Conviction and the crowd

Abstract

This essay fragment corresponds to the second half of Gabriel Tarde's 1898 essay ‘Le Public et la Foule’ (‘The Public and the Crowd’). While the first half of the essay was translated by Terry N. Clark in 1969 and gained a wide reputation in the fields of sociology and communication studies, the final segment has remained unavailable to English-language speakers until its publication below. Broadly speaking, ‘The Public and the Crowd’ is a theoretical intervention on the social nature of the crowd and its Other – the public. The portion that follows expands and develops many of the ideas presented in the Clark translation, while also adding a layer of nuance as described in the introductory essay that precedes this text. It consists broadly of three parts: a series of reflections on crowds with ‘positive’ (pro-social) tendencies, an extended discussion of criminality, and concluding remarks that discuss continuities between crowds and publics.

Keywords:

• criminality
• crowd
• devotion
• public
• Tarde
• violence

Notes

This essay was originally published in 1898 as ‘Le Public et la Foule’ in La Revue de Paris, and later republished in Gabriel Tarde's L'opinion et la foule (Paris: Félix Alcan, 1901). The essay was partially translated into English by Terry Clark in 1969 as ‘The Public and the Crowd’ in Gabriel Tarde on communication and social influence. Selected Papers, ed. by Terry N. Clark (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1969).

Original: On this subject, see our Transformations du droit, p. 116 and 307, as well as the thesis by René Worms concerning unilateral intent.

Original: Because it is with public groups as with assemblies that the greater their numbers, the easier it is to fool them, as magicians well know in their craft.

Original: Revolution, t. I, p. 88. During the same period, a crowd at Caen did worse: an officer of Belsunce was dismembered, like La Pérouse at Fiji, and a woman ate his heart.

Original: Occasionally, the crowd presents a collective respectability that is totally lacking in integrity. In 1720, after an outbreak of financial speculation, the English Parliament, ‘in which almost all the members as individuals took part in the corrupt speculation, condemned the act as a group and ordered the arrest of its promoters for having corrupted the public’ (Claudio Jannet, le Capital).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Gabriel Tarde

Translated by Dana Milstein