THE
CROWD
Taken from chapter 2 of Gustave
Le Bon's Psychologie des Foules (1895; translated as The Crowd: A Study of
the Popular Mind, in 1897).
THE SENTIMENTS AND MORALITY OF CROWDS
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 individuals composing a crowd--The equality of the
educated and the ignorant man in a crowd--Various examples of the illusions to
which the individuals 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 individuals composing them--Explanation and examples--
Crowds rarely guided by those considerations of interest which are most often
the exclusive motives of the isolated individual--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 individual 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
individual 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 individual 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 individual, 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,[1] 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 individual in a crowd.
An isolated individual 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
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 individual, 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.[2]
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 individuals 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 individuals.
The first perversion of the truth effected
by one of the individuals of the gathering is the starting-point of the
contagious suggestion. Before St. George appeared on the walls of
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 individuals 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 individuals 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 Scientifique.
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 individuals 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 individually 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, etc. 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 marvellousness of the tricks themselves, but the extreme
weakness of the reports made with respect to them by the noninitiated
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
In parallel cases the starting-point of the
suggestion is always the illusion produced in an individual 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
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
individual 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
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 Therese, 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
individual 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 individual would not gain
strength, becomes at once furious hatred in the case of an individual 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 individual. 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 individual 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 individual. We shall soon have
occasion to revert to this point when we come to study the morality of crowds.
Given to exaggeration in its feelings, a crowd is
only impressed by excessive sentiments. An orator wishing to move a crowd must
make an abusive use of violent affirmations. To exaggerate, to affirm, to
resort to repetitions, and never to attempt to prove anything by reasoning are
methods of argument well known to speakers at public meetings.
Moreover, a crowd exacts a like exaggeration in the
sentiments of its heroes. Their apparent qualities and virtues must always be
amplified. It has been justly remarked that on the stage a crowd demands from
the hero of the piece a degree of courage, morality, and virtue that is never
to be found in real life.
Quite rightly importance has been laid on the
special standpoint from which matters are viewed in the theatre. Such a
standpoint exists no doubt, but its rules for the most
part have nothing to do with common sense and logic. The art of appealing to
crowds is no doubt of an inferior order, but it demands quite special
aptitudes. It is often impossible on reading plays to explain their success. Managers
of theatres when accepting pieces are themselves, as a rule, very uncertain of
their success, because to judge the matter it would be necessary that they
should be able to transform themselves into a crowd.[5]
"Charley's Aunt," refused at every
theatre, and finally staged at the expense of a stockbroker, has had two
hundred representations in
inexplicable. This is a subject that I cannot deal with here, but it might
worthily tempt the pen of a writer acquainted with theatrical matters, and at
the same time a subtle psychologist--of such a writer, for instance, as M. Francisque Sarcey.
Here, once more, were we
able to embark on more extensive explanations, we should show the
preponderating influence of racial considerations. A play which provokes the
enthusiasm of the crowd in one country has sometimes no success in another, or
has only a partial and conventional success, because it does not put in
operation influences capable of working on an altered public.
I need not add that the tendency to exaggeration in
crowds is only present in the case of sentiments and not at all in the matter
of intelligence. I have already shown that, by the mere fact that an individual
forms part of a crowd, his intellectual standard is immediately and
considerably lowered. A learned magistrate, M. Tarde,
has also verified this fact in his researches on the crimes of crowds. It is
only, then, with respect to sentiment that crowds can rise to a very high or,
on the contrary, descend to a very low level.
4. THE INTOLERANCE, DICTATORIALNESS AND CONSERVATISM
OF CROWDS.
Crowds are only cognisant
of simple and extreme sentiments; the opinions, ideas, and beliefs suggested to
them are accepted or rejected as a whole, and considered as absolute truths or
as not less absolute errors. This is always the case with beliefs induced by a
process of suggestion instead of engendered by reasoning. Every one is aware of
the intolerance that accompanies religious beliefs, and of the despotic empire
they exercise on men's minds.
Being in doubt as to what constitutes
truth or error, and having, on the other hand, a clear notion of its strength,
a crowd is as disposed to give authoritative effect to its inspirations as it
is intolerant. An individual may accept contradiction and discussion; a crowd
will never do so. At public meetings the slightest contradiction on the part of
an orator is immediately received with howls of fury and violent invective,
soon followed by blows, and expulsion should the orator stick to his point.
Without the restraining presence of the representatives of authority the
contradictor, indeed, would often be done to death.
Dictatorialness and intolerance are common to all
categories of crowds, but they are met with in a varying degree of intensity.
Here, once more, reappears that fundamental notion of race which dominates all
the feelings and all the thoughts of men. It is more especially in Latin crowds
that authoritativeness and intolerance are found developed in the highest
measure. In fact, their development is such in crowds of Latin origin that they
have entirely destroyed that sentiment of the independence of the individual so
powerful in the Anglo-Saxon. Latin crowds are only concerned with the
collective independence of the sect to which they belong, and the characteristic
feature of their conception of independence is the need they experience of
bringing those who are in disagreement with themselves into immediate and
violent subjection to their beliefs. Among the Latin races the Jacobins of
every epoch, from those of the Inquisition downwards, have never been able to
attain to a different conception of liberty.
Authoritativeness and intolerance are sentiments of
which crowds have a very clear notion, which they easily conceive and which
they entertain as readily as they put them in practice when once they are
imposed upon them. Crowds exhibit a docile respect for force, and are but
slightly impressed by kindness, which for them is scarcely other than a form of
weakness. Their sympathies have never been bestowed on easy-going masters, but
on tyrants who vigorously oppressed them. It is to these latter that they
always erect the loftiest statues. It is true that they willingly trample on
the despot whom they have stripped of his power, but it is because,having lost his strength, he has resumed his place
among the feeble, who are to be despised because they are not to be feared. The
type of hero dear to crowds will always have the semblance of a Caesar. His
insignia attracts them, his authority overawes them, and his sword instils them with fear.
A crowd is always ready to revolt against a feeble,
and to bow down servilely before a strong authority. Should
the strength of an authority be intermittent, the crowd, always obedient to its
extreme sentiments, passes alternately from anarchy to servitude, and from
servitude to anarchy.
However, to believe in the predominance among crowds
of revolutionary instincts would be to entirely misconstrue their psychology. It
is merely their tendency to violence that deceives us on this point. Their
rebellious and destructive outbursts are always very transitory. Crowds are too
much governed by unconscious considerations, and too
much subject in consequence to secular hereditary influences not to be
extremely conservative. Abandoned to themselves, they soon weary of disorder,
and instinctively turn to servitude. It was the proudest and most untractable of the Jacobins who acclaimed Bonaparte with
greatest energy when he suppressed all liberty and made his hand of iron
severely felt.
It is difficult to understand history,
and popular revolutions in particular, if one does not take sufficiently into
account the profoundly conservative instincts of crowds. They may be desirous,
it is true, of changing the names of their institutions, and to obtain these
changes they accomplish at times even violent revolutions, but the essence of
these institutions is too much the expression of the hereditary needs of the
race for them not invariably to abide by it. Their incessant mobility only
exerts its influence on quite superficial matters. In fact they possess
conservative instincts as indestructible as those of all primitive beings. Their
fetish-like respect for all traditions is absolute; their unconscious horror of
all novelty capable of changing the essential conditions of their existence is
very deeply rooted. Had democracies possessed the power they wield to-day at
the time of the invention of mechanical looms or of the introduction of
steam-power and of railways, the realisation of these
inventions would have been impossible, or would have been achieved at the cost
of revolutions and repeated massacres. It is fortunate for the progress of civilisation that the power of crowds only began to exist
when the great discoveries of science and industry had already been effected.
5. THE MORALITY OF CROWDS.
Taking the word "morality" to mean
constant respect for certain social conventions, and the permanent repression
of selfish impulses, it is quite evident that crowds are too impulsive and too
mobile to be moral. If, however, we include in the term morality the transitory
display of certain qualities such as abnegation, self-sacrifice,
disinterestedness, devotion, and the need of equity, we may say, on the
contrary, that crowds may exhibit at times a very lofty morality.
The few psychologists who have studied crowds have
only considered them from the point of view of their criminal acts, and
noticing how frequent these acts are, they have come to the conclusion that the
moral standard of crowds is very low.
Doubtless this is often the case; but why? Simply
because our savage, destructive instincts are the inheritance left dormant in
all of us from the primitive ages. In the life of the isolated individual it
would be dangerous for him to gratify these instincts, while his absorption in
an irresponsible crowd, in which in consequence he is assured of impunity,
gives him entire liberty to follow them. Being unable, in the ordinary course
of events, to exercise these destructive instincts on our fellow-
men, we confine ourselves to exercising them on animals. The passion, so
widespread, for the chase and the acts of ferocity of crowds proceed from one
and the same source. A crowd which slowly slaughters a defenceless
victim displays a very cowardly ferocity; but for the philosopher this ferocity
is very closely related to that of the huntsmen who gather in dozens for the
pleasure of taking part in the pursuit and killing of a luckless stag by their
hounds.
A crowd may be guilty of murder, incendiarism,
and every kind of crime, but it is also capable of very lofty acts of devotion,
sacrifice, and disinterestedness, of acts much loftier indeed than those of
which the isolated individual is capable. Appeals to sentiments of glory, honour, and patriotism are particularly likely to influence
the individual forming part of a crowd, and often to the extent of obtaining
from him the sacrifice of his life. History is rich in examples analogous to
those furnished
by the Crusaders and the volunteers of 1793. Collectivities alone are capable
of great disinterestedness and great devotion.
How numerous are the crowds that have heroically faced death for beliefs,
ideas, and phrases that they scarcely understood! The crowds that go on strike
do so far more in obedience to an order than to obtain an increase of the
slender salary with which they make shift. Personal interest is very rarely a
powerful motive force with crowds, while it is almost the exclusive motive of
the conduct of the isolated individual. It is assuredly not self-interest that
has guided crowds in so many wars,
incomprehensible as a rule to their intelligence--wars in which they have
allowed themselves to be massacred as easily as the larks hypnotised
by the mirror of the hunter.
Even in the case of absolute scoundrels it often
happens that the mere fact of their being in a crowd endows them for 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
individual 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.
NOTES:
[1]
General Boulanger.
[2] Persons who went through the siege of
[3] L'Eclair,
[4] Do we know in the case of one single battle
exactly how it took place? I am very doubtful on the point. We know who were
the conquerors and the conquered, but this is probably all. What M. D'Harcourt has said with respect to the battle of Solferino, which he witnessed and in which he was
personally engaged, may be
applied to all battles--"The generals (informed, of course, by the
evidence of hundreds of witnesses) forward their official reports; the orderly
officers modify these documents and draw up a definite narrative; the chief of
the staff raises objections and re-writes the whole on a fresh basis. It is
carried to the Marshal, who exclaims, `You are entirely in error,' and he
substitutes a fresh edition. Scarcely anything remains of the original
report." M. D'Harcourt relates this fact as
proof of the impossibility of establishing the truth in connection with the
most striking, the best observed events.
[5] It is understandable for this reason why it
sometimes happens that pieces refused by all theatrical managers obtain a
prodigious success when by a stroke of chance they are put on the stage. The
recent success of Francois Coppee's play "Pour
la Couronne" is well known, and yet, in spite of
the name of its author, it was refused during ten years by the managers of the
principal Parisian theatres.