“The Crowd Thinks in Images”: Gustave Le Bon on the Endurance of Historical Myths
When it comes to the psychology of crowds, researchers often refer to Gustave Le Bon’s classic yet still relevant work, The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind (1895). Discussions typically focus on the power of the unconscious, the diffusion of responsibility (which seems to disappear as it is spread among members), the spontaneous and impulsive actions of people in a crowd, the lack of logic, and the contagiousness and emotionality of crowd behavior. However, Le Bon also highlights another feature of crowds that prevents them from adequately assessing reality: the power of imagination and the tendency to think in images. Below is an excerpt from his work, describing how this trait manifests and the consequences it can have.
Suggestibility and Gullibility of the Crowd
As previously mentioned, one of the general characteristics of a crowd is its extraordinary suggestibility. In any human gathering, suggestion becomes contagious, which explains how quickly feelings can be oriented in a particular direction.
No matter how neutral a crowd may seem, it is usually in a state of expectant attention, making it receptive to any suggestion. The first suggestion is immediately transmitted to all minds due to its contagious nature, and a corresponding mood arises at once. As with all beings under the influence of suggestion, an idea that takes hold of the mind seeks to express itself in action. A crowd can just as easily set fire to a palace as perform an act of supreme self-sacrifice; it all depends on the nature of the stimulus, not on the relationships that, for an isolated individual, exist between the suggested act and the sum of rationality that might counteract it.
Always hovering on the edge of the unconscious, easily swayed by suggestions, and possessing the wild emotions typical of beings who cannot be guided by reason, the crowd, lacking any critical faculties, is extremely gullible. For the crowd, nothing is impossible, and this explains the remarkable ease with which legends and the most implausible stories are created and spread.
Those who were in Paris during the siege witnessed many examples of such gullibility. A candle burning in an upper window was immediately taken as a signal to the enemy, even though a moment’s thought would reveal the absurdity of this assumption, since the enemy could not possibly see a candle flame from miles away.
The Formation and Spread of Legends
The creation of legends that quickly spread among crowds is not only due to their gullibility but also to the distortions that events undergo in the imagination of people gathered together. In the eyes of the crowd, the simplest event rapidly takes on a completely different scale. The crowd thinks in images, and the image evoked in its imagination, in turn, calls forth others that have no logical connection to the first. We can easily understand this state if we recall how a memory of some event can sometimes trigger a strange chain of thoughts. Reason points out the inconsistencies in these images, but the crowd does not see them and mixes into the real event whatever its distorting imagination creates. The crowd does not distinguish between subjective and objective; it considers the images in its mind to be real, even if they have only a distant connection to the observed fact.
One might think that the distortions an event undergoes in the eyes of the crowd would be highly varied, since the individuals making up the crowd have very different temperaments. But this is not the case. Under the influence of contagion, these distortions are always the same for all individuals. The first distortion, created by the imagination of one person in the group, becomes the nucleus of contagious suggestion. Before the image of St. George was seen by everyone on the walls of Jerusalem and in every window, it was first seen by just one person, and through suggestion and contagion, the miracle he described was immediately accepted by all the others.
This is always the mechanism behind all collective hallucinations, which are often mentioned in history and whose authenticity is confirmed by thousands of people. It would be unnecessary, given the above, to point out the intellectual qualities of the individuals in the crowd. These qualities are irrelevant; both the ignorant and the learned, once they are part of a crowd, equally lose their ability to observe. This may seem paradoxical, but to prove it would require citing so many historical facts that it would fill entire volumes. Nevertheless, I will give a few examples, chosen at random from the many I could cite.
Examples of Collective Hallucination
The most typical case of such collective hallucination—where the crowd consisted of all kinds of individuals, both the most ignorant and the most educated—was described by Lieutenant Julien Felix in his book on ocean currents and was once published in the Revue Scientifique. The frigate La Belle Poule was cruising at sea, searching for the corvette Berceau, from which it had been separated by a violent storm. It was daytime, and the sun was shining brightly. Suddenly, a lookout spotted an abandoned ship. The crew turned their eyes to the indicated spot, and everyone—officers and sailors alike—clearly saw a raft loaded with people, being towed by boats displaying distress signals. However, all of this was nothing more than a collective hallucination. Admiral Defosse immediately sent boats to rescue the supposed survivors. As they approached the site, officers and sailors distinctly saw crowds of people, waving their arms and heard a dull, mixed noise of many voices. But when the boats finally arrived, they found nothing but a few branches with leaves, carried by the waves from a nearby shore. Such clear evidence, of course, made the hallucination disappear.
This example clearly shows the mechanism of collective hallucination: on one hand, a crowd in a state of expectant attention; on the other, a suggestion made by the lookout who saw an abandoned ship at sea. This suggestion, through contagion, spread to everyone present—officers and sailors alike.
A crowd does not have to be large for its ability to see reality to be destroyed and for hallucinations to replace real facts. As soon as a few individuals gather together, they already form a crowd, even if they are distinguished scientists. Sometimes, they acquire all the properties of a crowd regarding anything outside their specialty. The powers of observation and criticism that each of these scientists possesses individually immediately disappear in a crowd. The clever psychologist Dave gave a very curious example of this state, described in the Annales des Sciences Psychiques. He gathered distinguished observers, including one of England’s leading scientists, Wallace, and, after inviting them to examine all the objects in the room and seal everything, presented all the classic phenomena of spiritualism: materialization of spirits, writing on a board, etc. He then obtained written confirmation from them, stating that these phenomena could not have been produced except by supernatural means. Dave then admitted that these phenomena were the result of simple trickery. “The most astonishing thing about Dave’s experiments,” the author notes, “is not so much the tricks themselves, which were quite remarkable, but the extraordinary unreliability of the testimony given by witnesses who were not in on the secret. This shows that the positive accounts of numerous witnesses can be completely false, since, in this case, if we accepted their testimony, we would have to agree that the phenomena could not be explained by any trickery. Yet the methods Dave used were so simple that one can only marvel at his boldness in using them. But he had such power over the minds of the crowd that he could convince them they were seeing things that did not exist.” Again, we see the power of the hypnotist over the hypnotized, and if even the greatest minds, whose skepticism had been aroused in advance, could be swayed, how much more easily can an ordinary crowd be influenced!
The Reliability of Crowd Testimony
There are many such examples. As I write these lines, all the newspapers are filled with stories about two little girls pulled from the Seine. At least a dozen witnesses identified the children in the most categorical way. Their testimonies were so consistent that the investigator had no doubt and had already written the death certificate. But at the moment the girls were to be buried, it was discovered that the supposed victims were alive and only slightly resembled the drowned children. As in the previous examples, the assurance of the first witness, who fell under an illusion, was enough to create a suggestion that influenced all the other witnesses.
In all such cases, the source of suggestion is always an illusion, triggered in one individual by more or less vague memories. This initial illusion, once asserted, becomes the source of contagion. For an impressionable person, a chance resemblance or a detail reminiscent of another face is enough to make them believe they are seeing that very person. The image thus evoked becomes the nucleus for further crystallization, filling the entire mind and paralyzing all critical faculties. This explains, for example, the astonishing fact of a mother mistakenly identifying a stranger as her own child, as happened in a case recently reported in the newspapers. The same mechanism of suggestion can be traced here as before.
“A child recognized his friend in the dead body, but it was a mistake, which immediately led to a series of similar errors. One woman, seeing the child’s body, exclaimed, ‘Oh my God, that’s my child!’ Looking closer, she noticed a scar on the forehead and said, ‘Yes, that’s my poor son, who disappeared in July. He was kidnapped and murdered!’”
This woman was a concierge on Rue du Four, named Chavodret. Her son-in-law was called in, and without hesitation declared, “That’s little Philibert.” Several residents of the street also identified the dead child as Philibert Chavodret, and even his own teacher, noticing a medal, recognized his former pupil in the corpse.
And yet? The neighbors, the son-in-law, the schoolteacher, and the mother—all were mistaken! Six weeks later, the child’s identity was finally established: it turned out to be a child from Bordeaux, killed there and brought to Paris by stagecoach (Eclair, April 21, 1895).
Such mistaken identifications, as has been noted, are most often made by women and children—the most impressionable subjects—and show how much weight such testimony should have in court. As for children, for example, their testimony should never be taken into account. Judges like to say that children do not lie, but if they knew anything about psychology, they would know that, on the contrary, children always lie at that age. This lie is, no doubt, innocent, but it is still a lie. It would be better to decide a defendant’s fate by drawing lots than to pass judgment, as has often happened, based on a child’s testimony!
On Historical Testimony and the Creation of Myths
Returning to the observations made by crowds, it must be said that collective observations are the most erroneous of all and usually represent nothing more than the illusion of one individual, spread by contagion and suggestion. The number of such cases, showing how skeptical we should be of crowd testimony, could be multiplied endlessly. For example, thousands of people witnessed the famous cavalry charge at the Battle of Sedan, yet it is impossible, due to the most contradictory eyewitness accounts, to know who commanded the charge. British General Wolseley, in his recent work, shows that even now, regarding the most important factors of the Battle of Waterloo, there are the most mistaken ideas, despite the fact that these facts are confirmed by hundreds of witnesses.
Can we ever know how any battle actually took place? I strongly doubt it. We know who were the victors and the vanquished, and our knowledge probably goes no further. What D’Harcourt, a participant and eyewitness, says about the Battle of Solferino can be applied to any battle: “Generals, receiving information from a hundred witnesses, draw up their official reports; officers tasked with transmitting orders alter these documents and draft the final report; the chief of staff refutes it and writes a new one. Then it goes to the marshal, who exclaims, ‘You are completely mistaken!’ and drafts yet another version. Nothing remains of the original report.” D’Harcourt recounts this as proof of the impossibility of establishing the truth even about the most striking and well-known events.
Such facts clearly show the value of crowd testimony. According to logic, the unanimous testimony of numerous witnesses should be considered among the strongest evidence of any fact. But what we know from crowd psychology shows that, in this respect, logic textbooks should be completely rewritten. The most doubtful events are precisely those witnessed by the largest number of people. To say that a fact is confirmed simultaneously by thousands of witnesses is, in most cases, to say that the actual event bears no resemblance to the stories told about it.
From all this, it is clear that historical works should be regarded as pure works of imagination—fantastic tales about poorly observed facts, accompanied by explanations made up later. Mixing mortar would be a more useful task than writing such books. If the past had not left us its literary and artistic works and monuments, we would know nothing of the truth about it. Do we know a single word of truth about the lives of the great figures who played a major role in human history, such as Hercules, Buddha, or Muhammad? Most likely, we do not! In essence, however, their real lives matter little to us; we are interested in these great people only as they have been shaped by popular legend. It is these legendary, not real, heroes who have influenced the soul of the crowd.
Unfortunately, legends, even when written down, have no real stability. The imagination of the crowd constantly changes them according to the times and especially according to the race. How far, for example, is the bloodthirsty biblical Jehovah from the God of love worshipped by St. Teresa; and the Buddha adored in China has nothing in common with the Buddha worshipped in India!
It is not even necessary for centuries to pass after a hero’s death for the crowd’s imagination to completely transform their legend. Sometimes, the transformation of a legend takes only a few years. We have seen how, in less than fifty years, the legend of one of history’s greatest heroes changed several times. Under the Bourbons, Napoleon was depicted as an idyllic philanthropist and liberal, a friend of the downtrodden, whose memory, according to poets, would long live under the roofs of cottages. Thirty years later, the kindly hero had become a bloodthirsty despot who, having seized power and freedom, destroyed three million people solely to satisfy his vanity. Now we are witnessing yet another transformation of this legend. When a few more centuries have passed, future scholars, faced with such contradictory accounts of the hero, may even doubt his very existence, just as they sometimes doubt the existence of Buddha, and may see in these tales of the hero some kind of solar myth or a further development of the legend of Hercules. But these scholars, likely better versed in crowd psychology than we are, will surely know that history can only immortalize myths.