Le Bon, Gustave (1841–1931)

French social theorist

Born in Nogent-le-Rotrou, in Normandy, France, in 1841, Gustav Le Bon lived in a time of rapid social change, with massive shifts from small, close-knit rural communities to impersonal urban industrial ones. It was a time of conflict during which millions lost their lives in revolutions and wars.

Intense intellectual struggles developed among those who favored and supported and those who opposed and feared these changes. Intellectuals worked to describe and understand these changes, to control them, and to persuade others to adopt their views about what was happening and what should be done about it. Their views were expressed through art, music, novels, poetry, and social science literature. In the latter milieu, the work of Gustave Le Bon, especially his book La psychologie des foules (1895; in English, The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind,1960) had the most lasting influence.

Le Bon moved to Paris in 1860 to study medicine and received his medical degree in 1866. Rather than practicing medicine, he decided to write for the general public about scientific topics. He wrote more than 40 books and at least 250 articles. He wrote on many subjects, including photography, geology, reproduction and heredity, alcohol consumption, the falling birth rate in France, tobacco smoke, social movements, revolution, crowds, and military problems. His income came primarily from his writing and the sale of scientific instruments that he invented and manufactured. Le Bon was popular with the reading public but to his disappointment, he never gained an academic position or significant recognition from the French academic system.

As a young man, he had contact with people who had lived through the French Revolution of 1789. He experienced the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–1871 and the Paris Commune that came immediately after it, and he later lived through World War I. Those experiences contributed to his hatred and fear of what he called the “age of the crowd.” Le Bon wrote:

• Today the claims of the masses are becoming more and more sharply defined and amount to nothing less than a determination to destroy society as it now exists, with a view to making it hark back to that primitive communism which was the normal condition of all human groups before the dawn of civilization. Limitation of the hours of labor, the nationalization of mines, railways, factories, and the soil, the equal distribution of all products, the elimination of all the upper classes for the benefit of the popular classes, etc., such are these claims. (Le Bon 1960, p. 16)

Le Bon's La psychologie des foules, which was written in part to help leaders resist coercion by crowds, contributed to his having a longer-lasting influence than most contemporary social scientists. Since its publication, millions of copies of La psychologie des foules have been sold. It has been translated into more than fifteen languages and is still in print today. Le Bon is often credited with beginning the modern study of the crowd and has been referred to as “the father of collective behavior.”

His importance extended far beyond the social sciences. He directly influenced many powerful people, including heads of state, through correspondence, visits, and the weekly luncheons he held for prominent persons, in which he presented his views on the problems of the time.

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