The Crowd

Look at the fall of Rome and you see invasions, burned cities, emperors deposed. Le Bon asks you to look behind all that. Beneath the apparent causes, he says, the real one is usually a deep change in the ideas of the people themselves.

The barbarians at the gate are the last scene, not the plot. What decides whether a civilisation stands is what its people still believe, and that shifts quietly, long before anything is set on fire. In his words: "The memorable events of history are the visible effects of the invisible changes of human thought."

This is also why such upheavals are rare. Nothing in a people is as stable as the inherited groundwork of its thinking, so ideas move first, and events follow only when that groundwork finally gives way.

Le Bon believed he was living inside one of those rare moments. Two things were happening at once. The religious, political and social beliefs that European life was rooted in were being destroyed, and science and industry were creating conditions of life and thought that had never existed before.

The old ideas were half dead but still powerful; the new ones were not yet formed. He called the result a period of transition and anarchy.

Into that gap stepped one power. Kings, churches and old authorities were all tottering, and the only force nothing threatened, the one whose prestige kept rising, was the crowd. He called it the last surviving sovereign force of modern times, and gave the coming age its name: the era of crowds.

Le Bon looks at the fall of the Roman Empire. What does he say was the real cause behind it?

• A deep change in what the people themselves believed✓Correct answer
• Foreign invasion and the overthrow of the ruling dynasty
• A long economic decline that emptied the treasury
• The poor decisions of a few weak emperors

Invasions and fallen dynasties are what history shows first, and Le Bon calls them only the apparent causes. The real upheaval is invisible: a shift in ideas and beliefs, of which the dramatic events are the visible effect.

A century before Le Bon wrote, events in Europe were shaped by the policy of states and the rivalries of sovereigns. What ordinary people thought barely counted. By the 1890s he saw the reverse: kings listened for the voice of the masses and followed it. The destinies of nations were now worked out in the heart of the masses, not in the councils of princes.

You might assume the vote did this. Le Bon says no. Universal suffrage, for a long time, changed very little.

The power grew another way. First certain ideas spread and slowly took root in people's minds. Then people banded together to make those ideas real, in unions, syndicates and committees. It was by association that crowds became aware of their strength, and the representatives they elected became spokesmen for the committees behind them.

Here is the line that gives the introduction its bite: "The divine right of the masses is about to replace the divine right of kings."

Read it slowly, because it is not simply a complaint that the wrong people are in charge. It is a claim about the shape of authority. Crowds, Le Bon says, are little suited to reasoning but very quick to act, and the new dogmas they adopt will soon have exactly what the old dogmas had: the force of being above discussion.

So the throne changes hands, but the untouchable belief stays. An idea that once could not be questioned because the king stood behind it becomes an idea that cannot be questioned because everyone stands behind it. That is the power Le Bon wants you to learn to see.

Le Bon argued that universal suffrage was not the main way the masses rose to power.

True✓Correct answer

True. He notes that the vote had little influence for a long time. The masses gained power first through ideas that slowly spread, and then through people associating to put those ideas into practice.