Lebon, Gustave

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LEBON, GUSTAVE

LEBON, GUSTAVE (1841–1931), French sociologist known for his study of crowds.

Gustave LeBon was born in a village west of Paris in 1841 and died in the Paris suburbs in 1931. Apart from holidays, LeBon never left Paris after his arrival in the French capital in 1860. LeBon obtained his medical degree in 1867 but never practiced medicine. Instead he devoted himself to a career as a popularizer and synthesizer of science, politics, and contemporary affairs, occasionally laying claims to precedence for work that was almost always initiated by others. He was a prolific writer whose books sold extremely well and was also successful as an editor, a friend of the politically powerful, and a dashing man about town. He never married but maintained a series of glamorous mistresses who helped preside over the fashionable lunches and dinners he hosted for most of his life.

For all his popular and political triumphs, LeBon was a distinct outsider in French academic life. To be a man of the right was no disqualification in French intellectual life, but LeBon's unusual combativeness and his unwillingness to bend his knee to men he regarded as his inferiors meant that all the doors to academic appointments and honors were closed to him. Positioning himself on the political right, LeBon took his revenge on the establishment by lampooning the French university and ridiculing the leftist political opinions held by much of the professoriat. In his mature writings, he explicitly linked the intellectual ideals and style of the university with socialism, national decadence, and, after 1894, the crimes of Alfred Dreyfus (1859–1935), the Jewish officer accused by the French army of treason.

Beginning in the early 1890s, LeBon published a series of popular books that linked evolutionary theory, psychology, and anthropology with national and global developments in which he posed alternatives to the bankrupt policies of the leftist political coalitions that governed France in the last few decades of the nineteenth century. Beginning with La Psychologie des peuples (Psychology of peoples) in 1894, LeBon published La Psychologie des foules (Psychology of crowds) in 1895, La Psychologie du socialisme (Psychology of socialism) in 1898, and La Psychologie de l'éducation (Psychology of education) in 1901. The gist of these books was that a vast revolt led by urban masses, colonial peoples, socialist labor agitators, and university professors was threatening to destabilize the foundations of Western civilization. Though a freethinker himself, LeBon took a highly pragmatic stance on the conservative virtues of religion, nationalism, and colonialism, which he believed could ultimately generate greater loyalty within the democratic masses than leftist causes.

LeBon's book on crowds is now regarded as a classic of the social science literature, despite being largely a synthesis of the work of other writers and scholars. The book was still in print in French at the turn of the twenty-first century and has been translated into dozens of foreign languages. The appeal of the book lay in LeBon's characterization of the end of the nineteenth century as the beginning of the "era of crowds," which was brought about by the electoral mobilization of democratic politics, the creation of national audiences by the new mass press, and the rise of radical and revolutionary working-class movements. LeBon's slender book suggested numerous ways that conservative leaders could manipulate the mentality of crowds by appealing to images deeply rooted in the popular mind: patriotism, racial and national stereotypes, and the masculine virtues of struggle. It is not surprising that the book appealed to Benito Mussolini (1883–1945), Adolf Hitler (1889–1945), and many other right- and left-wing advocates of direct action in politics in the first half of the twentieth century. The politics of the interwar years do appear to testify to a widely shared conviction that power could be gained and held only by those who grasped the essential nature of modern mass society, of which atomized and available crowds were an important component.

Since World War II, collectivities have been studied as integral elements of the surrounding social order, from which they receive their norms and behavioral cues, not as anomic entities stripped of values and goals. Researchers now assume that "emergent norms" and "value-added perspectives" drive collective action. It is thus possible to consider seriously what LeBon could never admit, namely that crowds may be said to act on the basis of "interests" and to follow well-defined strategies based on an awareness of the wider social environment. In this perspective, crowds are not guided by willful leaders or by particular images and ideological constructs but by tacit reckonings communicated by means of nonverbal signs.

LeBon evinced a certain admiration for Mussolini in the 1920s, but lent his advice and support to conservative and nationalist republican politicians like Raymond Poincaré (1860–1934) in his own country. Ultimately, LeBon was an elitist and pragmatist for whom ideology was nothing more than an instrument to be wielded in the interests of power. Only lesser mortals actually believed ideologies were true.

See alsoDreyfus Affair; France; Socialism; Sociology.