LEBON, GUSTAVE (1841–1931)

LEBON, GUSTAVE (1841–1931)

Gustave LeBon was a French philosopher and sociologist. He became the founder of ‘mass psychology’ with his influential book on the The Crowd (La Psychologie des foules) . LeBon also wrote on the psychology of nations. He was good at explaining science to a wider audience, and due to a skilful mixture of popular science and social commentary his works became so fashionable that he could almost live from the sale of his many publications in the realms of medicine, physiology, Eastern civilizations, ‘race science’ and social psychology. In addition, he invented and developed technical scientific equipment, such as a ‘pocket cephalometer’ for anthropologists who engaged in the latest fad of racial ‘craniology’ and its measuring of skulls.

Trained as a medical doctor, he applied his ‘diagnosis’ to the purported ills of French national life, such as the dramatically falling birth rate or the rise of alcoholic consumption, ills for which he was searching for a remedy, particularly in view of the antagonism vis-à-vis Germany and the defeat of 1870. The fear of degeneracy of the ‘national body’ was closely connected with the issue of the ‘masses’: the revolutions of 1789, 1830 and 1848, the phenomenon of the Paris Commune, and the increase of the proletariat nurtured a growing concern amongst the educated elites regarding the role of the masses. The intelligentsia became increasingly fearful of the ‘mob’, and the topic of the crowd turned out to be one of the important motifs in fin de siècle discussions. Although this was a Europe-wide phenomenon it was in France where it was most hotly debated.

LeBon attended lectures on hysteria at the famous Salpétrière hospital in Paris; there, in 1870, he also came into contact with neuro-physiologists and anthropologists. In 1881,

he published L’Homme et les sociétés (Man and Societies), an account of humankind’s cultural and physical evolution from its animal origins, and a study which was rooted in Darwinian evolutionary biology (see DARWIN, CHARLES) and imbued with theories of race and their values (see ANTHROPOLOGY AND RACE). The book bears witness of his fascination with hypnotic theory and the phenomena of sleepwalking and hallucinations. It laid the foundation of his life-long elaboration on two concepts—the

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psychology of race and the crowd mind. A reason for the decadence of civilization was seen not only in the mixing of ‘superior’ and ‘inferior’ racial stocks but also in the nefarious egalitarian spirit of democracy that led to chaos and went against the natural law of the inequality of men. LeBon warned of the dangers of racial assimilation of any sort and accused the modern reformers of seducing the masses with their ominous socialist utopia. LeBon’s further research into the history and the ‘souls’ of races was summarized in 1894 in his Psychology of Peoples (Lois Psychologiques de l’évolution des peuples, trans. 1899), which propagated the urgent need for the regeneration of the French social organism. This work was enormously popular and purportedly became bedside reading for the future US president Theodore Roosevelt. It stated the inferiority of both the non-European peoples and the lower strata of European societies, the superior grades of society being as far apart from its inferior grades as the white man from the black.

Other major works in the realm of social psychology comprise: The Psychology of Revolution (La Révolution française et la psychologie des révolutions, 1912, trans. 1913); The Psychology of Socialism (Psychologie du socialisme, 1898, trans. 1899); Psychologie

de l’éducation (1902); La Psychologie politique et la défense sociale (1910); and Psychology of the Great War: The First World War and its Origins (Enseignements psychologiques de la guerre européenne, 1915, trans. 1916). It was, however, his groundbreaking enquiry into La Psychologie des foules, published in 1895, which became world-famous. By 1974, this work on the psychology of the crowd, which set the foundation of social psychology, had been translated into at least sixteen foreign languages (first translated into English as The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind, 1896) and published in forty-five French editions. In this book he developed further his ideas regarding the crowd mind.

LeBon contended the structural resemblance between the racial (i.e. the people’s) mind and the crowd mind: the latter reflecting the atavistic traits or primordial sentiments deeply embedded in the primitive heritage of the race. A study of crowd behaviour was thus the path of enquiry into the people’s ancestral mentality.

What are the characteristics ascribed by LeBon to the crowd and its mind? When a crowd forms, it presents new characteristics very different from those of the individuals composing it. Regardless of the qualities of the individual members of a crowd, the fact that these individuals have been transformed into a crowd puts them in possession of a collective mind that may differ very strongly from the individual minds. A crowd is subject to the ‘law of the mental unity of crowds’, and it is always dominated by considerations of which it is unconscious. Steered by stark images rather than reasoning, easily influenced by suggestion and prone to collective hallucinations, the crowd always tends to go to extremes and does not admit doubt or uncertainty. The crowd is thus moved by a certain religious-like sentiment and most possibly by an intolerant fanaticism that can easily lead to violence. Crowds can be as easily heroic as criminal, and in situations like war be ready for sacrifice. They obey their leaders who by definition need to be despotic and use tactics such as simplistic affirmation, repetition and suggestion— tactics that also apply to the biggest ‘psychological crowd’, the democratic electorate.

To LeBon, mental contagion and suggestion in the sense of hypnotism were the decisive factors in the genesis of ideas, emotions and beliefs in crowds. Since the entry of the popular classes into the political arena there had been the dawn of the ‘era of crowds’,

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which demanded a new art or even ‘science’—namely of crowd manipulation—a ‘science’ that every French statesman needed to know in order to combat pacifistic socialism at home and the German beyond the border, as he pointed out in La Psychologie politique et la défense sociale .

LeBon’s contribution to race thought exerted a considerable influence on other ‘race scientists’ such as Houston Stewart Chamberlain or Vacher de Lapouge who both, in turn, influenced Hitler. In the realm of social psychology LeBon’s ideas were appropriated by FREUD. Regardless of whether Hitler knew of LeBon’s work or not, he was certainly aware of the manipulation of the crowd mind, a topic for which LeBon had laid the theoretical groundwork several decades earlier.