoyed an immense prestige by the mere fact of his power,but he was already endowed in part with this prestige when he was without power and completely unknown. When,an obscure general,he was sent,thanks to influential protection,to command the army of Italy,he found himself among rough generals who were of a mind to give a hostile reception to the young intruder dispatched them by the Directory. From the very beginning,from the first interview,without the aid of speeches,gestures,or threats,at the first sight of the man who was to become great they were vanquished. Taine furnishes a curious account of this interview taken from contemporary memoirs.

“The generals of pision,amongst others Augereau,a sort of swashbuckler,uncouth and heroic,proud of his height and his bravery,arrive at the staff quarters very badly disposed towards the little upstart dispatched them from Paris. On the strength of the description of him that has been given them,Augereau is inclined to be insolent and insubordinate; a favourite of Barras,a general who owes his rank to the events of Vendémiaire who has won his grade by street-fighting,who is looked upon as bearish,because he is always thinking in solitude,of poor aspect,and with the reputation of a mathematician and dreamer. They are introduced,and Bonaparte keeps them waiting. At last he appears,girt with his sword; he puts on his hat,explains the measures he has taken,gives his orders,and dismisses them. Augereau has remained silent; it is only when he is outside that he regains his self-possession and is able to deliver himself of his customary oaths. He admits with Masséna that this little devil of a general has inspired him with awe; he cannot understand the ascendency by which from the very first he has felt himself overwhelmed.”

Become a great man,his prestige increased in proportion as his glory grew,and came to be at least equal to that of a pinity in the eyes of those devoted to him. General Vandamme,a rough,typical soldier of the Revolution,even more brutal and energetic than Augereau,said of him to Marshal d'Arnano in 1815,as on one occasion they mounted together the stairs of the Tuileries: “That devil of a man exercises a fascination on me that I cannot explain even to myself,and in such a degree that,though I fear neither God nor devil,when I am in his presence I am ready to tremble like a child,and he could make me go through the eye of a needle to throw myself into the fire.” Napoleon exercised a like fascination on all who came into contact with him.

Davoust used to say,talking of Maret's devotion and of his own: “Had the Emperor said to us,‘It is important in the interest of my policy that Paris should be destroyed without a single person leaving it or escaping,’ Maret I am sure would have kept the secret,but he could not have abstained from compromising himself by seeing that his family got clear of the city. On the other hand,I,for fear of letting the truth leak out,would have let my wife and children stay.”

It is necessary to bear in mind the astounding power exerted by fascination of this order to understand that marvellous return from the Isle of Elba,that lightning-like conquest of France by an isolated man confronted by all the organised forces of a great country that might have been supposed weary of his tyranny. He had merely to cast a look at the generals sent to lay hands on him,and who had sworn to accomplish their mission. All of them submitted without discussion.

“Napoleon,” writes the English General Wolseley,“lands in France almost alone,a fugitive from the small island of Elba which was his kingdom,and succeeded in a few weeks,without bloodshed,in upsetting all organised authority in France under its legitimate king; is it possible for the personal ascendency of a man to affirm itself in a more astonishing manner? But from the beginning to the end of this campaign,which was his last,how remarkable too is the ascendency he exercised over the Allies,obliging them to follow his initiative,and how near he came to crushing them!”

His prestige outlived him and continued to grow. It is his prestige that made an emperor of his obscure nephew. How powerful is his memory still is seen in the resurrection of his legend in progress at the present day. Ill-treat men as you will,massacre them by millions,be the cause of invasion upon invasion,all is permitted you if you possess prestige in a sufficient degree and the talent necessary to uphold it. I have invoked,no doubt,in this case a quite exceptional example of prestige,but one it was useful to cite to make clear the genesis of great religions,great doctrines,and great empires. Were it not for the power exerted on the crowd by prestige,such growths would be incomprehensible.

Prestige,however,is not based solely on personal ascendency,military glory,and religious terror; it may have a more modest origin and still be considerable. Our century furnishes several examples. One of the most striking ones that posterity will recall from age to age will be supplied by the history of the illustrious man who modified the face of the globe and the commercial relations of the nations by separating two continents. He succeeded in his enterprise owing to his immense strength of will,but also owing to the fascination he exercised on those surrounding him. To overcome the unanimous opposition he met with,he had only to show himself. He would speak briefly,and in face of the charm he exerted his opponents became his friends. The English in particular strenuously opposed his scheme; he had only to put in an appearance in England to rally all suffrages. In later years,when he passed Southampton,the bells were rung on his passage; and at the present day a movement is on foot in England to raise a statue in his honour.

“Having vanquished whatever there is to vanquish,men and things,marshes,rocks,and sandy wastes,” he had ceased to believe in obstacles,and wished to begin Suez over again at Panama. He began again with the same methods as of old; but he had aged,and,besides,the faith that moves mountains does not move them if they are too lofty. The mountains resisted,and the catastrophe that ensued destroyed the glittering aureole of glory that enveloped the hero. His life teaches how prestige can grow and how it can vanish. After rivalling in greatness the most famous heroes of history,he was lowered by the magistrates of his country to the ranks of the vilest criminals. When he died his coffin,unattended,traversed an indifferent crowd. Foreign sovereigns are alone in rendering homage to his memory as to that of one of the greatest men that history has known.

Still,the various examples that have just been cited represent extreme cases. To fix in detail the psychology of prestige,it would be necessary to place them at the extremity of a series,which would range from the founders of religions and empires to the private inpidual who endeavours to dazzle his neighbours by a new coat or a decoration.

Between the extreme limits of this series would find a place all the forms of prestige resulting from the different elements composing a civilisation — sciences,arts,literature,& c. — and it would be seen that prestige constitutes the fundamental element of persuasion. Consciously or not,the being,the idea,or the thing possessing prestige is immediately imitated in consequence of contagion,and forces an entire generation to adopt certain modes of feeling and of giving expression to its thought. This imitation,moreover,is,as a rule,unconscious,which accounts for the fact that it is perfect. The modern painters who copy the pale colouring and the stiff attitudes of some of the Primitives are scarcely alive to the source of their inspiration. They believe in their own sincerity,whereas,if an eminent master had not revived this form of art,people would have continued blind to all but its nave and inferior sides. Those artists who,after the manner of another illustrious master,inundate their canvasses with violet shades do not see in nature more violet than was detected there fifty years ago; but they are influenced,“suggestioned,” by the personal and special impressions of a painter who,in spite of this eccentricity,was successful in acquiring great prestige. Similar examples might be brought forward in connection with all the elements of civilisation.

It is seen from what precedes that a number of factors may be concerned in the genesis of prestige; among them success was always one of the most important. Every successful man,every idea that forces itself into recognition,ceases,ipso facto,to be called in question. The proof that success is one of the principal stepping-stones to prestige is that the disappearance of the one is almost always followed by the disappearance of the other. The hero whom the crowd acclaimed yesterday is insulted today should he have been overtaken by failure. The reaction,indeed,will be the stronger in proportion as the prestige has been great. The crowd in this case considers the fallen hero as an equal,and takes its revenge for having bowed to a superiority whose existence it no longer admits. While Robespierre was causing the execution of his colleagues and of a great number of his contemporaries,he possessed an immense prestige. When the transposition of a few votes deprived him of power,he immediately lost his prestige,and the crowd followed him to the guillotine with the self-same imprecations with which shortly before it had pursued his victims. Believers always break the statues of their former gods with every symptom of fury.

Prestige lost by want of success disappears in a brief space of time. It can also be worn away,but more slowly by being subjected to discussion.

This latter power,however,is exceedingly sure. From the moment prestige is called in question it ceases to be prestige. The gods and men who have kept their prestige for long have never tolerated discussion. For the crowd to admire,it must be kept at a distance.

Chapter IV. Limitations of the Variability of the Beliefs and Opinions of Crowds

Men are guided in their conduct above all by their beliefs and by the customs that are the consequence of those beliefs. These beliefs and customs regulate the smallest acts of our existence, and the most independent spirit cannot escape their influence.

Abstract:1. Fixed Beliefs. The invariability of certain general beliefs — They shape the course of a civilisation — The difficulty of uprooting them — In what respect intolerance is a virtue in a people — The philosophic absurdity of a belief cannot interfere with its spreading. 2. The Changeable Opinions of Crowds. The extreme mobility of opinions which do not arise from general beliefs — Apparent variations of ideas and beliefs in less than a century — The real limits of these variations — The matters effected by the variation — The disappearance at present in progress of general beliefs,and the extreme diffusion of the newspaper press,have for result that opinions are nowadays more and more changeable — Why the opinions of crowds tend on the majority of subjects towards indifference — Governments now powerless to direct opinion as they formerly did — Opinions prevented today from being tyrannical on account of their exceeding pergency.

1. Fixed Beliefs

A close parallel exists between the anatomical and psychological characteristics of living beings.

In these anatomical characteristics certain invariable,or slightly variable,elements are met with,to change which the lapse is necessary of geological ages. Side by side with these fixed,indestructible features are to be found others extremely changeable,which the art of the breeder or horticulturist may easily modify,and at times to such an extent as to conceal the fundamental characteristics from an observer at all inattentive.

The same phenomenon is observed in the case of moral characteristics. Alongside the unalterable psychological elements of a race,mobile and changeable elements are to be encountered. For this reason,in studying the beliefs and opinions of a people,the presence is always detected of a fixed groundwork on which are engrafted opinions as changing as the surface sand on a rock.

The opinions and beliefs of crowds may be pided,then,into two very distinct classes. On the one hand we have great permanent beliefs,which endure for several centuries,and on which an entire civilisation may rest. Such,for instance,in the past were feudalism,Christianity,and Protestantism; and such,in our own time,are the nationalist principle and contemporary democratic and social ideas. In the second place,there are the transitory,changing opinions,the outcome,as a rule,of general conceptions,of which every age sees the birth and disappearance; examples in point are the theories which mould literature and the arts — those,for instance,which produced romanticism,naturalism,mysticism,& c. Opinions of this order are as superficial,as a rule,as fashion,and as changeable. They may be compared to the ripples which ceaselessly arise and vanish on the surface of a deep lake.

The great generalised beliefs are very restricted in number. Their rise and fall form the culminating points of the history of every historic race. They constitute the real framework of civilisation.

It is easy to imbue the mind of crowds with a passing opinion,but very difficult to implant therein a lasting belief. However,a belief of this latter description once established,it is equally difficult to uproot it. It is usually only to be changed at the cost of violent revolutions. Even revolutions can only avail when the belief has almost entirely lost its sway over men's minds. In that case revolutions serve to finally sweep away what had already been almost cast aside,though the force of habit prevented its complete abandonment. The beginning of a revolution is in reality the end of a belief.

The precise moment at which a great belief is doomed is easily recognisable; it is the moment when its value begins to be called in question. Every general belief being little else than a fiction,it can only survive on the condition that it be not subjected to examination.

But even when a belief is severely shaken,the institutions to which it has given rise retain their strength and disappear but slowly. Finally,when the belief has completely lost its force,all that rested upon it is soon involved in ruin. As yet a nation has never been able to change its beliefs without being condemned at the same time to transform all the elements of its civilisation. The nation continues this process of transformation until it has alighted on and accepted a new general belief: until this juncture it is perforce in a state of anarchy. General beliefs are the indispensable pillars of civilisations; they determine the trend of ideas. They alone are capable of inspiring faith and creating a sense of duty.

Nations have always been conscious of the utility of acquiring general beliefs,and have instinctively understood that their disappearance would be the signal for their own decline. In the case of the Romans,the fanatical cult of Rome was the belief that made them masters of the world,and when the belief had died out Rome was doomed to die. As for the barbarians who destroyed the Roman civilisation,it was only when they had acquired certain commonly accepted beliefs that they attained a measure of cohesion and emerged from anarchy.

Plainly it is not for nothing that nations have always displayed intolerance in the defence of their opinions. This intolerance,open as it is to criticism from the philosophic standpoint,represents in the life of a people the most necessary of virtues. It was to found or uphold general beliefs that so many victims were sent to the stake in the Middle Ages and that so many inventors and innovators have died in despair even if they have escaped martyrdom. It is in defence,too,of such beliefs that the world has been so often the scene of the direst disorder,and that so many millions of men have died on the battlefield,and will yet die there.

There are great difficulties in the way of establishing a general belief,but when it is definitely implanted its power is for a long time to come invincible,and however false it be philosophically it imposes itself upon the most luminous intelligence. Have not the European peoples regarded as incontrovertible for more than fifteen centuries religious legends which,closely examined,are as barbarous as those of Moloch? The frightful absurdity of the legend of a God who revenges himself for the disobedience of one of his creatures by inflicting horrible tortures on his son remained unperceived during many centuries. Such potent geniuses as a Galileo,a Newton,and a Leibnitz never supposed for an instant that the truth of such dogmas could be called in question. Nothing can be more typical than this fact of the hypnotising effect of general beliefs,but at the same time nothing can mark more decisively the humiliating limitations of our intelligence.

As soon as a new dogma is implanted in the mind of crowds it becomes the source of inspiration whence are evolved its institutions,arts,and mode of existence. The sway it exerts over men's minds under these circumstances is absolute. Men of action have no thought beyond realising the accepted belief,legislators beyond applying it,while philosophers,artists,and men of letters are solely preoccupied with its expression under various shapes.

From the fundamental belief transient accessory ideas may arise,but they always bear the impress of the belief from which they have sprung. The Egyptian civilisation,the European civilisation of the Middle Ages,the Mussulman civilisation of the Arabs are all the outcome of a small number of religious beliefs which have left their mark on the least important elements of these civilisations and allow of their immediate recognition.

Thus it is that,thanks to general beliefs,the men of every age are enveloped in a network of traditions,opinions,and customs which render them all alike,and from whose yoke they cannot extricate themselves. Men are guided in their conduct above all by their beliefs and by the customs that are the consequence of those beliefs. These beliefs and customs regulate the smallest acts of our existence,and the most independent spirit cannot escape their influence. The tyranny exercised unconsciously on men's minds is the only real tyranny,because it cannot be fought against. Tiberius,Ghengis Khan,and Napoleon were assuredly redoubtable tyrants,but from the depth of their graves Moses,Buddha,Jesus,and Mahomet have exerted on the human soul a far profounder despotism. A conspiracy may overthrow a tyrant,but what can it avail against a firmly established belief? In its violent struggle with Roman Catholicism it is the French Revolution that has been vanquished,and this in spite of the fact that the sympathy of the crowd was apparently on its side,and in spite of recourse to destructive measures as pitiless as those of the Inquisition. The only real tyrants that humanity has known have always been the memories of its dead or the illusions it has forged itself.

The philosophic absurdity that often marks general beliefs has never been an obstacle to their triumph. Indeed the triumph of such beliefs would seem impossible unless on the condition that they offer some mysterious absurdity. In consequence,the evident weakness of the socialist beliefs of today will not prevent them triumphing among the masses. Their real inferiority to all religious beliefs is solely the result of this consideration,that the ideal of happiness offered by the latter being realisable only in a future life,it was beyond the power of anybody to contest it. The socialist ideal of happiness being intended to be realised on earth,the vanity of its promises will at once appear as soon as the first efforts towards their realisation are made,and simultaneously the new belief will entirely lose its prestige. Its strength,in consequence,will only increase until the day when,having triumphed,its practical realisation shall commence. For this reason,while the new religion exerts to begin with,like all those that have preceded it,a destructive influence,it will be unable,in the future,to play a creative part.

2. The Changeable Opinions of Crowds

Above the substratum of fixed beliefs,whose power we have just demonstrated,is found an overlying growth of opinions,ideas,and thoughts which are incessantly springing up and dying out. Some of them exist but for a day,and the more important scarcely outlive a generation. We have already noted that the changes which supervene in opinions of this order are at times far more superficial than real,and that they are always affected by racial considerations. When examining,for instance,the political institutions of France we showed that parties to all appearance utterly distinct — royalists,radicals,imperialists,socialists,& c. — have an ideal absolutely identical,and that this ideal is solely dependent on the mental structure of the French race,since a quite contrary ideal is found under analogous names among other races. Neither the name given to opinions nor deceptive adaptations alter the essence of things. The men of the Great Revolution,saturated with Latin literature,who (their eyes fixed on the Roman Republic),adopted its laws,its fasces,and its togas,did not become Romans because they were under the empire of a powerful historical suggestion. The task of the philosopher is to investigate what it is which subsists of ancient beliefs beneath their apparent changes,and to identify amid the moving flux of opinions the part determined by general beliefs and the genius of the race.

In the absence of this philosophic test it might be supposed that crowds change their political or religious beliefs frequently and at will. All history,whether political,religious,artistic,or literary,seems to prove that such is the case. As an example,let us take a very short period of French history,merely that from 1790 to 1820,a period of thirty years' duration,that of a generation. In the course of it we see the crowd at first monarchical become very revolutionary,then very imperialist,and again very monarchical. In the matter of religion it gravitates in the same lapse of time from Catholicism to atheism,then towards deism,and then returns to the most pronounced forms of Catholicism. These changes take place not only amongst the masses,but also amongst those who direct them. We observe with astonishment the prominent men of the Convention,the sworn enemies of kings,men who would have neither gods nor masters,become the humble servants of Napoleon,and afterwards,under Louis XVIII,piously carry candles in religious processions.

Numerous,too,are the changes in the opinions of the crowd in the course of the following seventy years. The “Perfidious Albion” of the opening of the century is the ally of France under Napoleon's heir; Russia,twice invaded by France,which looked on with satisfaction at French reverses,becomes its friend.

In literature,art,and philosophy the successive evolutions of opinion are more rapid still. Romanticism,naturalism,mysticism,& c.,spring up and die out in turn. The artist and the writer applauded yesterday are treated on the morrow with profound contempt.

When,however,we analyse all these changes in appearance so far reaching,what do we find? All those that are in opposition with the general beliefs and sentiments of the race are of transient duration,and the perted stream soon resumes its course. The opinions which are not linked to any general belief or sentiment of the race,and which in consequence cannot possess stability,are at the mercy of every chance,or,if the expression be preferred,of every change in the surrounding circumstances. Formed by suggestion and contagion,they are always momentary; they crop up and disappear as rapidly on occasion as the sandhills formed by the wind on the sea-coast.

At the present day the changeable opinions of crowds are greater in number than they ever were,and for three different reasons.

The first is that as the old beliefs are losing their influence to a greater and greater extent,they are ceasing to shape the ephemeral opinions of the moment as they did in the past. The weakening of general beliefs clears the ground for a crop of haphazard opinions without a past or a future.

The second reason is that the power of crowds being on the increase,and this power being less and less counterbalanced,the extreme mobility of ideas,which we have seen to be a peculiarity of crowds,can manifest itself without let or hindrance.

Finally,the third reason is the recent development of the newspaper press,by whose agency the most contrary opinions are being continually brought before the attention of crowds. The suggestions that might result from each inpidual opinion are soon destroyed by suggestions of an opposite character. The consequence is that no opinion succeeds in becoming widespread,and that the existence of all of them is ephemeral. An opinion nowadays dies out before it has found a sufficiently wide acceptance to become general.

A phenomenon quite new in the world's history,and most characteristic of the present age,has resulted from these different causes; I allude to the powerlessness of governments to direct opinion.

In the past,and in no very distant past,the action of governments and the influence of a few writers and a very small number of newspapers constituted the real reflectors of public opinion. Today the writers have lost all influence,and the newspapers only reflect opinion. As for statesmen,far from directing opinion,their only endeavour is to follow it. They have a dread of opinion,which amounts at times to terror,and causes them to adopt an utterly unstable line of conduct.

The opinion of crowds tends,then,more and more to become the supreme guiding principle in politics. It goes so far today as to force on alliances,as has been seen recently in the case of the Franco-Russian alliance,which is solely the outcome of a popular movement. A curious symptom of the present time is to observe popes,kings,and emperors consent to be interviewed as a means of submitting their views on a given subject to the judgment of crowds. Formerly it might have been correct to say that politics were not a matter of sentiment. Can the same be said today,when politics are more and more swayed by the impulse of changeable crowds,who are uninfluenced by reason and can only be guided by sentiment?

As to the press,which formerly directed opinion,it has had,like governments,to humble itself before the power of crowds. It wields,no doubt,a considerable influence,but only because it is exclusively the reflection of the opinions of crowds and of their incessant variations. Become a mere agency for the supply of information,the press has renounced all endeavour to enforce an idea or a doctrine. It follows all the changes of public thought,obliged to do so by the necessities of competition under pain of losing its readers. The old staid and influential organs of the past,such as the Constitutionnel,the Débats,or the Siécle,which were accepted as oracles by the preceding generation,have disappeared or have become typical modern papers,in which a maximum of news is sandwiched in between light articles,society gossip,and financial puffs. There can be no question today of a paper rich enough to allow its contributors to air their personal opinions,and such opinions would be of slight weight with readers who only ask to be kept informed or to be amused,and who suspect every affirmation of being prompted by motives of speculation. Even the critics have ceased to be able to assure the success of a book or a play. They are capable of doing harm,but not of doing a service. The papers are so conscious of the uselessness of everything in the shape of criticism or personal opinion,that they have reached the point of suppressing literary criticism,confining themselves to citing the title of a book,and appending a “puff” of two or three lines. In twenty years' time the same fate will probably have overtaken theatrical criticism.

The close watching of the course of opinion has become today the principal preoccupation of the press and of governments. The effect produced by an event,a legislative proposal,a speech,is without intermission what they require to know,and the task is not easy,for nothing is more mobile and changeable than the thought of crowds,and nothing more frequent than to see them execrate today what they applauded yesterday.

This total absence of any sort of direction of opinion,and at the same time the destruction of general beliefs,have had for final result an extreme pergency of convictions of every order,and a growing indifference on the part of crowds to everything that does not plainly touch their immediate interests. Questions of doctrine,such as socialism,only recruit champions boasting genuine convictions among the quite illiterate classes,among the workers in mines and factories,for instance. Members of the lower middle class,and working men possessing some degree of instruction,have either become utterly sceptical or extremely unstable in their opinions.

The evolution which has been effected in this direction in the last twenty-five years is striking. During the preceding period,comparatively near us though it is,opinions still had a certain general trend; they had their origin in the acceptance of some fundamental belief. By the mere fact that an inpidual was a monarchist he possessed inevitably certain clearly defined ideas in history as well as in science,while by the mere fact that he was a republican,his ideas were quite contrary. A monarchist was well aware that men are not descended from monkeys,and a republican was not less well aware that such is in truth their descent. It was the duty of the monarchist to speak with horror,and of the republican to speak with veneration,of the great Revolution. There were certain names,such as those of Robespierre and Marat,that had to be uttered with an air of religious devotion,and other names,such as those of Csar,Augustus,or Napoleon,that ought never to be mentioned unaccompanied by a torrent of invective. Even in the French Sorbonne this ingenuous fashion of conceiving history was general.There are pages in the books of the French official professors of history that are very curious from this point of view. They prove too how little the critical spirit is developed by the system of university education in vogue in France. I cite as an example the following extracts from the “French Revolution” of M.Rambaud,professor of history at the Sorbonne:

“The taking of the Bastille was a culminating event in the history not only of France,but of all Europe; and inaugurated a new epoch in the history of the world!”

With respect to Robespierre,we learn with stupefaction that “his dictatorship was based more especially on opinion,persuasion,and moral authority; it was a sort of pontificate in the hands of a virtuous man!” (pp. 91 and 220.)

At the present day,as the result of discussion and analysis,all opinions are losing their prestige; their distinctive features are rapidly worn away,and few survive capable of arousing our enthusiasm. The man of modern times is more and more a prey to indifference.

The general wearing away of opinions should not be too greatly deplored. That it is a symptom of decadence in the life of a people cannot be contested. It is certain that men of immense,of almost supernatural insight,that apostles,leaders of crowds — men,in a word,of genuine and strong convictions — exert a far greater force than men who deny,who criticise,or who are indifferent,but it must not be forgotten that,given the power possessed at present by crowds,were a single opinion to acquire sufficient prestige to enforce its general acceptance,it would soon be endowed with so tyrannical a strength that everything would have to bend before it,and the era of free discussion would be closed for a long time. Crowds are occasionally easy-going masters,as were Heliogabalus and Tiberius,but they are also violently capricious. A civilisation,when the moment has come for crowds to acquire a high hand over it,is at the mercy of too many chances to endure for long. Could anything postpone for a while the hour of its ruin,it would be precisely the extreme instability of the opinions of crowds and their growing indifference with respect to all general beliefs.

Book III. The Classification and Description of the Different Kinds of Crowds

Chapter I. The Classification of Crowds

The crowd is always intellectually inferior to the isolated inpidual, but that, from the point of view of feelings and of the acts these feelings provoke, the crowd may, according to circumstances, he better or worse than the inpidual.

Abstract:The general pisions of crowds — The classification. 1. Heterogeneous crowds. Different varieties of them — The influence of race — The spirit of the crowd is weak in proportion as the spirit of the race is strong — The spirit of the race represents the civilised state and the spirit of the crowd the barbarian state. 2. Homogeneous crowds. Their different varieties — Sects,castes,and classes.

We have sketched in this work the general characteristics common to psychological crowds. It remains to point out the particular characteristics which accompany those of a general order in the different categories of collectivities,when they are transformed into a crowd under the influences of the proper exciting causes. We will,first of all,set forth in a few words a classification of crowds.

Our starting-point will be the simple multitude. Its most inferior form is met with when the multitude is composed of inpiduals belonging to different races. In this case its only common bond of union is the will,more or less respected of a chief. The barbarians of very perse origin who during several centuries invaded the Roman Empire,may be cited as a specimen of multitudes of this kind.

On a higher level than these multitudes composed of different races are those which under certain influences have acquired common characteristics,and have ended by forming a single race. They present at times characteristics peculiar to crowds,but these characteristics are overruled to a greater or less extent by racial considerations.

These two kinds of multitudes may,under certain influences investigated in this work,be transformed into organised or psychological crowds. We shall break up these organised crowds into the following pisions: —

A. Heterogeneous crowds.

1. Anonymous crowds (street crowds,for example).

2. Crowds not anonymous (juries,parliamentary assemblies,& c.).

B. Homogeneous crowds.

1. Sects (political sects,religious sects,& c.).

2. Castes (the military caste,the priestly caste,the working caste,& c.).

3. Classes (the middle classes,the peasant classes,& c.).

We will point out briefly the distinguishing characteristics of these different categories of crowds.

1. Heterogeneous Crowds

It is these collectivities whose characteristics have been studied in this volume. They are composed of inpiduals of any description,of any profession,and any degree of intelligence.

We are now aware that by the mere fact that men form part of a crowd engaged in action,their collective psychology differs essentially from their inpidual psychology,and their intelligence is affected by this differentiation. We have seen that intelligence is without influence in collectivities,they being solely under the sway of unconscious sentiments.

A fundamental factor,that of race,allows of a tolerably thorough differentiation of the various heterogeneous crowds.

We have often referred already to the part played by race,and have shown it to be the most powerful of the factors capable of determining men's actions. Its action is also to be traced in the character of crowds. A crowd composed of inpiduals assembled at haphazard,but all of them Englishmen or Chinamen,will differ widely from another crowd also composed of inpiduals of any and every description,but of other races — Russians,Frenchmen,or Spaniards,for example.

The wide pergencies which their inherited mental constitution creates in men's modes of feeling and thinking at once come into prominence when,which rarely happens,circumstances gather together in the same crowd and in fairly equal proportions inpiduals of different nationality,and this occurs,however identical in appearance be the interests which provoked the gathering. The efforts made by the socialists to assemble in great congresses the representatives of the working-class populations of different countries,have always ended in the most pronounced discord. A Latin crowd,however revolutionary or however conservative it be supposed,will invariably appeal to the intervention of the State to realise its demands. It is always distinguished by a marked tendency towards centralisation and by a leaning,more or less pronounced,in favour of a dictatorship. An English or an American crowd,on the contrary,sets no store on the State,and only appeals to private initiative. A French crowd lays particular weight on equality and an English crowd on liberty. These differences of race explain how it is that there are almost as many different forms of socialism and democracy as there are nations.

The genius of the race,then,exerts a paramount influence upon the dispositions of a crowd. It is the powerful underlying force that limits its changes of humour. It should be considered as an essential law that the inferior characteristics of crowds are the less accentuated in proportion as the spirit of the race is strong. The crowd state and the domination of crowds is equivalent to the barbarian state,or to a return to it. It is by the acquisition of a solidly constituted collective spirit that the race frees itself to a greater and greater extent fromthe unreflecting power of crowds,and emerges from the barbarian state. The only important classification to be made of heterogeneous crowds,apart from that based on racial considerations,is to separate them into anonymous crowds,such as street crowds,and crowds not anonymous — deliberative assemblies and juries,for example. The sentiment of responsibility absent from crowds of the first description and developed in those of the second often gives a very different tendency to their respective acts.

2. Homogeneous Crowds

Homogeneous crowds include: 1. Sects; 2. Castes; 3. Classes.

The sect represents the first step in the process of organisation of homogeneous crowds. A sect includes inpiduals differing greatly as to their education,their professions,and the class of society to which they belong,and with their common beliefs as the connecting link. Examples in point are religious and political sects.

The caste represents the highest degree of organisation of which the crowd is susceptible. While the sect includes inpiduals of very different professions,degrees of education and social surrounding,who are only linked together by the beliefs they hold in common,the caste is composed of inpiduals of the same profession,and in consequence similarly educated and of much the same social status. Examples in point are the military and priestly castes.

The class is formed of inpiduals of perse origin,linked together not by a community of beliefs,as are the members of a sect,or by common professional occupations,as are the members of a caste,but by certain interests and certain habits of life and education almost identical. The middle class and the agricultural class are examples.

Being only concerned in this work with heterogeneous crowds,and reserving the study of homogeneous crowds (sects,castes,and classes) for another volume,I shall not insist here on the characteristics of crowds of this latter kind. I shall conclude this study of heterogeneous crowds by the examination of a few typical and distinct categories of crowds.

Chapter II. Crowds Termed Criminal Crowds

The usual motive of the crimes of crowds is a powerful suggestion, and the inpiduals who take part in such crimes are afterwards convinced that they have acted in obedience to duty, which is far from being the case with the ordinary criminal.

Abstract:Crowds termed criminal crowds — A crowd may be legally yet not psychologically criminal — The absolute unconsciousness of the acts of crowds — Various examples — Psychology of the authors of the September massacres — Their reasoning,their sensibility,their ferocity and their morality.

Owing to the fact that crowds,after a period of excitement,enter upon a purely automatic and unconscious state,in which they are guided by suggestion,it seems difficult to qualify them in any case as criminal. I only retain this erroneous qualification because it has been definitely brought into vogue by recent psychological investigations. Certain acts of crowds are assuredly criminal,if considered merely in themselves,but criminal in that case in the same way as the act of a tiger devouring a Hindoo,after allowing its young to maul him for their amusement.

The usual motive of the crimes of crowds is a powerful suggestion,and the inpiduals who take part in such crimes are afterwards convinced that they have acted in obedience to duty,which is far from being the case with the ordinary criminal.

The history of the crimes committed by crowds illustrates what precedes.

The murder of M.de Launay,the governor of the Bastille,may be cited as a typical example. After the taking of the fortress the governor,surrounded by a very excited crowd,was dealt blows from every direction. It was proposed to hang him,to cut off his head,to tie him to a horse's tail. While struggling,he accidently kicked one of those present. Some one proposed,and his suggestion was at once received with acclamation by the crowd,that the inpidual who had been kicked should cut the governor's throat.

“The inpidual in question,a cook out of work,whose chief reason for being at the Bastille was idle curiosity as to what was going on,esteems,that since such is the general opinion,the action is patriotic and even believes he deserves a medal for having destroyed a monster. With a sword that is lent him he strikes the bared neck,but the weapon being somewhat blunt and not cutting,he takes from his pocket a small black-handled knife and (in his capacity of cook he would be experienced in cutting up meat) successfully effects the operation.”

The working of the process indicated above is clearly seen in this example. We have obedience to a suggestion,which is all the stronger because of its collective origin,and the murderer's conviction that he has committed a very meritorious act,a conviction the more natural seeing that he enjoys the unanimous approval of his fellow-citizens. An act of this kind may be considered crime legally but not psychologically.

The general characteristics of criminal crowds are precisely the same as those we have met with in all crowds: openness to suggestion,credulity,mobility,the exaggeration of the sentiments good or bad,the manifestation of certain forms of morality,& c.

We shall find all these characteristics present in a crowd which has left behind it in French history the most sinister memories — the crowd which perpetrated the September massacres. In point of fact it offers much similarity with the crowd that committed the Saint Bartholomew massacres. I borrow the details from the narration of M.Taine,who took them from contemporary sources.

It is not known exactly who gave the order or made the suggestion to empty the prisons by massacring the prisoners. Whether it was Danton,as is probable,or another does not matter; the one interesting fact for us is the powerful suggestion received by the crowd charged with the massacre.

The crowd of murderers numbered some three hundred persons,and was a perfectly typical heterogeneous crowd. With the exception of a very small number of professional scoundrels,it was composed in the main of shopkeepers and artisans of every trade: bootmakers,locksmiths,hairdressers,masons,clerks,messengers,& c. Under the influence of the suggestion received they are perfectly convinced,as was the cook referred to above,that they are accomplishing a patriotic duty. They fill a double office,being at once judge and executioner,but they do not for a moment regard themselves as criminals.

Deeply conscious of the importance of their duty,they begin by forming a sort of tribunal,and in connection with this act the ingenuousness of crowds and their rudimentary conception of justice are seen immediately. In consideration of the large number of the accused,it is decided that,to begin with,the nobles,priests,officers,and members of the king's household — in a word,all the inpiduals whose mere profession is proof of their guilt in the eyes of a good patriot — shall be slaughtered in a body,there being no need for a special decision in their case. The remainder shall be judged on their personal appearance and their reputation. In this way the rudimentary conscience of the crowd is satisfied. It will now be able to proceed legally with the massacre,and to give free scope to those instincts of ferocity whose genesis I have set forth elsewhere,they being instincts which collectivities always have it in them to develop to a high degree. These instincts,however — as is regularly the case in crowds — will not prevent the manifestation of other and contrary sentiments,such as a tenderheartedness often as extreme as the ferocity.

“They have the expansive sympathy and prompt sensibility of the Parisian working man. At the Abbaye,one of the federates,learning that the prisoners had been left without water for twenty-six hours,was bent on putting the gaoler to death,and would have done so but for the prayers of the prisoners themselves. When a prisoner is acquitted (by the improvised tribunal) every one,guards and slaughterers included,embraces him with transports of joy and applauds frantically,” after which the wholesale massacre is recommenced. During its progress a pleasant gaiety never ceases to reign. There is dancing and singing around the corpses,and benches are arranged “for the ladies,” delighted to witness the killing of aristocrats. The exhibition continues,moreover,of a special description of justice.

A slaughterer at the Abbaye having complained that the ladies placed at a little distance saw badly,and that only a few of those present had the pleasure of striking the aristocrats,the justice of the observation is admitted,and it is decided that the victims shall be made to pass slowly between two rows of slaughterers,who shall be under the obligation to strike with the back of the sword only so as to prolong the agony. At the prison de la Force the victims are stripped stark naked and literally “carved” for half an hour,after which,when every one has had a good view,they are finished off by a blow that lays bare their entrails.

The slaughterers,too,have their scruples and exhibit that moral sense whose existence in crowds we have already pointed out. They refuse to appropriate the money and jewels of the victims,taking them to the table of the committees.

Those rudimentary forms of reasoning,characteristic of the mind of crowds,are always to be traced in all their acts. Thus,after the slaughter of the 1,200 or 1,500 enemies of the nation,some one makes the remark,and his suggestion is at once adopted,that the other prisons,those containing aged beggars,vagabonds,and young prisoners,hold in reality useless mouths,of which it would be well on that account to get rid. Besides,among them there should certainly be enemies of the people,a woman of the name of Delarue,for instance,the widow of a poisoner:

“She must be furious at being in prison,if she could she would set fire to Paris: she must have said so,she has said so. Another good riddance.” The demonstration appears convincing,and the prisoners are massacred without exception,included in the number being some fifty children of from twelve to seventeen years of age,who,of course,might themselves have become enemies of the nation,and of whom in consequence it was clearly well to be rid.

At the end of a week's work,all these operations being brought to an end,the slaughterers can think of reposing themselves. Profoundly convinced that they have deserved well of their country,they went to the authorities and demanded a recompense. The most zealous went so far as to claim a medal.

The history of the Commune of 1871 affords several facts analogous to those which precede. Given the growing influence of crowds and the successive capitulations before them of those in authority,we are destined to witness many others of a like nature.

Chapter III. Criminal Juries

A gathering of scientific men or of artists, owing to the mere fact that they form an assemblage, will not deliver judgments on general subjects sensibly different from those rendered by a gathering of masons or grocers.

Abstract:Criminal juries — General characteristics of juries — Statistics show that their decisions are independent of their composition — The manner in which an impression may be made on juries — The style and influence of argument — The methods of persuasion of celebrated counsel — The nature of those crimes for which juries are respectively indulgent or severe — The utility of the jury as an institution,and the danger that would result from its place being taken by magistrates.

Being unable to study here every category of jury,I shall only examine the most important — that of the juries of the Court of Assize. These juries afford an excellent example of the heterogeneous crowd that is not anonymous. We shall find them display suggestibility and but slight capacity for reasoning,while they are open to the influence of the leaders of crowds,and they are guided in the main by unconscious sentiments. In the course of this investigation we shall have occasion to observe some interesting examples of the errors that may be made by persons not versed in the psychology of crowds.

Juries,in the first place,furnish us a good example of the slight importance of the mental level of the different elements composing a crowd,so far as the decisions it comes to are concerned. We have seen that when a deliberative assembly is called upon to give its opinion on a question of a character not entirely technical,intelligence stands for nothing. For instance,a gathering of scientific men or of artists,owing to the mere fact that they form an assemblage,will not deliver judgments on general subjects sensibly different from those rendered by a gathering of masons or grocers. At various periods,and in particular previous to 1848,the French administration instituted a careful choice among the persons summoned to form a jury,picking the jurors from among the enlightened classes; choosing professors,functionaries,men of letters,& c. At the present day jurors are recruited for the most part from among small tradesmen,petty capitalists,and employés. Yet,to the great astonishment of specialist writers,whatever the composition of the jury has been,its decisions have been identical. Even the magistrates,hostile as they are to the institution of the jury,have had to recognise the exactness of the assertion. M. Bérard des Glajeux,a former President of the Court of Assizes,expresses himself on the subject in his “Memoirs” in the following terms: —

“The selection of jurymen is today in reality in the hands of the municipal councillors,who put people down on the list or eliminate them from it in accordance with the political and electoral preoccupations inherent in their situation.... The majority of the jurors chosen are persons engaged in trade,but persons of less importance than formerly,and employés belonging to certain branches of the administration.... Both opinions and professions counting for nothing once the rle of judge assumed,many of the jurymen having the ardour of neophytes,and men of the best intentions being similarly disposed in humble situations,the spirit of the jury has not changed: its verdicts have remained the same.”

Of the passage just cited the conclusions,which are just,are to be borne in mind and not the explanations,which are weak. Too much astonishment should not be felt at this weakness,for,as a rule,counsel equally with magistrates seem to be ignorant of the psychology of crowds and,in consequence,of juries. I find a proof of this statement in a fact related by the author just quoted. He remarks that Lachaud,one of the most illustrious barristers practising in the Court of Assize,made systematic use of his right to object to a juror in the case of all inpiduals of intelligence on the list. Yet experience — and experience alone — has ended by acquainting us with the utter uselessness of these objections. This is proved by the fact that at the present day public prosecutors and barristers,at any rate those belonging to the Parisian bar,have entirely renounced their right to object to a juror; still,as M.des Glajeux remarks,the verdicts have not changed,“they are neither better nor worse.”

Like all crowds,juries are very strongly impressed by sentimental considerations,and very slightly by argument. “They cannot resist the sight,” writes a barrister,“of a mother giving its child the breast,or of orphans.” “It is sufficient that a woman should be of agreeable appearance,” says M.des Glajeux,“to win the benevolence of the jury.”

Without pity for crimes of which it appears possible they might themselves be the victims — such crimes,moreover,are the most dangerous for society — juries,on the contrary,are very indulgent in the case of breaches of the law whose motive is passion. They are rarely severe on infanticide by girl-mothers,or hard on the young woman who throws vitriol at the man who has seduced and deserted her,for the reason that they feel instinctively that society runs but slight danger from such crimes,and that in a country in which the law does not protect deserted girls the crime of the girl who avenges herself is rather useful than harmful,inasmuch as it frightens future seducers in advance.

Juries,like all crowds,are profoundly impressed by prestige,and President des Glajeux very properly remarks that,very democratic as juries are in their composition,they are very aristocratic in their likes and dislikes: “Name,birth,great wealth,celebrity,the assistance of an illustrious counsel,everything in the nature of distinction or that lends brilliancy to the accused,stands him in extremely good stead.”

The chief concern of a good counsel should be to work upon the feelings of the jury,and,as with all crowds,to argue but little,or only to employ rudimentary modes of reasoning. An English barrister,famous for his successes in the assize courts,has well set forth the line of action to be followed: —

“While pleading he would attentively observe the jury. The most favourable opportunity has been reached. By dint of insight and experience the counsel reads the effect of each phrase on the faces of the jurymen,and draws his conclusions in consequence. His first step is to be sure which members of the jury are already favourable to his cause. It is short work to definitely gain their adhesion,and having done so he turns his attention to the members who seem,on the contrary,ill-disposed,and endeavours to discover why they are hostile to the accused. This is the delicate part of his task,for there may be an infinity of reasons for condemning a man,apart from the sentiment of justice.”

These few lines résumé the entire mechanism of the art of oratory,and we see why the speech prepared in advance has so slight an effect,it being necessary to be able to modify the terms employed from moment to moment in accordance with the impression produced.

The orator does not require to convert to his views all the members of a jury,but only the leading spirits among it who will determine the general opinion. As in all crowds,so in juries there are a small number of inpiduals who serve as guides to the rest. “I have found by experience,” says the counsel cited above,“that one or two energetic men suffice to carry the rest of the jury with them.” It is those two or three whom it is necessary to convince by skilful suggestions. First of all,and above all,it is necessary to please them. The man forming part of a crowd whom one has succeeded in pleasing is on the point of being convinced,and is quite disposed to accept as excellent any arguments that may be offered him. I detach the following anecdote from an interesting account of M.Lachaud,alluded to above: —

“It is well known that during all the speeches he would deliver in the course of an assize sessions,Lachaud never lost sight of the two or three jurymen whom he knew or felt to be influential but obstinate. As a rule he was successful in winning over these refractory jurors. On one occasion,however,in the provinces,he had to deal with a juryman whom he plied in vain for three-quarters of an hour with his most cunning arguments; the man was the seventh juryman,the first on the second bench. The case was desperate. Suddenly,in the middle of a passionate demonstration,Lachaud stopped short,and addressing the President of the court said: ‘Would you give instructions for the curtain there in front to be drawn? The seventh juryman is blinded by the sun.’ The juryman in question reddened,smiled,and expressed his thanks. He was won over for the defence.”

Many writers,some of them most distinguished,have started of late a strong campaign against the institution of the jury,although it is the only protection we have against the errors,really very frequent,of a caste that is under no control.A portion of these writers advocate a jury recruited solely from the ranks of the enlightened classes; but we have already proved that even in this case the verdicts would be identical with those returned under the present system. Other writers,taking their stand on the errors committed by juries,would abolish the jury and replace it by judges. It is difficult to see how these would-be reformers can forget that the errors for which the jury is blamed were committed in the first instance by judges,and that when the accused person comes before a jury he has already been held to be guilty by several magistrates,by the juge d'instruction,the public prosecutor,and the Court of Arraignment. It should thus be clear that were the accused to be definitely judged by magistrates instead of by jurymen,he would lose his only chance of being admitted innocent. The errors of juries have always been first of all the errors of magistrates. It is solely the magistrates,then,who should be blamed when particularly monstrous judicial errors crop up,such,for instance,as the quite recent condemnation of Dr. L — who,prosecuted by a juge d'instruction,of excessive stupidity,on the strength of the denunciation of a half-idiot girl,who accused the doctor of having performed an illegal operation upon her for thirty francs,would have been sent to penal servitude but for an explosion of public indignation,which had for result that he was immediately set at liberty by the Chief of the State. The honourable character given the condemned man by all his fellow-citizens made the grossness of the blunder self-evident. The magistrates themselves admitted it,and yet out of caste considerations they did all they could to prevent the pardon being signed. In all similar affairs the jury,confronted with technical details it is unable to understand,naturally hearkens to the public prosecutor,arguing that,after all,the affair has been investigated by magistrates trained to unravel the most intricate situations. Who,then,are the real authors of the error — the jurymen or the magistrates? We should cling vigorously to the jury. It constitutes,perhaps,the only category of crowd that cannot be replaced by any inpiduality. It alone can temper the severity of the law,which,equal for all,ought in principle to be blind and to take no cognisance of particular cases. Inaccessible to pity,and heeding nothing but the text of the law,the judge in his professional severity would visit with the same penalty the burglar guilty of murder and the wretched girl whom poverty and her abandonment by her seducer have driven to infanticide. The jury,on the other hand,instinctively feels that the seduced girl is much less guilty than the seducer,who,however,is not touched by the law,and that she deserves every indulgence.

Being well acquainted with the psychology of castes,and also with the psychology of other categories of crowds,I do not perceive a single case in which,wrongly accused of a crime,I should not prefer to have to deal with a jury rather than with magistrates. I should have some chance that my innocence would be recognised by the former and not the slightest chance that it would be admitted by the latter. The power of crowds is to be dreaded,but the power of certain castes is to be dreaded yet more. Crowds are open to conviction; castes never are.

Chapter IV. Electoral Crowds

With regard to social problems, owing to the number of unknown quantities they offer, men are substantially, equally ignorant.

Abstract:General characteristics of electoral crowds — The manner of persuading them — The qualities that should be possessed by a candidate — Necessity of prestige — Why working men and peasants so rarely choose candidates from their own class — The influence of words and formulas on the elector — The general aspect of election oratory — How the opinions of the elector are formed — The power of political committees — They represent the most redoubtable form of tyranny — The committees of the Revolution — Universal suffrage cannot be replaced in spite of its slight psychological value — Why it is that the votes recorded would remain the same even if the right of voting were restricted to a limited class of citizens — Of what universal suffrage is the expression in all countries.

Electoral crowds — that is to say,collectivities invested with the power of electing the holders of certain functions — constitute heterogeneous crowds,but as their action is confined to a single clearly determined matter,namely,to choosing between different candidates,they present only a few of the characteristics previously described. Of the characteristics peculiar to crowds,they display in particular but slight aptitude for reasoning,the absence of the critical spirit,irritability,credulity,and simplicity. In their decision,moreover,is to be traced the influence of the leaders of crowds and the part played by the factors we have enumerated: affirmation,repetition,prestige,and contagion.

Let us examine by what methods electoral crowds are to be persuaded. It will be easy to deduce their psychology from the methods that are most successful.

It is of primary importance that the candidate should possess prestige. Personal prestige can only be replaced by that resulting from wealth. Talent and even genius are not elements of success of serious importance.

Of capital importance,on the other hand,is the necessity for the candidate of possessing prestige,of being able,that is,to force himself upon the electorate without discussion. The reason why the electors,of whom a majority are working men or peasants,so rarely choose a man from their own ranks to represent them is that such a person enjoys no prestige among them. When,by chance,they do elect a man who is their equal,it is as a rule for subsidiary reasons — for instance,to spite an eminent man,or an influential employer of labour on whom the elector is in daily dependence,and whose master he has the illusion he becomes in this way for a moment.

The possession of prestige does not suffice,however,to assure the success of a candidate. The elector stickles in particular for the flattery of his greed and vanity. He must be overwhelmed with the most extravagant blandishments,and there must be no hesitation in making him the most fantastic promises. If he is a working man it is impossible to go too far in insulting and stigmatising employers of labour. As for the rival candidate,an effort must be made to destroy his chance by establishing by dint of affirmation,repetition,and contagion that he is an arrant scoundrel,and that it is a matter of common knowledge that he has been guilty of several crimes. It is,of course,useless to trouble about any semblance of proof. Should the adversary be ill-acquainted with the psychology of crowds he will try to justify himself by arguments instead of confining himself to replying to one set of affirmations by another; and he will have no chance whatever of being successful.

The candidate's written programme should not be too categorical,since later on his adversaries might bring it up against him; in his verbal programme,however,there cannot be too much exaggeration. The most important reforms maybe fearlessly promised. At the moment they are made these exaggerations produce a great effect,and they are not binding for the future,it being a matter of constant observation that the elector never troubles himself to know how far the candidate he has returned has followed out the electoral programme he applauded,and in virtue of which the election was supposed to have been secured.

In what precedes,all the factors of persuasion which we have described are to be recognised. We shall come across them again in the action exerted by words and formulas,whose magical sway we have already insisted upon. An orator who knows how to make use of these means of persuasion can do what he will with a crowd. Expressions such as infamous capital,vile exploiters,the admirable working man,the socialisation of wealth,& c.,always produce the same effect,although already somewhat worn by use. But the candidate who hits on a new formula as devoid as possible of precise meaning,and apt in consequence to flatter the most varied aspirations,infallibly obtains a success. The sanguinary Spanish revolution of 1873 was brought about by one of these magical phrases of complex meaning on which everybody can put his own interpretation. A contemporary writer has described the launching of this phrase in terms that deserve to be quoted: —

“The radicals have made the discovery that a centralised republic is a monarchy in disguise,and to humour them the Cortes had unanimously proclaimed a federal republic,though none of the voters could have explained what it was he had just voted for. This formula,however,delighted everybody; the joy was intoxicating,delirious. The reign of virtue and happiness had just been inaugurated on earth. A republican whose opponent refused him the title of federalist considered himself to be mortally insulted. People addressed each other in the streets with the words: ‘Long live the federal republic!’ After which the praises were sung of the mystic virtue of the absence of discipline in the army,and of the autonomy of the soldiers. What was understood by the ‘federal republic?’ There were those who took it to mean the emancipation of the provinces,institutions akin to those of the United States and administrative decentralisation; others had in view the abolition of all authority and the speedy commencement of the great social liquidation. The socialists of Barcelona and Andalusia stood out for the absolute sovereignty of the communes; they proposed to endow Spain with ten thousand independent municipalities,to legislate on their own account,and their creation to be accompanied by the suppression of the police and the army. In the southern provinces the insurrection was soon seen to spread from town to town and village to village.

Directly a village had made its pronunciamento its first care was to destroy the telegraph wires and the railway lines so as to cut off all communication with its neighbours and Madrid. The sorriest hamlet was determined to stand on its own bottom. Federation had given place to cantonalism,marked by massacres,incendiarism,and every description of brutality,and bloody saturnalia were celebrated throughout the length and breadth of the land.”

With respect to the influence that may be exerted by reasoning on the minds of electors,to harbour the least doubt on this subject can only be the result of never having read the reports of an electioneering meeting. In such a gathering affirmations,invectives,and sometimes blows are exchanged,but never arguments. Should silence be established for a moment it is because some one present,having the reputation of a “tough customer,” has announced that he is about to heckle the candidate by putting him one of those embarrassing questions which are always the joy of the audience. The satisfaction,however,of the opposition party is shortlived,for the voice of the questioner is soon drowned in the uproar made by his adversaries. The following reports of public meetings,chosen from hundreds of similar examples,and taken from the daily papers,may be considered as typical: —

“One of the organisers of the meeting having asked the assembly to elect a president,the storm bursts. The anarchists leap on to the platform to take the committee table by storm. The socialists make an energetic defence; blows are exchanged,and each party accuses the other of being spies in the pay of the Government,& c.... A citizen leaves the hall with a black eye.

“The committee is at length installed as best it may be in the midst of the tumult,and the right to speak devolves upon ‘Comrade’ X.

“The orator starts a vigorous attack on the socialists,who interrupt him with shouts of ‘Idiot,scoundrel,blackguard!’ & c.,epithets to which Comrade X. replies by setting forth a theory according to which the socialists are ‘idiots’ or ‘jokers.’”

“The Allemanist party had organised yesterday evening,in the Hall of Commerce,in the Rue du Faubourg-du-Temple,a great meeting,preliminary to the workers’ fête of the 1st of May. The watchword of the meeting was ‘Calm and Tranquillity!’

“Comrade G — alludes to the socialists as ‘idiots’ and ‘humbugs.’

“At these words there is an exchange of invectives and orators and audience come to blows. Chairs,tables,and benches are converted into weapons,” & c.,& c.

It is not to be imagined for a moment that this description of discussion is peculiar to a determined class of electors and dependent on their social position. In every anonymous assembly whatever,though it be composed exclusively of highly educated persons,discussion always assumes the same shape. I have shown that when men are collected in a crowd there is a tendency towards their mental levelling at work,and proof of this is to be found at every turn. Take,for example,the following extract from a report of a meeting composed exclusively of students,which I borrow from the Temps of 13th of February,1895: —

“The tumult only increased as the evening went on; I do not believe that a single orator succeeded in uttering two sentences without being interrupted. At every instant there came shouts from this or that direction or from every direction at once. Applause was intermingled with hissing,violent discussions were in progress between inpidual members of the audience,sticks were brandished threateningly,others beat a tattoo on the floor,and the interrupters were greeted with yells of ‘Put him out!’ or ‘Let him speak!’

“M.C — lavished such epithets as odious and cowardly,monstrous,vile,venal and vindictive,on the Association,which he declared he wanted to destroy,” & c.,& c.

How,it may be asked,can an elector form an opinion under such conditions? To put such a question is to harbour a strange delusion as to the measure of liberty that may be enjoyed by a collectivity. Crowds have opinions that have been imposed upon them,but they never boast reasoned opinions. In the case under consideration the opinions and votes of the electors are in the hands of the election committees,whose leading spirits are,as a rule,publicans,their influence over the working men,to whom they allow credit,being great. “Do you know what an election committee is?” writes M. Schérer,one of the most valiant champions of present-day democracy. “It is neither more nor less than the corner-stone of our institutions,the masterpiece of the political machine. France is governed today by the election committees.”

To exert an influence over them is not difficult,provided the candidate be in himself acceptable and possess adequate financial resources. According to the admissions of the donors,three millions of francs sufficed to secure the repeated elections of General Boulanger.

Such is the psychology of electoral crowds. It is identical with that of other crowds: neither better nor worse.

In consequence I draw no conclusion against universal suffrage from what precedes. Had I to settle its fate,I should preserve it as it is for practical reasons,which are to be deduced in point of fact from our investigation of the psychology of crowds. On this account I shall proceed to set them forth.

No doubt the weak side of universal suffrage is too obvious to be overlooked. It cannot be gainsaid that civilisation has been the work of a small minority of superior intelligences constituting the culminating point of a pyramid,whose stages,widening in proportion to the decrease of mental power,represent the masses of a nation. The greatness of a civilisation cannot assuredly depend upon the votes given by inferior elements boasting solely numerical strength. Doubtless,too,the votes recorded by crowds are often very dangerous. They have already cost us several invasions,and in view of the triumph of socialism,for which they are preparing the way,it is probable that the vagaries of popular sovereignty will cost us still more dearly.

Excellent,however,as these objections are in theory,in practice they lose all force,as will be admitted if the invincible strength be remembered of ideas transformed into dogmas. The dogma of the sovereignty of crowds is as little defensible,from the philosophical point of view,as the religious dogmas of the Middle Ages,but it enjoys at present the same absolute power they formerly enjoyed. It is as unattackable in consequence as in the past were our religious ideas. Imagine a modern freethinker miraculously transported into the midst of the Middle Ages. Do you suppose that,after having ascertained the sovereign power of the religious ideas that were then in force,he would have been tempted to attack them? Having fallen into the hands of a judge disposed to send him to the stake,under the imputation of having concluded a pact with the devil,or of having been present at the witches sabbath,would it have occurred to him to call in question the existence of the devil or of the sabbath? It were as wise to oppose cyclones with discussion as the beliefs of crowds. The dogma of universal suffrage possesses today the power the Christian dogmas formerly possessed. Orators and writers allude to it with a respect and adulation that never fell to the share of Louis XIV. In consequence the same position must be taken up with regard to it as with regard to all religious dogmas. Time alone can act upon them.

Besides,it would be the more useless to attempt to undermine this dogma,inasmuch as it has an appearance of reasonableness in its favour. “In an era of equality,” Tocqueville justly remarks,“men have no faith in each other on account of their being all alike; yet this same similitude gives them an almost limitless confidence in the judgment of the public,the reason being that it does not appear probable that,all men being equally enlightened,truth and numerical superiority should not go hand in hand.”

Must it be believed that with a restricted suffrage — a suffrage restricted to those intellectually capable if it be desired — an improvement would be effected in the votes of crowds? I cannot admit for a moment that this would be the case,and that for the reasons I have already given touching the mental inferiority of all collectivities,whatever their composition. In a crowd men always tend to the same level,and,on general questions,a vote,recorded by forty academicians is no better than that of forty water-carriers. I do not in the least believe that any of the votes for which universal suffrage is blamed — the re-establishment of the Empire,for instance — would have fallen out differently had the voters been exclusively recruited among learned and liberally educated men. It does not follow because an inpidual knows Greek or mathematics,is an architect,a veterinary surgeon,a doctor,or a barrister,that he is endowed with a special intelligence of social questions. All our political economists are highly educated,being for the most part professors or academicians,yet is there a single general question — protection,bimetallism,& c. — on which they have succeeded in agreeing? The explanation is that their science is only a very attenuated form of our universal ignorance. With regard to social problems,owing to the number of unknown quantities they offer,men are substantially,equally ignorant.

In consequence,were the electorate solely composed of persons stuffed with sciences their votes would be no better than those emitted at present. They would be guided in the main by their sentiments and by party spirit. We should be spared none of the difficulties we now have to contend with,and we should certainly be subjected to the oppressive tyranny of castes.

Whether the suffrage of crowds be restricted or general,whether it be exercised under a republic or a monarchy,in France,in Belgium,in Greece,in Portugal,or in Spain,it is everywhere identical; and,when all is said and done,it is the expression of the unconscious aspirations and needs of the race. In each country the average opinions of those elected represent the genius of the race,and they will be found not to alter sensibly from one generation to another.

It is seen,then,that we are confronted once more by the fundamental notion of race,which we have come across so often,and on this other notion,which is the outcome of the first,that institutions and governments play but a small part in the life of a people. Peoples are guided in the main by the genius of their race,that is,by that inherited residue of qualities of which the genius is the sum total. Race and the slavery of our daily necessities are the mysterious master-causes that rule our destiny.

Chapter V. Parliamentary Assemblies

The influence of the leaders is due in very small measure to the arguments they employ, but in a large degree to their prestige. The best proof of this is that, should they by any circumstance lose their prestige, their influence disappears.

Abstract:Parliamentary crowds present most of the characteristics common to heterogeneous crowds that are not anonymous — The simplicity of their opinions — Their suggestibility and its limits — Their indestructible,fixed opinions and their changed opinions — The reason of the predominance of indecision — The role of the leaders — The reason of their prestige — They are the true masters of an assembly whose votes,on that account,are merely those of a small minority — The absolute power they exercise — The elements of their oratorical art — Phrases and images — The psychological necessity the leaders are under of being in a general way of stubborn convictions and narrow-minded — It is impossible for a speaker without prestige to obtain recognition for his arguments — The exaggeration of the sentiments,whether good or bad,of assemblies — At certain moments they become automatic — The sittings of the Convention — Cases in which an assembly loses the characteristics of crowds — The influence of specialists when technical questions arise — The advantages and dangers of a parliamentary system in all countries — It is adapted to modern needs; but it involves financial waste and the progressive curtailment of all liberty — Conclusion.

In parliamentary assemblies we have an example of heterogeneous crowds that are not anonymous. Although the mode of election of their members varies from epoch to epoch,and from nation to nation,they present very similar characteristics. In this case the influence of the race makes itself felt to weaken or exaggerate the characteristics common to crowds,but not to prevent their manifestation. The parliamentary assemblies of the most widely different countries,of Greece,Italy,Portugal,Spain,France,and America present great analogies in their debates and votes,and leave the respective governments face to face with identical difficulties.

Moreover,the parliamentary system represents the ideal of all modern civilised peoples. The system is the expression of the idea,psychologically erroneous,but generally admitted,that a large gathering of men is much more capable than a small number of coming to a wise and independent decision on a given subject.

The general characteristics of crowds are to be met with in parliamentary assemblies: intellectual simplicity,irritability,suggestibility,the exaggeration of the sentiments and the preponderating influence of a few leaders. In consequence,however,of their special composition parliamentary crowds offer some distinctive features,which we shall point out shortly.

Simplicity in their opinions is one of their most important characteristics. In the case of all parties,and more especially so far as the Latin peoples are concerned,an invariable tendency is met with in crowds of this kind to solve the most complicated social problems by the simplest abstract principles and general laws applicable to all cases. Naturally the principles vary with the party; but owing to the mere fact that the inpidual members are a part of a crowd,they are always inclined to exaggerate the worth of their principles,and to push them to their extreme consequences. In consequence parliaments are more especially representative of extreme opinions.

The most perfect example of the ingenuous simplification of opinions peculiar to assemblies is offered by the Jacobins of the French Revolution. Dogmatic and logical to a man,and their brains full of vague generalities,they busied themselves with the application of fixed-principles without concerning themselves with events. It has been said of them,with reason,that they went through the Revolution without witnessing it. With the aid of the very simple dogmas that served them as guide,they imagined they could recast society from top to bottom,and cause a highly refined civilisation to return to a very anterior phase of the social evolution. The methods they resorted to to realise their dream wore the same stamp of absolute ingenuousness. They confined themselves,in reality,to destroying what stood in their way.

All of them,moreover — Girondists,the Men of the Mountain,the Thermidorians,& c. — were alike animated by the same spirit.

Parliamentary crowds are very open to suggestion; and,as in the case of all crowds,the suggestion comes from leaders possessing prestige; but the suggestibility of parliamentary assemblies has very clearly defined limits,which it is important to point out.

On all questions of local or regional interest every member of an assembly has fixed,unalterable opinions,which no amount of argument can shake. The talent of a Demosthenes would be powerless to change the vote of a Deputy on such questions as protection or the privilege of distilling alcohol,questions in which the interests of influential electors are involved. The suggestion emanating from these electors and undergone before the time to vote arrives,sufficiently outweighs suggestions from any other source to annul them and to maintain an absolute fixity of opinion.

On general questions — the overthrow of a Cabinet,the imposition of a tax,& c. — there is no longer any fixity of opinion,and the suggestions of leaders can exert an influence,though not in quite the same way as in an ordinary crowd. Every party has its leaders,who possess occasionally an equal influence. The result is that the Deputy finds himself placed between two contrary suggestions,and is inevitably made to hesitate. This explains how it is that he is often seen to vote in contrary fashion in an interval of a quarter of an hour or to add to a law an article which nullifies it; for instance,to withdraw from employers of labour the right of choosing and dismissing their workmen,and then to very nearly annul this measure by an amendment.

It is for the same reason that every Chamber that is returned has some very stable opinions,and other opinions that are very shifting. On the whole,the general questions being the more numerous,indecision is predominant in the Chamber — the indecision which results from the ever-present fear of the elector,the suggestion received from whom is always latent,and tends to counterbalance the influence of the leaders.

Still,it is the leaders who are definitely the masters in those numerous discussions,with regard to the subject-matter of which the members of an assembly are without strong preconceived opinions.

The necessity for these leaders is evident,since,under the name of heads of groups,they are met with in the assemblies of every country. They are the real rulers of an assembly. Men forming a crowd cannot do without a master,whence it results that the votes of an assembly only represent,as a rule,the opinions of a small minority.

The influence of the leaders is due in very small measure to the arguments they employ,but in a large degree to their prestige. The best proof of this is that,should they by any circumstance lose their prestige,their influence disappears.

The prestige of these political leaders is inpidual,and independent of name or celebrity: a fact of which M.Jules Simon gives us some very curious examples in his remarks on the prominent men of the Assembly of 1848,of which he was a member: —

“Two months before he was all-powerful,Louis Napoleon was entirely without the least importance.

“Victor Hugo mounted the tribune. He failed to achieve success. He was listened to as Félix Pyat was listened to,but he did not obtain as much applause. ‘I don't like his ideas,’ Vaulabelle said to me,speaking of Félix Pyat,‘but he is one of the greatest writers and the greatest orator of France.’ Edgar Quinet,in spite of his exceptional and powerful intelligence,was held in no esteem whatever. He had been popular for awhile before the opening of the Assembly; in the Assembly he had no popularity.

“The splendour of genius makes itself less felt in political assemblies than anywhere else. They only give heed to eloquence appropriate to the time and place and to party services,not to services rendered the country. For homage to be rendered Lamartine in 1848 and Thiers in 1871,the stimulant was needed of urgent,inexorable interest. As soon as the danger was passed the parliamentary world forgot in the same instant its gratitude and its fright.”

I have quoted the preceding passage for the sake of the facts it contains,not of the explanations it offers,their psychology being somewhat poor. A crowd would at once lose its character of a crowd were it to credit its leaders with their services,whether of a party nature or rendered their country. The crowd that obeys a leader is under the influence of his prestige,and its submission is not dictated by any sentiment of interest or gratitude.

In consequence the leader endowed with sufficient prestige wields almost absolute power. The immense influence exerted during a long series of years,thanks to his prestige,by a celebrated Deputy,beaten at the last general election in consequence of certain financial events,is well known. He had only to give the signal and Cabinets were overthrown. A writer has clearly indicated the scope of his action in the following lines: —

“It is due,in the main,to M.X — that we paid three times as dearly as we should have done for Tonkin,that we remained so long on a precarious footing in Madagascar,that we were defrauded of an empire in the region of the Lower Niger,and that we have lost the preponderating situation we used to occupy in Egypt. The theories of M.X — have cost us more territories than the disasters of Napoleon I.”

We must not harbour too bitter a grudge against the leader in question. It is plain that he has cost us very dear; but a great part of his influence was due to the fact that he followed public opinion,which,in colonial matters,was far from being at the time what it has since become. A leader is seldom in advance of public opinion; almost always all he does is to follow it and to espouse all its errors.

The means of persuasion of the leaders we are dealing with,apart from their prestige,consist in the factors we have already enumerated several times. To make a skilful use of these resources a leader must have arrived at a comprehension,at least in an unconscious manner,of the psychology of crowds,and must know how to address them. He should be aware,in particular,of the fascinating influence of words,phrases,and images. He should possess a special description of eloquence,composed of energetic affirmations — unburdened with proofs — and impressive images,accompanied by very summary arguments. This is a kind of eloquence that is met with in all assemblies,the English Parliament included,the most serious though it is of all.

“Debates in the House of Commons,” says the English philosopher Maine,“may be constantly read in which the entire discussion is confined to an exchange of rather weak generalities and rather violent personalities. General formulas of this description exercise a prodigious influence on the imagination of a pure democracy. It will always be easy to make a crowd accept general assertions,presented in striking terms,although they have never been verified,and are perhaps not susceptible of verification.”

Too much importance cannot be attached to the “striking terms” alluded to in the above quotation. We have already insisted,on several occasions,on the special power of words and formulas. They must be chosen in such a way as to evoke very vivid images. The following phrase,taken from a speech by one of the leaders of our assemblies,affords an excellent example: —

“When the same vessel shall bear away to the fever-haunted lands of our penitentiary settlements the politician of shady reputation and the anarchist guilty of murder,the pair will be able to converse together,and they will appear to each other as the two complementary aspects of one and the same state of society.”

The image thus evoked is very vivid,and all the adversaries of the speaker felt themselves threatened by it. They conjured up a double vision of the fever-haunted country and the vessel that may carry them away; for is it not possible that they are included in the somewhat ill-defined category of the politicians menaced? They experienced the lurking fear that the men of the Convention must have felt whom the vague speeches of Robespierre threatened with the guillotine,and who,under the influence of this fear,invariably yielded to him.

It is all to the interest of the leaders to indulge in the most improbable exaggerations. The speaker of whom I have just cited a sentence was able to affirm,without arousing violent protestations,that bankers and priests had subsidised the throwers of bombs,and that the directors of the great financial companies deserve the same punishment as anarchists. Affirmations of this kind are always effective with crowds. The affirmation is never too violent,the declamation never too threatening. Nothing intimidates the audience more than this sort of eloquence. Those present are afraid that if they protest they will be put down as traitors or accomplices.

As I have said,this peculiar style of eloquence has ever been of sovereign effect in all assemblies. In times of crisis its power is still further accentuated. The speeches of the great orators of the assemblies of the French Revolution are very interesting reading from this point of view. At every instant they thought themselves obliged to pause in order to denounce crime and exalt virtue,after which they would burst forth into imprecations against tyrants,and swear to live free men or perish. Those present rose to their feet,applauded furiously,and then,calmed,took their seats again.

On occasion,the leader may be intelligent and highly educated,but the possession of these qualities does him,as a rule,more harm than good. By showing how complex things are,by allowing of explanation and promoting comprehension,intelligence always renders its owner indulgent,and blunts,in a large measure,that intensity and violence of conviction needful for apostles. The great leaders of crowds of all ages,and those of the Revolution in particular,have been of lamentably narrow intellect; while it is precisely those whose intelligence has been the most restricted who have exercised the greatest influence.

The speeches of the most celebrated of them,of Robespierre,frequently astound one by their incoherence: by merely reading them no plausible explanation is to be found of the great part played by the powerful dictator: —

“The commonplaces and redundancies of pedagogic eloquence and Latin culture at the service of a mind childish rather than undistinguished,and limited in its notions of attack and defence to the defiant attitude of schoolboys. Not an idea,not a happy turn of phrase,or a telling hit: a storm of declamation that leaves us bored. After a dose of this unexhilarating reading one is attempted to exclaim ‘Oh!’ with the amiable Camille Desmoulins.”

It is terrible at times to think of the power that strong conviction combined with extreme narrowness of mind gives a man possessing prestige. It is none the less necessary that these conditions should be satisfied for a man to ignore obstacles and display strength of will in a high measure.

Crowds instinctively recognise in men of energy and conviction the masters they are always in need of.

In a parliamentary assembly the success of a speech depends almost solely on the prestige possessed by the speaker,and not at all on the arguments he brings forward. The best proof of this is that when for one cause or another a speaker loses his prestige,he loses simultaneously all his influence,that is,his power of influencing votes at will.

When an unknown speaker comes forward with a speech containing good arguments,but only arguments,the chances are that he will only obtain a hearing. A Deputy who is a psychologist of insight,M.Desaubes,has recently traced in the following lines the portrait of the Deputy who lacks prestige: —

“When he takes his place in the tribune he draws a document from his portfolio,spreads it out methodically before him,and makes a start with assurance.

“He flatters himself that he will implant in the minds of his audience the conviction by which he is himself animated. He has weighed and reweighed his arguments; he is well primed with figures and proofs; he is certain he will convince his hearers. In the face of the evidence he is to adduce all resistance would be futile. He begins,confident in the justice of his cause,and relying upon the attention of his colleagues,whose only anxiety,of course,is to subscribe to the truth.

“He speaks,and is at once surprised at the restlessness of the House,and a little annoyed by the noise that is being made.

“How is it silence is not kept? Why this general inattention? What are those Deputies thinking about who are engaged in conversation? What urgent motive has induced this or that Deputy to quit his seat?

“An expression of uneasiness crosses his face; he frowns and stops. Encouraged by the Presisident,he begins again,raising his voice. He is only listened to all the less. He lends emphasis to his words,and gesticulates: the noise around him increases. He can no longer hear himself,and again stops; finally,afraid that his silence may provoke the dreaded cry,‘The Closure!’ he starts off again. The clamour becomes unbearable.”

When parliamentary assemblies reach a certain pitch of excitement they become identical with ordinary heterogeneous crowds,and their sentiments in consequence present the peculiarity of being always extreme. They will be seen to commit acts of the greatest heroism or the worst excesses. The inpidual is no longer himself,and so entirely is this the case that he will vote measures most adverse to his personal interests.

The history of the French Revolution shows to what an extent assemblies are capable of losing their self-consciousness,and of obeying suggestions most contrary to their interests. It was an enormous sacrifice for the nobility to renounce its privileges,yet it did so without hesitation on a famous night during the sittings of the Constituant Assembly. By renouncing their inviolability the men of the Convention placed themselves under a perpetual menace of death and yet they took this step,and were not afraid to decimate their own ranks,though perfectly aware that the scaffold to which they were sending their colleagues today might be their own fate tomorrow. The truth is they had attained to that completely automatic state which I have described elsewhere,and no consideration would hinder them from yielding to the suggestions by which they were hypnotised. The following passage from the memoirs of one of them,Billaud-Varennes,is absolutely typical on this score: “The decisions with which we have been so reproached,” he says,“were not desired by us two days,a single day before they were taken: it was the crisis and nothing else that gave rise to them.” Nothing can be more accurate.

The same phenomena of unconsciousness were to be witnessed during all the stormy sittings of the Convention.

“They approved and decreed measures,” says Taine,“which they held in horror — measures which were not only stupid and foolish,but measures that were crimes — the murder of innocent men,the murder of their friends. The Left,supported by the Right,unanimously and amid loud applause,sent to the scaffold Danton,its natural chief,and the great promoter and leader of the Revolution. Unanimously and amid the greatest applause the Right,supported by the Left,votes the worst decrees of the revolutionary government. Unanimously and amid cries of admiration and enthusiasm,amid demonstrations of passionate sympathy for Collot d'Herbois,Couthon,and Robespierre,the Convention by spontaneous and repeated re-elections keeps in office the homicidal government which the Plain detests because it is homicidal,and the Mountain detests because it is decimated by it. The Plain and the Mountain,the majority and the minority,finish by consenting to help on their own suicide. The 22 Prairial the entire Convention offered itself to the executioner; the 8 Thermidor,during the first quarter of an hour that followed Robespierre's speech,it did the same thing again.”

This picture may appear sombre. Yet it is accurate. Parliamentary assemblies,sufficiently excited and hypnotised,offer the same characteristics. They become an unstable flock,obedient to every impulsion. The following description of the Assembly of 1848 is due to M.Spuller,a parliamentarian whose faith in democracy is above suspicion. I reproduce it from the Revue littéraire,and it is thoroughly typical. It offers an example of all the exaggerated sentiments which I have described as characteristic of crowds,and of that excessive changeableness which permits of assemblies passing,from moment to moment,from one set of sentiments to another entirely opposite.

“The Republican party was brought to its perdition by its pisions,its jealousies,its suspicions,and,in turn,its blind confidence and its limitless hopes. Its ingenuousness and candour were only equalled by its universal mistrust. An absence of all sense of legality,of all comprehension of discipline,together with boundless terrors and illusions; the peasant and the child are on a level in these respects. Their calm is as great as their impatience; their ferocity is equal to their docility. This condition is the natural consequence of a temperament that is not formed and of the lack of education. Nothing astonishes such persons,and everything disconcerts them. Trembling with fear or brave to the point of heroism,they would go through fire and water or fly from a shadow.

“They are ignorant of cause and effect and of the connecting links between events. They are as promptly discouraged as they are exalted,they are subject to every description of panic,they are always either too highly strung or too downcast,but never in the mood or the measure the situation would require. More fluid than water they reflect every line and assume every shape. What sort of a foundation for a government can they be expected to supply?”

Fortunately all the characteristics just described as to be met with in parliamentary assemblies are in no wise constantly displayed. Such assemblies only constitute crowds at certain moments. The inpiduals composing them retain their inpiduality in a great number of cases,which explains how it is that an assembly is able to turn out excellent technical laws. It is true that the author of these laws is a specialist who has prepared them in the quiet of his study,and that in reality the law voted is the work of an inpidual and not of an assembly. These laws are naturally the best. They are only liable to have disastrous results when a series of amendments has converted them into the outcome of a collective effort. The work of a crowd is always inferior,whatever its nature,to that of an isolated inpidual. It is specialists who safeguard assemblies from passing ill-advised or unworkable measures. The specialist in this case is a temporary leader of crowds. The Assembly is without influence on him,but he has influence over the Assembly.

In spite of all the difficulties attending their working,parliamentary assemblies are the best form of government mankind has discovered as yet,and more especially the best means it has found to escape the yoke of personal tyrannies. They constitute assuredly the ideal government at any rate for philosophers,thinkers,writers,artists,and learned men — in a word,for all those who form the cream of a civilisation.

Moreover,in reality they only present two serious dangers,one being inevitable financial waste,and the other the progressive restriction of the liberty of the inpidual.

The first of these dangers is the necessary consequence of the exigencies and want of foresight of electoral crowds. Should a member of an assembly propose a measure giving apparent satisfaction to democratic ideas,should he bring in a Bill,for instance,to assure old-age pensions to all workers,and to increase the wages of any class of State employés,the other Deputies,victims of suggestion in their dread of their electors,will not venture to seem to disregard the interests of the latter by rejecting the proposed measure,although well aware they are imposing a fresh strain on the Budget and necessitating the creation of new taxes. It is impossible for them to hesitate to give their votes. The consequences of the increase of expenditure are remote and will not entail disagreeable consequences for them personally,while the consequences of a negative vote might clearly come to light when they next present themselves for re-election.

In addition to this first cause of an exaggerated expenditure there is another not less imperative — the necessity of voting all grants for local purposes. A Deputy is unable to oppose grants of this kind because they represent once more the exigencies of the electors,and because each inpidual Deputy can only obtain what he requires for his own constituency on the condition of acceding to similar demands on the part of his colleagues.

The second of the dangers referred to above — the inevitable restrictions on liberty consummated by parliamentary assemblies — is apparently less obvious,but is,nevertheless,very real. It is the result of the innumerable laws — having always a restrictive action — which parliaments consider themselves obliged to vote and to whose consequences,owing to their shortsightedness,they are in a great measure blind.

The danger must indeed be most inevitable,since even England itself,which assuredly offers the most popular type of the parliamentary régime,the type in which the representative is most independent of his elector,has been unable to escape it. Herbert Spencer has shown,in a work already old,that the increase of apparent liberty must needs be followed by the decrease of real liberty. Returning to this contention in his recent book,“The Inpidual versus the State,” he thus expresses himself with regard to the English Parliament: —

“Legislation since this period has followed the course,I pointed out. Rapidly multiplying dictatorial measures have continually tended to restrict inpidual liberties,and this in two ways. Regulations have been established every year in greater number,imposing a constraint on the citizen in matters in which his acts were formerly completely free,and forcing him to accomplish acts which he was formerly at liberty to accomplish or not to accomplish at will. At the same time heavier and heavier public,and especially local,burdens have still further restricted his liberty by diminishing the portion of his profits he can spend as he chooses,and by augmenting the portion which is taken from him to be spent according to the good pleasure of the public authorities.”

This progressive restriction of liberties shows itself in every country in a special shape which Herbert Spencer has not pointed out; it is that the passing of these innumerable series of legislative measures,all of them in a general way of a restrictive order,conduces necessarily to augment the number,the power,and the influence of the functionaries charged with their application. These functionaries tend in this way to become the veritable masters of civilised countries. Their power is all the greater owing to the fact that,amidst the incessant transfer of authority,the administrative caste is alone in being untouched by these changes,is alone in possessing irresponsibility,impersonality,and perpetuity. There is no more oppressive despotism than that which presents itself under this triple form.

This incessant creation of restrictive laws and regulations,surrounding the pettiest actions of existence with the most complicated formalities,inevitably has for its result the confining within narrower and narrower limits of the sphere in which the citizen may move freely. Victims of the delusion that equality and liberty are the better assured by the multiplication of laws,nations daily consent to put up with trammels increasingly burdensome. They do not accept this legislation with impunity. Accustomed to put up with every yoke,they soon end by desiring servitude,and lose all spontaneousness and energy. They are then no more than vain shadows,passive,unresisting and powerless automata.

Arrived at this point,the inpidual is bound to seek outside himself the forces he no longer finds within him. The functions of governments necessarily increase in proportion as the indifference and helplessness of the citizens grow. They it is who must necessarily exhibit the initiative,enterprising,and guiding spirit in which private persons are lacking. It falls on them to undertake everything,direct everything,and take everything under their protection. The State becomes an all-powerful god. Still experience shows that the power of such gods was never either very durable or very strong.

This progressive restriction of all liberties in the case of certain peoples,in spite of an outward license that gives them the illusion that these liberties are still in their possession,seems at least as much a consequence of their old age as of any particular system. It constitutes one of the precursory symptoms of that decadent phase which up to now no civilisation has escaped.

Judging by the lessons of the past,and by the symptoms that strike the attention on every side,several of our modern civilisations have reached that phase of extreme old age which precedes decadence. It seems inevitable that all peoples should pass through identical phases of existence,since history is so often seen to repeat its course.

It is easy to note briefly these common phases of the evolution of civilisations,and I shall terminate this work with a summary of them. This rapid sketch will perhaps throw some gleams of light on the causes of the power at present wielded by crowds.

If we examine in their main lines the genesis of the greatness and of the fall of the civilisations that preceded our own,what do we see?

At the dawn of civilisation a swarm of men of various origin,brought together by the chances of migrations,invasions,and conquests. Of different blood,and of equally different languages and beliefs,the only common bond of union between these men is the half-recognised law of a chief. The psychological characteristics of crowds are present in an eminent degree in these confused agglomerations. They have the transient cohesion of crowds,their heroism,their weaknesses,their impulsiveness,and their violence. Nothing is stable in connection with them. They are barbarians.

At length time accomplishes its work. The identity of surroundings,the repeated intermingling of races,the necessities of life in common exert their influence. The assemblage of dissimilar units begins to blend into a whole,to form a race; that is,an aggregate possessing common characteristics and sentiments to which heredity will give greater and greater fixity. The crowd has become a people,and this people is able to emerge from its barbarous state. However,it will only entirely emerge therefrom when,after long efforts,struggles necessarily repeated,and innumerable recommencements,it shall have acquired an ideal. The nature of this ideal is of slight importance; whether it be the cult of Rome,the might of Athens,or the triumph of Allah,it will suffice to endow all the inpiduals of the race that is forming with perfect unity of sentiment and thought.

At this stage a new civilisation,with its institutions,its beliefs,and its arts,may be born. In pursuit of its ideal,the race will acquire in succession the qualities necessary to give it splendour,vigour,and grandeur. At times no doubt it will still be a crowd,but henceforth,beneath the mobile and changing characteristics of crowds,is found a solid substratum,the genius of the race which confines within narrow limits the transformations of a nation and overrules the play of chance.

After having exerted its creative action,time begins that work of destruction from which neither gods nor men escape. Having reached a certain level of strength and complexity a civilisation ceases to grow,and having ceased to grow it is condemned to a speedy decline. The hour of its old age has struck.

This inevitable hour is always marked by the weakening of the ideal that was the mainstay of the race. In proportion as this ideal pales all the religious,political,and social structures inspired by it begin to be shaken.

With the progressive perishing of its ideal the race loses more and more the qualities that lent it its cohesion,its unity,and its strength. The personality and intelligence of the inpidual may increase,but at the same time this collective egoism of the race is replaced by an excessive development of the egoism of the inpidual,accompanied by a weakening of character and a lessening of the capacity for action. What constituted a people,a unity,a whole,becomes in the end an agglomeration of inpidualities lacking cohesion,and artificially held together for a time by its traditions and institutions. It is at this stage that men,pided by their interests and aspirations,and incapable any longer of self-government,require directing in their pettiest acts,and that the State exerts an absorbing influence.

With the definite loss of its old ideal the genius of the race entirely disappears; it is a mere swarm of isolated inpiduals and returns to its original state — that of a crowd. Without consistency and without a future,it has all the transitory characteristics of crowds. Its civilisation is now without stability,and at the mercy of every chance. The populace is sovereign,and the tide of barbarism mounts. The civilisation may still seem brilliant because it possesses an outward front,the work of a long past,but it is in reality an edifice crumbling to ruin,which nothing supports,and destined to fall in at the first storm.

To pass in pursuit of an ideal from the barbarous to the civilised state,and then,when this ideal has lost its virtue,to decline and die,such is the cycle of the life of a people.

译名对照表

阿尔维耶拉Goblet d’Alviela

阿伦特Hannah Arendt

安东尼Marcus Antonius

奥尔波特Gordon W﹒Allport

奥尔特加-加塞特José Ortegay Gasset

奥热罗Pierre－F﹒－C﹒Augereau

巴拉斯Paul－F﹒－J﹒Barras

比希纳Ludwig Buchner

伯吉斯Watson Burgess

布尔热Paul Bourget

布朗热Georges Boulonger

布罗伊尔Josef Breuer

达武Louis‐Nicolas Davout

戴鲁莱德Paul Deroulede

丹东Georges Danton

德布瓦Collotd＇Herbois

迪尔凯姆Emile Durkheim

弗洛姆Erich Fromm

弗洛伊德Sigmund Freud

伏尔泰Francois M﹒A﹒Voltaire

戈宾诺Joseph‐Arthur de Gobineau

格兰维尔Joseph Glanvill

龚古尔兄弟Edmond＆Jule Goncourt

华莱士Alfred Wallace

霍尔姆斯Oliver W﹒Holmes

加里波第Giuseppe Garilbaldi

加瓦尔尼Paul Gavarni

科拉蒂尼Enrico Corradini

科佩Francois Coppee

克列孟梭Georges Clemenceau

孔代The Great Conde

孔斯坦Ernest Constans

库东Georges Couthon

库朗热Fustel de Coulange

拉马丁Alphonse de Lamartine

拉扎斯菲尔德Paul F﹒Lazarsfeld

兰克Otto Rank

勒南Ernest Renan

勒絮尔Daniel Lesueur

雷恩Christopher Wren

雷赛布Ferdinand de Lesseps

李凯尔特Heinrich Rickert

利德莱尔Emil Lederer

路德Martin Luther

卢梭J﹒－J﹒Rousseau

罗斯E﹒A﹒Ross

马雷Hugues‐B﹒Maret

马塞纳Andre Massena

麦考利Thomas B﹒Macaulay

麦克道格尔William Mc Dougall

莫勒斯霍特Jacob Moleschott

缪拉Joachim Murat

内伊Michel Ney

纽曼Franz Neumann

帕克Robert Park

帕斯卡尔Blaise Pascal

萨伏那罗拉Cirolamo Savonarola

圣保罗Saint Paul the Apostle

圣伯夫Charles‐Augustin Sainte‐Beuve

圣德肋撒Saint Therese

圣鞠斯特Louis de Saint‐Just

斯宾塞Herbert Spencer

塔尔德Gabriel Tarde

泰纳hippolyte Taine

提比略Tiberius

梯也尔Adolphe Thiers

托克维尔Alexis de Tocqueville

托马斯William I﹒Thomas

陀斯妥耶夫斯基Dostoievsky

旺达姆Dominique‐R﹒Vandamme

维伊奥Louis Veuillot

文德尔班Wilhelm Windelband

西盖勒Scipio Sighele

西蒙Jules Simon

隐士彼得Peter the Hermit