Le Bon’s wartime study of how the First World War reshaped the collective mind
What the Work Is
Premières conséquences de la guerre: transformation mentale des peuples — rendered in English as First Consequences of the War — is a work by the French polymath Gustave Le Bon, published in 1916, during the First World War. It is one of several books Le Bon wrote while the war was still underway, alongside Enseignements Psychologiques de la Guerre Européenne (1915) and Hier et demain. Pensées brèves (1918). The book belongs to the psychological and sociological line of Le Bon’s writing, the field in which he had produced his most successful works, and it takes as its subject the mental and psychological transformation that the war was working upon whole peoples.
What the Book Is About
The title states the book’s central concern directly: the “first consequences” of the war, understood specifically as a transformation mentale des peuples — a mental transformation of peoples. Le Bon’s focus is therefore not on the military, diplomatic, or economic outcome of the conflict but on what the war was doing to the minds of the populations caught up in it. The work extends the psychological outlook Le Bon had developed across his career — his long-standing interest in how collective bodies of people think, feel, and act — into an examination of the wartime condition of entire nations. It stands as his attempt, made while the war was still in progress, to assess how the unprecedented scale of the conflict was reshaping the collective psychology of the peoples involved.
Key Ideas and Themes
The governing theme of the book is that a war of this magnitude does not merely kill and destroy but alters the mentality of the peoples who fight it. Le Bon frames this as a transformation of peoples — a change operating at the level of the collective mind rather than the individual alone. This framing is consistent with the view of collective psychology he had developed in his earlier work, in which a gathering of people is understood to form a new psychological entity whose characteristics are not simply the sum of its individual members. Applied to the war, that outlook leads Le Bon to treat the conflict as a force acting on the psychology of whole nations, reshaping how they think and feel as collectives.
The book also reflects Le Bon’s broader convictions about nations and peoples, which he had formed through his earlier anthropological travels and writing. He had come to view culture and national character as shaped chiefly by hereditary factors, including the distinctive racial features of a people, and he held an essentialist view of humanity. In First Consequences of the War, the wartime transformation of peoples is examined against this background: the war is treated as an event that acts upon the enduring mental character of nations. Le Bon’s political outlook — conservative and critical of majoritarianism and socialism — also informs the work, as it does his writing of this period generally. He had long warned his countrymen about the dangers of political division in the face of German military strength and rapid industrialisation, and had been an avowed opponent of socialist pacifists and protectionists, whom he believed were hindering France’s development. These commitments shape the perspective from which he interprets the war’s effects on the collective mind.
Structure and Approach
The book is a work of psychological and sociological reflection rather than a narrative history or a military chronicle. Its approach is that of Le Bon’s psychological writing: it takes the behaviour and mentality of large collectives as its object and seeks to identify the general processes at work within them. The title’s emphasis on “first consequences” indicates that the book was written as an early assessment — an attempt to read the initial effects of the war on the minds of peoples while the conflict was still unfolding, rather than a retrospective account written after its conclusion.
Significance and Influence
First Consequences of the War belongs to the wartime phase of Le Bon’s long and varied career, a period in which he continued to publish steadily even as the war raged. It sits within the body of work through which Le Bon’s psychological and sociological theories reached a wide readership; his books in this field, beginning in the 1890s, had been best-sellers, and his reputation as a psychological writer was well established by the time this book appeared. The work forms part of his sustained effort, carried on through the war and into the volatile interwar years that followed, to interpret the modern world through the lens of collective psychology.
Le Bon was born Charles-Marie Gustave Le Bon on 7 May 1841 in Nogent-le-Rotrou, Centre-Val de Loire, into a family of Breton ancestry. His mother, Annette Josephine Eugénic Tétiot Desmarlinais, was twenty-six at the time of his birth; his father, Jean-Marie Charles Le Bon, was forty-one and a provincial functionary of the French government. He was a direct descendant of Jean-Odet Carnot, whose grandfather Jean Carnot had a brother, Denys, from whom Marie François Sadi Carnot — the fifth president of the French Third Republic — was directly descended. When Le Bon was eight, his father obtained a new government post and the family, including Gustave’s younger brother Georges, left Nogent-le-Rotrou never to return; the town nonetheless took pride in his birth there and later named a street after him. Beyond his attendance at a lycée in Tours, where he was an unexceptional student, little else is known of his childhood.
He began medicinal studies at the University of Paris in 1860, completed his internship at Hôtel-Dieu de Paris, and received his doctorate in 1866. From that time on he referred to himself as “Doctor” though he never formally worked as a physician. During his university years he wrote articles on a range of medical topics, the first concerning maladies that plagued those living in swamp-like conditions; he published several others on loa loa filariasis and asphyxia before releasing his first full-length book in 1866, De la mort apparente et des inhumations prématurées, which dealt with the definition of death and preceded twentieth-century legal debates on the issue.
After graduating, Le Bon remained in Paris, where he taught himself English and German by reading William Shakespeare’s works in each language. He maintained his passion for writing and authored several papers on physiological studies, as well as an 1868 textbook about sexual reproduction, before joining the French Army as a medical officer after the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War in July 1870. During the war he organised a division of military ambulances; in that capacity he observed the behaviour of the military under the worst possible condition — total defeat — and wrote about his reflections on military discipline, leadership and the behaviour of man in a state of stress and suffering. These reflections garnered praise from generals and were later studied at Saint-Cyr and other military academies in France. At the end of the war he was named a Chevalier of the Legion of Honour.
Le Bon also witnessed the Paris Commune of 1871, which deeply affected his worldview. The then thirty-year-old looked on as Parisian revolutionary crowds burned down the Tuileries Palace, the library of the Louvre, the Hôtel de Ville, the Gobelins Manufactory, the Palais de Justice, and other irreplaceable works of architectural art. From 1871 on he was an avowed opponent of socialist pacifists and protectionists, who he believed were halting France’s martial development and stifling her industrial growth, stating in 1913: “Only people with lots of cannons have the right to be pacifists.” He also warned his countrymen of the deleterious effects of political rivalries in the face of German military might and rapid industrialisation, and was therefore uninvolved in the Dreyfus Affair which dichotomised France.
Anthropological Travels and the Formation of His Views
Le Bon became interested in the emerging field of anthropology in the 1870s and travelled throughout Europe, Asia and North Africa. Influenced by Charles Darwin, Herbert Spencer and Ernst Haeckel, he supported biological determinism and a hierarchical view of the races and sexes; after extensive field research he posited a correlation between cranial capacity and intelligence in Recherches anatomiques et mathématiques sur les variations de volume du cerveau et sur leurs relations avec l’intelligence (1879), which earned him the Godard Prize from the French Academy of Sciences. During his research he invented a portable cephalometer to aid with measuring the physical characteristics of remote peoples, and in 1881 published a paper, “The Pocket Cephalometer, or Compass of Coordinates”, detailing his invention and its application.
In 1884 he was commissioned by the French government to travel around Asia and report on the civilisations there. The results of his journeys were a number of books, and a development in his thinking to also view culture as influenced chiefly by hereditary factors such as the unique racial features of the people. The first book, La Civilisation des Arabes, was released in 1884; in it Le Bon praised Arabs highly for their contributions to civilisation but criticised Islamism as an agent of stagnation, described their culture as superior to that of the Turks who governed them, and produced a work whose translations were inspirational to early Arab nationalists. He followed this with a trip to Nepal, becoming the first Frenchman to visit the country, and released Voyage au Népal in 1886. He next published Les Civilisations de l’Inde (1887), in which he applauded Indian architecture, art and religion but argued that Indians were comparatively inferior to Europeans in regard to scientific advancements, and that this had facilitated British domination. In 1889 he released Les Premières Civilisations de l’Orient, giving in it an overview of the Mesopotamian, Indian, Chinese and Egyptian civilisations. The same year he delivered a speech to the International Colonial Congress criticising colonial policies which included attempts of cultural assimilation, stating: “Leave to the natives their customs, their institutions and their laws.” He released the last book on the topic of his travels, Les monuments de l’Inde, in 1893, again praising the architectural achievements of the Indian people.
From Horsemanship to Crowd Psychology
On his travels Le Bon travelled largely on horseback and noticed that techniques used by horse breeders and trainers varied depending on the region. He returned to Paris and in 1892, while riding a high-spirited horse, was bucked off and narrowly escaped death. Unsure as to what caused him to be thrown, he decided to begin a study of what he had done wrong as a rider. The result was L’Équitation actuelle et ses principes. Recherches expérimentales (1892), consisting of numerous photographs of horses in action combined with analysis by Le Bon. This work became a respected cavalry manual, and Le Bon extrapolated his studies on the behaviour of horses to develop theories on early childhood education.
His behavioural study of horses also sparked a long-standing interest in psychology, and in 1894 he released Lois psychologiques de l’évolution des peuples. This work was dedicated to his friend Charles Richet though it drew much from the theories of Théodule-Armand Ribot, to whom Le Bon dedicated Psychologie des Foules (1895). Psychologie des Foules was in part a summation of Le Bon’s 1881 work L’Homme et les sociétés, to which Émile Durkheim referred in his doctoral dissertation De la division du travail social. Both were best-sellers, with Psychologie des Foules being translated into nineteen languages within one year of its appearance. Le Bon followed these with two more books on psychology, Psychologie du Socialisme and Psychologie de l’Éducation, in 1896 and 1902 respectively; these works rankled the largely socialist academic establishment of France.
Physics, Society, and the Years Before the War
Le Bon constructed a home laboratory in the early 1890s, and in 1896 reported observing “black light”, a new kind of radiation that he believed was distinct from, but possibly related to, X-rays and cathode rays. Not the same type of radiation as what is now known as black light, its existence was never confirmed and, similar to N rays, it is now generally understood to be non-existent; but the discovery claim attracted much attention among French scientists at the time, many of whom supported it and Le Bon’s general ideas on matter and radiation, and he was even nominated for the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1903.
In 1902 Le Bon began a series of weekly luncheons to which he invited prominent intellectuals, nobles and ladies of fashion. The strength of his personal networks is apparent from the guest list: participants included cousins Henri and Raymond Poincaré, Paul Valéry, Alexander Izvolsky, Henri Bergson, Marcellin Berthelot and Aristide Briand. In L’Évolution de la Matière (1905) he anticipated the mass–energy equivalence, and in a 1922 letter to Albert Einstein complained about his lack of recognition; Einstein responded and conceded that a mass–energy equivalence had been proposed before him, but only the theory of relativity had cogently proved it. Gaston Moch gave Le Bon credit for anticipating Einstein’s theory of relativity. In L’Évolution des Forces (1907) Le Bon prophesied the Atomic Age, writing about “the manifestation of a new force—namely intra-atomic energy—which surpasses all others by its colossal magnitude,” and stating that a scientist who discovered a way to dissociate rapidly one gram of any metal would “not witness the results of his experiments … the explosion produced would be so formidable that his laboratory and all neighbouring houses, with their inhabitants, would be instantaneously pulverised.”
Le Bon discontinued his research in physics in 1908 and turned again to psychology. He released La Psychologie politique et la défense sociale, Les Opinions et les croyances, La Révolution Française et la Psychologie des Révolutions, Aphorismes du temps présent, and La Vie des vérités in back-to-back years from 1910 to 1914, expounding in them his views on affective and rational thought, the psychology of race, and the history of civilisation.
The Theory of Crowds
Convinced that human actions are guided by eternal laws, Le Bon attempted to synthesise Auguste Comte and Herbert Spencer with Jules Michelet and Alexis de Tocqueville. According to Steve Reicher, Le Bon was not the first crowd psychologist: “The first debate in crowd psychology was actually between two criminologists, Scipio Sighele and Gabriel Tarde, concerning how to determine and assign criminal responsibility within a crowd and hence who to arrest.” Le Bon, who also explicitly recognised the positive potential of crowds, viewed the criminological focus of the earlier authors as an unnecessary restriction for the study of crowd psychology.
Le Bon theorised that the new entity, the “psychological crowd”, which emerges from incorporating the assembled population not only forms a new body but also creates a collective “unconsciousness”. As a group of people gather together and coalesce to form a crowd, there is a “magnetic influence given out by the crowd” that transmutes every individual’s behaviour until it becomes governed by the “group mind”. This model treats the crowd as a unit in its composition which robs every individual member of their opinions, values and beliefs; as Le Bon states: “An individual in a crowd is a grain of sand amid other grains of sand, which the wind stirs up at will”. Le Bon detailed three key processes that create the psychological crowd: anonymity, contagion and suggestibility. Anonymity provides to rational individuals a feeling of invincibility and the loss of personal responsibility; an individual becomes primitive, unreasoning, and emotional. This lack of self-restraint allows individuals to “yield to instincts” and to accept the instinctual drives of their “unconscious”. For Le Bon, the crowd inverts Darwin’s law of evolution and becomes atavistic, proving Ernst Haeckel’s embryological theory: “ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny”. Contagion refers to the spread in the crowd of particular behaviours and individuals sacrifice their personal interest for the collective interest. Suggestibility is the mechanism through which the contagion is achieved; as the crowd coalesces into a singular mind, suggestions made by strong voices in the crowd create a space for the unconscious to come to the forefront and guide its behaviour. At this stage, the psychological crowd becomes homogeneous and malleable to suggestions from its strongest members. “The leaders we speak of,” says Le Bon, “are usually men of action rather than of words. They are not gifted with keen foresight… They are especially recruited from the ranks of those morbidly nervous excitable half-deranged persons who are bordering on madness.”
Later Life, Death, and Posthumous Influence
Le Bon continued writing throughout World War I, publishing Enseignements Psychologiques de la Guerre Européenne (1915), Premières conséquences de la guerre: transformation mentale des peuples (1916) and Hier et demain. Pensées brèves (1918) during the war. He then released Psychologie des Temps Nouveaux (1920) before resigning from his position as Professor of Psychology and Allied Sciences at the University of Paris and retiring to his home. He released Le Déséquilibre du Monde, Les Incertitudes de l’heure présente and L’évolution actuelle du monde, illusions et réalités in 1923, 1924 and 1927 respectively, giving in them his views of the world during the volatile interwar period. He became a Grand-Croix of the Legion of Honour in 1929. He published his last work, Bases scientifiques d’une philosophie de l’histoire, in 1931 and on 13 December died in Marnes-la-Coquette, Île-de-France at the age of ninety. A tribute written upon his death stated: “In putting an end to the long, diverse and fruitful activity of Gustave Le Bon, death deprived our culture of a truly remarkable man. His was a man of most exceptional intelligence; it sprang entirely from within himself; he was his own master, his own initiator…. Science and philosophy have suffered a cruel loss.”
George Lachmann Mosse claimed that fascist theories of leadership that emerged during the 1920s owed much to Le Bon’s theories of crowd psychology. Adolf Hitler is known to have read The Crowd and in Mein Kampf drew on the propaganda techniques proposed by Le Bon. Benito Mussolini also made a careful study of Le Bon. Le Bon was widely read within the Committee of Union and Progress in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Philosophical and military leaders who would later lead the Young Turk Revolution, such as Ahmet Rıza and Enver Bey, took inspiration from Le Bon and movements such as Social Darwinism to define their elitist and authoritarian approach to politics, as well as their advocacy of revolution from above. Some commentators have drawn a link between Le Bon and Vladimir Lenin / the Bolsheviks, although the two are polar opposites ideologically. Just prior to World War I, Wilfred Trotter introduced Wilfred Bion to Le Bon’s writings and Sigmund Freud’s work Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego. Trotter’s book Instincts of the Herd in Peace and War (1919) forms the basis for the research of both Wilfred Bion and Ernest Jones who established what would be called group dynamics. During the first half of the twentieth century, Le Bon’s writings were used by media researchers such as Hadley Cantril and Herbert Blumer to describe the reactions of subordinate groups to media. Edward Bernays, a nephew of Sigmund Freud, was influenced by Le Bon and Trotter. In his influential book Propaganda, he declared that a major feature of democracy was the manipulation of the electorate by the mass media and advertising. Some have claimed that Theodore Roosevelt, Charles G. Dawes and many other American progressives in the early twentieth century were also deeply affected by Le Bon’s writings.
