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past; after the family it is the oldest of all social groups. Whatever its form, standing or seated,
immobile or on the march, it is incapable of extension beyond a limited area; when its leaders cease
to keep it in hand, when the crowd no longer hears their voices, it breaks loose. The biggest audience
ever seen was in the Coliseum, and even that did not exceed 100,000 persons. . . .
But the public can be extended indefinitely, and since its particular life becomes more intense as it
extends, one cannot deny that it is the social group of the future. Thus three mutually auxiliary
inventions—printing, the railroad, and the telegraph—combined to create the formidable power of the
press, that prodigious telephone which has so inordinately enlarged the former audiences of orators
and preachers. I therefore cannot agree with that vigorous writer, Dr. LeBon, that our age is the “era
of crowds.” It is the era of the public or of publics, and that is a very different thing. . . .
Up to a certain point, a public is confused with what we call a world, “the literary world,” “the
political world,” and so forth, except that this idea implies personal contact such as an exchange of
visits or receptions among those who are part of this world; this contact need not exist among the
members of the same public. From the crowd to the public is an enormous leap, as we have already
seen, even though the public comes in part from a type of crowd, from the orators’ audience.
Between the two there are many other instructive differences which I have not yet pointed out. One
can belong—and in fact one always does belong—simultaneously to several publics, as to several
corporations or sects; one can only be part of one crowd at a time. From this follows the far greater
intolerance of crowds, and consequently of nations dominated by the spirit of crowds, because one is
completely taken over, irresistibly drawn along by a force with no counterbalance; hence the
advantage of the gradual substitution of publics for crowds, a transformation which is always
accompanied by progress in tolerance, if not in skepticism. Admittedly, it often happens, that an
overexcited public produces fanatical crowds which run around in the streets crying “long live” or
“death” to anything at all. In this sense the public could be defined as a potential crowd. But this fall
from public to crowd, though extremely dangerous, is fairly rare; and without questioning whether or
not these crowds which have arisen from publics are a little less brutal, on the whole, than crowds
preceding any public, it remains evident that the opposition of two publics, always ready to fuse
along their indistinct boundaries, is a lesser danger to social peace than the encounter of two
opposing crowds. . . .
It has been contested, wrongly but not without a deceptive appearance of reason, that every crowd
has a leader and that in fact it is often the crowd that leads its chief. But who will contest the fact that
every public has someone who inspires it and is sometimes its creator? What Sainte-Beuve said of
genius, that “genius is a king who creates his people,” is especially true of the great journalist. How
often one sees publicists create their own public! 2 For Edouard Drumont to resuscitate antisemitism it
was necessary that his initial attempts at agitation respond to a certain state of mind among the
population; but as long as no voice made itself heard, echoed and expressed this state of mind, it
remained purely individual, with little intensity and even less contagion, unaware of itself. He who
expressed it created it as a collective force, artificial perhaps, yet nonetheless real. I know of areas in
France where the fact that no one has ever seen a single Jew does not prevent antisemitism from
flowering, because people there read anti-semitic papers. Nor did the socialist state of mind or the
anarchist state of mind amount to anything before a few famous publicists, Karl Marx, Kropotkin, and
others, expressed them and put them into circulation. Accordingly it is quite understandable that the
individual stamp of its promoter’s genius is more marked on a public than the genius of its nationality,
and that the opposite is true of the crowd. . . .
It may be objected that a newspaper reader is much more in control of his intellectual freedom than