Champs-Élysées, November 25, 2018 | © WikiCommons
The recent images of Paris bursting into flames during the grassroots Yellow Vests protest movement make us wonder whether we are not re-living the Paris Commune all over again.
In 1895, Gustave Le Bon, a social psychologist, wrote in his seminal work, „The Crowd: a study of the popular mind“:
„by the mere fact that he [the individual] forms part of an organised crowd, a man descends several rungs in the ladder of civilisation. Isolated, he may be a cultivated individual; in a crowd, he is a barbarian – that is, a creature acting by instinct.“
These words might have accurately described the Zeitgeist in France more than twenty years earlier, in 1871, when angry crowds poured into the streets of Paris following the French surrender at the Battle of Sedan in the Franco-German war. The statesman Georges Clemenceau noted at that time: „Suddenly a terrific noise broke out, and the mob which filled the courtyard burst into the street in the grip of some kind of frenzy…All were shrieking like wild beasts without realizing what they were doing.“ Crowds were meant to reveal the prowess of individuals, who isolated would be inferior or even irrelevant in the face of the opposition. The more intense their determination and anger, the stronger their conviction of reaching their goal. The downside was that crowd insurrections ended up being characterized in the 19th century mainly as savage, irresponsible, impulsive and irrational. The French even has one word „foule“, meaning both „crowd“ and „mob“.
The behaviour of rioters during the gilets jaunes protest, who wreaked havoc in Paris by burning cars, smashing shops, destroying statues, and vandalising the Arc de Triomphe, mirrors the same attitude of becoming invincible through violent affirmations.
The country-wide demonstration and rioting that started on November 17 as a reaction to Emmanuel Macron‘s eco-tax on diesel and petrol, has rapidly spread to other perceived forms of social injustice, such as the slashing of the wealth tax. Macron is described by some as the „president of the rich“, who disregards the suffering of the poor.
The gilets jaunes protest movement brought together a heterogeneous crowd of different professions, age, and social background, united by their revolt against the 1% and the political establishment. According to The Economist, 75% of the French population support their cause.
They organized themselves through social media. There isn’t an actual leader, even if the poll from Elab shows that over 60 per cent of gilets jaunes backed Marine Le Pen and Jean-Luc Mélenchon‘s far-left France Insoumise (20%) in the first-round presidential election in 2017. Only 5 per cent amongst the protesters voted for Emmanuel Macron, with the rest favouring François Fillon and Benoît Hamon, a former member of the Socialist Party.
Le Bon observed that the sense of responsibility decreases sharply in heterogeneous crowds. In addition, crowds tend to think in images, which serve as a trigger for action. Images with the destructive and violent behaviour of rioters on week three of the protest have circulated widely. As a result, French authorities deployed around 89,000 security forces nationwide to prepare for „Act IV“ of the anti-government demonstration on December 8.
Crowds are impressed by images and are prone to imitation, noted Gustave Le Bon. Not without reason, the Department of Public Prosecutions in Liège, Belgium, imposed a „zero-tolerance“ policy for any sign of violence following the Paris protest, and emphasized that any photo, video, or message showing rioters in Paris and which aim to incite violence in Liège or Brussels would not be ignored.
Not all crowds are violent though; there are heroic and virtuous crowds, like the American civil rights movements through the 1950s and 1960s. The Spanish philosopher Ortega y Gasset (1930) forged a modern understanding of the „mass-man“, who is emancipated and in control of his political destiny. In comparison to Le Bon, he gives the individual a consciousness, thus not agreeing totally with the unconscious action of collective demonstrations, even if the „mass-man“ can be exploited for political aims.
Psychologists say that an individual may experience a state of deindividuation when he acts in a group. His public self-awareness decreases and the feeling of anonymity it triggers encourages transgressive behaviour or performing acts that he would otherwise not do independently.
Edward Diener anf Mark Wallbom (1976), two American psychologists, conducted a study in which they showed that simple techniques, such as listening to one‘s own voice or looking in the mirror, can enhance one‘s self-awareness in a crowd and thus contain impulsive, aggressive behaviour.
Maybe next time an individual joins a crowd, he does not forget that he is, above all else, an individual.
The Gordian Knot 