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

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-oriented shape of its modem descendant, nineteenth and early twentieth-century social psychology in France employed a vocabulary and a scientific imagery which spoke to common sense and dealt with concrete problems, earning for its practitioners a reading public which generally outstripped in numbers those of its sister sciences. Perhaps more than any other figure in this period, Gustave LeBon couched his message in straightforward, concrete prose, and finished by gaining a reading public no other social thinker could rival. It seems very probable that his Psychologie des Foules, which is now in its 45th French edition and has appeared in at least 16 foreign languages,* aside from helping set the foundations of social psychology itself,> has been one of the best-selling scientific books in history. If one bulks together the French editions of his total literary output of about 40 volumes, the entire number of volumes approaches half a million in the French language alone; with the approximately 250 articles in major periodicals, his aggregate reading public probably rivalled that of many contemporary novelists. He was the supreme scientific vulgarizer of his generation, raising his pen for the first time at the age of twenty in 1862, and only Setting it down on the very day of his death, half-way through his ninety-first year, in December of 1931. In view of the intense political and social bias, barely concealed by scientific trappings, which was endemic to his writings, it appears puzzling that no detailed analysis has emerged, in any language, of LeBon and his influences. Despite the availability of a valuable cache of letters and manuscripts, his well-publicized association with the leading conservative political figures of his day, and the acknowledged impact of his many writings, no more than a handful of short, article-length studies of him have appeared. Harry Elmer Barnes penned a damning article on his social psychology in the American Journal of Psychology in 1920, but nothing else beyond histories of social psychology accords him more than a few short lines.