The Science of Crowds: A Genealogical Analysis of Gustave Le Bon’s Collective Psychology

Abstract

This article examines Gustave Le Bon’s thinking, focusing in particular on the aspects most closely connected to the search for the “laws” of the rise and fall of civilizations. Indeed, throughout his intellectual career, Le Bon cultivated the ambition of providing a credible answer to the problem of French decadence. In other words, he tried to become a kind of “Machiavelli of the age of crowds”. This article argues that this political objective affected Le Bon’s theory and his psychology of crowds. Since he wanted to make his political recipes appear credible to the elites of the Third Republic, he had to modify his theoretical architecture on nonsecondary points. He managed to hide the inconsistencies under the veil of effective rhetoric but, in retrospect, one can easily recognize that, in his theory, he uses three different ideas of the unconscious to explain the behavior of crowds, peoples, and “races”.

1. Introduction

For many French intellectuals, the experience of the Paris Commune, proclaimed in the spring of 1871, was even more traumatic than France’s disastrous defeat in the war against Prussia. Traumatized by the insurrection, Hippolyte Taine became convinced that the Commune was merely the final episode of a long period of decline. In his view, the deepest roots of this process lay in the culture of the Enlightenment and, above all, in the dismantling of social hierarchies brought about by the revolution of 1789. In the following years, he devoted himself to extensive archival research and the writing of Les Origines de la France contemporaine, a monumental work in which he sought to prove his thesis. Following Taine’s example to some extent, Émile Zola conceived the Rougon-Macquart saga, a cycle of twenty novels that, by tracing the story of a family during the Second Empire of Napoleon III, aimed to depict the overall process of degeneration that had progressively undermined the health of the French nation and had manifested itself spectacularly in the insurrection of 1871 (Barrows 1981; Battini 1995; Geiger 1977; Métraux 1982; Thiec 1981; Thiec and Théanthon 1983).

Like Taine and Zola, many other observers of fin-de-siècle Europe saw in the social transformations of those years the contours of a process of degeneration that was more or less inevitable (Nye 1984; Pick 1989). Moreover, the idea that the social body was undermined by hereditary defects was a widely cultivated theme in the final decades of the nineteenth century, expressed in many variants that aimed to involve, in turn, psychic anomalies, moral deviations, and an ever-expanding catalog of monstrosities. Gustave Le Bon also made an important contribution to this reflection, even though his name is associated primarily with collective psychology and his famous Psychologie des foules, published in Paris in 1895, in which the eclectic writer announced an irreversible entry into the “age of the crowds”. As for Taine and Zola, the defeat in the war against Prussia represented a traumatic shock for Le Bon, especially because it provided him with irrefutable confirmation of France’s decadence. His reflection was thus almost constantly focused on deciphering the reasons for the degeneration of the “French race”, and his investigation into collective psychology—which remains the most famous episode of his intellectual career—stemmed precisely from the attempt to find tools to slow, as much as possible, this process. From the first pages of Les Lois psychologiques de l’évolution des peuples—a book published in 1894, just one year before his book Psychologie des foules—Le Bon wrote that the psychological foundations of European races, and particularly Latin races, were eroding. The main cause for this could be found in the destructive implications that new scientific discoveries had had on religious beliefs, in addition to excessive luxury and long periods of peace. By demolishing millennia-old illusions, these new acquisitions of knowledge had produced “ominous conflicts in men’s souls”; in “vulgar minds”, they had “engendered that state of anarchy in regard to his ideas, which seems characteristic of the modern man” (Le Bon [1894] 1898, p. 216). Eroding every certainty, moral relativism thus devoured the very foundations on which European civilizations were built. “Like the ship that has lost its compass and strays as chance and the winds direct”, he wrote, “the modern man wanders haphazardly through the spaces formerly peopled by the gods and rendered a desert by science”; meanwhile, the masses, “grown excessively impressionable and changeable and no longer kept in check by any barrier, seem fated to oscillate without intermission between the wildest anarchy and the most oppressive despotism” (Le Bon [1894] 1898, p. 219).

Le Bon’s work and books have been extensively examined by scholars who have reconstructed the origins of late-nineteenth-century collective psychology (Apfelbaum 1981, 1995; Apfelbaum and McGuire 1986; Barrows 1981; Borch 2009, 2012; Bovo 2015, 2021; Curti 2018; Curti and Moroni 2011; Gallino 2020, 2021, 2023; McClelland 1989; Métraux 1982; Mucchi Faina 1983, 2002; Nacci 2019; Nye 1973; Palano 2002, 2022; Rouvier 1986, 2012; Rubio 2008; Thiec and Théanthon 1983; Van Ginneken 1992). Additionally, the personality of the French intellectual has been appropriately placed within the context of the Third Republic by studies that have shown his influence on the new right-wing circles of the time (Korpa 2011; Marpeau 2000; Nye 1975; Rouvier 1986, 2012; Widener 1979). In addition, contemporary social psychologists who authored the Elaborated Social Identity Model (ESIM) took up some of Le Bon’s insights on crowd behavior, first pointing out how they captured important and often underestimated aspects of the social sciences but, at the same time, showing how his explanation was based on completely incorrect assumptions (Drury 2018; Mosse 2022; Drury and Reicher 2000, 2009, 2018; Reicher 1996; Stott and Reicher 1998; Stott and Drury 2000). However, focusing on Psychologie des foules, many readers of Le Bon have seen in the multifaceted French writer only the precursor—more or less skilled and more or less creative, depending on their judgments—of the mass propaganda techniques developed in the following decades (Moscovici 1985; Thiec 1981), and, in some cases, the inspirer of twentieth-century totalitarian regimes (De Felice 1968; Doise 1986; Sternhell 1978). The success of the best-known work of the “Faust of Rue Vignon”, as Le Bon was defined by one of his admirers (Bibesco 1937), has thus at least partially prevented a recognition of the contours of a much more complex reflection. With the aim of placing Psychologie des foules within a more articulated theoretical framework, the following pages aim to offer a more precise portrait of the French thinker, focusing especially on a rereading of Lois psychologiques de l’évolution des peuples and a brief comparison with the theses supported in the more famous essay on crowds. This article aims to examine Gustave Le Bon’s thinking within the framework of a genealogy of the emergence of late-nineteenth-century collective psychology. The choice of the term “genealogy” does not refer solely to the reconstruction of the history of a concept but also draws on the investigations carried out by Michel Foucault in the 1970s (Foucault 1984). In his studies and lectures, Foucault did not focus on late-nineteenth-century collective psychology or its attempts to explain crowd violence1. However, his insights and methods are highly useful both for interpreting how crowds and their extreme psychology were represented and for identifying the strategies through which the image of the unconscious was “invented” by late-nineteenth-century scholars before Freud further redefined the concept. Moreover, following the guidelines of Foucault’s genealogical method, the aim of this article is to show how crowd psychology, in its effort to neutralize the risk of social disorder, contributed to constructing a new image of the unconscious—an image that shifted the notion of conflict from society to the individual psyche and thus encouraged the search for the enemy not only within society but, above all, within the mind of each individual.

Specifically, the considerations developed in this text seek to show how the great ambition of the Faust of Rue Vignon—that is, the intention to provide the principles of the twentieth century with tools to dominate the masses—was actually the result of a vain operation. Hiding inconsistencies under suggestive rhetoric, Le Bon juxtaposed his own vision of the psychology of peoples, centered on the idea of the “soul of the race”, with some new hypotheses drawn largely from the criminological reflection of a Lombrosian nature. Whereas, in his earlier works, he excluded the possibility of halting the degeneration process of Latin races, in Psychologie des foules, he proceeded in the opposite direction, presenting himself as a sort of “Machiavelli of the age of crowds” (Moscovici 1985).

2. The Comparative Psychology of Peoples

When Gustave Le Bon published his most famous essay on the psychology of crowds in 1895, he was already fifty-four years old and had an extensive body of work behind him2. After the war, he had definitively abandoned his medical career to focus on scientific interests, aiming to achieve academic recognition. During this period, he began planning a work that would contribute to the regeneration of France and thus address the crisis of its social structure. As he had written in the preface to La vie, published in 1872, the main cause of decline lay in the revolution of 1789 and in the success of slogans concerning liberty, fraternity, justice, and citizens’ rights. When the masses were promised education, he warned that the result would be the creation of illusions that contradicted scientific knowledge about human nature and the laws governing human instincts and passions (Le Bon 1872). In the following years, while not abandoning his publicistic activities, Le Bon dedicated himself to the development of anthropometric techniques (Le Bon 1879). Based on the measurements he conducted during this period, in 1881, he published a substantial two-volume treatise, L’homme et la société (Le Bon 1881), which was met with strong criticism (Nye 1975, p. 34). Without giving up his ambition for academic recognition, Le Bon then shifted his interests toward a somewhat different field by planning a monumental ten-volume work that aimed to outline the fundamental sequences of the process of civilization. After undertaking expeditions to the Arabic countries and India, he produced the volumes La civilisation des Arabes (Le Bon 1883b) and La civilisation de l’Inde (Le Bon 1883a), as well as two volumes of photographic material titled Les levers photographiques et la photographie en voyage (Le Bon 1888–1889). However, these works were also poorly received by scholars; in particular, Ernst Renan dealt a fatal blow to Le Bon’s academic aspirations (Nye 1975, p. 48). Having abandoned hope of scientific glory, the essayist then turned exclusively to a public readership for the recognition that official science had once again denied him, embarking on the popularization of racial psychology, elements of which he had outlined in L’homme et les sociétés.

In addition to a series of polemical articles on current issues (Le Bon 1886a, 1886b, 1887), the main products of his return to popularization were, initially, Les premières civilisations (Le Bon 1889), a volume on ancient Eastern civilizations, and, a few years later, the book Lois psychologiques de l’évolution des peoples (Le Bon [1894] 1898)—the first episode in a successful series of pamphlets that culminated in The Psychology of Crowds. In Les premières civilisations and, especially, Les lois psychologiques, Le Bon revisited and briefly presented the results of twenty years of research, although he gave the accumulated material greater coherence and a clearer, increasingly explicit orientation toward interpreting the dynamics of late-century society. The model of scientific investigation that emerged from Premières civilisations was explicitly designed on the model of the biological and natural sciences. In fact, when addressing the historical reconstruction of ancient Eastern civilizations, Le Bon sought to illustrate the evolutionary laws that had determined their birth, development, and, ultimately, decline. It was from advances in the natural sciences that the idea arose that social aggregates were also subject to constant laws, along with the intuition that in order to understand the present of a society it was necessary to look into its past; just as there was animal embryology, so history should become a true “social embryology”, capable of finding in ancestral forms the origins of contemporary ideas, institutions, and beliefs. In other words, according to this perspective, both living beings and societies modified themselves only very slowly; thus, before reaching higher forms, societies, too, had to go through a series of intermediate evolutionary stages.

By applying the principle of the general law of evolution, Le Bon believed it was possible to understand the causes of the birth and development of civilizations and that “social embryology” should reveal the stages of evolution traversed by different human societies and the results achieved at each stage. “The method that the modern scientist applies today to history”, he wrote, “is identical to the method that the naturalist applies in his laboratory”; therefore, each society could be considered “an organism in development” (Le Bon 1889, p. 15). More than to the theory of Darwin, Le Bon’s “social embryology” seemed to look to that of Ernst Haeckel, according to which the human fetus, from conception to birth, faithfully retraces the evolutionary stages previously undergone by the species. In the early months of gestation, the human embryo thus resembles, first, that of fish, then amphibians, and later mammals (initially inferior and later superior). Le Bon extended this hypothesis from fetal development to intellectual evolution: “After birth”, he wrote, “most organs have reached their final form, but the brain, the intellect, continues to evolve” (Le Bon 1889, p. 27). Therefore, in the different stages of growth, the individual is destined to retrace the stages of the intellectual evolution of the species, reaching more or less advanced levels depending on the evolutionary stage of their “race” (Le Bon 1889, pp. 26–27).

The extension of Haeckel’s embryological scheme was particularly useful to Le Bon because of the strong psychological emphasis he placed on his theory. In his reconstruction of the origins of civilizations, the multifaceted French intellectual considered the environmental and climatic factors that had led to the differentiation of the physical characteristics of different races, but did not attribute to these elements particularly significant explanatory value. Certainly, he pointed out that thermal conditions and humidity had a notable influence on determining the character of a people, favoring, for example, an inclination to work or, conversely, laziness, but these were still factors that clashed with the actions of other elements. The influence of the environment was, in fact, very slow, and once physical traits were established through heredity, they did not change, even if exposed to prolonged contact with new climatic conditions. Crossbreeding between different races, moreover, made the influence of the environment much more uncertain and difficult to identify in historical analysis. For these reasons, Le Bon deemed the classification of races based solely on anatomical traits unreliable: “The color of the skin or hair, the shape or volume of the skull”, he wrote, “only provide very coarse divisions” (Le Bon 1889, p. 135). Returning to this issue in Lois psychologiques, he argued that anatomical distinctions could only highlight the distinctive features of different “species” of humans, but not those existing among “races” belonging to the same “species” (Le Bon [1894] 1898, pp. 4–5). The only tool capable of rigorously establishing the distinction between anatomically similar races was, therefore, provided by comparative psychology, and it was precisely in this light that the extension of Haeckel’s embryological hypothesis proved particularly effective. By applying Haeckel’s idea to intellectual evolution, Le Bon could, for example, consider the elementary sounds uttered (still indistinctly) by infants as a reliable reproduction of the language of primitive humans, or infantile fears as testimonies of the ancestral fear at the origins of the most basic religious beliefs. However, the embryological hypothesis allowed Le Bon, above all, to connect his psychological notions to the study of human evolution, linking the individual plane to the more general one of the species and race and even partially abandoning the rigid phrenological framework of his early work.

Le Bon’s theoretical attempt was based on an image of the human mind that drew on elements from various reflections. While this image had already been largely defined in major works on the history of civilization, it was fully exposed primarily in The Psychology of Peoples. Here, Le Bon wrote that each race possessed “a mental constitution as unvarying as its anatomical constitution” (Le Bon [1894] 1898, pp. 5–6), and that each individual, in their way of thinking and in their most deeply rooted beliefs, could never fully free themself from this heavy inheritance. “The moral and intellectual traits whose association forms the soul of a people”, he wrote in clarification of his definition of “mental constitution”, “represent the synthesis of its past, the heritage of its ancestors, the motives of its conduct” (Le Bon [1894] 1898, p. 19). Furthermore, although traits sometimes appear extremely variable even among individuals of the same race, “observation proves that the majority of the individuals of a given race always possess a certain number of common psychological characteristics, which are as stable as the anatomical characteristics that allow of the classification of species” (Le Bon [1894] 1898, p. 6). This set of traits, which Le Bon referred to interchangeably as the “national soul” or the “national character”, is passed down through generations, thus allowing for the reconstruction of the “ideal type” of each race according to a criterion analogous to that used by naturalists in the study of animal species. The identity in the mental constitution of the members of a race (or at least of the majority of them) was, for Le Bon, based on “very simple physiological reasons” (Le Bon [1894] 1898, p. 8), referring to the fact that each individual is descended from their parents, a long line of ancestors, and ultimately their race. This heavy inheritance ultimately determines much of the individual’s behavior far more significantly than climate or other environmental factors. The race, as a product of the hereditary transmission not only of anatomical traits but, most importantly, of beliefs and emotional factors (rooted, according to Le Bon, precisely in the “mental constitution”), is so relevant that it can be considered “a permanent being that is independent of time”, a result “composed of the long succession of the dead who were its ancestors, as well as of the living individuals who constitute it at a given moment” (Le Bon [1894] 1898, p. 10). Race, therefore, can be understood as a kind of organism of a very long duration whose cells, destined to die quickly and be constantly replaced, are represented by individual members.

The image of race as a living and enduring body nourished by the life of its children was neither new nor particularly original in the field of the late-nineteenth-century social sciences (Nye 1984; Pick 1989). In fact, indications in this direction from Hippolyte Taine influenced the development of the conservative and nationalist Right at the end of the century (Battini 1995; Sternhell 1978). In the same years that Le Bon elaborated on his psychology of race, Alfred Fouillée’s reflections also took a largely analogous direction, using the theory of “ideo-dynamism” to interpret the psychology of the French people and of the European people as a whole (Fouillée 1890, 1892–1893, 1898, 1903). However, after evoking the figure of a collective, superindividual organism, Le Bon—and this was the most original aspect of his psychology of peoples—used it to represent the individual psyche, or rather, to depict its basis—its deepest and most hidden layer. Revisiting a metaphor established in the history of political thought, he made it the implicit assumption of his image of the psyche:

To understand the true signification of a race, it must be considered with regard to both its past and its future. The dead, besides being infinitely more numerous than the living, are infinitely more powerful. They reign over the vast domain of the unconscious—that invisible domain that exerts its sway over all the manifestations of intelligence and character. A people is guided far more by its dead than by its living members. It is by its dead, and by its dead alone, that a race is founded.

(Le Bon [1894] 1898, pp. 10–11)

This was not simply an occasional rhetorical device but a crucial conception in Le Bon’s model, as evidenced by the fact that the unconscious (i.e., the set of factors determining individual conduct, imposing themselves on every rational component) was constantly defined as the foundation of the mental constitution deposited at the bottom of the psyche. The “community of sentiments, ideas, beliefs, and interests, created by slow, hereditary accumulations” (Le Bon [1894] 1898, p. 13), indeed, gave coherence and stability to a people’s mental constitution and thus attributed a common base to each member of a race. According to Le Bon, the “soul of the people” (or the “soul of the race”) was the product of the fusion of previous races, which could gradually achieve a certain homogeneity over time. Precisely because of such fusion, the English people had acquired the three fundamental bases of the soul of a people: “common sentiments, common interests, and common beliefs” (Le Bon [1894] 1898, p. 13). “When a nation has reached this stage”, he wrote, “there is an instinctive agreement among all its members on all great questions, and it ceases to be prey to serious dissensions” (Le Bon [1894] 1898, p. 13). Moreover, while shared ideas and beliefs had always existed, it was their degree of diffusion that varied: “Restricted at first to the family and gradually extended to the village, the city, and the province” (Le Bon [1894] 1898, pp. 13–14), the collective soul had been extended to entire countries only relatively recently. By the end of the nineteenth century, according to Le Bon, it had already become a reality largely defined.

The formation of the collective soul, and thus the consolidation of the psychological structure of a race, was naturally a very long process, and such transformations could only occur through extremely slow and seemingly imperceptible hereditary evolutions. According to Le Bon, the factors capable of influencing the mental constitution (and inducing gradual transformations at the origin of a race’s evolution) were of various kinds and included needs, vital competition, the influence of certain environments, advances in sciences and industries, education, and beliefs. However, the fundamental point he emphasized was that these factors had only an indirect influence; they did not linearly determine human behavior but rather acted on the psychological constitution, inducing slow transformations that, over centuries, could become hereditary and thus unconsciously guide individual conduct. In this sense, with a formulation seemingly contradictory to his positivist framework, he emphatically wrote in Les premières civilisations: “It is, after all, ideas that guide the world. They first arise in vague forms and hover in the air, slowly changing in appearance, until one day they suddenly appear in the form of a great man or a great deed” (Le Bon 1889, p. 188). However, this was not a concession to the old idealistic tradition or, even less, to the Enlightenment’s trust in reason’s capabilities, because Le Bon actually grounded his reasoning in a very specific psychic model, essentially deterministic, based on a division of the mind into two areas: one “stable” and unconscious and the other “mobile” and conscious:

Ideas can have no real action on the soul of peoples until, as the consequence of a very slow elaboration, they have descended from the mobile regions of thought to that stable and unconscious region of the sentiments in which the motives of our actions are elaborated. They then become elements of character and may influence conduct. Character is formed as part of a stratification of unconscious ideas. When ideas have undergone this slow elaboration, their power is considerable because reason ceases to have any hold on them.

(Le Bon [1894] 1898, p. 169)

In every people, according to Le Bon, the number of fundamental ideas “stratified” in the character of the race is always quite small. “The study of the various civilizations that have succeeded one another since the origin of the world”, he wrote, “proves that they have always been guided in their development by a very small number of fundamental ideas” (Le Bon [1894] 1898, p. 168). Thus, beneath the surface of apparently conflicting formulas, one can often trace the same underlying ideas that are destined to constantly return to the life of a people, imposing the “unconscious” dominion of their heritage. While Le Bon built much of his historical and anthropological work on this hypothesis, it is particularly interesting to see how he reconstructed a dynamic through which fundamental ideas formed and consolidated in the mental constitution. In fact, in his explanatory framework, Le Bon, revisiting some hypotheses already formulated in his earlier works, drew on themes from the debate on hypnosis and hallucinations. Most notably, he traced the dynamics of the formation of “beliefs” to the phenomenon of suggestion.

3. The Contagion of Ideas

According to the hypothesis put forward by Le Bon in Les Lois psychologiques, an idea, regardless of its content, is always formed according to an identical mechanism. Initially developed by an individual or a very small group, it then has to be adopted “by a small number of apostles, the intensity of whose faith and the authority of whose names give great prestige” (Le Bon [1894] 1898, p. 172). These apostles then propagate the idea through a proselytism based primarily on suggestion and almost never on demonstration. The reference to “suggestion”, although only fleeting at this stage, is far from irrelevant. In fact, Le Bon argued that this specific mode of propaganda—on which he would build the theoretical edifice of Psychologie des foules a year later—held the secret to the success of any persuasive action. “The masses never let themselves be persuaded by demonstrations”, he wrote, “but merely by affirmations, and the authority of these affirmations depends solely on the prestige exerted by the person who enunciates them” (Le Bon [1894] 1898, p. 173).

However, the persuasion exercised by the apostles was only the first step in a much longer process. Once the new idea, after forming a small circle of adepts, began to enter a broader field of discussion, it was destined to encounter strong opposition and face widespread disapproval. This initial resistance was followed, albeit gradually, by an increasingly broad acceptance, first among the youth and then within ever larger segments of the ruling classes. The transmission of this idea did not occur through rational debate and deliberate adherence to new ideas but rather through a predominantly emotional “contagion”, which Le Bon considered an intrinsic and inescapable instinct of the human species. As he wrote, after the initial difficulties, new ideas began to spread “through the simple effect of imitation via contagion” (a faculty that humans “were generally endowed with as abundantly as anthropoid apes”), and only at this stage did they begin to consolidate in public opinion and imperceptibly penetrate the psychic structure:

As soon as the mechanism of contagion intervenes, the idea enters a phase that necessarily means success. It is soon accepted by opinion. It then acquires a penetrating and subtle force that spreads it progressively among all intellects, simultaneously creating a sort of special atmosphere, a general manner of thinking. Like the fine dust of the highway that penetrates everywhere, it finds its way into all the conceptions and productions of an epoch. The idea and its consequences then form part of the compact stock of hereditary commonplaces imposed on us by education. The idea has triumphed and entered the domain of sentiment, where for long it will have nothing to fear.

(Le Bon [1894] 1898, pp. 174–75)

In this way, Le Bon’s image of the psyche began to take clear shape: the division between an “unconscious” part of beliefs, sentiments, and fundamental ideas rooted in the hereditary patrimony of the race was increasingly contrasted with the “conscious” and rational part. Even the potential contradiction of attributing the assimilation of new ideas to sentiment (and thus to the very soul of the race) and emotional contagion could be resolved through the hypothesis of a primordial instinct for imitation. Not all ideas that guide civilization are destined for the same fate, and only some can penetrate the depths of the psyche. In this sense, after making a basic division of the psyche into two levels, Le Bon argued that different layers could also exist within the unconscious part. According to a widespread conception, the deepest layer of the psyche coincides with the deepest layer of society—with the “crowd”—in an overlap so evident that it is, in many ways, paradigmatic of the entire reflection on collective psychology. “Of the various ideas which guide a civilization”, Le Bon wrote, those “relating to the arts or philosophy, for example, rest confined to the upper grades of the nation”, while others—particularly “those relating to religious conceptions and politics”—“go deep down in some instances among the crowd” (Le Bon [1894] 1898, p. 175). It is precisely at this level that, by shaping “primitive souls”, they can take on a decisive and revolutionary historical function: “They arrive there in general much deformed, but when they arrive there, the power they exert over primitive minds incapable of reasoning is immense” because an “idea under these conditions represents something that is invincible, and its efforts are propagated with the violence of a torrent that has overflown its banks” (Le Bon [1894] 1898, p. 175).

According to Le Bon, the lower strata of society—the “crowds” of illiterate and uneducated individuals—are the privileged custodians of the “soul” of each people—that extremely small number of fundamental ideas that constitute the strength of an entire “race”. In the journey an idea takes “from the intellectual heights” where it was born, descending “from grade to grade, undergoing on the way incessant alterations and modifications”; it eventually assumes a form accessible to the popular soul” and condenses into “a very few words—sometimes into a single word, but one that evokes powerful images, either seductive or terrible, but always impressive” (Le Bon [1894] 1898, p. 179). Once it has penetrated the “soul of the crowds”—a term in Lois psychologiques essentially equivalent to “collective soul”, “soul of the people”, or “soul of the race”—the idea becomes a “dogma”, an indisputable truth capable of underpinning the lives of a people and guiding the process of their civilization. Inevitably, even a new idea, having penetrated deeply into the mental constitution, will eventually degenerate, following the same cycle as the beliefs that preceded it. However, its erosion will take a long time and require a succession of several generations. Before disappearing completely, it will linger on as “prejudice” or superstition among the lowest strata of the race.

The condition that makes the formation of a homogeneous mental constitution possible, according to Le Bon, is the limited capacity for critical reasoning and the instinctual tendency of human beings to passively absorb inherited beliefs. It is precisely the spirit of imitation—a “faculty very commonly possessed”—that ensures “heredity, education, surroundings, contagion, and opinion; the men of each age” share “a sum of average conceptions” (Le Bon [1894] 1898, p. 182), which makes them substantially similar to one another and endows them with the same ways of thinking and feeling. These deeply rooted and consolidated beliefs and sentiments make it possible to reconstruct the “ideal type” of each race based solely on psychological foundations.

Building on these theoretical assumptions, Le Bon outlined a classification of races based on their different degrees of psychological evolution. At the lowest level, he included the “primitive races”, which “remained in that state bordering on animality, which was traversed by our ancestors in the age of stone instruments”, while at the second level, he placed the “inferior races”, who possessed “barbarian forms of civilization” (Le Bon [1894] 1898, p. 27). The third tier was occupied by “average races”, such as the Chinese, Mongols, and Semitic peoples, while at the top of the hierarchy were the “superior races”, identified exclusively as peoples of Indo-European origin—the only ones “capable of great inventions in the arts, the sciences, and industry” (Le Bon [1894] 1898, p. 28). According to Le Bon, what distinguishes the level of civilization of a race is its ability to dominate instinct, thereby sacrificing immediate needs in favor of long-term interests: “When man is capable of weighing his future against his immediate interest, of giving himself a goal and pursuing it with perseverance, he has realized considerable progress” (Le Bon [1894] 1898, p. 30). Emphasizing the decisive opposition between “civilization” and “instinct”, Le Bon—following almost inevitable implications—identified the defining trait of a people’s psychological superiority in its capacity for discipline. “It is only in proportion because they are able to dominate their instincts—in proportion, that is, as they acquire willpower and, in consequence, an empire over themselves”, he wrote, “that peoples can understand the importance of discipline, the necessity of sacrificing themselves to an ideal and of raising themselves to a civilized state” (Le Bon [1894] 1898, p. 30).

In his analysis of the mental constitution of races, Le Bon thus made a clear distinction between “character” and “intelligence”: while “superior” races are distinguished by the development of both components, it is “character” that plays by far the most crucial role. Defined as a complex psychological substratum formed by the combination of “sentiments”, character essentially coincides with the “unconscious” part of the psyche—an ensemble of beliefs and ideas inherited from the evolutionary history of the race that imposes itself upon individuals. Among the elements of character, Le Bon emphasized perseverance, energy, self-control, and even morality, which, significantly, he defined as “hereditary respect for the rules on which the existence of a society is based” (Le Bon [1894] 1898, p. 31). Equally important in this regard is the fact that Le Bon considered morality itself a product of heredity and, therefore, a factor that had become “unconscious” (Le Bon [1894] 1898, p. 32).

The marked distinction between character and intelligence is far from marginal in Le Bon’s theoretical framework. The idea that character was a complex of sentiments and beliefs layered within the collective soul allowed him to explain—through emotional factors and, in particular, the key notion of the “unconscious”—the political strength of certain peoples without attributing to them particularly advanced intellectual faculties. Implicit in Le Bon’s racial psychology was evidently an attempt to account for France’s decline, as evidenced by the military collapse at Sedan, without having to acknowledge any intellectual superiority in the German adversary. His admiration for Germany, which clearly emerged on the pages of his essays, was directed exclusively at the “German character”—the inner discipline of this “race”—though he constantly emphasized its relative youth and, consequently, its fundamentally “barbaric” nature.

In the theory constructed by Le Bon, however, there was at least one other aspect that could not be overlooked. Having anchored the strength of civilization to the character of race—thus to an element deeply ingrained in every people—it was evident that even the “crowds”, despite their lack of intellectual capacity, were capable of sustaining the harsh struggle of evolution. Although the author of Psychologie des foules did not conceal his unwavering belief in the superiority (even biological) of extremely narrow elites, his psychology of race celebrated the profound foundation—both psychological and social—of every people. For ideas to leave their mark on history, they have to descend from the highest peaks of society through every level of the social pyramid and gradually penetrate its deepest layers. Only then, when beliefs take root within the masses, will those great events that revolutionize history and that only crowds can accomplish come to pass.

At least until 1894, the terms “crowd”, “race”, and “people” were used interchangeably by Le Bon. The crowds, in accordance with widespread nineteenth-century usage, identified the lower social classes and were therefore considered the repositories of the soul of the race (Barrows 1981; Palano 2004, 2010, 2020). However, starting the following year, “crowds” would take on a new and radically different connotation: from privileged guardians of the unconscious of the people, they would become the unequivocal expression of its tragic dissolution. As seen in the prediction of imminent decline outlined in Lois psychologiques, “modern man” and “crowds” were linked by a common cause of instability. Once the balance of mental constitution—meaning the foundation of character and inner discipline—was dissolved, the old beliefs could no longer serve as guiding principles. Both the individual, in his personal life, and the crowds, in their political behavior, wandered aimlessly and without direction. As selfishness grew, consciences capitulated, and the overall level of morality declined. Man lost “all control over himself”, and his inevitable fate, as with anyone incapable of self-mastery, was “before long to be governed by others” (Le Bon [1894] 1898, p. 222). Such a diagnosis, however, did not lead to the identification of tools capable of averting a fate that Le Bon saw as irreversible in many respects. European civilizations were in a phase of anarchy that could only be overcome if new beliefs, capable of replacing discredited ones, took root deep within the mental constitution. Le Bon already clearly foresaw what the new faith that would bring an end to the era of mental anarchy would be. Like many of his contemporaries, he believed that the rise of socialism was destined to result in a fatal victory. However, the sunset of the late century that Zola had prophesied in Germinal took on, for the author of Psychologie des foules, even darker tones.

The primary target of the comparative psychology of peoples that Le Bon sought to outline was precisely “the idea of the equality of individuals and races” (Le Bon [1894] 1898, p. xiv)—an idea developed in the eighteenth century by Enlightenment intellectuals, deeply absorbed by the popular strata, and celebrated by socialist doctrine. According to Le Bon, “modern psychology” scientifically demonstrated the fallacy of this notion, revealing that “the mental gulf created by the past between individuals and races can only be filled up by the slowly accumulating action of heredity” (Le Bon [1894] 1898, p. xv). On the basis of these refutations, the French writer sought to warn against the disastrous consequences that could result from the application of egalitarianism. At the turn of the century, his attack thus targeted positions advocating for equal rights and education for women, as well as colonial policies that ignored the fact that the mental constitution of so-called “inferior” races could not be altered by education.

However, Le Bon reserved his harshest criticism for socialism, which he called “the gravest of the dangers that threaten the European peoples” (Le Bon [1894] 1898, p. 225). According to the French intellectual, socialism was bound to bring back old Caesarism, for, in an era marked by decadence and the inability for self-governance, each individual would relinquish their freedom in exchange for an authoritarian direction of social life. Yet socialism was, above all, a new faith, in many ways analogous to old religious beliefs. For this reason, it could be embraced by vast masses of individuals. Thus, even though socialism was destined to “mark the end of Western civilization”, it would still win over “the suffering masses” (Le Bon [1894] 1898, p. 225), ushering in a new era.

Le Bon’s pessimism, at least as it emerged in Lois psychologiques in 1894, had no illusions about the possibility of countering the advance of the new creed. No scientific demonstration or refutation of socialist and egalitarian ideas could even begin to shake the solidity of this new faith. Although this conviction was somewhat contradictory to his earlier explanation of why old beliefs had collapsed, Le Bon’s psychology of peoples in its entirety seemed to point in this direction: a people’s strength does not lie in its intelligence but solely in its “character”, and thus in the beliefs forming the foundation of its mental constitution. Hoping to challenge faith with reason is simply utopian. Summarizing the main implication of his theory, he wrote, “[in] the matter of his beliefs, man only hearkens to the unconscious voice of his sentiments, … an obscure domain from which reason has always been excluded” (Le Bon [1894] 1898, p. 227). Faced with the power of this impenetrable unconscious force deeply embedded in the psyche, the man of science could only respond with resignation.

4. The People and the Crowd

The success of Lois psychologiques confirmed to Le Bon the existence of a readership interested in collective psychology and prompted him to continue along this path. The first French edition of the volume already announced a new work—a sort of continuation of the essay on the psychology of peoples—titled Luttes sociales et guerrières des peuples. In Richet’s Revue scientifique, Le Bon had already published some texts in which, foreshadowing fragments of Lois psychologiques, he hinted at the role of wars in shaping the character of peoples and the essentially equivalent function played by economic conflicts in modern civilizations. Excluded from the 1894 essay, these hypotheses would later be incorporated into Psychologie du socialisme (Le Bon [1898] 1899). However, instead of the announced volume on social struggles and wars among peoples, in 1895, Le Bon published Psychologie des foules (preceded by two articles in Revue scientifique) (Van Ginneken 1992, p. 172). Once again, Le Bon claimed to provide merely a succinct synthesis of his previous research findings. In reality, he made far from marginal modifications to the theoretical framework he had developed up to that point.

In earlier writings, he briefly referenced the dynamics of collective behavior, but these were fleeting mentions. In one passage of Lois psychologiques, for example, while discussing the elements of mental constitution and distinguishing between “accessory” (linked to environment and circumstance) and “fundamental” (a stable heritage of race) traits, he considered the case of personality splitting—an instance in which, under extraordinary historical circumstances, individuals exposed to environmental influences could display a “new and more or less ephemeral personality” (Le Bon [1894] 1898, p. 19) as distinct from their usual one. This phenomenon, he argued, confirmed the stability of a people’s irreducible character; even in exceptional circumstances, beneath the surface of extraordinary and unfamiliar personalities, “the fundamental characteristics of the race” could still be found. Thus, behind the great upheavals of the revolution, one could glimpse the shadow of a “centralized, dictatorial, and despotic regime” (Le Bon [1894] 1898, p. 21), not so different from the old absolutist monarchy.

However, from the very first pages of Psychologie des foules, Le Bon introduced a different psychological dynamic. Here, he described the crowd in psychological terms, emphasizing the mutual excitation among individuals and the emergence of a new “personality” distinct from their conscious personality. Unlike what Gabriel Tarde (1893) and Scipio Sighele (1891) had argued, Le Bon did not represent crowds as necessarily criminal but recognized that they could also have ‘heroic’ behavior. In addition, he provided a very broad definition of the crowd and did not consider physical contiguity an essential element. A “psychological crowd” could be formed even if individuals were simply united by a common sentiment, since the true distinguishing factor consisted of the “disappearance of conscious personality” and “the turning of feelings and thoughts in a definite direction” (Le Bon [1895] 1896, pp. 2–3). In all these cases, according to Le Bon, it was not the unconscious foundation of a people’s mental constitution that determined individual behavior but something different (which remained rather undefined and implicit in his discourse). As he wrote, “It is only in this advanced phase of organization that certain new and special characteristics are superposed on the unvarying and dominant character of the race” and “then takes place that turning already alluded to of all the feelings and thoughts of the collectivity in an identical direction” (Le Bon [1895] 1896, p. 5). As a result of what he defined the “psychological law of the mental unity of crowds”, a “collective mind” emerged that did not coincide with the soul of the race and yet was irreducible to the sum of individual members:

Whoever be the individuals that compose it, however like or unlike be their mode of life, their occupations, their character, or their intelligence, the fact that they have been transformed into a crowd puts them in possession of a sort of collective mind that makes them feel, think, and act in a manner quite different from that in which each individual of them would feel, think, and act were he in a state of isolation. There are certain ideas and feelings that do not come into being or do not transform themselves into acts, except in the case of individuals forming a crowd. The psychological crowd is a provisional being formed of heterogeneous elements, which for a moment are combined, exactly as the cells that constitute a living body form through their reunion a new being who displays characteristics very different from those possessed by each of the cells singly.

(Le Bon [1895] 1896, pp. 6–7)

With the idea of the “collective mind”, Le Bon introduced a new element into his theoretical framework, evidently borrowed from Sighele’s La folla delinquente [The Criminal Crowd], which had been published in Italy a few years earlier (Sighele 1891) and had immediately been translated into French (Sighele 1892). Sighele’s book also relied on hypotheses already formulated by other scholars. The idea that crowd psychology was different from that of more stable social groups had been proposed a few years earlier by Italian criminologist Enrico Ferri (1881), while Giuseppe Sergi (1888–1889) had formulated a hypothesis on the outbreak of “epidemic psychosis”. In Italy, the topic of collective crimes and epidemic psychosis, which also influenced the genesis of Vilfredo Pareto’s theory of elites (Damele 2022), had also been addressed on several occasions by criminologists and writers linked more or less directly to Cesare Lombroso such as the young Guglielmo Ferrero, the journalist Augusto Guido Bianchi and sociologist Pasquale Rossi, who devoted several books to collective psychology (Palano 2002, 2014). In France, Gabriel Tarde (1890a, 1890b) had already studied the mechanism of imitation. Most importantly, the image of a stratification of psychological character had been outlined by the Italian scholar Giuseppe Sergi (1882–1883). However, Le Bon took from his Italian colleague a critique of Herbert Spencer’s sociology and the image of the chemical combination of gases, which was placed right at the beginning of La folla delinquente. After the publication of Psychologie des Foules, Ferri opened a controversy, claiming that Le Bon’s ideas had actually been expounded by Sighele a few years earlier, but the French scholar, in addition to not acknowledging this debt, had also failed to mention previous studies on criminal crowds. Le Bon rejected these accusations and argued that his book on crowds developed the hypotheses he had already formulated since the 1980s. In fact, as has been pointed out by several scholars, Le Bon could not have failed to read Sighele’s book, as well as Gabriel Tarde’s articles on the crimes of crowds and the studies on collective crimes published in earlier years especially by criminologists of the Cesare Lombroso school (Van Ginneken 1992; Palano 2002). However, the key point of his reasoning—where Le Bon diverged from Sighele—was related to the reasons why the personality of an individual changed in crowd situations. The difference from Sighele did not lie so much in the fact that the French author evoked unconscious mechanisms but in how he defined the unconscious itself. On this point, summarizing a fundamental “truth established by modern psychology”, Le Bon wrote:

To obtain at any rate a glimpse of them, it is necessary in the first place to call to mind the truth established by modern psychology that unconscious phenomena play an altogether preponderating part not only in organic life but also in the operations of intelligence. The conscious life of the mind is of small importance compared with its unconscious life. The most subtle analyst, the most acute observer, is scarcely successful in discovering more than a very small number of the unconscious motives that determine his conduct. Our conscious acts are the outcome of an unconscious substratum created in the mind in the main by hereditary influences. This substratum consists of the innumerable common characteristics handed down from generation to generation that constitute the genius of a race. Behind the avowed causes of our acts, there undoubtedly lie secret causes that we do not avow, but behind these secret causes there are many others more secret still, which we ourselves ignore. The greater part of our daily actions are the result of hidden motives that escape our observation.

(Le Bon [1895] 1896, p. 7)

Although Le Bon seemed to adhere to the definition of the unconscious he had previously used, the new image of the psyche that he sketched deviated from it in certain aspects. He maintained a fundamental division between the unconscious basis of the psyche and the conscious surface of personality; however, in this case, it was no longer just the “character” of the race that marked the unconscious foundation of each individual’s mental constitution, as “instincts” also came into play (though their nature was not clearly defined). Indeed, without warning his readers of the shift, when describing the characteristics of the unconscious component of the psyche, he explicitly referred to the instinctual dimension: “All members of a race resemble each other in the unconscious elements that constitute the soul of the race itself”. “It is more especially with respect to those unconscious elements that constitute the genius of a race that all the individuals belonging to it resemble each other”, he added, “while it is principally in respect to the conscious elements of their characters—the fruit of education and yet more exceptional hereditary conditions—that they differ from each other” (Le Bon [1895] 1896, p. 8). While passions and feelings constituted, for Le Bon, the foundation of the mental constitution of a race, he had not considered “instincts” as such, since the formation of “character” had enabled their control. This was largely an implicit innovation, and Le Bon never clearly illustrated its role. According to his earlier explanatory framework, there could be no difference between the occasional behavior of a crowd and that of a people under normal conditions; at least, such a difference could not be explained by unconscious impulses, as the latter coincided precisely with the stable and consolidated mental constitution of the race. However, in Psychologie des foules, when explaining the escape from the “normal self” by evoking the role of the unconscious, he was forced to “split” the image of the unconscious, which implies that beneath the soul of the race, there exists another psychic layer, distinct and irreducible to the mental constitution of the people.

For this reason, like many of his contemporary collective psychologists, Le Bon resolved the issue by identifying, deep within the psychological stratifications produced by civilization, an instinctual base that harked back to the ancestral past of the species. As he would later write in The Psychology of Socialism (though not without ambiguity), concerning the violent and sometimes ferocious behavior of crowds, in his view, the explanation had to be sought in an even deeper psychological layer than the unconscious one consolidated by the race—namely, in the irreducible foundation of instincts. “The agitations of the crowd”, he wrote, “have their being above immutable depths that the movements of the surface do not reach”, and this “depth consists of those hereditary instincts whose sum is the soul of a nation”—a “substratum” that is as “solid in proportion as the race is ancient, and in consequence possesses a greater fixity” (Le Bon [1898] 1899, p. 103). In other words, the crowd always returns to these hereditary instincts (Le Bon [1898] 1899, p. 103).

In some passages of his previous works, Le Bon hinted at the role of instincts. In a more extensive manner, he addressed the theme of instinct in the first volume of L’homme et les sociétés (Le Bon 1881). Later, in Les premières civilisations, he mentioned “the feelings of natural ferocity that always slumber deep in the human heart, ready to be rekindled at the slightest opportunity” (Le Bon 1889, p. 178). Even in Lois psychologiques, he mentioned the instincts of ferocity, but only to assert that they had nothing to do with the soul and the “character” of the race (Le Bon [1894] 1898, pp. 29–30). This was an innate and irreducible tendency linked to the “struggle for existence” and the mechanism of species selection. However, the evolution of the superior races toward civilization entailed increasing control over instincts, and morality gradually imposed a distancing from this original ferocity. The most significant aspect was that Le Bon described morality not as a mere cultural element but as the necessary product of evolution; a sentiment so deeply rooted in the mental constitution of a people that it almost assumed the strength of an instinct. However, since the evolutionary process had not yet achieved the full “naturalization” of morality and absolute mastery over primordial instincts, these occasionally resurfaced “under the glossy veneer of modern civilizations”, becoming visible, for example, in the innate ferocity of “children” or in revolutionary uprisings. In these early works, primordial ferocity was not an element of the “character” or soul of the race but rather a remnant of animality that the process of civilization—and thus the mental constitution of the race, consolidated over centuries through heredity—had progressively, though not completely, subdued. In short, “instincts” were not part of the unconscious psychological heritage of the race but were “slumbered” beneath it in the deepest recesses of the mind.

Although, in Psychologie des foules, Le Bon did not provide a precise definition of instincts, he revisited these notions. However, by incorporating instinctual components into the “unconscious” part of the psyche (albeit in an ambiguous manner), he was forced to implicitly revise his theoretical framework. While he merely evoked the instinct of survival, the instincts of primitive ferocity, the instinct of imitation, and the herd instinct that led to submission to a leader, paradoxically (but this was just one of the many inconsistencies in his discourse), he wrote that in the excitement of the crowd—where the primordial and “atavistic” instincts of the species should have emerged—self-interest vanished in favor of the collective interest. “The very instinct of self-preservation”, he wrote, “is entirely obliterated in them, so much so that often the only recompense they solicit is that of martyrdom” (Le Bon [1895] 1896, p. 119).

The role assigned to “instincts” was, however, only one of the many implications of the innovations introduced by Le Bon in his pamphlet. His goal with Psycologie des foules was different from that of his previous writings. Beyond the apparent continuity in the use of the term “crowd”, the focus of his attention in this new volume was no longer that of his anthropological essays. In his studies on civilization, he equated the “crowd” with the “people”, implicitly praising its moral strength and “character” (albeit based on “irrational” and emotional elements). However, now his discourse took a radical turn; the crowds whose emergence he greeted—not without evident apprehension—were the working masses, the “new Barbarians” who, he feared, would destroy Western civilization and plunge Europe into a dark decline. Until then, he had considered the unconscious as the foundation of a people’s “character” and civilization, deposited in the depths of the “crowds”. But now, he argued that the “crowds” were nothing more than the result of the disintegration and decadence of a race. Thus, whereas “race” and “crowd” had been equivalent terms until 1894, in Psychologie des foules they became the antithetical poles of every civilization’s history.

Despite Le Bon’s attempt to obscure the replacement of his old theoretical tools through a sort of sleight of hand, the reason for this substantial innovation is quite evident. As early as 1894, he evoked a bleak vision of the rise of socialist hordes and, with a complacent pessimism, argued that this was an inevitable fate. In his 1894 essay, he wrote that old religious faiths would inevitably be replaced by new socialist beliefs, and that neither intellectuals nor rational criticism of ideologies could alter the course of history:

It is not given, however, for men to stop the march of ideas when they have penetrated the soul of the masses. When they have done this, their evolution must be accomplished, and it often happens that they are defended by those who will be their first victims. It is not merely sheep that docilely follow their guide to the slaughterhouse. We must bow before the strength of an idea. When it has attained a certain period of its evolution, there are no longer either arguments or demonstrations that can avail against it. For peoples to free themselves from the yoke of an idea, either centuries or violent revolutions are necessary—sometimes the two. Innumerable are the chimeras humanity has forged for itself and of which, in succession, it has been the victim.

(Le Bon [1894] 1898, pp. 188–89)

A year later, he confirmed this pessimistic outlook, reiterating that crowds could only play a destructive role. However, he left some room for the possibility that the power of the “unconscious and brutal crowds” might not be left unchecked:

Until now, these thoroughgoing destructions of a worn-out civilization have constituted the most obvious task of the masses. It is not indeed today merely that this can be traced. History tells us that from the moment when the moral forces on which a civilization rested have lost their strength; its final dissolution is brought about by those unconscious and brutal crowds known, justifiably enough, as barbarians. Civilizations, as yet, have been created and directed only by a small intellectual aristocracy, never by crowds. Crowds are only powerful for destruction. Their rule is always tantamount to a barbarian phase. A civilization involves fixed rules, discipline, a passing from the instinctive to the rational state, forethought for the future, and an elevated degree of culture—all of which are conditions that crowds, left to themselves, have invariably shown themselves incapable of realizing. As a consequence of the purely destructive nature of their power, crowds act like microbes that hasten the dissolution of enfeebled or dead bodies.

(Le Bon [1895] 1896, p. xix)

Although he continued to believe that the historical function of crowds consisted of the “final dissolution” of societies, Le Bon argued that there was a way to halt the decline and limit the destructive power of the multitudes. Thus, although one had to resign oneself to the role of the masses in politics, the knowledge of crowd psychology could provide statesmen with the necessary tools “not to be too much governed by them” (Le Bon [1895] 1896, p. xxi). “It is only by obtaining some sort of insight into the psychology of crowds”, he affirmed, “that it can be understood how slight is the action upon those of laws and institutions; how powerless they are to hold any opinions other than those which are imposed upon them on them and what seduces them” (Le Bon [1895] 1896, pp. xxi–xxii). Le Bon’s objective was thus to equip political elites with the tools needed to curb socialist advances. To achieve this goal, he had to dismantle his own theoretical edifice. First, he needed to conceptually establish the opposition between the people and the crowd, which he had previously represented as fundamentally identical. Second, he had to demonstrate that there was a way to guide the masses, despite having previously excluded any possibility of doing so. In response to this new task, Le Bon retained the old idea of the “soul of the race” as the safeguard of civilization, but alongside it, he introduced the “soul of the crowds” (âme des foules), conceived of as a temporary pathological degeneration.

By portraying socialist crowds as the outcome of a dissolution without prospects, Le Bon aimed to demonstrate the absurdity of democratic ideas while simultaneously arguing that, despite their widespread diffusion, these ideas were contrary both to reason and to the unconscious of the race. In this way, he achieved the effect of disqualifying crowds by denying them any rationality. However, he had yet to attain the objective of his pamphlet since he had failed to show how the dissolution of the race and the seemingly irreversible transformation of the people into a crowd could be halted. To achieve this, it was not sufficient to modify the image of the unconscious; it was also necessary to introduce an additional innovation into the framework—one that would theoretically establish the possibility of effectively and rapidly acting on the psyche of the crowd.

Although Le Bon’s suggestions were supported by commonplace and well-established imagery, rhetorical devices alone did not allow him to fully unravel the complexity of the issue. Indeed, whereas he argued that assertion and repetition were the most effective means of implanting a specific belief into the unconscious, he had previously maintained that leaders merely needed to overlay new notions onto deeply rooted images in the collective unconscious without expecting to alter the latter. Furthermore, in his anthropological works, he strongly asserted that beliefs could only penetrate the unconscious of a race over centuries through hereditary transmission that deposited certain elements into the “character” of a people (Le Bon 1889). In this regard, in Loys psychologique, for example, he described the unconscious basis of a race’s mental constitution as “the firm rock which the waters must wash day by day for centuries before they can even wear away its external asperities” and “the equivalent of the irreducible element of the species, of the fins of fish, of the beak of the bird, of the tooth of the carnivorous animal” (Le Bon [1894] 1898, p. 40). Likewise, in Psychologie des foules, he wrote that “an idea has undergone the transformations that render it accessible to crowds; it exerts influence only when, by various processes that we shall examine elsewhere, it has entered the domain of the unconscious, when indeed it has become a sentiment”, specifying that “much time is required” (Le Bon [1895] 1896, p. 52). However, without showing any signs of contradiction, in his 1895 pamphlet, he cited as examples of how ideas could effectively penetrate the unconscious newspaper advertisements and news reports. Writing that “the repeated statement is embedded in the long run in those profound regions of our unconscious selves in which the motives of our actions are forged” (Le Bon [1895] 1896, p. 127), he found no better example than advertising, in a clearly contradictory manner relative to his earlier statements on the slow penetration of ideas into the unconscious. To show that crowds could be governed, Le Bon thus introduced a further view of the unconscious: in this case, it was no longer an unconscious produced by the millennia-long evolution of civilization, but rather a result of a kind of psychological conditioning not very different from that identified by Ivan Pavlov’s later theory of conditioned reflexes and John Watson’s behaviorism. In other words, in this further view, the unconscious is in fact the set of automatic reflexes that can be shaped by educating humans (or training horses). Instead of being a reality established by history, it is the product of very rapid manipulation (Gallino 2020, 2021, 2023).

Moreover, the analogy between the meneur and the mesmerist was based on the idea that hypnosis and suggestion are very similar phenomena, but this analogy presupposed that the cerebral functions of the individual in a crowd are partially paralyzed, making them susceptible to suggestion by a subject capable of imposing images and feelings on those subdued by manipulation. However, by extending the action of suggestion to means such as the press and advertising, Le Bon was no longer referring to a true crowd but rather to a much less exceptional psychological condition, such as that of a newspaper reader or a passerby confronted with advertisements. In other words, both the psychological unity characteristic of the crowd and the temporary and exceptional suspension of intellectual functions were absent. Aware of this glaring contradiction, Sighele (1897) and Tarde (1898, 1902) generalized the mechanism of imitation by shifting their focus to the “public”, referring to it as a sort of evolutionary transformation of the “crowd”. In contrast, Le Bon did not distinguish between the two dynamics, thus presenting a theoretical framework that appeared only superficially coherent and systematic, while, in reality, the means he proposed for exercising suggestion and manipulation over the masses were entirely inconsistent with the premises of the psychology of peoples he had outlined in his earlier works.

To establish the idea that the masses could be manipulated and hypnotized, Le Bon essentially restructured his entire theoretical framework. However, inevitably, the image of the meneur that emerged from his pages could not help but be at least ambiguous and contradictory. In his earlier writings, Le Bon was far from lenient toward religious founders and political leaders. Following a widely used schema, he described them as insane, or, at the very least, as bearers of more or less severe mental pathologies. A year before Psychologie des foules, for example, he wrote that “it is only fanatics—men of narrow intelligence but energetic character and powerful passions—who are capable of founding religions and empires” (Le Bon [1894] 1898, p. 204), almost literally reiterating a passage from Les premières civilisations3. Moreover, he specifically argued that “it is the hallucinated—the creators or propagators of these mirages—who have effected the most far-reaching transformations in the world” (Le Bon [1894] 1898, p. 205). Even in Psychologie des foules, he reiterated this idea, albeit only incidentally, affirming that great men of action had always been “hypnotized” by the beliefs of which they later became apostles, and that they were therefore “especially recruited from the ranks of those morbidly nervous, excitable, half-deranged persons who are bordering on madness” (Le Bon [1895] 1896, p. 119). At the same time, he insisted on the idea that the meneur could consciously and voluntarily subjugate the crowd, bending it to his will. Thus, alongside the category of leaders with strong but fleeting willpower, capable at most of leading a coup or an insurrection, he identified a second category: “that of men of enduring strength of will who have, in spite of a less brilliant aspect, a much more considerable influence” (Le Bon [1895] 1896, p. 123). However, it was quite significant that to find an example of a meneur capable of imposing himself durably on the crowd, he cited the case of the French engineer who, despite deep-seated opposition and significant technical difficulties, managed to complete the Suez Canal project, placing Lesseps alongside St. Paul, Muhammad, and Christopher Columbus (Le Bon [1895] 1896, pp. 123–24). The figure of the meneur was thus redefined in Le Bon’s writings, no longer appearing as merely a madman but also—especially in the most significant cases—a tenacious individual with a strong and determined will. Willpower was, in fact, the key element in Le Bon’s conceptualization, as only through decisiveness and firmness could a leader impose himself on the crowds, who would otherwise be devoid of any guidance. In this sense, Le Bon evoked a genuine herd instinct that led most individuals to submit to the “magnetic” dominance of a leader. As he wrote, “Men gathered in a crowd lose all force of will and turn instinctively to the person who possesses the quality they lack” (Le Bon [1895] 1896, p. 119).

5. Conclusions

In this article, I retraced certain aspects of Gustave Le Bon’s reflections, focusing in particular on the “science of crowds” that emerged in his writings. As we have seen, Le Bon sought to examine ideologies and political symbols with the scalpel of science, searching for the unknown causes behind their success, sudden rise, persistence over centuries, and, at times, rapid decline. From the outset, this exploration was intended to find a possible barrier against a sweeping transformation process that, for Le Bon—as for many other observers—took on the contours of the decline of the French nation. If the trauma of the Commune had dramatically marked the birth of social sciences in France in the last three decades of the nineteenth century, the troubled life of the Third Republic continued to fuel debates and conflicts, even in the first fifteen years of the new century. Quickly engaging in these debates, Le Bon developed his scientific hypotheses with a keen eye on contemporary events. From his first books, he declared that his work in scientific dissemination was meant to contribute to France’s rebirth. He never abandoned this purpose, even conceiving of his anthropological research in the 1880s as a new chapter in the “scientific” struggle against the theoretical assumptions of egalitarianism. Having discovered the decisive role that “beliefs”, deposited in the unconscious of the people’s psychology, had always played in the history of civilization, in Lois psychologiques he used this idea to predict the imminent decline of French civilization, which seemed almost inevitable. However, starting with Psychologie des foules, he set aside his pessimism at least partially and brought to light the techniques that would enable the governance of crowds and consequently curb the advance of socialism and the decline of the French race. In the following years, he continued along this path, making some theoretical adjustments but never resolving the fundamental inconsistency of a framework built by assembling materials from diverse sources. For example, in Psychologie de l’éducation (Le Bon 1902), he argued that an effective educational method should instill ideas into the unconscious, making certain behaviors automatic through forms of conditioning. While he had previously maintained that modifying a people’s unconscious required centuries, he now asserted that the time needed to shape an individual’s unconscious could be significantly shorter.

Precisely because of the objectives pursued by Le Bon, his thinking can be read from the perspective outlined by Michel Foucault in several lectures he gave in France in the early 1970s. Modifying the structure of his previous research, during that period Foucault initiated a new polemocritical reflection “based on the possibility of understanding power relations in terms of force relations and the latter in terms of war” (Antoniol 2020, p. 502). Beginning with the 1971 essay Nietzsche, Genealogy, History (Foucault 1984), through the 1971–1972 and 1972–1973 lectures at the Collège de France Penal Theories and Institutions (Foucault 2019) and The Punitive Society (Foucault 2015), and reaching at least up to the 1975–1976 course Society Must Be Defended (Foucault 2003), Foucault suggested a radical rethinking of the relationship between war and politics. In particular, the French philosopher argued that power can be analyzed in terms of a relation of struggle. From this perspective, the famous Clausewitzian formula, according to which “war is merely the continuation of politics by other means”, can be radically questioned. Throughout his research, Foucault focused on the transformation of the concept of the “dangerous individual” and the role of psychiatry in establishing a boundary between the “normal” and the “pathological”. Furthermore, regarding the emergence of “biopolitics” at the end of the eighteenth century, he emphasized how the metamorphosis of racism at the end of the nineteenth century should be interpreted as the logical continuation of civil war. With this research, Foucault thus showed how the knowledge that had accompanied the construction of the state was united by one goal: to preserve the internal order by fighting a kind of silent war not against external enemies, but against “internal” enemies.

Taking up Foucault’s interpretation, in this article I have tried to show how the invention of the unconscious, to which Gustave Le Bon made an important contribution, can be interpreted as a stage in that sort of latent civil war. Le Bon and the scholars of collective psychology at the turn of the century also set out to “defend society”, as did the criminologists, criminalists, and physicians studied by Foucault. Many scholars have pointed out that investigations of crowds in the late nineteenth century almost without exception gave a negative portrayal of crowds, painting them as expressions of a “morbid”, irrational, criminal psychology (Barrows 1981; Nye 1975; Borch 2009). In this article, I have tried to show a further aspect of this thinking, which is not only about the way crowds are represented, but mainly about the fact that the goal of the “war” against the internal enemy influences the construction of the “map” of the psyche. In other words, albeit in a contradictory way, these thinkers, with the aim of neutralizing the risk of social disorder, produce a new conflict image: in light of this operation—which is conducted in an often contradictory and even clumsy way—the enemy is not simply identified inside society, but, even, inside the psyche of each individual. The line between normal and pathological therefore no longer separates only honest individuals from “dangerous” individuals, but also divides the “civilized” region of the individual psyche from the “barbaric” one, in which primal instincts are hidden. The secret to preserving social order is thus seen in the depths of the psyche. And the belief is that those who discover the “laws” of crowd psychology will succeed in mastering them.

Despite some fleeting references, Foucault did not focus on thinkers such as Le Bon or those scholars who sought to “scientifically” explain the Paris Commune uprising. In this article, I attempted to show how Le Bon’s reflections can be interpreted, through Foucault’s “polemocritical framework” (Antoniol 2023), as an episode of “the continuation of war by other means”. Indeed, Le Bon conceived of his psychology as a tool for waging an internal war. His primary goal was to counteract the “decline” of France, which, in his view, had become glaringly evident after its defeat by Prussia. More importantly, he always believed that France’s true enemies were not to be found beyond its borders but within its own society, particularly in the lower social classes. However, the most intriguing aspect of his work was his attempt to locate the deepest roots of this conflict in the psychological dynamics of each individual. According to his theory, the secret to political order and the success of a civilization lies within individual psyches. He sought to become a sort of Machiavelli of the age of crowds, demonstrating how crowds could be controlled by acting upon their “unconscious”. However, this political objective influenced Le Bon’s theory and his psychology of crowds. To make his political prescriptions appear credible to the elites of the Third Republic, he had to modify his theoretical structure on key points. He managed to conceal the inconsistencies under the veil of effective rhetoric but, in retrospect, it is easy to recognize that his theory employs three different notions of the unconscious to explain the behavior of crowds, peoples, and “races”.

The main problematic node lies precisely in the idea of the “unconscious” that was at the heart of his reflection. Indeed, while in his works it was possible to find vague and indeterminate definitions of the crowd and emotional contagion, something similar occurred, especially with the key notion of his explanatory framework. Inextricably intertwined in the fabric of his analyses, one can recognize at least three different conceptions of the unconscious. The first, derived from a physiological approach, describes the unconscious simply as the set of automatic reflexive mechanisms that make possible reactions to external stimuli and psychic life. The second, elaborated primarily during the anthropological studies of the 1880s, identifies the unconscious with the “soul of the race”, that is, with the foundation of the “character” of a people consolidated over the centuries. The third, less clear than the other two, picks up the idea of the Lombrosian school, which identified the unconscious with the deeper, uncivilized psychic layers, and therefore with the most barbaric and sanguinary instincts (Gibson 2002). Although Le Bon tried to present his Psychology of Crowds as the coherent application of the comparative psychology of peoples that he had developed in the 1880s and condensed on the pages of Lois psychologiques, much of the imagery and many of the theses of his celebrated pamphlet on crowd were actually derived from Sighele (1891), who had proposed considering the actions of crowds as the result of a sudden resurfacing of primordial psychic layers. At the same time, in explaining the origins of great religions or past civilizations, Le Bon did not hesitate to define the emerging ideas as embryos that, many centuries later, after being sedimented in the collective psyche, would shape the “soul of the race”. Finally, in attempting to explain the success of socialism, he resorted to the hypnotic model, according to which leaders would paralyze the attention of the masses and introduce images into their minds capable of subjugating them, at least temporarily. Although each of the three conceptions of the unconscious refers to a different image of crowd action, they are not necessarily in contradiction with one another because they somehow refer to three different paths leading to the representation of the darker regions of psychic life. The problem, however, is that Le Bon avoided not only clarifying how they related to each other but also recognizing that they were non-coincident definitions.

However, the eclecticism of the Faust of Rue Vignon was not merely the result of the theoretical amateurism that many critics always saw in his writings. The presence, within the same explanatory framework, of such different and potentially contradictory interpretative schemes was also driven by the need to show the possibility of manipulating and controlling mass action. The attempt to credit the thesis of the suggestibility of crowds by leaders was, from this point of view, the most obvious aspect of political voluntarism, in substantial contradiction with everything Le Bon had previously argued regarding the character of the race and the ungovernability of crowds during the 1880s. On the other hand, the fact that Le Bon entrusted the magnetic personality of a leader with the power to save the “French race” from a centuries-long decline (which, it is worth mentioning, he had asserted only a few months earlier was irreversible) could only leave perplexed readers less willing to accept his clever rhetorical artifices. The contradictions within Le Bon’s theoretical framework visibly testified to the origins of the heterogeneous materials from which it was constructed. Just as his predecessors had done, Le Bon drew heavily from traditional iconography and the positive sciences, and thus his work can be considered the result of the fusion of the psychology of peoples he had developed; the collective psychology outlined by Taine, Sighele, and Tarde; and the reflections on hypnotism conducted by Charcot and Bernheim. The synthesis of such diverse strands was bound to be inevitably disorganized, but perhaps this very fragmentariness was the main reason for its lasting success. Despite the famous formula of Psychologie des foules, Le Bon certainly did not manage to unravel the enigma that the new crowds posed to Western civilization. More simply, he dedicated much of his research to giving a face to the specter of the Commune and the threat of a socialist revolution.

By overlaying the image of social conflict with the myth of racial degeneration and the nightmare of individual psychic disorder, Le Bon put forward an interpretation full of contradictions. At the same time, he solidified a new vision of social conflict. Despite the numerous inconsistencies in his theses, Le Bon made a fundamental contribution to depicting a new type of civil war. More than to the “discovery” of the unconscious, to which the twentieth century would later credit Sigmund Freud, Le Bon contributed to “inventing” the figure of the unconscious—that is, a dark and magmatic region where one can find both the feral threats to social order and the deepest roots capable of explaining the rise and fall of civilizations. The unconscious thus became the region in which a new type of civil war had to be fought: a war in which the goal was the “conquest” of the unconscious, and in which each person would be asked to search “within themselves” for that dark region and those enemies of civilization—primordial instincts and “savage” passions—that could suddenly overwhelm the social order.