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16
THE PUBLIC AND THE CROWD *1
1901
Not only does a crowd attract and exert an irresistible pull on the spectator, but its very name has a
prestigious attraction for the contemporary reader, encouraging certain writers to use this ambiguous
word to designate all sorts of human groupings. It is important to put an end to this confusion, and
notably not to confuse the crowd with the public, a word in itself subject to various interpretations
but which I shall attempt to define precisely. We speak of the public at a theater, the public at some
assembly, and here public means crowd. But this is neither the sole nor even the primary meaning,
and while the importance of this type of public has declined or remains static, the invention of
printing has caused a very different type of public to appear, one which never ceases to grow and
whose indefinite extension is one of the most clearly marked traits of our period. There is a
psychology of crowds; *2 there remains to be developed a psychology of the public, understood in this
other sense as a purely spiritual collectivity, a dispersion of individuals who are physically separated
and whose cohesion is entirely mental. Where the public comes from, how it arises and develops; its
varieties and relationships with those who are its directors; its relationships to the crowd, to
corporations, to states; its strength for good or evil, and its ways of acting and feeling—this is what
we plan to investigate in this study.
In the lowest animal societies, associations are above all material aggregates. As one goes up the
tree of life, social relations become more spiritual. But if the individual members separate to the
point of no longer seeing each other or remain so separated beyond a certain short period of time,
they cease to be associates. Now, in this respect the crowd has something animal about it, for is it not
a collection of psychic connections produced essentially by physical contacts? However, not all
communications from mind to mind, from soul to soul, are necessarily based on physical proximity.
This condition is fulfilled less and less often in our civilized societies when currents of opinion take
shape. It is not the meetings of men on the public street or in the public square that witness the birth
and development of these kinds of social rivers, 1 these great impulses which are presently
overwhelming the hardest hearts and the most resistant minds, and which are now being consecrated
as laws or decrees enacted by governments and parliaments. The strange thing about it is that these
men who are swept along in this way, who persuade each other, or rather who transmit to one another
suggestions from above—these men do not come in contact, do not meet or hear each other; they are
all sitting in their own homes scattered over a vast territory, reading the same newspaper. What then
is the bond between them? This bond lies in their simultaneous conviction or passion and in their
awareness of sharing at the same time an idea or a wish with a great number of other men. It suffices
for a man to know this, even without seeing these others, to be influenced by them en masse and not
just by the journalist, who is the common inspiration of them all and is himself all the more
fascinating for being invisible and unknown. . . .
Neither in Latin nor Greek is there any word which is the equivalent of what we mean by public.
There are words to designate the masses, the gathering of armed or unarmed citizens, the electoral
body, and all types of crowds. But what writer of antiquity thought of talking about his public? None
of them ever knew anything other than his audience in rooms rented for public readings, at which the
poets contemporary to Pliny the Younger gathered a small sympathetic crowd. As for the few