As a man of science leading a solitary existence in his own laboratory, he invented the very first self-winding clock in 1878, thanks to the diurnal variations in temperature. Shortly afterwards, he succeeded in proving the existence of radioactivity. Long before Einstein, he demonstrated the falsity of the dogma surrounding the indestructibility of matter by proving that matter and energy are but different aspects of the very same thing (in Mémoires de physique,334 L’évolution de la matière335 and La naissance et l’évanouissement de la matière).336
In 1902, he established the renowned Library of Scientific Philosophy, which is still being published by Flammarion.
Dedicated to Théodule Ribot, his Psychology of Crowds was the genuine source behind the launching of research into people’s mentalities, in addition to being responsible for its author’s long-lasting fame: by 1929, the book’s 37th edition had already been published. Its central notion is the following: the moment a man finds himself among a ‘crowd’, he becomes someone else, a ‘cell’ whose behaviour ceases to be autonomous, submitting more or less entirely to the (permanent or temporary) group that it belongs to.
The ‘Mental Unity of Crowds’
In a preface that is otherwise rather uninteresting, Mr Otto Klineberg, a professor at the Sorbonne, reminds us about an essential principle of the psychology of perception (Gestalttheorie): a whole is more than the mere sum of its elements.
Just like in the theory of sets, the crowd is thus more than the summation of the individuals that it comprises. Le Bon writes: ‘This accounts for the fact that some juries pronounce verdicts which each individual juror would disagree with, and parliamentary assemblies sometimes adopt laws and measures which their members would privately disapprove of. When considered separately, the men who constituted the Convention were bourgeois men with peaceful habits. Once they had gathered as part of a crowd, however, they did not hesitate, under the influence of a few leaders, to send the most blatantly innocent individuals to die under the guillotine’.
Psychological suggestion is exacerbated through reciprocity. The criminal crowd that proceeded to assassinate the governor of the Bastille, Mr de Launey, on 14th July, 1789, was almost exclusively comprised of onlookers, shopkeepers and craftsmen. The same is true of the perpetrators of the Saint-Barthélémy massacre, the wars of religion, the tricoteuses337 of 1793, the Communards, etc.
Identical excesses may also take place in the opposite direction: ‘The renunciation of all privileges that the French nobility voted into effect during the famous night of August the 4th 1789 would never have been accepted by any of its separate members’.
One could thus formulate a ‘law of crowd mental unity’ characterised by the ‘vanishing of the conscious personality and the orientation of all sentiments and thoughts in a single direction’. Gustave Le Bon writes: ‘We have now entered the crowd era’, highlighting the consequences of the (legal) incursion of the masses into political life. If it is indeed true that ‘the crowd’s’ sole power is one of destruction and that their domination always represents a phase of utter disorder’, these consequences are definitely a source of worry.
Baron Motono, the former Japanese Minister for Foreign Affairs and a man who translated Mr Le Bon’s Psychology of Crowds into his own language, has written the following: ‘Due to civilisational progress, human races and the individuals that constitute them tend to increasingly differ from one another. It is thus not towards equality that mankind is marching, but, on the contrary, towards progressive inequality’ (in L’oeuvre de Gustave Le Bon,338 Flammarion, 1914).
Likewise, Le Bon himself believed that ‘the racial factor must be given absolute priority, for it is, in itself, far more decisive than all other elements in determining the ideas and beliefs embraced by the crowds’.
This assessment is based on the fact that the character traits manifested by crowds are regulated by the unconscious and are thus ‘almost equally pronounced in the psyche of the majority of the normal individuals that constitute a race’. The ‘psychological crowd’s’ actions are thus expressive of Jung’s collective soul:339 ‘The heterogeneous drowns in the homogeneous, as unconscious qualities prevail’.
This accounts for the very limited impact of mass actions: ‘The general decisions made by an assembly of distinguished men who specialise in different fields are not perceptibly superior to the decisions reached by a reunion of imbeciles. Indeed, they can only associate the mediocre qualities that everyone possesses. What crowds accumulate is not intelligence, but mediocrity’.
Traditions guide nations. It is merely the external forms that change, bestowing upon societies the illusion of breaking with their own past. As remarked by Le Bon, ‘a Latin crowd will invariably call for statal intervention to fulfil its expectations, however revolutionary or conservative one supposes it to be. It is always centralising in essence, and more or less Caesarean. By contrast, an English or American crowd cares little for the state and will necessarily turn to private initiatives. A French crowd is primarily attached to equality, whereas an English one values freedom above all else. These racial differences generate almost as many types of crowd as there are nations’.
He then goes on to add: ‘All the common characteristics imposed upon a nation’s individuals by their environment and heredity embodies the very soul of the people in question’.
Crowds are also intolerant and ‘feminine’ (‘but the most feminine ones are Latin crowds’, says Le Bon). Within them, instinct always prevails over reason. With their tendency towards narrow-minded dogmatism and harsh judgement, they do not tolerate disagreement. ‘Ever prepared to rise up against feeble authorities, they slavishly bow before all powerful ones’.
Men of Action
To master the art of stimulating the crowd’s imagination is to master the art of governing it. ‘It is always the marvellous and legendary aspects of events that impress crowds most. This is why the greatest statesmen have always, regardless of the historical period and the land being governed, considered popular imagination to be the pillar of their power; this applies even to the most despotic rulers’.
Napoleon once told his Council of State: ‘It is by embracing Catholicism that I put an end to the Vendean war; by espousing Islam that I prevailed in Egypt; and by adopting ultramontanism340 that I gained the support of Italian priests’.
‘Man can generally achieve more than he believes possible, yet he does not always realise what he can accomplish’ (in Hier et demain).341 It is, in fact, crowd leaders that reveal the possibilities unto him. These leaders are not men of thought, but men of action. Their energy is greater than their sheer intelligence. Their hold takes on the shape of a great design that catalyses wills and channels instincts.
It is easier for simple ideas to conquer the minds of crowds, especially those that abound in promises. Among them, Le Bon cites ‘medieval Christian ideas, the democratic ideas of the previous century, and today’s social ideas’.
Georges Sorel, who authored the Reflections on Violence, wrote the following: ‘Should psychology ever be annexed to the sphere of knowledge that a Frenchman must possess in order to have the right to declare himself genuinely cultivated, it is to Gustave Le Bon’s persistent efforts that one would owe such an outcome’.
The Psychology of Crowds has been translated into twelve languages, including Russian, Turkish, Japanese and Arabic. Predicting the great revolutionary convulsions of the current century, perhaps even the most recent developments in the field of psychological warfare, it was the bedside reading enjoyed by the officers of the Army War College during the 1920s. Back in 1922, one of those officers was a young Captain de Gaulle. Durkheimian obscurantism, which has since been weighing French sociology down, has failed to suppress the book’s significance.
Indeed, despite being eighty-two years old, the latter does not show a single wrinkle.
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The Psychology of Crowds, an essay by Gustave Le Bon, PUF, 132 pages.
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The only book on Gustave Le Bon to have been published since the war has been Robert A. Nye’s The Origins of Crowd Psychology — Gustave Le Bon and the Crisis of Mass Democracy in the Third Republic (Sage Publishing, London, 1975). Although focused almost exclusively on the political aspects of Le Bon’s literary work, it does contain a certain number of previously unpublished details. The author, who works as a professor at the University of Oklahoma, has not only proceeded to examine written sources, but has also conducted an inquiry among the people who actually knew Le Bon during his lifetime.
In 1976, a ‘Society of Gustave Le Bon’s Friends’ was founded thanks to the initiative of Mr Pierre Duverger (34 Gabrielle Street, 75018, Paris, France). Presided by Mr Jacques Benoist-Méchin, this society has taken it upon itself to republish four of Le Bon’s books, namely The Psychology of Socialism, The Psychological Laws that Govern the Evolution of Nations, Opinions and Beliefs, and The Psychology of Education.
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Alexis Carrel
Displaying a face with regular features — one that was entirely dominated by a cranial cavity upon which a pair of narrow and stiff lips seemed to have been drawn in parallel with his ancient-looking lorgnette glasses — and wearing both a black silken calotte that descended all the way to his eyes and an immaculate shirt which he was careful to replace every single morning: such was Alexis Carrel when encountered in the United States of America at the dawn of the 20th century. An apostle of healthy living.
Published by Pion in 1951, Robert Soupault’s book entitled Alexis Carrel was republished in 1973, on the occasion of a special centenary: indeed, it was on 28th June, 1873, that Carrel was born in the vicinity of Lyons.
In 1894, following the assassination of Sadi Carnot342 in Lyons, some medical milieus began to wonder whether a quick intervention would not have managed to save the president’s life. As a young doctor whose explosive temperament had earned him the nickname of ‘gun-cotton’,343 not only did Alexis Carrel agree with his colleagues, but he also had to prove the very soundness of their hypothesis.
Having been invited to the US, Carrel, a professor at the Faculty of Medicine in Lyons, set off to visit Chicago in 1905. A year later, he moved to the Rockefeller Institute, where his entire career was to unfold.
In the space of a few years, his methods of conducting vein and vessel suturing (as part of the famous ‘couturier technique’) allowed him to garner international recognition. He simultaneously teamed up with G. C. Guthrie to carry out the very first organ transplants, as well as experiments into in vitro tissue culture. During one of these experiments, he succeeded in maintaining organic activity within a piece of chicken heart for a duration that exceeded the entire lifespan of chickens.
In 1912, Carrel is awarded the Nobel prize in Physiology and Medicine. During that same year, he mentions the possibility of founding establishments that would keep ‘stocks of preserved tissue and grafts at the disposal of surgeons, catering to urgent cases’. This is what we now call ‘organ banks’.
A very close friend of Charles Lindbergh,344 with whom he co-authored a book on The Culture of Organs (1938), Carrel perfected a ‘perfusion pump’ that journalists were quick to baptise ‘artificial heart’. The apparatus was comprised of a chamber providing the nutritional liquid environment in which the organ was to be preserved, in addition to a second structure that dispensed the necessary pulsatile rhythm through intermittent gas pressure.
‘Know Yourself’
It was, however, through books targeting the general public that Carrel achieved the greatest fame. The most famous one, entitled L’homme, cet inconnu,345 would be published in a variety of languages, including Japanese, Hungarian, Russian and Hebrew.
The book opens with a double observation: the first is that since the Renaissance, our knowledge of living beings has been lagging behind our understanding of inanimate matter; as for the second, it is that we have been subjecting our environment to considerable transformations, without always pondering the consequences of our actions. This has given rise to a kind of chasm. And it is at times of greatest apparent knowledgeability that we fear most for our own future.
In order to attain clarity, says Carrel, one must abide by the ‘know yourself’ maxim, meaning that we are to establish a human science capable of leading us towards ‘regeneration’, a regeneration that is based on nature and observation. ‘Just like our inferior brothers, the Cetacea of the polar seas, or the anthropoids that wander through the tropical forests, we, too, are part of nature. We are subject to the same laws as the rest of the earthly world. And since we belong to nature, our existence must abide by its orders, just as Epictetus once taught. We must be what our essence requires us to be’.
Thanks to his intelligence, man can (and must) master nature. Once he has mastered it, however, he tends to forget its most imperious laws. What Carrel proposed was thus a new perspective.
Within every living body, each of its parts can only be defined in relation to other ones. The latter enjoy a genuine autonomy, but, simultaneously, the whole organism prevails over each separate part. The same principle applies to social bodies. The individual is defined not only in relation to those who surround him in his living space (and who form society itself), but also in relation to those that have preceded him in time (and thus constitute his lineage). There is, indeed, a continuous chain of living beings, and we are all nothing but relays and continuations.
‘Every man is closely tied to those who preceded him and those who shall follow. One might say that he somehow melts into them. Humanity is not made of separate elements such as gas molecules, but rather resembles a network of filaments that stretch across time and lead to successive generations of individuals, just like the beads of a rosary’.
In relation to their ancestors, men thus enjoy merely relative ‘freedom’, and an even more relative ‘equality’.
For too long, people have confused the abstract notion of being human with the specific notion of individuality, states Alexis Carrel. ‘Human beings are equal, but individuals are not. And neither are the sexes. People’s unawareness of all these inequalities is a source of great danger. By preventing the development of elites, the democratic system has contributed to the weakening of civilisation. It is obvious, of course, that individual inequalities must be respected. Within modern society, there are roles that are reserved for the great, the small, the average and the inferior. One must not attempt to school superior individuals in the same manner one schools the mediocre. […] Such is the myth of equality, the love of symbolism, and the scorn of specificity, which are largely to blame for the weakening of the individual. Since it turned out to be impossible to raise the inferior to a higher level, the only means of establishing equality among men lay in dragging them all to the lowest possible level. Thus vanished man’s personality strength’.
The programme that Carrel proposed was entirely different: ‘Every individual must be utilised in accordance with his own characteristics. By attempting to establish equality among men, what we have done is abolish individual particularities that were previously very useful. For each person’s happiness depends on their exact adaptation to the kind of work that suits them. And there is a great variety of tasks available in every modern nation. Instead of unifying human types, what we must thus do is ensure their diversity and increase their differences through both education and lifestyle habits’.
Alexis Carrel proceeded to condemn most vehemently the degradation of moral standards, alcoholism, spinelessness, and licentious behaviour. This is because every population’s loss of health is primarily the result of its own slackening, laxity, and lack of energy.
Medicinal progress allows us to treat the most serious cases; what it actually does is ‘patch things up’ (since medicines take on the role that our natural immune system can no longer play). When it comes to achieving ‘good health’, legislators are as useful as doctors. This is what Carrel states on the topic: ‘What we de
sire is natural health, one that stems from our body tissue’s resistance to infectious and degenerative disease and a balanced nervous system, and not artificial health, which relies on nutritional diets, vaccines, serums, endocrinal products, vitamins, regular check-ups, and the costly protection provided by doctors, hospitals and nurses’.
It is not a matter of rejecting modern techniques, but of displaying greater discernment when employing them: ‘A culture without comfort, beauty without luxury, machines without factory enslavement, and science without material worship is what would allow man to progress indefinitely without having to sacrifice his intelligence, moral sense and virility’.
In his Réflexions sur la conduite de la vie346 (1950), Carrel identifies 3 major laws of life ‘which, however distinct, remain inseparable: the laws of life preservation, racial propagation and spiritual ascension’.
In other words, life ‘tends to simultaneously preserve itself, propagate itself and spiritualise itself’. And there are three fundamental facts that correspond to these three levels: organic survival, genetic reproduction and the rise of the human mind through evolution.
Hence the natural conception of good and evil, which coincides perfectly with the conclusions of modern ethology: ‘Our actions and social institutions can either foster or hinder the development of life. They are thus either good or bad. What we define as bad, for instance, is any kind of society that proceeds to pile up large crowds of human beings in factories or lodgings where the preservation of life and racial propagation are precarious, and spiritual ascension is rendered impossible. On both the institutional and individual level, good is defined as anything that corresponds to the very structure of our body and mind, with evil representing the very opposite’.
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