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those of a crowd, and indicated its genealogical relationship with the different social groups, we
shall now delineate a classification of its varieties compared with those of a crowd.
Publics, like crowds, can be classified from different points of view. From that of sex, we see
masculine and feminine publics as well as masculine and feminine crowds. But feminine publics
made up of readers of popular novels or fashionable poetry, fashion magazines, feminist journals, and
the like, scarcely resemble crowds of the same sex. They have quite a different numerical importance
and a more inoffensive nature. I am not speaking of a female audience in church; but when women
assemble in the streets, they are always appalling in their extraordinary excitability and ferocity.
From the point of view of age, juvenile crowds—processions or demonstrations by students or
Paris urchins—have much greater importance than juvenile publics, even the literary ones, which
have nexer exercised any serious influence. On the other hand, elderly publics conduct the world of
business while elderly crowds have no effect. This unperceived gerontocracy establishes a
counterbalance to the ephebocracy of electoral crowds, in which the dominant element is young and
has not yet had time to become disgusted with the right to vote. Elderly crowds are, moreover,
extremely rare. One could cite a few tumultuous councils of old bishops in the days of the early
Church or a few stormy sessions of ancient and modern senates as examples of the excesses into
which assembled old men may be drawn and of the collective juvenility which they sometimes
manifest when they meet. . . .
Crowds can be distinguished according to the temper of the times, the season, the latitude. . . . We
have said why this distinction is inapplicable to publics. The action of physical agents on the
formation and development of a public is almost nil, whereas it is supreme in the formation and
behavior of crowds. The sun is a great tonic to crowds; summer crowds are much more feverish than
winter ones. Perhaps if Charles X had waited until December or January to publish his famous
ordinances, *3 the result would have been different. But the influence of race, taken in the national
sense of the word, on the public as well as on the crowd is not negligible, and the “enthusiasms”
characteristic of the French public bespeak the effects of the furia francese. *4
In spite of everything, the most important distinction to make between various publics, as between
various crowds, lies in the nature of their goal or their faith. Passers-by in the streets, each one going
about his own business, peasants assembled at a fairground, people out walking, may form a dense
mass, but they are merely a throng until they have a common faith or a common goal that moves them,
and moves them as one group. As soon as a new spectacle demands their attention, an unforeseen
danger or sudden indignation orients their hearts toward the same desire, they begin to aggregate
docilely, and this first degree of the social aggregate is the crowd. A parallel statement can be made:
so long as they read only notices and practical information relevant to their private affairs, even the
habitual readers of a newspaper do not form a public; and if I could believe, as is sometimes
claimed, that notices will grow at the expense of the news, I should hasten to erase all that I said
above about the social transformations caused by journalism. But this is not true, even in America. 5 It
is from the moment when the readers of a newspaper are seized by the idea or the passion which
provoked it that they truly become a public.
We must therefore classify crowds, as well as publics, before all else according to the nature of the
goal or the faith which animates them. But first of all, let us distinguish them according to the extent to
which the faith—the idea—or else the goal—the desire—dominates. There are believing crowds and
desirous crowds, believing publics and desirous publics; or rather (since men assembled or united
from afar rapidly push all thought and desire to extremes) there are crowds and publics which are
convinced and fanatic and those which are impassioned and despotic. There is scarcely ever a choice