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eligious, scientific, economic, and aesthetic publics are essentially and constantly international; religious, scientific, etc. crowds are so
only rarely, in the form of a congress. And the congresses could only become international because they were preceded in this direction
by their respective publics.
4 The family and the horde are the two points of departure of this evolution. But the horde, the gross, pillaging band, is only the crowd
in motion.
*3 Of July 25, 1830, which, dissolving the Chamber of Deputies and modifying the Constitution, provoked the July Revolution.—Ed.
*4 Expression used by the Italians after losing the battle of Fornova (1495) to characterize the impetuosity of the French in combat.—
Ed.
5 In his fine work on the Principles of Sociology, the American, Giddings, speaks incidentally of the major role played by the
newspapers in the Civil War. In this regard he goes against the popular opinion according to which “the papers have suppressed all
individual influence under the daily deluge of their impersonal opinions. . . .” The press, he says, “produced its maximum impression on
public opinion when it was the voice of a remarkable personality, a Garrisson [sic] or a Greeley. Furthermore, the public is not really
aware that in the newspaper offices, the idea-man, unknown to the public, is known by his co-workers and stamps his individuality on
their minds and their work.”
6 This is a new proof that the organic bond and the social bond are different and that the progress of the latter in no way implies the
progress of the former.
17 Opinion and Conversation 1898
*1 From L’Opinion et la foule (Paris: Alcan, 1922), pp. 62–158, with elisions.
First published in the Revue de Paris, 1898.
1 This word factor (facteur) is ambiguous; it means channel or source. Here it means channel, because conversation and education
only transmit the ideas which constitute opinion or tradition. Sources are always individual initiatives, small or great inventions.
2 However widespread an opinion may be, it is never manifest if it is moderate; but however narrowly held a violent opinion may be, it
is very manifest. Now the “manifestations,” expressions which are at once all-inclusive and very clear, play an immense role in the
fusion and interpenetration of opinions of various groups and in their propagation. It is the most violent opinions which, through
manifestation, are soonest and most clearly aware of their coëxistence, and thus their expansion is strangely favored.
*2 1268–1314, king of France who convoked the first Estates-General (1302).—Ed.
3 Mr. Ribot, in his clear and penetrating studies, has shown the importance of “spontaneous attention.”
4 Despots are well aware of this. Hence they keep a close and wary eye on talk between their subjects and prevent them as much as
possible from conversing. Authoritarian housekeepers do not like to see their servants talk with those from elsewhere, because they
know that it is this way that they “get ideas into their heads.” From the time of Cato the Elder the Roman ladies got together to gossip,
and the fierce censor looked askance at these feminine circles, these feminist sprees of the salons. Cato himself advised his successor,
saying that he should see to it that his wife “fear you, that she not care too much for luxury, that she see as little as possible of her
neighbors or other women.”
5 The customs of visits and gifts are tied together: it seems probable that the visit was only the necessary consequence of the gift. The
visit is, in short, a relic: the gift was its original raison d’être, which the visit outlived. Nonetheless something of this remains and in many
visits to the country, when one goes to see people who have children, it is still the custom in many countries to bring candy or treats.
Compliments must once have been simple accompaniments of gifts in the same way as visits. And in the same way, after gifts became
obsolete, the compliments continued, but little by little became more mutual, and in the form of conversation.
6 In France, for example, from 1830 to 1892 the number of letters grew regularly from year to year (except in 1848 and 1870) from 63
million to 773 million. From 1858 to 1892 the number of telegrams rose, in round numbers, from 32 to 463 million.
7 If this were the place, I would show the qualitative elements that are hidden beneath the physical quantities measured by scientific
procedures, which are basically analogous to and no less specious than statistics even though they seem more solid.
8 It would be possible if each of us regularly kept a diary analogous to that of the Goncourt brothers. Up to now the only types of
conversations recorded are the numbers of meetings of Congress or of learned societies, and the statistics affirm a constant progression.
9 The need to speak to a public is fairly recent. Even the kings of the ancien régime never spoke to the public: they spoke to bodies,
such as Parliament, the clergy, never to the nation taken en masse, and certainly not to particular individuals.
10 Printed announcements of marriages, births, and deaths deprived private correspondence of one of its most fruitful topics. In a
volume of Voltaire’s correspondence is a series of letters dedicated to announcing to the friends of Mme du Châtelet, with ingenious and
laborious variations of style, the birth of the child she had just produced.
11 What is undeniably decreasing and becoming simplified in letters of all types is their ceremony. Compare “yours sincerely” of the
present with the closing formalities of the sixteenth and seventeenth century. The change in ritual conversational formulas in this same
direction is not to be doubted, but since they never left a durable trace it is easier to study this progression or regression in the
correspondence of the past and the present.