The Crowd, Gustave le Bon [read ebook pdf .TXT] 📗

consent to be interviewed as a

means of submitting their views on a given subject to the

judgment of crowds. Formerly it might have been correct to say

that politics were not a matter of sentiment. Can the same be

said to-day, when politics are more and more swayed by the

impulse of changeable crowds, who are uninfluenced by reason and

can only be guided by sentiment?

 

As to the press, which formerly directed opinion, it has had,

like governments, to humble itself before the power of crowds.

It wields, no doubt, a considerable influence, but only because

it is exclusively the reflection of the opinions of crowds and of

their incessant variations. Become a mere agency for the supply

of information, the press has renounced all endeavour to enforce

an idea or a doctrine. It follows all the changes of public

thought, obliged to do so by the necessities of competition under

pain of losing its readers. The old staid and influential organs

of the past, such as the Constitutionnel, the Debats, or the

Siecle, which were accepted as oracles by the preceding

generation, have disappeared or have become typical modern

papers, in which a maximum of news is sandwiched in between light

articles, society gossip, and financial puffs. There can be no

question to-day of a paper rich enough to allow its contributors

to air their personal opinions, and such opinions would be of

slight weight with readers who only ask to be kept informed or to

be amused, and who suspect every affirmation of being prompted by

motives of speculation. Even the critics have ceased to be able

to assure the success of a book or a play. They are capable of

doing harm, but not of doing a service. The papers are so

conscious of the uselessness of everything in the shape of

criticism or personal opinion, that they have reached the point

of suppressing literary criticism, confining themselves to citing

the title of a book, and appending a “puff” of two or three

lines.[22] In twenty years’ time the same fate will probably

have overtaken theatrical criticism.

 

[22] These remarks refer to the French newspaper press.—Note of

the Translator.

 

The close watching of the course of opinion has become to-day the

principal preoccupation of the press and of governments. The

effect produced by an event, a legislative proposal, a speech, is

without intermission what they require to know, and the task is

not easy, for nothing is more mobile and changeable than the

thought of crowds, and nothing more frequent than to see them

execrate to-day what they applauded yesterday.

 

This total absence of any sort of direction of opinion, and at

the same time the destruction of general beliefs, have had for

final result an extreme divergency of convictions of every order,

and a growing indifference on the part of crowds to everything

that does not plainly touch their immediate interests. Questions

of doctrine, such as socialism, only recruit champions boasting

genuine convictions among the quite illiterate classes, among the

workers in mines and factories, for instance. Members of the

lower middle class, and working men possessing some degree of

instruction, have either become utterly sceptical or extremely

unstable in their opinions.

 

The evolution which has been effected in this direction in the

last twenty-five years is striking. During the preceding period,

comparatively near us though it is, opinions still had a certain

general trend; they had their origin in the acceptance of some

fundamental belief. By the mere fact that an individual was a

monarchist he possessed inevitably certain clearly defined ideas

in history as well as in science, while by the mere fact that he

was a republican, his ideas were quite contrary. A monarchist

was well aware that men are not descended from monkeys, and a

republican was not less well aware that such is in truth their

descent. It was the duty of the monarchist to speak with horror,

and of the republican to speak with veneration, of the great

Revolution. There were certain names, such as those of

Robespierre and Marat, that had to be uttered with an air of

religious devotion, and other names, such as those of Caesar,

Augustus, or Napoleon, that ought never to be mentioned

unaccompanied by a torrent of invective. Even in the French

Sorbonne this ingenuous fashion of conceiving history was

general.[23]

 

[23] There are pages in the books of the French official

professors of history that are very curious from this point of

view. They prove too how little the critical spirit is developed

by the system of university education in vogue in France. I cite

as an example the following extracts from the “French Revolution”

of M. Rambaud, professor of history at the Sorbonne:

 

“The taking of the Bastille was a culminating event in the

history not only of France, but of all Europe; and inaugurated a

new epoch in the history of the world!”

 

With respect to Robespierre, we learn with stupefaction that “his

dictatorship was based more especially on opinion, persuasion,

and moral authority; it was a sort of pontificate in the hands of

a virtuous man!” (pp. 91 and 220.)

 

At the present day, as the result of discussion and analysis, all

opinions are losing their prestige; their distinctive features

are rapidly worn away, and few survive capable of arousing our

enthusiasm. The man of modern times is more and more a prey to

indifference.

 

The general wearing away of opinions should not be too greatly

deplored. That it is a symptom of decadence in the life of a

people cannot be contested. It is certain that men of immense,

of almost supernatural insight, that apostles, leaders of

crowds—men, in a word, of genuine and strong convictions—exert

a far greater force than men who deny, who criticise, or who are

indifferent, but it must not be forgotten that, given the power

possessed at present by crowds, were a single opinion to acquire

sufficient prestige to enforce its general acceptance, it would

soon be endowed with so tyrannical a strength that everything

would have to bend before it, and the era of free discussion

would be closed for a long time. Crowds are occasionally

easy-going masters, as were Heliogabalus and Tiberius, but they

are also violently capricious. A civilisation, when the moment

has come for crowds to acquire a high hand over it, is at the

mercy of too many chances to endure for long. Could anything

postpone for a while the hour of its ruin, it would be precisely

the extreme instability of the opinions of crowds and their

growing indifference with respect to all general beliefs.