The Crowd - Gustave le Bon (classic fiction .txt) 📗

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,[2] becoming

suddenly popular, might easily have found a hundred thousand men

ready to sacrifice their lives for his cause had he demanded it.

 

[2] General Boulanger.

 

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 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 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.[3]

 

[3] Persons who went through the siege of Paris saw numerous

examples of this credulity of crowds. A candle alight in an

upper story was immediately looked upon as a signal given the

besiegers, although it was evident, after a moment of reflection,

that it was utterly impossible to catch sight of the light of the

candle at a distance of several miles.

 

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 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 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, &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 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