The four chapters of Book II of Gustave Le Bon, The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind (1895) — twenty thousand unemployed schoolteachers in one French department, a tax renamed so that nobody notices paying it, a general almost torn apart at the gates of the Louvre and walking home a quarter of an hour later, Augereau coming out of a first interview unable to explain why he had shut up, and de Lesseps' coffin going through an indifferent crowd with nobody following it. Read from
RAW/books/The Crowd-A Study of the Popular Mind.md. One full archaeology pass per chapter, sweeping all seven dimensions in every run. Chapters are numbered within their book, as the source numbers them.This is the half of the book that got used. Book I says what a crowd is. Book II says what you do to one, and it is where affirmation, repetition, contagion and prestige are set out as a working kit. The runs below hold the two apart on purpose: what the crowd is assumed to be, and what the man addressing it is assumed to be entitled to do.
Siblings: Part 1 — Le Bon, Preface to Book I · Part 3 — Le Bon, Book III · Part 4 — Hoffer, Preface and Part One · Part 5 — Hoffer, Part Two · Part 6 — Hoffer, Part Three · Part 7 — Hoffer, Part Four · What Runs Through All of It.
Thread map: Le Bon vs Hoffer on What a Crowd Is Made Of.
Pairs with the Kershaw build and the Meerloo build.
Source ingest: Gustave Le Bon, The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind
What makes things happen. The chapter opens by splitting causes into two kinds and insisting the split is real.1 Remote factors are the ones that make a crowd capable of adopting some convictions and completely closed to others. They prepare the ground. Immediate factors arrive on top of that long preparation, and without it they do nothing at all — they're what turns the idea loose with its consequences.
The worked example is the Revolution and it's clean. Remote: the writings of the philosophers, the exactions of the nobility, the progress of scientific thought. Immediate: the speeches of orators, and the court party's resistance to reforms too small to matter. The sudden outburst is a surface effect, and behind it is a preparatory action of long duration.
What is real. Race, in the first rank, ahead of everything else. He says he's already dealt with it in another book and won't do it again, which tells you it isn't up for argument. A historical race, once its character has formed, holds that character by the laws of heredity, and its beliefs, institutions and arts are only the outward expression of the same thing. Nothing can pass from one people to another without being deeply transformed on the way.
Environment, circumstance and events are the social suggestions of the moment. They can matter a great deal, and their influence is always brief if it runs against the suggestions the nation has inherited from the whole line of its ancestors. That is the sentence the rest of Book II leans on. It's why crowds in different countries believe different things and can't be worked on the same way.
How people should relate. Through traditions, which he defines as the ideas, needs and sentiments of the past, weighing on us with immense force. A people is an organism created by the past, and like any organism it can only be changed by slow hereditary accumulation. Tradition guides men, and guides them most when they are in a crowd — and the changes they can easily make to their traditions only touch names and outward forms.
Then the balance he can't solve and says so. Civilisation is impossible without traditions and progress is impossible without destroying them, so man's two great occupations have been building a network of traditions and then trying to tear it down once the good in it has worn out. Let customs set too hard and a people can no longer change, like China. Violent revolution doesn't help: either the broken links get pieced back together and the past resumes without alteration, or they stay broken and anarchy turns into decay. Rome in the ancient world and England in the modern one are almost alone in having found the middle setting.
His proof is a church timetable. At the end of the last century, with churches destroyed and priests exiled or guillotined, you would have thought the old religious ideas had lost everything. A few years later public worship had to be restored on universal demand, and the ex-Conventionist Fourcroy wrote the report explaining why. The great majority of men need religion, worship and priests, he wrote, and it was an error of some modern philosophers — himself once among them — to think instruction could ever be general enough to destroy religious prejudice. The masses must be allowed their priests, their altars and their public worship.
Le Bon's own sentence about it is the best in the run. The most fearsome idols don't live in temples and the most despotic tyrants don't live in palaces, and both can be broken in a moment. The invisible masters that reign inside us are safe from every revolt and only give way to the slow wearing of centuries.
The shape of time. Time is the only real creator and the only real destroyer. It made mountains out of grains of sand and raised the obscure cell of the geological eras to human dignity, and the action of centuries is enough to transform any phenomenon whatever. He quotes the observation that an ant with enough time could level Mont Blanc, and adds that anyone who could vary time at will would have the power believers attribute to God.
Applied to opinion, that means beliefs have a life cycle and time runs it. Time causes their birth, their growth and their death; it gives them strength and it takes it away. It also accumulates the immense heap of dead beliefs and thoughts in which the ideas of any given period grow, so ideas never spring up at random and their roots always run back into a long past. And the practical conclusion is a counsel of patience aimed squarely at frightened conservatives: we're all uneasy about the aspirations of the masses, and time on its own will restore the balance. He borrows Lavisse for the arithmetic — no form of government was ever founded in a day, feudalism spent centuries shapeless before it found its laws, and absolute monarchy did the same, and both waiting periods were extremely troubled.
What is worth having. Not institutions, and this is the run's most sustained argument. The idea that institutions can fix the defects of societies, that progress follows from improving governments, and that social change can be made by decree — that idea started the French Revolution and underlies every social theory of the day. He calls it a grave delusion.
A nation no more chooses its institutions than it chooses the colour of its hair. Institutions and governments are the product of the race, created by an age rather than creating it, and peoples are governed as their character requires rather than as their whims prefer. Institutions have no intrinsic virtue and are neither good nor bad in themselves; what suits one people at one moment may be ruinous for another. A people can change their names by violent revolution and their substance stays exactly as it was, which makes the names futile labels a serious historian needn't bother with.
His evidence is a pair of mismatches. England, the most democratic country in the world, lives under a monarchy. The Spanish-American republics, with republican constitutions, are where the most oppressive despotism actually operates. The United States prospers under democratic institutions; the Spanish-American republics are in a pitiable state of anarchy under institutions that are nearly identical. So the institutions are as foreign to the greatness of the first as to the decadence of the second.
How you know. By watching what a nation has actually done over centuries, and never by reasoning from a constitution. He hands the method to Macaulay and reprints it as a rule of thumb. Think nothing of symmetry and much of convenience. Never remove an anomaly merely because it is an anomaly. Never innovate except when a grievance is felt, and never further than removing the grievance. And never state a proposition wider than the case in front of you. Those, Macaulay says, are the rules that guided two hundred and fifty English Parliaments from John to Victoria.
The negative form of the same test is centralisation. You can hold philosophical opinions about it either way. But take a people made of very different races that spends a thousand years achieving it. Then a revolution aimed at destroying every institution of the past not only respects it but strengthens it. You should conclude it answers a need the nation cannot do without — and pity the politicians who talk about dismantling it.
What a person is. Someone made by his schooling, and the education section is where Le Bon stops describing and starts prosecuting. The dogma of the age is that instruction improves men and makes them equal, and it's now as hard to attack as a Church dogma used to be. He says psychology and experience disagree, and reaches for numbers.
The figures come from the magistrate Adolphe Guillot. Three thousand educated criminals now appear for every thousand illiterate ones. In fifty years the criminal share of the population has gone from 227 to 552 per hundred thousand, an increase of 133 per cent. Crime is rising fastest among the young — the very group for whom free compulsory schooling has replaced apprenticeship in France.
The mechanism he blames is a psychological error about what a mind is: that intelligence is developed by learning textbooks by heart. From primary school to university a young man acquires books by memory and never once uses his judgment or his initiative. The former minister Jules Simon is quoted calling it a ludicrous education, every effort of which is an act of faith in the master's infallibility, and whose only results are to belittle us and make us powerless.
Then the picture. For seven or eight years a boy is shut in a school being taught the genealogy of the sons of Clotaire and the wars between Neustria and Austrasia, instead of anything he could use. What that does isn't just waste. It gives him a violent dislike of the life he was born into and an intense wish to escape it. The working man stops wanting to be a working man and the peasant stops wanting to be a peasant, and the humblest of the middle classes can imagine no career for a son except a salaried post from the State.
The arithmetic then finishes the argument. The State manufactures diploma-holders by the textbook, can employ only a few of them, and has to feed those and keep the rest as enemies. A businessman can't find an agent to represent him in the colonies while thousands compete for the most modest official post. In the department of the Seine alone there are twenty thousand schoolmasters and mistresses without employment, all of them people who disdained the fields and the workshop and look to the State to keep them. Since the number of the chosen is fixed, the number of the discontented has to be enormous — and they are ready for any revolution, whoever leads it and wherever it's going.
He extends it beyond France twice, and both extensions are about empires. China has the same disease, with functions won by competitive examination and the imperturbable recitation of bulky manuals, and its army of educated unemployed is treated as a national calamity. India has it because the English opened schools to supply instruction rather than to educate, producing a class Le Bon calls the Baboos, who become irreconcilable enemies of English rule when they can't get posts.
The alternative he wants is Taine's, quoted at length. Ideas only form in their natural surroundings. Growth comes from the countless impressions a young man picks up daily in the workshop, the mine, the law court, the builder's yard, the hospital. He sees tools and materials, customers and workers, and work done well or badly, cheaply or profitably. Those small perceptions of the eye, the ear, the hands and even the nose are gathered involuntarily, worked on silently, and eventually suggest a simplification or an invention. The English or American engineer trains in a workshop and never in a school, so each man reaches the level his intelligence allows: workman, foreman, or engineer. Against that, the French system makes a whole career depend on a two-hour examination taken at nineteen — and a month later, Taine notes, the successful candidate could not sit it again.
Read: lines 749–947.
What is real. Words are, and their reality has nothing to do with their meaning.2 The images a crowd can be moved by aren't always lying about, but you can call them up with the right words and formulas. Handled with skill those really do have the power the magicians used to claim for them — they raise the most formidable storms in a crowd's mind and can also calm them. A pyramid taller than Cheops could be built from the bones of the men killed by words and formulas.
The power of a word is tied to the image it evokes and is entirely independent of what it means. The vaguest words often have the most force: democracy, socialism, equality, liberty, terms whose meaning whole volumes fail to fix. Say them solemnly in front of a crowd and every face turns respectful and every head bows. Their obscurity is what does it. They're the mysterious divinities behind the tabernacle, approached in fear and trembling.
Words wear out, too. Some have had the image-making power and lost it in use, and then they're vain sounds whose main use is to spare whoever says them the trouble of thinking. Armed with a small stock of formulas learnt young, a man can get through life without ever having to reflect on anything.
The shape of time. Words change slowly and their images change constantly, which he thinks makes the true translation of a dead language impossible. All we can do is put modern images where entirely different ancient ones stood. So when the men of the Revolution thought they were copying Greece and Rome, they were giving old words a sense those words never had. A republic then was an aristocratic thing, a gathering of small despots over a crowd of slaves, and could not have lasted a moment without the slaves.
He runs the same test on three more words. Liberty, in a city where discussing the gods or the laws was the most exceptional of crimes. Fatherland, for an Athenian or a Spartan, meaning the cult of one city and never Greece. For the Gauls it meant nothing at all. Caesar always found allies among the tribes, and it was Rome that made a country out of Gaul. And fatherland again for the royalist émigrés fighting against France, who thought they were obeying honour and by feudal law were. The vassal was bound to the lord and not to the soil, so the fatherland was wherever the sovereign happened to be.
How people should relate. Through renaming, and this is the run's operating instruction. When a crowd has come to hate the images attached to certain words, the first duty of a real statesman is to change the words and leave the things alone — the things being too deeply bound into the inherited constitution to be altered. He credits Tocqueville with the observation that the Consulate and Empire mostly consisted of dressing the institutions of the past in new words.
The list is short and exact. The taille became the land tax. The gabelle became the tax on salt. The aids became the indirect contributions and the consolidated duties. The tax on trade companies and guilds became the licence. One of the most essential functions of a statesman, he says, is baptising with popular or at least indifferent words the things a crowd can't stand under their old names. And the power runs the other way too: Taine's line is that it was by invoking liberty and fraternity that the Jacobins installed a despotism worthy of Dahomey and a tribunal like the Inquisition's.
There's a warning attached that most readers skip. Inside one society the same word usually means very different things to different classes, who appear to use the same language and never do. And across races it gets worse. To a Latin, democracy means the individual's will subordinated to the community's, with the State directing, centralising and monopolising everything. To an Anglo-Saxon, and especially in America, the same word means the intense development of the individual will, with the State kept out of everything except police, army and diplomacy — not even allowed to run the schools.
What is worth having. Illusions, and he means that as a compliment. From the dawn of civilisation crowds have lived under them, and they've raised more temples, statues and altars to the makers of illusions than to any other kind of man. The temples of Chaldea and Egypt, the religious buildings of the Middle Ages, and the upheaval that shook Europe a century ago were all built in their name. Occasionally, at terrible cost, a man overturns them, and he seems condemned to put them straight back up. Without them he'd never have left barbarism, and without them he'd soon return to it.
He then explains why science lost, and the explanation is one sentence borrowed from Daniel Lesueur. Gods, heroes and poets exist to give men the portion of hope and illusion they cannot live without. For fifty years science looked as if it would take that job over — and it has been compromised in hearts hungry for an ideal, because it doesn't dare promise enough, and because it cannot lie.
The philosophers of the last century set about destroying the religious, political and social illusions their forefathers had lived on for centuries, and in destroying them dried up the springs of hope and resignation. Behind the slaughtered fantasies they found the blind, silent forces of nature, which are merciless to weakness and know nothing of pity. Philosophy has offered the masses no ideal that can charm them, so they turn, as an insect turns to light, to whichever rhetorician will give them what they want. Not truth but error has always been the chief factor in the evolution of nations. The masses have never thirsted after truth, and whoever can supply them with illusions is easily their master, while whoever tries to destroy their illusions is always their victim.
How you know. Only by experience, and only if it's huge and repeated. Experience is nearly the only process that fixes a truth in the mind of the masses, or destroys an illusion grown dangerous. It has to happen on a very large scale and happen often. What one generation goes through is usually useless to the next. That's why historical facts cited as demonstrations achieve nothing.
The prices are then listed like invoices. To establish that a society can't be rebuilt from top to bottom by pure reason, several million men had to be massacred and Europe disturbed for twenty years. To prove that dictators cost the nations who acclaim them dear, two ruinous experiments in fifty years were required. They still don't seem to have been convincing. The first cost three million men and an invasion; the second cost territory and left permanent armies behind. To get a nation to admit that the German army was not the harmless national guard it had been called thirty years earlier, the war had to happen. Protection will need at least twenty years of disaster before anyone accepts it ruins the nations that adopt it.
The footnote on the German army is the sharpest thing in the section, because it catches a statesman making a crowd's mistake. The French national guard of the period was peaceable shopkeepers, undisciplined and impossible to take seriously, so anything wearing the same name evoked the same picture and was assumed harmless. And the error wasn't confined to the crowd. On 31 December 1867 Thiers told the Chamber that Prussia had a national guard like France's and therefore unimportant, plus a regular army about the size of France's. He was a man, Le Bon says, who often followed the opinion of the crowd and was never ahead of it.
What makes things happen. Not reason, whose influence he includes only to record as negative. Orators who can move crowds always appeal to sentiment and never to reason, and the laws of logic have no purchase. To convince a crowd you first have to understand what it's feeling and pretend to share it. Then you shift it by calling up suggestive notions through crude associations, going back to your starting point when you need to. Above all you read, from moment to moment, what your own speech is producing. Which is why a prepared speech is useless: the orator is following his own line of thought instead of his listeners', and by that fact alone his influence is gone.
The evidence is a scene, and it's the best in Book II. During the siege of Paris he watched a Marshal being marched to the Louvre by a furious crowd who claimed to have caught him copying the plans of the fortifications to sell to the Prussians. A famous orator from the government came out. Le Bon, very young, expected him to point out the absurdity — the accused had helped build those fortifications, and their plan was on sale at every bookshop.
Instead the orator walked towards the prisoner and said that justice would be done, and pitiless justice, that the Government of National Defence should complete its inquiry, and that meanwhile they would keep the prisoner in custody. The crowd, calmed by that apparent concession, broke up. A quarter of an hour later the Marshal went home. He would infallibly have been torn to pieces, Le Bon writes, if the speaker had used the logical arguments that his own extreme youth had found so convincing.
What a person is. A creature whose sentiments beat his reasoning every time, and Le Bon thinks that's just as well. For nearly two thousand years the most luminous minds bowed to religious superstitions that contradict the simplest logic. The Middle Ages and the Renaissance had plenty of enlightened men and not one who reasoned his way to doubting the misdeeds of the devil or the need to burn sorcerers.
Should we regret that crowds are never guided by reason? He won't say so. Human reason would not have driven humanity along the road of civilisation with the ardour its illusions have. History looked at fact by fact is a series of improbable chances. A Galilean carpenter becomes an all-powerful god for two thousand years. A few bands of Arabs out of the desert take most of the Graeco-Roman world and build an empire larger than Alexander's. An obscure artillery lieutenant ends up reigning over a crowd of peoples and kings. Leave reason to the philosophers, he says. Honour, self-sacrifice, religious faith, patriotism and the love of glory are the mainsprings of every civilisation, and they were made in spite of it.
Read: lines 948–1076.
How people should relate. Under a leader, immediately and by instinct.3 As soon as any number of living beings gather, animals or men, they put themselves under a chief. In human crowds the chief is often no more than a ringleader, and his will is the nucleus the crowd's opinions group around until they become one opinion. Le Bon's phrase for what he's describing is a servile flock incapable of ever doing without a master.
The leader's authority is despotic and has to be, because the despotism is the condition of being followed. He notes how easily such men extract obedience from the most turbulent part of the working class with nothing at all to back them up — fixing hours, fixing wages, starting and ending strikes at the hour they choose. Where public authority allows itself to be questioned and loses its strength, these new masters take its place, and crowds obey them far more docilely than they've obeyed any government.
The test case is a strike that stopped. During the last strike of the Paris omnibus employees, arresting the two men directing it was enough to end it at once. Remove the leaders and the crowd goes back to being a collectivity with no cohesion and no power to resist. What is predominant in the soul of crowds, he writes, is the need not of liberty but of servitude.
What a person is. In a leader's case, usually someone who was led first. He's been hypnotised by the idea whose apostle he became, so completely that everything outside it has vanished and every contrary opinion looks like error or superstition. Robespierre, hypnotised by Rousseau's philosophy and using the methods of the Inquisition to spread it, is the example.
The character sketch is not flattering and isn't meant to be. Leaders are men of action rather than thinkers, and they aren't gifted with foresight, because foresight leads to doubt and inaction. They're recruited especially from among the morbidly nervous, the excitable, the half-deranged who are close to madness. However absurd the idea, their conviction is strong enough that no reasoning touches it, and contempt and persecution only excite them further. They give up interest, family, everything, and the instinct of self-preservation is gone so completely that the only reward many of them ask is martyrdom. The intensity of their faith is what gives their words their power of suggestion — and a crowd, having lost all force of will, turns instinctively to the man who has the thing it lacks.
He then sorts them by the durability of that will, which is the useful part. One class is energetic only in bursts: violent, brave, audacious, good for a sudden enterprise and for turning yesterday's recruits into heroes. Ney and Murat under the First Empire; Garibaldi, whom he calls a talentless but energetic adventurer who took the kingdom of Naples off a disciplined army with a handful of men. Their energy barely outlasts the cause that raised it, and back in ordinary life these men are often astonishingly weak, incapable of conducting themselves in simple circumstances — leaders who can only function while somebody else is leading them.
The rarer class has enduring will, and to that class he assigns St Paul, Mahomet, Columbus and de Lesseps. Whether they're clever or narrow doesn't matter; the world belongs to them, because persistent will is an immensely rare faculty that nothing resists. The Suez story is his proof, told through Dr Cazalis, who heard de Lesseps tell it. England attacked without pause. Egypt and France hesitated, and the French consul was foremost in opposing the early work. The Minister of Marine and every trained engineer were certain on scientific grounds that disaster was coming, predicting the day and hour of it like an eclipse. And one detail that isn't rhetoric — the attempt to make his workmen desert from thirst by refusing them fresh water.
What makes things happen. Three named instruments, in order, plus a fourth that makes them stick. To move a crowd for a short time — to make it sack a palace or die on a barricade — you use rapid suggestion, of which example is the strongest, and you need prestige to do it. To put ideas and beliefs into a crowd's mind you use affirmation, repetition and contagion, which work slowly and last.
Affirmation means assertion kept clear of all reasoning and all proof. The more concise it is, and the more completely stripped of anything resembling evidence, the more weight it carries. He notes that religious books and legal codes have always used it, and that statesmen defending a cause and businessmen advertising a product both know exactly what it's worth.
Affirmation does nothing unless it's repeated, as far as possible in the same words. He credits Napoleon with the line that there is only one serious figure of rhetoric, repetition. The reason it works is that the repeated statement gets embedded in the deep regions of the unconscious where the motives of our actions are made — and after a while we've forgotten who said it and we believe it. Which is why advertisements work. Read a thousand times that X's chocolate is the best and you begin to think you've heard it from many quarters and end up certain. Read a thousand times that Y's flour cured the most illustrious people of the most obstinate illnesses and you'll try it when you're ill. Read always in the same paper that A is a scoundrel and B an honest man, and you'll believe it, unless you also read another paper where the labels are swapped. Affirmation and repetition, he says, are the only things strong enough to fight each other.
When an affirmation has been repeated enough, and the repetition is unanimous — as with certain financial undertakings rich enough to buy every assistance — a current of opinion forms and contagion takes over. Ideas and emotions in crowds are as contagious as microbes, which he thinks is unsurprising since animals do it too. A horse that starts biting his manger will be copied by the others in the stable. A panic in a few sheep runs through the flock. Nor do people have to be in the same place: contagion works at a distance where minds have been prepared, and 1848 broke out in Paris and went across most of Europe, shaking a number of thrones.
The direction it travels in is the finding worth keeping. Contagion works among the popular classes first and then spreads upward, which is why an opinion adopted by the populace ends by planting itself firmly in the highest social strata however absurd it is. He watches it happening with socialist doctrine, held now by people who will be its first victims. And the circuit is closed by an irony he states plainly. The crowd's beliefs usually began as a higher idea that had no influence where it was born. Leaders took it up and distorted it, a sect distorted it again, and the masses deformed it further. Then it came back up to the class it started in. In the long run intelligence shapes the world, he says, very indirectly, and the philosophers who thought of the ideas are dust before the ideas win.
What is worth having. Prestige, which he defines as a domination exercised on our mind by a person, a work or an idea, one that paralyses the critical faculty completely and fills the soul with astonishment and respect. It can involve admiration or fear and needs neither. The dead have the most of it — Alexander, Caesar, Mahomet, Buddha — and we don't fear them. The monstrous divinities in the underground temples of India are not admired and have it anyway.
He splits it in two. Acquired prestige comes from name, fortune and reputation, and is much the commoner: a position, a fortune or a title supplies it however slight the man. A soldier in uniform and a judge in his robes have it automatically, and Pascal was right that judges need the robes and the wigs, since without them half their authority is gone. The travel book he quotes has the physical detail — Englishmen in the presence of a peer redden with pleasure, and if he speaks to them the suppressed joy makes them redder and makes their eyes shine.
Prestige also attaches to works, and there it's just accumulated repetition. Literary and artistic history is the repetition of identical judgments nobody checks, until there are names nobody would dare touch. For a modern reader Homer is incontestably boring, and who would say so? The Parthenon as it stands is a wretched ruin with nothing interesting about it, and it has so much prestige that we can't see it as it is. That, he says, is what prestige is for: to prevent us seeing things as they are and to paralyse judgment entirely.
Personal prestige is the rarer kind, independent of title or authority, and it lets a few people exercise a magnetic fascination on their social equals with none of the ordinary means of domination. The evidence is Bonaparte's first interview with the generals of the army of Italy, taken from Taine. Augereau — a swashbuckler, proud of his height and his courage — arrives ready to be insolent to the little upstart from Paris. This is a general who won his rank in street-fighting, thought bearish because he's always alone thinking, poor-looking, with a reputation as a mathematician and a dreamer. Bonaparte keeps them waiting, appears wearing his sword, puts on his hat, explains the measures he's taken, gives his orders and dismisses them. Augereau says nothing at all, and only recovers his oaths outside. He admits to Masséna that this little devil of a general has filled him with awe, and that he can't understand the ascendancy that overwhelmed him from the first moment.
The other two witnesses are stronger because they're specific about what they'd have done. Vandamme was a rougher and more brutal soldier than Augereau. On the stairs of the Tuileries in 1815 he said he feared neither God nor devil, and trembled like a child in that man's presence. Napoleon, he said, could make him go through the eye of a needle to throw himself into the fire. Davout said that if the Emperor had told them Paris must be destroyed with nobody leaving it, Maret would have kept the secret. He would also have compromised himself getting his own family out. Davout, for fear of leaking the truth, would have left his wife and children in the city.
How you know. That prestige is real, by watching what happens when it goes. Success is one of its main sources, and a successful man or an accepted idea stops being questioned by that fact alone. The proof is that the two vanish together. The hero the crowd acclaimed yesterday is insulted today if failure has caught him. The reaction is stronger the greater the prestige was. The crowd now considers the fallen man an equal, and is taking revenge for having bowed. Robespierre had immense prestige while he was executing his colleagues; a few transferred votes removed his power, and the crowd followed him to the guillotine with the same curses it had used on his victims.
De Lesseps supplies the long version, and it's the saddest passage in the book. Having beaten men, things, marshes, rocks and sand, he stopped believing in obstacles and wanted to do Suez again at Panama with the same methods. He had aged, and the faith that moves mountains doesn't move them if they are too high. After that, the courts of his own country put him among the vilest criminals, and when he died his coffin went unattended through an indifferent crowd, with only foreign sovereigns paying homage. The Viennese paper Le Bon reprints says the thing exactly: when he joined two seas, princes and nations did him honour; failing among the rocks of the Cordilleras, he is nothing but a vulgar rogue.
The shape of time. Prestige built by repetition is slow and prestige lost by failure goes in a moment. There's a second way to lose it, slower and completely reliable — being discussed. From the moment prestige is questioned it stops being prestige. The gods and men who kept theirs a long time never once tolerated discussion. For a crowd to admire, he says, it must be kept at a distance.
Read: lines 1077–1284.
What is real. Two layers, and only the bottom one matters.4 Living beings have anatomical features that change only across geological ages, and alongside them features a breeder can alter easily enough to hide the fundamental ones from a careless observer. Moral characteristics work the same way, so the beliefs of a people are always a fixed groundwork with opinions grafted on, and the opinions are surface sand on a rock.
The permanent beliefs last centuries and hold a whole civilisation up. Feudalism, Christianity and Protestantism were of that kind; today it's the nationalist principle and the democratic and social ideas. The transitory opinions are as superficial as fashion — romanticism, naturalism, mysticism — ripples that keep rising and vanishing on the surface of a deep lake. The real general beliefs are very few, and their rise and fall are the culminating points in the history of any race.
The shape of time. A belief is easy to kill only when it's already dying, which he states as a rule with a very sharp edge. Putting a passing opinion into a crowd's mind is easy and planting a lasting belief is very hard, and once planted it's just as hard to remove. Usually it takes a violent revolution — and even a revolution only works when the belief has almost entirely lost its hold already, sweeping away what habit had kept standing. The beginning of a revolution is in reality the end of a belief.
The moment of death is identifiable, and the test is the same one he applied to prestige. A great belief is doomed at the moment its value begins to be called in question, because every general belief is little more than a fiction and can only survive if it isn't examined. After that the institutions built on it keep their strength for a while and go slowly, and when the belief is finally gone everything resting on it falls. A nation has never yet changed its beliefs without having to transform every element of its civilisation, and until it finds a new general belief it is necessarily in anarchy.
How people should relate. Intolerantly, and he defends that in as many words. Nations have always known instinctively that losing their general beliefs would be the signal for their own decline. The fanatical cult of Rome made the Romans masters of the world, and when the belief died Rome was doomed; the barbarians who destroyed it only emerged from anarchy once they had beliefs of their own that everyone accepted. So the intolerance nations show in defending their opinions, open to criticism as it is philosophically, is in the life of a people the most necessary of virtues. It was to establish or maintain general beliefs that so many people were sent to the stake in the Middle Ages. It is why so many inventors died in despair. And it is why millions have died on battlefields and will die there yet.
What a person is. Somebody wrapped in a net of traditions, opinions and customs that make all the men of an age alike and that none of them can climb out of. Beliefs and the customs that follow from them govern the smallest acts of daily life, and the most independent mind can't escape them. The tyranny exercised unconsciously on men's minds is the only real tyranny, because there's nothing to fight. Tiberius, Genghis Khan and Napoleon were formidable tyrants, and from inside their graves Moses, Buddha, Jesus and Mahomet have exercised a far deeper despotism. A conspiracy can bring down a tyrant, and what can it do against an established belief? In its struggle with Roman Catholicism it was the French Revolution that was beaten, with the crowd's sympathy apparently on its side and with measures as pitiless as the Inquisition's.
How you know. Not by intelligence, which offers no protection at all. The absurdity of a general belief has never stopped it winning, and he says the triumph would seem impossible unless the belief offered some mysterious absurdity to begin with. European peoples held religious legends incontrovertible for more than fifteen centuries; the legend of a god who avenges the disobedience of one creature by torturing his own son went unnoticed as an absurdity for all that time. Galileo, Newton and Leibniz never supposed for a moment that such dogmas might be questioned. Nothing marks the humiliating limits of our intelligence more decisively.
His footnote softens it in a way worth keeping, because it shows what he means by absurd. Barbarous philosophically, he writes — in practice those beliefs created an entirely new civilisation and gave mankind fifteen centuries of a glimpse of generous dreams and hope that he will not know again.
What makes things happen. Underneath the changes, nothing much. He runs French history from 1790 to 1820, one generation, and the crowd goes monarchical, then very revolutionary, then very imperialist, then very monarchical; and in religion from Catholicism to atheism to deism and back to the most pronounced Catholicism. It isn't only the masses but the men directing them. The prominent men of the Convention were sworn enemies of kings and would have neither gods nor masters. They become Napoleon's humble servants, and then, under Louis XVIII, carry candles piously in religious processions.
Then the deflation. Everything in those changes that ran against the general beliefs and sentiments of the race was brief, and the diverted stream soon went back to its course. Opinions not attached to a general belief have no stability at all and are at the mercy of every circumstance, formed by suggestion and contagion and disappearing like sandhills made by wind on a coast. The men of the Revolution, saturated in Latin literature and wearing togas with their eyes on the Roman Republic, did not become Romans; they were under a powerful historical suggestion, which is a different thing.
What is worth having. He thinks the age is losing the thing that makes civilisations and can't decide whether to be sorry. Changeable opinions are more numerous than ever, for three reasons. The old beliefs are too weak to shape the opinions of the moment. The power of crowds is rising with nothing to counterbalance it. And the newspaper press keeps putting contrary opinions in front of crowds, so each suggestion is destroyed by the next. An opinion now dies before it's widespread enough to become general.
The result is something he calls new in the world's history — governments powerless to direct opinion. Not long ago governments, a few writers and a very small number of papers were the real reflectors of public opinion. Now the writers have lost all influence and the papers only reflect. Statesmen, far from directing opinion, do nothing but follow it, and their dread of it sometimes amounts to terror and makes their conduct completely unstable. Opinion is becoming the supreme guiding principle in politics; it can force an alliance, as it did with Russia. And popes, kings and emperors now consent to be interviewed, so as to submit their views to the judgment of crowds.
The press has had to humble itself the same way. It has become an agency for supplying information and has given up trying to enforce an idea, following every change in public thought under pain of losing readers. The old staid organs are gone or have turned into modern papers where a maximum of news is sandwiched between light articles, society gossip and financial puffs. Even the critics can no longer make a book or a play succeed — they can do harm and not a service — and papers have begun suppressing literary criticism altogether, printing the title and two or three lines of puff.
He ends on a defence of his own dispirited age that is almost the only optimism in the book. The general wearing away of opinions is a symptom of decadence and can't be denied. But given the power crowds now have, if a single opinion ever acquired enough prestige to be generally accepted, it would become so tyrannical that everything would bend to it and free discussion would close for a long time. Crowds are sometimes easy-going masters, as Heliogabalus and Tiberius were, and they are also violently capricious. If anything can postpone the hour of a civilisation's ruin, he writes, it's exactly the instability of the opinions of crowds and their growing indifference to general beliefs.
Read: lines 1285–1413.
Everything from here down is speculative by design. Above the line, every claim carries a footnote and a line range. Below it, the writing is allowed to weigh alternatives, run counterfactuals and hand the decision to advisors from other traditions — because that is the job of these sections.
[SPECULATIVE]Paradigm-obvious in 1895.
Heredity as the limit on everything. Race sits at the head of the remote factors, is declared to outrank all the others, and is then explicitly not argued because he did that in a previous book. Every comparative claim in Book II runs on it.
Advertising as a self-evident model of belief formation. X's chocolate and Y's flour appear as illustrations rather than as findings, because a Parisian reader in 1895 already knew what a thousand repetitions of a slogan felt like. The novelty is the extension to politics, not the observation.
Crowds needing a master. It's stated as an instinct shared with animals, and the phrase — a servile flock incapable of ever doing without a master — is offered without support.
Great-man prestige as a category. Napoleon, de Lesseps, Columbus and St Paul sit in one class because the period's biography put them there.
Paradigm-breaking, and the cost is what marks it.
Telling a governing class that its institutions do nothing. Book II's longest argument is that constitutions are labels and that England is democratic under a monarchy while the Spanish-American republics are despotisms with republican constitutions. The cost is that his own conclusion is unusable: if institutions don't matter, then neither does most of what a statesman does, and the advice left over is renaming taxes and managing spectacle.
Prosecuting French education with numbers in a book about crowds. He risks the whole argument on Guillot's figures and on twenty thousand unemployed schoolteachers in one department, in a chapter that has to keep insisting it hasn't wandered off the subject. He asks the question himself — have we digressed? — which is the tell.
Defining intolerance as the most necessary of virtues in the life of a people. That is not a slip and he doesn't soften it. It costs him any position from which to object to the Inquisition, the stake, or the millions dead on battlefields, all of which he lists in the same paragraph as the price of having general beliefs at all.
Predicting that socialism will lose its prestige on the day it succeeds. He gives the mechanism: religions promise happiness in a life nobody can check, and a promise of happiness on earth is falsifiable the moment anybody tries to deliver it. The cost is that the same test applies to his own recommendations, which are also to be realised on earth.
[SPECULATIVE]This is the rare chapter where the alternative is live rather than constructed, because he names it, argues for it, and quotes a dead man at length in its favour.
The road he wants is Taine's apprenticeship. Train the engineer in the workshop and not the school. Let the student start young in the hospital, the mine, the factory, the architect's or the lawyer's office, and put the general course of instruction before the practical start only as a framework to store observations in. Then let him take technical courses in his leisure hours to organise what he's picking up daily. The claim is that capability then grows in exact proportion to the man's faculties and in the direction his future work requires, and that at twenty-five he's not merely a useful performer but capable of enterprise — not a part of the machine but a motor.
What makes it a road not taken rather than a preference is the reason he gives for its impossibility. It is evidently too late to retrace our steps, he writes, and only experience — that supreme educator of peoples — will be able to show us the mistake. That is the same doctrine of experience from the next chapter, and it prices the lesson: several million dead for the Revolution, three million for the first dictator, and an unstated number for a schooling system.
The counterfactual worth running is the one his own frame forbids. If the Latin system is producing an army of discontented diploma-holders ready for any revolution, and the Anglo-Saxon system is not, then the difference between Latin and Anglo-Saxon crowds — the difference the whole book explains by heredity — has a much cheaper explanation sitting in the same chapter. Two school systems will do it, and one of them was imposed within living memory. He has assembled every piece of that argument and can't make it, because race is the floor and schooling is one of the things standing on the floor.
[SPECULATIVE]Decision type: getting a population to accept a thing it has already rejected.
The technique is renaming, and the case is a tax nobody would pay under its old name. The taille becomes the land tax. The gabelle becomes the tax on salt. The aids become the indirect contributions. Nothing about the money changes. What changes is the picture the word calls up, and Le Bon's claim is that the picture is the whole of the word's power and its meaning is beside the point.
The mechanism has two halves and only one of them is famous. The first is that the old word carries an image of the old regime, and the crowd is refusing the image. The second is the constraint: change the words without laying hands on the things, because the things are bound into the inherited constitution and can't be transformed. So the technique isn't a substitute for reform. It's what you do instead of reform when you've decided reform is impossible.
Scope conditions. This works while the new word is genuinely new to the crowd, which means it fails on the second use — words wear out, as he says himself, and a worn word is a vain sound. It also fails where the thing renamed is felt directly and often. The salt tax could be renamed because the payer meets it in fractions of a farthing, and a lump sum on income could not have been. And it fails across classes inside one society, where the same word already means different things to different people who think they share a language.
The general form. A refusal attached to a name can be dissolved by changing the name, provided the thing itself is met in pieces too small to notice. Modern equivalent: any charge repackaged as a fee, a levy, a contribution or a surcharge, and any policy that survives a rename while keeping its schedule of payments intact. The test of whether it will hold is not whether the new word is honest. It's whether anybody ever meets the whole sum at once.
[SPECULATIVE]Take a man in the crowd rather than in front of it. He has read the same paper for a year. It has told him a thousand times that A is a scoundrel and B is honest, and he now believes it, and cannot say where he first heard it. He also cannot argue with the man who has prestige, because prestige, by Le Bon's own definition, has already paralysed the part of him that would do the arguing.
Le Bon offers this man nothing whatever. Book II is addressed to the person at the front.
An advisor working from testimony sorted by source would hand him a procedure instead of an attitude, and the procedure is the interesting part. Rank what you're told by where it came from, and rank it before you hear it: what the man says about himself, what the people who knew him say, and — most heavily — what his opponents are forced to concede. Note what that ordering does to a thousand repetitions in one newspaper. All of them are tier one, restated. The count was never evidence; it was one claim with copies attached, which is the same finding Le Bon reached about witnesses at Sedan and never carried into this chapter.
An advisor working from the concrete-hoop defence goes at the words rather than the sources, and is blunter. Prestige and affirmation both need vague nouns to work — democracy, socialism, equality, liberty, the terms whose obscurity Le Bon says is exactly what makes them powerful. The counter is to demand the specific: the plan, the date, the amount, the recipe behind the pie in the sky. A phrase that survives that demand was carrying something. A phrase that dissolves under it was doing what Le Bon says these phrases do.
They disagree about where the leverage is. The first says the defect is in how you weigh a source. The second says it's in how much vagueness you tolerate in a sentence.
Where they converge is on the thing Book II treats as a natural fact. Le Bon presents affirmation, repetition, contagion and prestige as forces, like weather. Both advisors treat them as procedures that a second procedure can meet — one at the point of intake, one at the point of wording. Neither claims it's easy. But both would say the reason his book contains no defence is not that no defence exists. It's that he wrote it for the man doing the affirming, and a defence would have been a chapter for somebody else.
[SPECULATIVE]Decision type: judging how much time a regime, a doctrine or an institution has left.
The indicator is not opposition, and that's the useful part. Le Bon's test is that a general belief is doomed at the moment its value begins to be examined, because every general belief is a fiction that can only live unexamined. Opposition is a late symptom; enquiry is the early one. And revolutions are lagging indicators — a revolution can only succeed against a belief that has almost entirely lost its hold already, so the fall dates the death rather than causing it.
The mechanism is that a belief does its work by supplying a frame that isn't visible from inside. Galileo, Newton and Leibniz stood inside one for a lifetime and never noticed. So the observable moment isn't the arrival of a better argument. It's the arrival of the question, from anywhere, in a tone that expects an answer.
Scope conditions. This applies to beliefs that are load-bearing — the ones institutions are built on — and not to opinions, which change constantly and mean nothing. Distinguishing them is the whole difficulty, and Le Bon's own rule is the only one on offer: watch what survives a generation of reversals. Between 1790 and 1820 the same men were monarchist, revolutionary, imperialist and monarchist again, Catholic, atheist, deist and Catholic again. What moved four times in thirty years was never the rock.
The general form. Examination, not opposition, is the leading indicator of a belief's death, and institutions built on it keep standing for a while afterwards, which is what makes the collapse look sudden. Modern equivalent: any arrangement that has just started being asked to justify itself in public by people who are not its enemies.
The second-order finding is the one he half-states and doesn't develop. If a belief dies of being examined, and general beliefs are what hold civilisations together, then an age with cheap printing and many newspapers is an age in which nothing can become load-bearing at all. He describes exactly that — opinions dying before they spread, statesmen following rather than leading, the press reflecting rather than directing — and then calls it decadence. The other reading is that it's a defence, and he nearly takes it in the last paragraph before deciding to be gloomy instead.