Passing by his grave in the Parisian cemetery of Père-Lachaise (in division 89), few curious people will recognize the name engraved on the grave. Its faded bronze bust, where rusty tears flow, seems to meditate on a forgotten heritage. Who remembers Gustave Le Bon (1841-1931)? And how many know that the man buried there owes his posterity – and a Legion of Honor obtained in 1929 – to a science often associated with the totalitarianism of the 20th century?e century?
“Little capable of reasoning, crowds are on the contrary very capable of action.” In his little pamphlet Crowd psychologypublished in 1895, Gustave Le Bon analyzes the crowd, not as a sum of individualities, but rather as a “collective soul”. If the work could – like the rest of its bibliography – have enjoyed a dusty retirement in the back of a library, it was on the contrary a real bookstore success, experiencing fifteen reissues in the space of twenty-five years.
Carried away by the crowd
The context of the time is not insignificant when such a book was released. Marked by the insurrectional episode of the Paris Commune (1870-1871), Gustave Le Bon realized that “the voice of the crowds has become preponderant”. In fact, the 19the century has helped to shape worker movements and union forces, which those in power try as best they can to tame. “Gustave Le Bon had the intuition that crowds constituted a new political forceobserves Elena Bovo, lecturer at the University of Franche-Comté and author of Crowd mechanics (Armand Colin, 2024). He insisted on their irrationality and their potential to destroy institutions.”
Sensitive to suggestion and mimicry, the crowd becomes easy to capture when a charismatic leader is able to give it direction.
Why such distrust? According to him, individuals drastically change their behavior when they come together around a common idea, sharing a “mental unity” which can be as galvanizing as it is dangerous. When a “psychological crowd” is formed, writes Gustave Le Bon, “the conscious personality disappears, the feelings and ideas of all units are oriented in one direction”. Drowned in the mass, individual identities are diluted and, with them, the safeguards that usually deter extremist behavior. The crowds “go immediately to extremesadds Gustave Le Bon. The stated suspicion immediately turns into indisputable evidence. A beginning of antipathy or disapproval, which, in the isolated individual, would not be accentuated, immediately becomes fierce hatred in the individual in a crowd.
Worse: sensitive to suggestion and mimicry, the crowd becomes easy to capture once a charismatic leader is able to give it direction, inspiring blind and total obedience close to religious devotion. We understand why the crowd, which “bows in servility before strong authority”played a leading role in bringing dictators to power. With simplistic rhetoric, gestures close to trance and a consummate art of staging, self-proclaimed “guides” regimented their audiences with bludgeoning ideas: the restoration of national prestige, the elimination of “parasites,” the purification of society, etc.
(Involuntary) advisor to tyrants
Of course, Gustave Le Bon did not intend to fertilize the thoughts of tyrants. A trained doctor (even if he was suspected of having falsified his diploma), this polygraph author was also worried, at the end of the 19the century, to see its privileges threatened by the dictatorship of the proletariat. “In crowds, men become equal and, on general questions, the suffrage of forty academicians is no better than that of forty water carriers”he regretted. Despite this assumed contempt for the working classes, he was above all driven by a feeling of distrust: “He perceived the danger of a leader who would be capable of manipulating the crowds”underlines Elena Bovo.
His theories, however, hit the mark with dictators. Benito Mussolini did not hide the fact that he had read and reread Crowd psychologywhile Lenin made it his bedside book. “Mussolini appropriated certain intuitions from Gustave Le Bon, but at the cost of a decisive shift in their meaningsshade Elena Bovo. He understood that it was necessary to touch emotions to seduce the crowds. Indeed, where the French scholar perceived the danger of a charismatic and seductive leader – drawing inspiration in particular from the irresistible rise of General Boulanger who caused the IIIe Republic at the end of the 1880s–, the Duce made him a model, that of the unifying leader and savior of the masses.
As for Adolf Hitler, if he did not have the pamphlet in his library, we must recognize that the precepts of Gustave Le Bon speak through him. In February 1940, a journalist from La Dépêche du Berry himself drew a parallel between the Führer’s speeches and the precepts of Gustave Le Bon, evoking “the power of irresistible fascination” that the dictator exerts on the crowds, the technologies of the time – photography and radio – contributing to “this collective intoxication”. Today, crowds have changed their appearance, but they still exist as ideological universes evolving in isolation: social networks are only yet another incarnation of the phenomenon.
Rehabilitate “fouloscopy”?
The power of digital crowds is one of the many reasons why an objective reading of Gustave Le Bon’s work seems more relevant than ever. “We never left the era of crowdsinsists Elena Bovo. In recent years there has been a re-emergence of crowds demonstrating without necessarily being led by unions.” We can think, for example, of the Black Lives Matter movement in the United States or the recent episode of “yellow vests” in France.
Alas, his contribution to the totalitarianisms of the 20the century having been largely overvalued, Gustave Le Bon continues to be accused of a pre-fascist thinker. In 1976, forty-five years after the person’s death, the founding of the association Les Amis de Gustave Le Bon by Pierre Duverger, a well-known collaborator, contributed to making Crowd psychology the bible of the extreme right… Blackening its reputation for good.
Without rehabilitating Gustave Le Bon, whose convictions remain marked by racialist tendencies to be forgotten, would it be time to rehabilitate “fouloscopy”? “Crowd psychology has never been recognized as a scientific discipline in its own right, since it suffers from too close an association with the reactionary side of the thought of Gustave Le Bon”says Elena Bovo.
However, the thinking of the crowds cannot be reduced to this 19th century author.e and XXe centuries, especially since it has evolved a lot since the IIIe Republic. Contrary to the anthropological pessimism that he embodied, contemporary analysts now consider the crowd in a more positive light. Namely, a means for the invisible and those left behind to make voices that are often inaudible heard, through the law of numbers.
