The Origins of Crowd Psychology: Gustave LeBon and the Crisis of Mass Democracy in the 3rd Republic

233 Pages·1975·12.451 MB·English

by  Robert A Nye

THE ORIGINS OF
CROWD PSYCHOLOGY

Gustave LeBon and the Crisis of
Mass Democracy in the Third Republic

Robert A. Nye
SAGE Studies in 20th Century History Volume 2
S) SAGE Publications Ltd. London Beverly Hills
Copyright © 1975 by Robert A. Nye.
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First Printing
Printed and Bound in Great Britain by
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International Standard Book Number 0-8039-9903-8
Library of Congress Catalog Card No. 74-76327
For Mary Jo
ROBERT A. NYE received his B.A. from San Jose State College
(California) in 1964, his M.A. from the University of Wisconsin in
1965, and his Ph.D. from Wisconsin in 1969. Dr. Nye has taught
modern European history and French and European intellectual history
at the University of Oklahoma in Norman since 1969. During this time
Dr. Nye has received grants from the American Philosophical Society
and the National Endowment for the Humanities for research work on
social thought and criminological theory, and he has a forth-coming
article entitled ‘Heredity vs. Milieu: The Foundations of European
Criminological Theory’.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The origins of a book often lie buried beneath accumulated stages
that bear witness to its progressive development. Two gifted teachers,
George Mosse and Harvey Goldberg, provided the initial idea and the
critical impetus that set this study in motion. The staffs of the
Bibliothéque Nationale and the Archives Nationales were helpful in
many ways, and M. Jacques Rémy, M. Edouard Bonnefous, and M.
Pierre Chanlaine provided important information in discussions. I am
particularly indebted to two individuals who gave me access to LeBon’s
previously unexamined manuscript remains. Madeleine Caillon spent
many hours arranging the materials in her possession and many more in
helpful conversation. M. Pierre-Sadi Carnot took time from a busy
schedule to allow me to examine the LeBon manuscripts in the Carnot
family library. The efforts and kindnesses of these two persons have
allowed this study to penetrate through published materials to the web
of personal relations beneath. The Faculty Research Committee of the
University of Oklahoma and the American Philosophical Society,
Penrose Fund, made possible a supplementary trip to France. Alexis
Rodgers and Cathye Woody typed the manuscript with efficient good
humor.
Critical help is more difficult to assess; a colleague’s offhand
observation may have as much effect on the orientation of a manuscript
as a more thoroughgoing appraisal. | would like especially to thank
some individuals who participated in one degree or another in the
process of preparation. George Stocking and Charles Tilly critically read
earlier versions; Bob Shalhope and Jim Fisher read a later one. Among
those who commented helpfully on portions of the study are Dave
Levy, Sabetai Unguru, Henry Tobias, Bill Maehl, Clarice Fisher and
Harry Paul. Jim Briscoe’s special attention to logic and style stimulated
a useful rewriting. The major share of my gratitude is reserved for Mary
Jo, who participated in each stage of development: inspiration, the
mechanics of typing, conceptual criticism, and suggestions on style. She
has been my most relentless critic and my firmest supporter
throughout. As my wife, intellectual companion, and closest comrade,
her role in this work is so great that it can only partly be repaid by this
book’s dedication.
Robert A. Nye
University of Oklahoma 1974
CONTENTS

Introduction , , , , , , , , , . l
1. The Initiate: Paris and Scientism in the Second Empire 7
2. Defeat and the Commune: The Intellectual Reorientation of
the Seventies i. , : , , , , ; , 19
3. The Positivist Harvest: Race and the Modern World, 1880-1894 39
4. Collective Psychology in the “Era of Crowds” ; , 59
5. | The Dilemma of the Third Republic: The Conjunction of
Collective Psychology and Political Theory , , . 83
6. Gustave LeBon and Crowd Theory in French Military Thought
Prior to the First World War , , , ; , . 123
7. Collective Psychology and the Democratic Tradition: An
Ambiguous Heritage , , , , , , . 155
Appendix. An Antidote: Toward an Historical Study of Collective
Behavior Coe 19
Bibliography , ; , , , , , , - . 197
Index 22)

INTRODUCTION

The great historian of Victorianism G. M. Young has written ‘“‘The real,
central theme of history is not what happened, but what people felt
about it when it was happening”.’ No doubt Young does not mean to
say that what happened has no bearing in assembling a version of the
historical past; but he hopes to stress that contemporaries in any epoch
only rarely grasp the nature and significance of the historical forces
shaping their lives. Marx, Tocqueville, Weber, and other giants of
nineteenth-century social thought notwithstanding, it seems safe to say
that most observers of the process and consequences of European
industrialization and urbanization suffered from a _ manifest
incongruence between what actually occurred and how they perceived
it. And it seems equally safe to say that very often the illusory
perception of a generation will refuse to die with it, but will live on,
barely transformed, to haunt later generations. It follows that the
historian must take these perceptions seriously insofar as they served as
truisms that influenced men and women’s attempts to make sense of a
complex social reality.
A phenomenon which has especially suffered from the effects of this
perceptual dualism and repeatedly confounded its serious students is
collective violence. But if the circumstances in which violent collective
activity generally takes place make dispassionate observation
particularly unlikely, such a limitation seldom proved to be much of an
obstacle for theorists of collective behavior in the late nineteenth
century. Georges Clemenceau’s retrospective description of the initial
crowd episodes in the Paris Commune, still cited by historians as an
accurate account, is typical of the usual stereotype of violent collective
behavior.
1
2 Origins of Crowd Psychology

Suddenly a terrific noise broke out, and the mob which filled the
courtyard burst into the street in the grip of some kind of
frenzy ... All were shrieking like wild beasts without realizing
what they were doing. I observed then that pathological
phenomenon which might be called blood lust. A breath of
madness seemed to have passed over this mob.... It was one of
those extraordinary nervous outbursts, so frequent in the middle
ages, which still occur amongst masses of human beings under the
stress of some primeval emotion.”
For Clemenceau’s contemporaries the preferred explanation for the
endurance of such a phenomenon in the modern world lay in the
disastrous circumstances of industrialization and rapid urbanization, a
sort of germ of our contemporary “theory of mass society”.
Presumably, the alienation and social disorganization characteristic of
these processes encouraged collective violence and related forms of
criminality; that, at any rate, is how Frenchmen from the 1870s to
recent times have most often perceived the situation. Even those most
convinced that they were studying collective behavior “‘scientifically”
fell prey to these notions.
If recent research seems to suggest that urbanization, crime, and
collective violence are not historically interrelated phenomena, it
cannot challenge the essential conviction of those who lived through
those times of change that such causal relationships did exist. It is
valuable to know that we may treat “criminal activity and collective
violence as quite different sorts of behavior, each requiring substantially
different kinds of explanations and methods of investigation”. On the
other hand it is impossible to impose this insight retroactively; thus we
must, however reluctantly, accept “false” conceptions as historically
valid if they were believed to be so. This study will explore the
historical development of a psychological theory of collective behavior
from the perspective of the career of its most influential and colorful
contributor.
During the latter quarter of the nineteenth century, the psychology
of society emerged as a derivative of contemporary philosophy and
social thought. Differing from the schematic, statistically-onented
shape of its modem descendant, nineteenth and early twentieth-century
social psychology in France employed a vocabulary and a scientific