Fascist Spectacle.pdf

Fascist Spectacle http://content.cdlib.org/xtf/view?docId=ft18700444&chunk.id=0&doc.v...
At the end of the 1800s, there developed in France a "scientific" interest in the crowd. [15] Social
theorists focused on mass movements in order to establish the scientific laws of human behavior, and
new interpretations of people's conduct were thus produced. These theories arose in a climate of
anxiety among intellectual elites over the fast development of an industrialurban society. [16] But they
also reflected growing perceptions about societal crisis in the wake of France's large military defeat in
1870 and the violent social upheavals that characterized the end of the Commune in 1871. [17]
Suddenly, the old, familiar order seemed to be breaking into pieces, and the intellectual and scientific
community began to doubt the primacy of France's civilizational role and the value of French culture.
Modern discoveries and industries, and the new conditions of existence deriving from them, created
uncertainties among members of the upper class, who worried about the continuity of a political and
economic system that had privileged the individual against egalitarian tendencies. The specter of the
crowd, with its disruptive potential and violent energy, came to haunt the imagination of France's
privileged classes. [18]
To be sure, the number of strikes had risen in France by the end of the nineteenth century, and
workers' movements acquired unprecedented visibility. Yet research has shown that violent episodes
occurred in only 3.6 percent of all labor protests, and only in one case had there been a murder. This
notwithstanding, the public presence of the "masses" was increasingly interpreted as a social rupture,
an internal disturbance. [19] Social psychologists reflected these perceptions by dedicating their
attention to the study of the crowd. Under their pen, mass violence became magnified, and crowds
came to embody the source and mirror of social problems.
This new wave of psychologists seemingly continued the historical and literary tradition initiated by
Hippolyte Taine and Émile Zola, who just a few years earlier had offered in their fiction suggestive and
negative descriptions of crowds' behavior. [20] But whereas Taine and Zola had merely portrayed what
they believed was the irrational nature of the crowds, the new social theorists tried to transform
descriptive observations into general explanatory laws that would account for collective behavior in
modern social
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relations. Gabriel Tarde, Henri Fournial, Alfred Espinas, Gustave Le Bon, and the Italian Scipio Sighele
were the major representatives of the new science, and all shared a common premise: they believed
that a gathering of people would cause the blinding of the individual minds participating. Accordingly, a
collective mentality would dominate the group and turn it into an unpredictable and uncontrollable
force. For Tarde and the others, the result of collective interaction was doubtlessly negative, and they
identified the melding of minds with the suspension of reason—that is, with the necessary condition for
the perpetration of crimes. [21] The first elaboration of crowd theories thus issued from a direct
interest in determining the criminal responsibility of crowds. [22] Drawn on contemporary medical
studies of nonrational processes in people's conduct, these theories extended the discussion of crowds'
crimes to a general assessment of crowd behavior. Hence, Sighele believed that mass revolts, strikes,
and riots made urgent a solution to the question of collective actions' general causes and
consequences. [23] Though he proposed a differentiation between two kinds of collective crimes,
premeditated and spontaneous, he still maintained that all kinds of crowds were susceptible to evil and
tended to commit antisocial acts. [24] People, whenever grouped in a crowd, formed an irrational
whole, an irresponsible acting subject. Following this trend, Le Bon stressed the element of irrationality
in the "masses." For him, crowds were characterized by illogical spirit, instinctive character, and a
propensity to be governed by feelings. "Little adapted to reasoning, crowds, on the contrary, are quick
to act," Le Bon stated in the introduction to his popular text La psychologie des foules . [25] The book
proceeded to list other distinctive attributes of the crowd: "impulsiveness, irritability, incapacity to
reason, the absence of judgment and of the critical spirit, the exaggeration of the sentiments." [26] Le
Bon affirmed that the qualities one could find in the crowd were the same as the ones in "beings
belonging to inferior forms of evolution"—that is, women, savages, and children. [27] Crowds were
instinctual and emotional, and feelings dominated them. Le Bon ultimately offered a portrayal of the
"masses" as unable to participate responsibly in political processes.
One of the main arguments social theorists used to support their negative judgment of the
"masses" was the identification of crowds with women. Women, along with drunkards, had indeed
become the object of strict pathological analyses in the Third Republic because of the belief in their
potential power to undermine civilization. [28] Physicians, criminologists, and other social scientists
dedicated their efforts to examining the female gender's pathologies and deranged behavior. [29]
Having established women's biological impurity and consequent predisposition to insanity and hysteria,
some
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