FR 255: Crowd Psychology and the Fin-de-Si ècle

1. FR 255: Crowd Psychology and the Fin-de-Siècle

2. Gustave Le BonLa Psychologie des Foules(1895) Unecivilisationimplique des règles fixes, une discipline, le passage de l’instinctif au rationnel, la prévoyance de l’avenir, un degréélevé de culture, conditions totalementinaccessibles aux fouleselles-mêmes. Par leur puissance uniquementdestructif, ellesagissentcommeces microbes qui activent la dissolution des corps débilitésou des cadavres.

3. Lecture plan • A. The scientific study of society • B. The cult of decadence and the fin-de-siècle • C. Case studies: Hippolyte Taine, Gustave Le Bon

4. A. The scientific study of society • The idea of ‘sciences morales et politiques’ began to be developed in France a few decades before the Revolution • During the Revolution, these moral and political sciences received official recognition through their representation in the Institut de France (pictured above) • In 1795, the new Académie des Sciences Morales et Politiques ranked just under the Académie des Sciences. This disappeared under Napoleon’s reorganization in 1803, but was reestablished in the early 1830s

5. ‘The backward state of the moral (human) sciences can be remedied by applying to them the methods of physical science, duly extended and generalized.’ John Stuart Mill (1843) In German, the ‘moral sciences’ were referred to as Geisteswissenschaften

6. Positivism • Positivism: ‘Any philosophical system that confines itself to the data of experience, excludes a priori or metaphysical explanations, and emphasizes the achievements of science.’ (Encyclopaedia Britannica) • Strongly associated (in the French context) with Claude Bernard (Introduction àl’Etude de la MédecineExpérimentale) and Auguste Comte

7. Claude Bernard • Rejected ‘vitalism’, and believed that the organic world was subject to the same laws that governed the inorganic world • Believed that the ‘inner environment’ of beings could be understood through investigation and experiment

8. Auguste Comte • Believed in a hierarchy of sciences: mathematics came lowest, then astronomy, physics, chemistry, physiology, and finally sociology, the most advanced of all • Outlined three rules for the positivistic study of society: to confine one’s study to observable externals; to use rigorous methods, and to abstain from moral judgements

9. Statistics and society • A handful of censuses had been conducted in the mid to late eighteenth century, e.g. in Sweden (1749) and the USA (1790) • Many European countries established census offices in the 1830s, and provide invaluable records of births, deaths, occupations etc. • In France, the Statistical Society of Paris was set up in 1860

10. Psychology • In the emergence of experimental psychology, German psychologists were particularly influential, e.g. the ‘psycho-physicist’ Gustav Theodor Fechner (1801-1887), and Wilhelm Wundt (1832-1920), who created a new kind of scientific laboratory intended to study reaction times and thought processes. Later, Sigmund Freud developed the methods of psychoanalysis.

11. Emile Zola and Paul Bourget

12. Paul Bourget and the scientific approach to literature • Si derrière la Science il y a méthode, derrière la méthode il y a quelque chose encore. Ce quelque chose, qui constitue l’essence même de la recherche expérimentale, c’est le fait.Essais de PsychologieContemporaine (Paris, LibrairiePlon, 1899) • Notre observation à nous ne consiste pas uniquement à noter les faits. Nous en induisons les conséquences, et nous poussons sans cesse, dans nos hypothèses, jusqu’au terme de leur logique… (Le Démon de Midi )

13. B. The Cult of Decadence and the Fin-de-Siècle • Defeat by Prussia sparked off fears of national decadence • Pamphlets of the 1870s expressed this very clearly, with titles like La Fin du monde Latin, Des Causes de la décadencefrançaise and Républiqueoudécadence? • Fears of decadence were also associated with the city; with urban anonymity, a concentrated population of workers but also of vagrants and the unemployed, concerns about poor hygiene in living and working conditions and about the difficulty of identifying and controlling criminal elements.

14. A literary cult of decadence • First referred to by Théophile Gautier in his study of Baudelaire’s poetry in 1869, the idea of decadence in literature was later adopted by Verlaine, and by 1882 Jules Laforgue was using the term to describe many young poets of the day • In Joris-Karl Huysmans’ A Rebours(1884), the hero despairs of modern life and creates an artificial world for himself

15. « un véritable festival d’excentricités, d’extravagances, de folies inquiétantes » (Review of Huysmans’sA Rebours, 1884) • « Si les citoyensd’unedécadencesontinférieurscommeouvriers de la grandeur du pays, ne sont-ils pas trèssupérieurscomme artistes de l’intérieur de leurame? » • Paul Bourget, Essaisde PsychologieContemporaine (1883)

16. C. Case Studies: HippolyteTaine & Gustave Le Bon

17. Hippolyte Taine and the crowd • Although he did not develop a scientific doctrine, his ideas on the effects of race, milieu, and moment on human actions were widely influential • « Une puissance formidable, destructive et vague, sur laquelle nulle main n’a de prise, et qui, avec sa mère, la Liberté aboyante et monstrueuse, siège au seuil de la Révolution » Les Origines de la France, Vol. I, p.79

18. Gustave Le Bon and the Crowd

19. La Pyschologie des Foules • Le Bon admired Taine’s work, but felt that he had not explained the psychology of the revolutionary crowd • Le Bon believed that any individual could be transformed by the crowd mentality • The crowd, for him, was a collective being with its own emotional and psychological states

20. Le Bon on the crowd • A crowd is susceptible to illusion, myth, and legend • ‘Connaîtrel’artd’impressionerl’imagination des foules,c’estconnaîtrel’art de les gouverner’ • With its own ‘collective soul’, a crowd can be morally superior or inferior to the individual • Crowds are inherently conservative and susceptible to charismatic leaders • Yet because of their susceptibility, they can be governed only through recourse to the emotional and the irrational — a future to be feared