Gustave Le Bon

French psychologist

• Born: May 7, 1841
• Birthplace: Nogent-le-Rotrou, France
• Died: December 13, 1931
• Place of death: Marnes-la-Coquette, France

Le Bon is known primarily for his work in crowd psychology but is still remembered by some not always favorably for his work on the unconscious mind, his writing in medicine, his controversial theories of race, his books on anthropology and archaeology, his treatise on the training of horses, his explorations into black light and the equivalence of matter and energy, and his writing on the composition of tobacco smoke.

Early Life

Gustave Le Bon (gews-tahv leh bohn) was born into a bourgeois family of civil servants in the farming town of Nogent-le-Rotrou, not far from Chartres. As a boy, he vowed not to follow in the footsteps of his father and grandfather, as his brother George was to do, but rather to escape what he considered the deadening rural atmosphere of his native town. By the time he was nineteen, his lycée education at Tours behind him, Le Bon moved to Paris and never returned.

After six years as an intern at the Hôtel Dieu in Paris, Le Bon was granted his license to practice medicine, a vocation for which he had slight enthusiasm. Between 1862 and 1873, nevertheless, he published seven medical books that dealt with topics ranging from fevers and heredity to physiology and urology. His medical interest began to focus on pathology, and inevitably he formed connections between pathologies of the body and pathologies of society. Le Bon’s books, which enjoyed a considerable vogue in the France of his day, usually went into multiple editions; by 1875, Le Bon had enough money from them that he no longer had to work.

Le Bon, a handsome man with a high forehead and intense dark eyes, aspired to acceptance into Parisian society but was repeatedly shunned, even after his books and accomplishments had attracted considerable attention. Although he was something of a lady’s man, he never married, possibly because his deep-seated pessimism and his views about the inferiority of women interfered with his relationships.

During Le Bon’s formative years, intellectual France was applying scientific principles to everything, resulting in such outcomes as Émile Zola’s modeling his theory of literature, Le Roman expérimental (1880; The Experimental Novel, 1964), on Claude Bernard’s Introduction à l’étude de la médecine expérimentale (1865; Introduction to the Study of Experimental Medicine, 1927), a book that was influential to Le Bon as well. Using experimental methods to study cranial characteristics of people from various races as well as to train horses, Le Bon began to transfer his ideas from such diverse areas to his notions about race.

Life’s Work

Once he had achieved financial independence, Le Bon indulged in his lifelong passion of traveling, going through Europe extensively and to parts of Africa as well. Between 1880 and 1895, he published significant books on the civilizations of the Arab countries and of India, as well as one on how to apply photographic principles to cartography. His most impressive books of this period, however, were L’Homme et les sociétés: Leur Origines et leur histoire (1881), Les Lois psychologiques de l’évolution des peuples (1894; The Psychology of Peoples , 1898), and Psychologie des foules (1895; The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind , 1896).

Besides inventing apparatuses for use in various branches of medicine, Le Bon invented apparatuses for making cranial measurements at anthropological sites. As he measured the skulls of various peoples, he reached generalizations about the seeming correlation between intelligence and head features. These generalizations led to his theorizing that some races are superior to others, although Le Bon used the word “race” to indicate nationality rather than confining its meaning to its more accepted anthropological definition. In the three books cited above, he articulated some of his most influential theories about race.

Le Bon became extremely interested in the unconscious mind of humans. Freudianism was in the air, although Le Bon’s theories in many respects put one in mind of the collective unconscious of Carl Jung, whom Le Bon predates, more than of Sigmund Freud. Le Bon denied the idea of rationality in the affairs of societies. He held to a theory of mental contagion that works constantly on the unconscious mind, an insight that he developed when he was working on training horses and that he applied to the human race.

So powerful did the unconscious mind appear to Le Bon that he believed both individuals and whole societies respond to it rather than to more rational means of meeting problems or crises. When Le Bon applied his mechanistic view of human behavior to the behavior of crowds, he raised questions of intense interest to those who would manage people. Such political figures as Adolf Hitler, Benito Mussolini, and Vladimir Ilich Lenin admired Le Bon. Hitler’s Mein Kampf (1925-1927) reflects both the language and philosophy of The Crowd. Particularly appealing to revolutionaries is Le Bon’s contention that crowds, in destroying the old order, prepare for the emergence of the new.

The Crowd presented the fullest statement of Le Bon’s ideas about mob behavior. According to its assessment of crowd characteristics, people en masse act with unanimity; anyone who deviates is no longer a part of the crowd, and the consequences for such a deviation are often drastic, particularly at times of national hysteria. The major products of crowd unanimity are intolerance and a sense of absolute rightness. Le Bon believed that crowds assume a life of their own, one often detached from the individual ideas of their members. As crowd momentum accelerates, its energy is fueled by a perception of colossal power.

A second characteristic of crowd behavior is emotionality. This is what Le Bon designates as the feminine characteristic of crowds. It results in sudden action, can change without warning, and is usually based on a one-sided rather than a balanced view of the matters that have led to crowd action. Because in his hierarchy of the superiority of people Le Bon places women, children, the deranged, socialists, and the sexually perverse toward the bottom, it is not surprising that he labels the emotional characteristics of crowds as feminine.

The third characteristic that Le Bon presented is that crowd behavior is purely mechanical and that it grows from a fundamental reaction of the unconscious. The unconscious mind makes members of crowds extremely receptive to leadership that can stir them to the sudden actions that evolve from the second characteristic, emotionality. Le Bon contended that crowd psychology applies both to disorderly mobs aroused by an issue and to such bodies as legislatures, religious groups, regional groups, and entire nations. The crowd reinforces individuals’ tentative beliefs and lends them a strength based on primitive reactions rather than rationality.

Le Bon applied his theories to understanding the psychology of World War I. In Enseignements psychologiques de la guerre européenne (1915; The Psychology of the Great War , 1916), he tried to sustain his earlier observations by noting that soldiers who become separated from their units lose their value because they lose the crowd mentality required for motivation. He observed further that such isolated servicemen usually regained their value when they were united with their own groups but that it did not return when they joined other, less familiar groups, presumably because the latter were impelled by a different unconscious.

Although Le Bon believed that under some circumstances individuals can be transformed into a crowd acting with a collective mind, he nowhere specified what these circumstances are. One might speculate on the behavior of people faced with imminent danger, such as people on a sinking ship, or of people drawn into some action, such as a gang rape, that might not reflect accurately the behavior patterns of every individual in the group.

The Psychology of Peoples, in which Le Bon establishes his hierarchies that set the Anglo-Saxon race (Le Bon’s use of the word is narrow) above Latins, has appeal for racists. In his hierarchy of the sexes, Le Bon places males well above women. Prior to the publication of this book, Le Bon had examined and measured the skulls of forty-two famous men collected in the Museum of Natural History in Paris. This research indicated to him that the brightest, most successful men had the largest skulls. He noted that the skull of one general who was frequently defeated measured 1,510 centimeters, whereas the skull of one who was nearly always victorious was 1,725 centimeters. He tried to generalize about criminal behavior from examining the skulls of criminals, finding that the backs of criminal skulls, where the passions are supposedly centered, were overdeveloped.

Significance

Gustave Le Bon died just as Nazism was on the rise in Germany, and it is impossible to deny that the theoretical base of this devastating political movement had some of its roots in Le Bon’s opinions and others like his. Nevertheless, much of Le Bon’s writing was the product of a highly ordered mind much affected by the positivist sociology of Auguste Comte, the experimental approach to medicine of Claude Bernard, the evolutionary theories of Charles Darwin, and the new psychology of Freud.

Le Bon wrote twenty-eight books during his lifetime and was actively writing until the year of his death, when his final study, Bases scientifiques d’une philosophie de l’histoire (1931), was published. The range of his interests is truly remarkable, as is the level of accomplishment he achieved in such a broad variety of subjects.

Le Bon’s overall misanthropy, demonstrated even in his early childhood, was intensified by the social rejection he suffered when he finally left his native community for Paris. Le Bon died an isolated man, despite his correspondence with such notables as Albert Einstein, Henri Bergson, Jean-Gabriel de Tarde, and others. Pictures of Le Bon in later life show a balding man with a scraggly beard extending halfway down his chest; he is poised as though he is looking down on the whole of humanity.

Bibliography

Clemenceau, Georges. France Facing Germany: Speeches and Articles. Translated by Ernest Hunter Wright. New York: E. P. Dutton, 1919. Despite its age, Clemenceau’s book provides interesting insights into the effect on society of Le Bon’s theories about World War I. The notions of racial superiority and of the effect of social isolation on people, particularly on servicemen, as detailed by Le Bon had a profound influence on Clemenceau.

Ledger, Sally, and Roger Luckhurst, eds. The Fin de Siècle: A Reader in Cultural History, c. 1880-1900. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000. This collection of nonliterary texts written during the last decade of the nineteenth century includes Le Bon’s essay, “The Mind of Crowds.”

Maury, Lucien. “Mob Violence and War Psychology.” New Republic, August 3, 1918. This article illustrates the seriousness with which Le Bon’s theory and his books in 1916 and 1917 about the psychology of World War I were taken. The perspective is far to the left of Le Bon’s, but it cannot repudiate extensively the inherent logic of much that Le Bon had written about the topic.

Nye, Mary Jo. “Gustave Le Bon’s Black Light: A Study in Physics and Philosophy in France at the Turn of the Century.” Historical Studies in the Physical Sciences 4 (1974). This article shows Le Bon, when classical physics was in decline, dealing with some of the problems of light and thermodynamics that others such as Max Planck found intriguing at about the same time. The article reveals Le Bon’s incredible thirst for knowledge and relates him to events in the French society of his day that served to shape his thinking.

Nye, Robert A. The Origins of Crowd Psychology: Gustave Le Bon and the Crisis of Mass Democracy in the Third Republic. Beverly Hills, Calif.: Sage, 1975. Nye’s treatment of Le Bon remains the fullest presentation in English. It is a carefully documented study, much of it based on manuscript resources held by two branches of Le Bon’s family in France. Although Nye concentrates on crowd psychology, he realizes that this theory is so intimately intertwined with Le Bon’s earlier work that his discourse is quite complete and extensive.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. “Two Paths to a Psychology of Social Action: Gustave Le Bon and Georges Sorel.” Journal of Modern History 45 (1973). Nye shows the irony of the misalliance between Sorel, a vociferous representative of the Left, and Le Bon, an equally vociferous representative of the Right. Although they approached France’s basic problems from completely opposing perspectives, the two men assessed the problems similarly, particularly as they considered matters such as the psychology on which French religiosity is based.