The five chapters of Book III of Gustave Le Bon, The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind (1895) — an unemployed cook who borrows a sword, finds it blunt, and takes out his own knife; benches set out for the ladies at the Abbaye so they can watch; a barrister who wins his case by asking for a curtain to be drawn; a village of 523 people getting a seven-million-franc railway; and a Deputy discovering, mid-speech, that nobody in the room is listening. 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 where the theory is put on named institutions, and the last chapter is where the book stops describing crowds and starts predicting the end of a civilisation. It also contains the two places Le Bon argues against his own class — he keeps the jury and he keeps universal suffrage — and those two are the most useful pages in the book for working out what he actually believed.
Siblings: Part 1 — Le Bon, Preface to Book I · Part 2 — Le Bon, Book II · 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 is real. Kinds of crowd, arranged like a naturalist's tray.1 The starting point is the simple multitude, and its lowest form is a multitude of people from different races whose only bond is a chief's will, more or less respected. The barbarians of many origins who came into the Roman Empire over several centuries are his specimen. Above them sit multitudes that have picked up common characteristics under some influence and ended as a single race.
Both kinds can turn into organised crowds, and there the sorting begins. Heterogeneous crowds split into anonymous ones like a street crowd and non-anonymous ones like juries and parliaments. Homogeneous crowds split into sects, castes and classes. He says the rest of the book will only deal with the heterogeneous kind, and reserves the other for a volume he doesn't write here.
How people should relate. By what binds them, and he grades the three bonds. A sect is the first step in organisation: people of very different education, professions and classes held together by nothing but shared belief. A caste is the highest degree of organisation a crowd can reach, made of men in the same profession, so with the same education and much the same social standing — the military caste, the priestly caste. A class is people of different origins linked neither by belief nor by profession, but by shared interests and nearly identical habits of life and education, like the middle class or the agricultural class.
What a person is. In this run, a member of a race first and an individual second. Race allows the different heterogeneous crowds to be told apart, and he calls it the most powerful of all the factors determining what men do. A crowd of men assembled at random who are all English or all Chinese will differ widely from a random crowd of Russians, Frenchmen or Spaniards.
The demonstration is a failed congress. Socialists have repeatedly tried to gather representatives of the working classes of different countries, and it has always ended in pronounced discord — however identical the interests that brought them together. A Latin crowd, revolutionary or conservative, always appeals to the State, leans towards centralisation and inclines to dictatorship. An English or American crowd sets no store by the State and appeals to private initiative. A French crowd weighs equality, an English crowd liberty. Which is why, he says, there are nearly as many kinds of socialism and democracy as there are nations.
What makes things happen. A tug of war between two spirits, and he states it as a law. The inferior characteristics of crowds show up less strongly in proportion as the spirit of the race is strong. Being in the crowd state, and being ruled by crowds, is equivalent to the barbarian state or a return to it. A race frees itself from the unreflecting power of crowds by acquiring a solidly built collective spirit, and that is how it leaves barbarism.
How you know. By whether people can be named. The one classification of heterogeneous crowds that matters apart from race is anonymous against not-anonymous — a street crowd against a deliberative assembly or a jury. The sense of responsibility is absent in the first and developed in the second, and that often sends their acts in very different directions. It's a small remark and it's the hinge for the next four chapters, since three of them are about crowds whose members have names.
The shape of time. Nothing much in this run beyond the barbarian-to-race-to-civilisation arc it borrows from Book II, which the last chapter of the book will spell out. What is worth having is likewise only implied: the strong racial spirit, because it is what keeps the crowd state at bay.
Read: lines 1418–1482.
What is real. A category error, in his view, sitting in the middle of the criminology of his day.2 Since crowds after a period of excitement enter a purely automatic and unconscious state where suggestion guides them, he thinks it's hard to call them criminal at all. He keeps the word only because recent psychological work has put it into circulation. Certain acts of crowds are criminal considered in themselves, and criminal in the way a tiger is when it eats a Hindu after letting its cubs maul him for fun.
The usual motive of a crowd's crimes is a powerful suggestion. The people who take part are afterwards convinced they acted out of duty, which is precisely what an ordinary criminal doesn't think.
What a person is. Somebody who can be handed a role in three seconds and take it. The evidence is the death of de Launay, governor of the Bastille. After the fortress fell he was surrounded by a very excited crowd and struck from every direction, and it was proposed to hang him, behead him, tie him to a horse's tail. While struggling he accidentally kicked one of the men there. Someone proposed — and the crowd acclaimed it at once — that the man who'd been kicked should cut the governor's throat.
The man was an unemployed cook whose main reason for being at the Bastille was curiosity about what was going on. He reckons that since this is the general opinion, the act is patriotic, and he even believes he deserves a medal for having destroyed a monster. He's lent a sword. The blade is blunt and won't cut. So he takes from his pocket a small black-handled knife and, being a cook and used to cutting up meat, finishes the job.
The mechanism is visible in the whole of that. Obedience to a suggestion, made stronger because it came from everybody, and a murderer certain he has done something meritorious — the certainty being natural enough, since he has the unanimous approval of his fellow citizens. Legally it's a crime, Le Bon says, and psychologically it isn't.
How people should relate. By setting up a tribunal, which is what the September massacres began with. He takes the details from Taine, who took them from contemporary sources. The crowd of murderers numbered about three hundred and was a perfectly typical heterogeneous crowd: apart from a very few professional scoundrels, it was shopkeepers and artisans of every trade — bootmakers, locksmiths, hairdressers, masons, clerks, messengers.
Convinced they were performing a patriotic duty, and acting as judge and executioner at once, they began by forming a sort of court. And the rudimentary idea of justice shows immediately. Given the number of accused, a decision was taken about whole categories. Nobles, priests, officers and members of the king's household — everyone whose profession is proof of guilt in the eyes of a good patriot — were to be killed in a body, with no individual decision needed. The rest would be judged on their appearance and their reputation. With the crowd's conscience satisfied that way, the massacre could proceed legally.
What is worth having. Both ferocity and tenderness, held at once, which is the observation this chapter exists to make. The men have the expansive sympathy and quick feeling of the Parisian working man. At the Abbaye, one of them learned the prisoners had been left twenty-six hours without water and meant to kill the gaoler for it, and only the prisoners' own pleading stopped him. When the improvised tribunal acquits a prisoner, everybody — guards and slaughterers included — embraces him with transports of joy and applauds wildly. Then the killing resumes.
And a pleasant gaiety never stops during it. There is dancing and singing round the corpses, and benches are set out for the ladies, who are delighted to watch aristocrats being killed. When a slaughterer complains that the ladies placed a little way off can't see properly, and that only a few of the men are getting the pleasure of striking, the justice of the observation is admitted. It is decided that the victims will be passed slowly between two rows of slaughterers, who are to strike with the flat of the sword only, so as to prolong it. At the prison de la Force the victims are stripped naked and carved for half an hour, and once everyone has had a good view they're finished with a blow that opens the belly.
The scruples come in the same paragraph as the carving. The slaughterers refuse to take the money and jewels of the victims, and carry them to the committee table.
What makes things happen. Crude reasoning, followed immediately by action. After the killing of twelve or fifteen hundred enemies of the nation, somebody makes a remark, and the suggestion is adopted at once. The other prisons hold aged beggars, vagabonds and young prisoners, who are in fact useless mouths. It would be well to be rid of them. Besides, there must be enemies of the people among them. A woman called Delarue, the widow of a poisoner: she must be furious at being in prison, and if she could she would set fire to Paris, and she must have said so, and she has said so. Another good riddance.
The demonstration seems convincing and the prisoners are massacred without exception. Among them are about fifty children between twelve and seventeen, who might of course have become enemies of the nation themselves, so it was clearly well to be rid of them too.
How you know. By what the men do at the end of the week. The work finished, the slaughterers can think about resting, and being profoundly convinced they have deserved well of their country they go to the authorities and ask for a reward. The most zealous go as far as to claim a medal. That is the same conclusion the cook reached at the Bastille, arrived at independently by three hundred people, and it is Le Bon's whole evidence that the state he's describing is real.
The shape of time. Recurrent and expected to continue. He notes the same pattern in the Commune of 1871, and says that given the growing influence of crowds and the successive capitulations of authority before them, we are going to see many more.
Read: lines 1483–1540.
How you know. By an experiment the French state ran without meaning to.3 Before 1848 the administration chose jurors carefully from the enlightened classes — professors, functionaries, men of letters. Now jurors come mostly from small tradesmen, petty capitalists and employees. And to the great astonishment of the specialists, whatever the composition of the jury has been, its decisions have been identical.
Even the magistrates, who dislike the institution, have had to admit it. Bérard des Glajeux, a former President of the Court of Assizes, sets it out. Jurors are now picked by municipal councillors according to political and electoral concerns, and most are people in trade of less standing than before. Opinions and professions count for nothing once the role of judge is assumed. The spirit of the jury has not changed, and its verdicts have remained the same.
Le Bon keeps the conclusion and throws away the explanation, and then supplies a second piece of evidence in the same style. Lachaud, one of the great barristers of the Assize Court, made systematic use of his right to object to any intelligent-looking man on the jury list. Experience has since taught everyone that the objections are useless, and Parisian prosecutors and barristers have given the right up entirely. The verdicts, des Glajeux says, are neither better nor worse.
What a person is. On a jury, someone moved by the sight of things rather than by argument. A barrister is quoted saying they cannot resist the sight of a mother giving her child the breast, or of orphans. Des Glajeux says it's enough for a woman to be of agreeable appearance to win the jury's benevolence. And though juries are democratic in composition they are aristocratic in their likes: name, birth, great wealth, celebrity, the help of an illustrious counsel — anything that lends brilliance to the accused stands him in extremely good stead.
What is worth having. A rough sorting of crimes that Le Bon thinks is better than the law's. Juries are without pity for crimes they might be the victims of, which are also the most dangerous for society. They are very indulgent towards offences whose motive is passion — rarely severe on infanticide by unmarried mothers, or hard on the young woman who throws vitriol at the man who seduced and left her. They feel instinctively that society is barely endangered by such crimes. In a country whose law doesn't protect deserted girls, the crime of a girl who avenges herself is more useful than harmful. It frightens seducers in advance.
His footnote there is where he says what he thinks punishment is for. The object of criminal law is to protect society against dangerous criminals and not to avenge it. The French code, and above all the minds of French magistrates, are still soaked in the spirit of vengeance from the old primitive law, and the word vindicte is in daily use. Many magistrates refuse to apply Bérenger's law, which lets a condemned person avoid serving a sentence unless he offends again — although the statistics show that a first punishment reliably produces further crime. Rather than leave society unavenged, they prefer to create a confirmed criminal.
What makes things happen. Two or three men, and pleasing them. The good counsel's whole job is to work on feelings and argue very little. The English barrister he quotes describes watching the jury while pleading. He reads the effect of each phrase on their faces and draws his conclusions from it. First he makes sure which members are already favourable, and gains them quickly. Then he turns to the ones who seem hostile and tries to find out why. That, Le Bon says, is the entire mechanism of oratory, and it's why a speech prepared in advance does so little.
The orator doesn't have to convert the whole jury, only the leading spirits who'll determine the general opinion. One or two energetic men, the barrister says, are enough to carry the rest. And the first requirement is to please them, because a man in a crowd whom you have succeeded in pleasing is on the point of being convinced, and will accept as excellent almost any argument you then offer.
The proof is the best anecdote in the book. Lachaud never lost sight, through a whole session, of the two or three jurors he knew to be influential and obstinate, and usually won them. Once in the provinces he spent three-quarters of an hour on one man with his most cunning arguments and got nowhere. It was the seventh juryman, first on the second bench, and the case was desperate. Then in the middle of a passionate passage Lachaud stopped, turned to the President of the court, and asked whether he would give instructions for the curtain in front to be drawn — the seventh juryman is blinded by the sun. The man reddened, smiled, and thanked him. He was won for the defence.
How people should relate. Under some control, and this is the run's real argument. Distinguished writers have been campaigning against the jury, and Le Bon says it's the only protection there is against the errors — really very frequent — of a caste under no control at all. The magistracy is the one administration whose acts nobody supervises. Democratic France, for all its revolutions, has no habeas corpus of the kind England is proud of. We have banished all the tyrants and set up a magistrate in each city who disposes at will of the honour and liberty of the citizens.
The picture he gives it is exact. An insignificant juge d'instruction fresh from university can send a person of the most considerable standing to prison on a supposition of guilt, without justifying it to anybody. He can keep him there six months or a year while pursuing his investigation. He can then free him owing neither indemnity nor apology. The French warrant is the exact equivalent of the lettre de cachet, with one difference. The old one could only be used by people in very high positions. This one is in the hands of a whole class of citizens who are not conspicuously enlightened or independent.
Then the case of Dr L—, prosecuted by a juge d'instruction of excessive stupidity on the denunciation of a half-idiot girl who accused him of performing an illegal operation on her for thirty francs. He would have gone to penal servitude but for a public outcry that got him freed by the Chief of State. The magistrates admitted the blunder, and out of caste feeling did everything they could to stop the pardon being signed.
What is real. A juror's error, in Le Bon's reading, is usually a magistrate's error travelling. By the time an accused man reaches a jury he has already been held guilty by the juge d'instruction, the public prosecutor and the Court of Arraignment. Confronted with technical details it can't follow, the jury naturally listens to the prosecutor, reasoning that men trained to unravel complicated things have already looked into it. So replacing jurymen with magistrates would remove the accused's only chance of being found innocent.
The shape of time. His closing line is about what changes and what doesn't, and it's the sharpest sentence in Book III. Knowing the psychology of castes as well as that of other kinds of crowd, he says he can't imagine a case in which, wrongly accused, he would not rather face a jury than magistrates. The power of crowds is to be feared, and the power of certain castes more. Crowds are open to conviction; castes never are.
Read: lines 1541–1603.
What makes things happen. Prestige first, and everything else after.4 An electoral crowd is heterogeneous, but since its action is confined to one clear matter — choosing between candidates — it shows only a few of the crowd characteristics: little aptitude for reasoning, no critical spirit, irritability, credulity and simplicity. What runs it are the factors already named: affirmation, repetition, prestige, contagion.
The candidate must have prestige, meaning he can impose himself on the electorate without discussion. Personal prestige can only be substituted for by the prestige of wealth. Talent and even genius are not elements of serious importance. And this explains something Le Bon thinks needs explaining: why electors who are mostly working men or peasants so rarely choose a man from their own ranks. Such a man has no prestige among them. When they do elect an equal it's usually for a side reason — to spite an eminent man, or an employer they depend on daily, whose master they get the illusion of becoming for a moment.
How people should relate. By flattery and by the destruction of the other man, which he sets out as instructions. The elector wants his greed and his vanity fed. He must be overwhelmed with the most extravagant blandishments and offered the most fantastic promises. If he's a working man it's impossible to go too far in insulting employers of labour. As for the rival, the effort must be to establish by affirmation, repetition and contagion that he is an arrant scoundrel and that everybody knows he has committed several crimes. It is, of course, useless to trouble about any semblance of proof. If the rival doesn't know the psychology of crowds he'll try to justify himself with arguments instead of answering one set of affirmations with another, and he'll have no chance at all.
The programme gets the same treatment, split in two. The written one shouldn't be too categorical, since it can be produced against him later. In the spoken one there cannot be too much exaggeration, and the most important reforms may be fearlessly promised. The exaggerations do their work at the moment and bind nobody, because the elector never troubles to find out how far the man he returned followed the programme he applauded.
What is real. Whatever a phrase can be made to mean, and the case is a revolution. A new formula as devoid as possible of precise meaning, and therefore able to flatter every kind of aspiration, wins infallibly. The Spanish revolution of 1873 was brought on by one of these — a federal republic, unanimously proclaimed by the Cortes, though none of the men voting could have said what he had voted for.
The account he reprints is the best evidence in the run because it lists the incompatible readings. The formula delighted everybody, and the joy was intoxicating and delirious; a republican whose opponent denied him the title of federalist thought himself mortally insulted; men greeted each other in the street with long live the federal republic. Some took it to mean the emancipation of the provinces and administrative decentralisation on the American model. Others meant the abolition of all authority and the start of the great social liquidation. The socialists of Barcelona and Andalusia meant absolute sovereignty for the communes, and proposed to give Spain ten thousand independent municipalities legislating for themselves, with the police and the army suppressed. In the southern provinces, as soon as a village had made its pronouncement, its first care was to cut the telegraph wires and the railway lines, so as to be out of communication with its neighbours and with Madrid. Federation became cantonalism, with massacres and burning across the country.
How you know. By reading the report of any election meeting, which he says settles the question of whether reasoning has any influence. In such a gathering there are affirmations, invectives and sometimes blows, and never arguments. If silence falls it's because somebody with a reputation as a tough customer has announced he's about to put the candidate an embarrassing question, and the satisfaction is brief, because the questioner's voice is soon drowned by his adversaries.
He then quotes the newspapers. The organisers ask the assembly to elect a president, and the storm bursts. The anarchists leap on the platform to take the committee table and the socialists defend it. Blows are exchanged, each party accuses the other of being government spies, and a citizen leaves the hall with a black eye. At another meeting, whose watchword was calm and tranquillity, a comrade calls the socialists idiots and humbugs, and chairs, tables and benches are converted into weapons.
The control case is students, and it's there to stop anyone blaming the working class. A report from Le Temps of 13 February 1895 describes a meeting composed exclusively of students in which no orator managed two sentences without interruption, applause mixed with hissing, sticks brandished, others beating a tattoo on the floor, and shouts of put him out and let him speak.
What a person is. Not the author of his own opinion, on this evidence. Crowds have opinions that have been imposed on them and never reasoned ones, and here the opinions and votes are in the hands of the election committees, whose leading men are usually publicans with great influence over working men to whom they extend credit. He quotes Schérer, a champion of democracy, calling the election committee the cornerstone of French institutions and the masterpiece of the political machine, and saying France is governed by them.
His own footnote on committees is the harshest thing in the book. Under whatever name — clubs, syndicates — they are the most impersonal and therefore the most oppressive form of tyranny, because the men directing them are supposed to speak for a collectivity and are freed from all responsibility. The most savage tyrant never dreamed of proscriptions like those the committees of the Revolution ordered. Barras said they decimated the Convention, picking off members at their pleasure. Robespierre held absolute power for exactly as long as he could speak in their name, and was lost the moment he separated himself from them out of personal pride.
And the price of a seat is on the record. According to the admissions of the donors, three million francs were enough to secure the repeated elections of General Boulanger.
What is worth having. Universal suffrage, which he keeps — and the argument for keeping it is the one place he turns his method against his own preferences. He states the objection first and states it fully: civilisation has been the work of a small minority of superior intelligences at the top of a pyramid, the greatness of a civilisation can't depend on votes cast by inferior elements with nothing but numbers, and the votes of crowds have already cost France several invasions.
Then he says the objections are excellent in theory and lose all force in practice. The dogma of the sovereignty of crowds is as indefensible philosophically as the religious dogmas of the Middle Ages, and it now has the same absolute power, so it is just as unattackable. He asks the reader to imagine a modern freethinker dropped into the Middle Ages and to consider whether, in front of a judge ready to send him to the stake for a pact with the devil, he would be tempted to question the existence of the devil. It would be as wise to oppose a cyclone with discussion as the beliefs of crowds. Time alone acts on them.
He also thinks restricting the vote would change nothing, and gives the reason. In a crowd men always tend to the same level, so on general questions a vote by forty academicians is no better than a vote by forty water-carriers. Knowing Greek or mathematics, being an architect or a veterinary surgeon or a barrister, doesn't confer any special intelligence about social questions. The political economists are all highly educated, mostly professors and academicians — and on protection, on bimetallism, on any general question, they have never once managed to agree. Their science, he says, is only a very attenuated form of our universal ignorance.
The shape of time. Stable in a way that makes elections nearly decorative. Restricted or general, under a republic or a monarchy, in France or Belgium or Greece or Portugal or Spain, the suffrage of crowds is everywhere identical, and expresses the unconscious aspirations and needs of the race. In each country the average opinions of the elected represent the genius of the race, and don't alter noticeably from one generation to the next. So the chapter ends where every chapter ends: race and the slavery of our daily necessities are the mysterious master-causes that rule our destiny.
Read: lines 1604–1701.
What is real. The parliamentary system, which he calls the ideal of all modern civilised peoples and an expression of an idea that is psychologically false.5 The idea is that a large gathering of men is much more capable than a small number of reaching a wise and independent decision. Parliaments in Greece, Italy, Portugal, Spain, France and America produce great similarities in their debates and their votes, and leave their governments facing identical difficulties, so race modifies the crowd characteristics here without preventing them.
Simplicity of opinion is the leading feature. Members tend to solve the most complicated social problems with the simplest abstract principles applied to every case, and being in a crowd they exaggerate the worth of their principles and push them to extremes. Parliaments therefore represent extreme opinions especially.
The example is the Jacobins, and the sentence he borrows about them is the one to keep. Dogmatic and logical to a man, their heads full of vague generalities, they applied fixed principles without concerning themselves with events. It has been said of them, with reason, that they went through the Revolution without witnessing it. With very simple dogmas as a guide they thought they could rebuild society from the top down and send a highly refined civilisation back to an earlier stage — and their method came down to destroying whatever stood in the way.
What makes things happen. Two suggestions pulling against each other, which explains a behaviour that otherwise looks like madness. On local or regional questions every member has fixed opinions no argument can shake. The talent of a Demosthenes would not change a Deputy's vote on protection or the privilege of distilling alcohol, where influential electors have interests. The suggestion from those electors was received before the vote and outweighs every other.
On general questions — bringing down a Cabinet, imposing a tax — there's no fixity, and the leaders' suggestions work, but each party has leaders of roughly equal influence. So the Deputy stands between two contrary suggestions and is made to hesitate. That's why he can be seen voting in opposite ways within a quarter of an hour, or adding to a law an article that cancels it — taking from employers the right to choose and dismiss their workmen, and then nearly annulling the measure with an amendment. Since general questions are the more numerous, indecision predominates, produced by an ever-present fear of the elector.
The English parliamentarian's line, quoted in a footnote, is the flattest possible statement of the same thing. During the fifty years he sat at Westminster he listened to thousands of speeches; few of them changed his opinion, and not one of them changed his vote.
How people should relate. Under leaders, again, and the votes of an assembly usually represent only a small minority's opinion. The influence of those leaders comes in very small measure from their arguments and in large measure from prestige, and the proof is that when they lose the prestige the influence goes with it.
That prestige is individual and has nothing to do with celebrity, which Jules Simon demonstrates from the Assembly of 1848. Two months before he was all-powerful, Louis Napoleon was of no importance whatever. Victor Hugo mounted the tribune and failed; he was listened to as Félix Pyat was listened to and got less applause. Edgar Quinet, with an exceptional and powerful intelligence, was held in no esteem at all — popular before the Assembly opened, and unpopular in it. Le Bon keeps the facts and rejects Simon's explanation, since a crowd that credited its leaders with services rendered would immediately stop being a crowd.
He then prices one man's prestige in territory. A celebrated Deputy — the translator names Clemenceau — had only to give the signal and Cabinets fell. A writer is quoted saying it is mainly due to him that France paid three times what it should have for Tonkin, stayed precariously placed in Madagascar, was defrauded of an empire on the Lower Niger, and lost its position in Egypt. His theories, the writer says, have cost us more territory than the disasters of Napoleon I. Le Bon then declines to hold a grudge, on the grounds that much of the man's influence came from following public opinion, since a leader is seldom ahead of it and almost always does nothing but follow it and adopt its errors.
How you know. By what a phrase does to a room. The leader needs a special eloquence made of energetic affirmations unburdened with proof, impressive images, and very summary argument. Maine says debates in the House of Commons can constantly be read in which the whole discussion is an exchange of weak generalities and violent personalities, and that general formulas of that kind have a prodigious influence on the imagination of a pure democracy.
The example given is a threat wrapped in a picture. A leader of one of the French assemblies said that when the same vessel carries off to the fever-haunted lands of the penitentiary settlements both the politician of shady reputation and the anarchist guilty of murder, the pair will be able to converse, and will appear to each other as two complementary aspects of one and the same state of society. Every adversary in the room felt threatened. They saw the fever country and the ship, since it is perfectly possible they belong to the ill-defined class of politicians being menaced — the same fear, Le Bon says, that the men of the Convention felt when Robespierre's vague speeches threatened them with the guillotine, and under which they always gave way.
The corollary is that exaggeration has no ceiling. The same speaker could say without provoking protest that bankers and priests had subsidised the bomb-throwers, and that the directors of the great financial companies deserved the same punishment as anarchists. The affirmation is never too violent and the declamation never too threatening, because those present are afraid that if they protest they'll be put down as traitors or accomplices.
What a person is. In a leader's case, better off narrow, which he states as a mechanism rather than an insult. Intelligence shows how complex things are, allows explanation, promotes understanding — and so makes its owner indulgent and blunts the violence of conviction an apostle needs. The great leaders of crowds in every age, and of the Revolution in particular, have been of lamentably narrow intellect, and the most restricted have had the greatest influence.
Robespierre is the case, read through his own speeches. They frequently astound by their incoherence, and simply reading them offers no plausible explanation of the part he played. The verdict quoted is unsparing: the commonplaces and redundancies of pedagogic eloquence and Latin culture at the service of a mind childish rather than undistinguished, limited in attack and defence to the defiant attitude of schoolboys — not an idea, not a happy turn of phrase, not a telling hit, a storm of declamation that leaves the reader bored.
The counter-portrait is the Deputy without prestige, and it's the best scene in the chapter because you can watch it happen. He takes his place in the tribune, draws a document from his portfolio, spreads it out methodically, and starts with assurance. He has weighed and re-weighed his arguments, is well primed with figures and proofs, and is certain he'll convince, since in the face of his evidence resistance would be futile.
He speaks, and is at once surprised by the restlessness of the House and a little annoyed by the noise. Why is silence not kept, and what are those Deputies talking about, and what urgent motive has made that one leave his seat? An expression of uneasiness crosses his face; he frowns and stops. Encouraged by the President he begins again, louder, and is listened to less. He puts emphasis on his words and gesticulates, and the noise increases. He can no longer hear himself, and stops again — and then, afraid his silence will bring the cry of the closure, he starts off once more, and the clamour becomes unbearable.
What is worth having. Specialists, and the parliamentary system anyway. When assemblies reach a certain pitch of excitement they become ordinary heterogeneous crowds and their sentiments go to extremes, and the individual will vote measures against his own interests. Billaud-Varennes is the witness: the decisions we have been so reproached for, he wrote, were not desired by us two days, or a single day, before they were taken — it was the crisis and nothing else that gave rise to them.
Taine's account of the Convention is the extended version, and it turns on unanimity. The Left, supported by the Right, unanimously and amid loud applause sent Danton — its natural chief and the great promoter of the Revolution — to the scaffold. Unanimously and with the greatest applause the Right, supported by the Left, voted the worst decrees of the revolutionary government. By spontaneous and repeated re-elections the Convention kept in office the homicidal government that the Plain detested for being homicidal and the Mountain detested because it was being decimated by it. On 22 Prairial the entire Convention offered itself to the executioner, and on 8 Thermidor, in the first quarter of an hour after Robespierre's speech, it did the same thing again.
Against all that he sets one saving mechanism. Assemblies are only crowds at certain moments, and their members keep their individuality a great deal of the time, which is how a chamber can produce excellent technical laws. The author of such a law is a specialist who prepared it alone in his study, so the law voted is an individual's work and not an assembly's — and these are the best laws, only becoming disastrous when a series of amendments turns them into a collective effort. The specialist is a temporary leader of crowds: the Assembly has no influence on him and he has influence over it.
Then the verdict, which is not the one his reputation predicts. Parliamentary assemblies are the best form of government mankind has found so far, and the best means it has found of escaping personal tyranny. They are the ideal government for philosophers, thinkers, writers, artists and learned men.
How people should relate — the two costs. He names two dangers and both are arithmetic. The first is financial waste, produced by the electors' demands and their lack of foresight. Let a member propose old-age pensions for all workers, or a rise for some class of State employees, and no other Deputy will dare seem to disregard his electors by rejecting it — knowing perfectly well he is straining the budget and requiring new taxes. The consequences of the spending are remote and won't hurt him personally; the consequences of a negative vote will be perfectly visible at the next election.
The second cause is local grants, which no Deputy can oppose, since each can only get what his own constituency needs by agreeing to everyone else's demands. The footnote from the Economiste of 6 April 1895 puts numbers on it. Fifteen million francs for a railway to connect Langayes, a town of three thousand on a mountain, with Puy. Seven million to connect Beaumont, three thousand five hundred people, with Castel-Sarrazin. Seven million to connect Oust, a village of 523 people, with Seix, which has 1,200. Six million to connect Prade with the hamlet of Olette, 747 people. Ninety million francs voted in 1895 alone for railways of purely local use.
The second danger is the shrinking of liberty, and he takes the mechanism from Spencer. Dictatorial measures multiply, restricting the citizen in two ways: more regulations every year constrain him in matters where he used to be free and compel acts he used to be able to decline, and heavier public and local burdens reduce the part of his earnings he can spend as he likes. Le Bon adds the piece Spencer left out. Every restrictive law increases the number, power and influence of the officials who apply it — and the administrative caste is the one thing untouched by every transfer of authority, alone in having irresponsibility, impersonality and perpetuity. There is no more oppressive despotism than that triple form.
The shape of time. A cycle, given in the last pages as the book's summary and its prophecy. At the dawn of a civilisation there's a swarm of men of various origins brought together by migration, invasion and conquest, of different blood and language and belief, with nothing binding them but the half-recognised law of a chief. They have the transient cohesion of crowds, their heroism, weakness, impulsiveness and violence. Nothing about them is stable. They are barbarians.
Then time does its work. Shared surroundings, repeated intermingling and the necessities of common life blend the dissimilar units into a race, with heredity fixing the common characteristics harder each generation. The crowd has become a people, and it leaves the barbarous state entirely only when it has acquired an ideal — and the nature of the ideal barely matters, whether it's the cult of Rome, the might of Athens or the triumph of Allah, so long as it gives every individual the same sentiments and thoughts.
The decline is the same road walked backwards. Once a civilisation reaches a certain strength and complexity it stops growing, and having stopped it is condemned to decline. The hour is always marked by the weakening of the ideal, and as that ideal pales, every religious, political and social structure built on it begins to shake. The individual's personality and intelligence may increase — and the collective egoism of the race is replaced by the egoism of the individual, with a weakening of character and less capacity for action. What was a people and a whole becomes an aggregate of individuals with no cohesion, held together for a while by traditions and institutions. Divided by their interests, no longer capable of governing themselves, men need directing in their smallest acts, and the State takes on an absorbing influence.
At the end the genius of the race disappears entirely, and what's left is a swarm of isolated individuals returned to their original condition — a crowd. The civilisation still has an outward front, the work of a long past, and it is an edifice crumbling to ruin with nothing holding it up, due to fall at the first storm. That is the last sentence of the book, and it explains why the man who wrote a manual of persuasion thought he was writing a warning.
Read: lines 1702–1903.
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.
The crowd-state as barbarism, and the race-spirit as the thing that lifts a people out of it. Stated as a law in the first chapter and used as the frame of the last one.
Colonial arithmetic as the natural measure of a statesman's worth. The indictment of Clemenceau is written in lost territories — Tonkin, Madagascar, the Lower Niger, Egypt — and expects the reader to agree that losing an empire is the injury.
Crimes of passion as a lesser category. The jury's leniency towards the abandoned girl who throws vitriol is offered as instinctive good sense, and the reasoning — that it frightens seducers in advance — passes without comment.
Elections as a thing money buys. Three million francs for Boulanger's repeated elections is cited from the donors' own admissions, as a fact rather than a scandal.
Paradigm-breaking, and the cost is what marks it.
Keeping the jury while saying the jury cannot reason. Everything in his own account argues for abolishing it, and he keeps it because the alternative is a caste under no control. The cost is that he has to concede crowds are correctable and castes are not, which cuts against the hereditary fixity the rest of the book runs on.
Keeping universal suffrage after describing electors as unable to form opinions. He builds the whole case against it and then refuses the conclusion, on the ground that restricting the vote would change nothing and would add the tyranny of castes. Forty academicians voting no better than forty water-carriers is the line, and it costs him the aristocracy of intelligence that the Introduction to the book leans on.
Calling the juge d'instruction's warrant the equivalent of a lettre de cachet. He is attacking the administrative class of his own republic in a book his republic's enemies would enjoy, and he names the case and the stupidity.
Refusing to call the September massacres criminal. The refusal is consistent with his psychology and it is also the sentence that would follow him. The cost is a book that can be read as an excuse, and he supplies the excuse in the same paragraphs as the benches for the ladies.
Ending a study of crowd psychology with a prophecy of civilisational death. Nothing in the method licenses it and he does it anyway, in a summary he announces as a summary.
[SPECULATIVE]Take the cook at the Bastille. He came to see what was happening. He is kicked by accident. A stranger proposes that he should be the one to cut the governor's throat, the crowd acclaims it, and he now believes the act is patriotic and that he is owed a medal. Somebody hands him a sword. It won't cut.
The moment that matters is the one Le Bon passes over. Between the blunt sword and the knife in his pocket there is a pause, and in that pause a man who cuts meat for a living decides to go and get his own tool.
Le Bon's counsel to him is nothing, because Le Bon's finding is that he is not there. The act is a suggestion carried out by an automaton, criminal legally and not psychologically, and there is nobody in the pause to advise.
An advisor working from non-harm as bedrock with carved exceptions would go straight at the pause and would not accept that it was empty. The tradition's structure is the point: harm is the floor, and the exceptions to it are carved — specified in advance, narrow, attached to office and to circumstance, and known before the day arrives. A cook has no such exception. He is not an executioner, he holds no office, and nothing has been carved for him. The counsel is that the exception has to exist before the crowd names you, because a rule invented in the moment by three hundred people is not an exception, it is the crowd's appetite wearing the shape of one. What the unanimity supplied was permission. What it could not supply was standing.
An advisor working from judging by effects rather than intentions would leave the pause alone and go after the medal. This man's defence is entirely a claim about his own intention — patriotic, dutiful, deserving. So is the slaughterers' defence a week later, when they go to the authorities to ask for a reward. The doctrine is blunt about that: intention is the thing least available to inspection and most available to invention, and the only report you can trust is what actually happened to somebody. On that test the week produced twelve hundred corpses, fifty of them children between twelve and seventeen, and every good intention in it is irrelevant.
They disagree about where a person can still be reached. The first says the moment of decision is real and can be prepared for years in advance, by knowing exactly which harms you are licensed to do. The second says the moment can't be trusted at all and only the effects can be counted.
Where they converge is on the thing Le Bon builds his defence out of. He treats the unanimous approval of fellow citizens as what makes the cook's conviction natural, and therefore as what excuses it. Both advisors read the same fact as aggravating rather than mitigating. Unanimity is what removed the last thing that might have stopped him, and a doctrine that has already fixed the exceptions, or that counts only the bodies, is a doctrine designed to survive exactly that.
[SPECULATIVE]Decision type: persuading a body whose members are not equally worth persuading.
The finding is that they are not, and that the working number is very small. One or two energetic men are enough to carry the rest of a jury, and the counsel's real job is to find them and please them. A man in a crowd whom you have succeeded in pleasing is on the point of being convinced, and will then accept as excellent nearly any argument you offer him.
The mechanism separates two things that usually get run together. Persuading somebody of a proposition is slow, contestable, and often impossible. Making somebody willing to be persuaded by you is fast and has nothing to do with the proposition. Lachaud spent three-quarters of an hour on the seventh juryman with his best arguments and moved him not at all. He moved him in four seconds by noticing the sun in the man's eyes and asking the court for a curtain.
Scope conditions. This works where the body deliberates together, where a few members are visibly more energetic than the others, and where the decision-maker can be observed while the case is being made. It fails where members decide separately and never meet — nobody carries anybody. It fails where the leading spirits can't be identified, which is why the technique needs a room and faces in it. And it fails on Le Bon's own evidence where the member has a fixed prior interest: the Deputy whose electors distil alcohol cannot be reached by any orator alive.
The general form. In a deliberating body, identify the two or three who will carry the rest, and spend your effort on being acceptable to them rather than on being right in front of everybody. Modern equivalent: any committee, panel or board where a case is presented live. The reason the technique keeps working is that it costs the persuaded man nothing to admit — the seventh juryman did not change his mind about anything, and he was won.
The uncomfortable half is what it says about the verdicts. If two energetic men carry a jury, and juries reached identical verdicts whether they were composed of professors or of small tradesmen, then the composition never mattered because the mechanism was never about composition. The institution is stable because the process is the same in every room, which is an argument for its predictability and not for its accuracy.
[SPECULATIVE]The live alternative here is the one his readers were actually proposing, and he names it to kill it: restrict the suffrage to the intellectually capable.
He rejects it on a mechanism rather than on principle, which is what makes the rejection interesting. In a crowd, men level to the same point, so on general questions forty academicians vote no better than forty water-carriers. Knowing Greek, or being an architect or a veterinary surgeon, confers no special intelligence about social questions. And the economists — highly educated, mostly professors — have never agreed on protection or on bimetallism.
The counterfactual he refuses to run is the one his own examples set up. He never asks what a restricted electorate would have done differently, except to assert that the re-establishment of the Empire would have happened anyway. That assertion is doing a great deal of work and is offered without support, which is the failure mode Book I warned about: a claim about a vote that never happened, stated in the register of a finding.
The constructed alternative worth tracing is a third one, which nobody in 1895 was proposing and which the chapter's own material suggests. The committees are what actually decide, and their leading men are publicans with credit over their working-class electors. So the binding constraint on French elections in this account is not who may vote but who may be a candidate, and the price of that is three million francs. A reform aimed at candidacy and at committee finance would leave universal suffrage intact and change the outcomes — which is precisely the reform his frame cannot generate, because institutions are labels and only the genius of the race decides.
The second-order consequence is where it gets expensive. He tells the reader that opposing the dogma of popular sovereignty is like arguing with a cyclone, and that time alone acts on it. That is a counsel of passivity issued to the only people positioned to act, and it is the same counsel the Preface gave about reform generally. Between the Preface and this chapter, the book has advised a governing class to leave the electorate alone, leave the institutions alone, and wait — and then it ends by predicting that the civilisation falls at the first storm.
[SPECULATIVE]Decision type: voting on a spending measure when the cost is deferred and the credit is immediate.
The mechanism is a ratchet, and Le Bon draws it with no economics in it at all. A member proposes pensions for all workers or a rise for some class of State employees. Every other Deputy knows this strains the budget and will require new taxes. None of them can vote against it, because the consequences of the spending are remote and will never be traced to him personally, while the consequences of a negative vote will be perfectly visible at his next election. The asymmetry is not in the merits. It is in the timing.
The second half is the part that makes it permanent. Local grants can't be opposed either, because each Deputy can only get the railway his constituency wants by voting for everybody else's. So the ratchet doesn't need anyone to believe in the spending. It needs only that each man's own grant depends on his assent to all the others.
The numbers make it concrete in a way an argument couldn't. Seven million francs to connect a village of 523 people to a town of 1,200. Six million to reach a hamlet of 747. Ninety million in one year for railways of purely local use. Nobody in the chamber thinks those are worth building.
Scope conditions. This holds where costs are borne collectively and benefits are local and named, where the decision-maker faces a periodic re-selection by the beneficiaries, and where the horizon of the cost is longer than the horizon of the selection. It fails where a cost lands visibly on the same people who get the benefit, and it fails where somebody who won't face re-election can refuse.
The general form. Where the benefit is local and named and the cost is national and deferred, no member of the deciding body can vote no, and unanimity for a measure nobody wants is the equilibrium. Modern equivalent: any legislature that appropriates by district, and any organisation whose budget is set by the people who spend it.
The finding underneath it is Le Bon's alone and he barely marks it. He has just spent five chapters explaining decisions by suggestion, contagion and prestige — and here, in the one place where he traces a mechanism with no crowd psychology in it whatever, he produces the most durable prediction in the book. The mechanism needs no unconscious, no heredity and no hypnosis. It works on rational men counting the dates.