Philosopher · Age of revolutions · France

Gustave Le Bon

1841–1931

French physician and publicist. Psychologie des foules (1895) described crowd suggestion, prestige and repetition. His racial hierarchies and brain-volume claims have been repudiated.

Facts

Born: 7 May 1841, Nogent-le-Rotrou.; Source: Encyclopaedia Britannica, Gustave Le Bon
Died: 13–14 December 1931, Marnes-la-Coquette.; Source: Encyclopaedia Britannica, Gustave Le Bon
Major work: Psychologie des foules (The Crowd), 1895.; Source: Encyclopaedia Britannica, Gustave Le Bon

The record

Gustave Le Bon took a medical doctorate in Paris, served in 1870–71, and watched the Commune. He never held a university chair. The Crowd argued that anonymity, contagion and suggestibility form a temporary collective mind; affirmation, repetition and prestige move it.

His racial rankings and claims about women's brains were attacked in his own day and rejected by later science. Modern crowd research replaces hypnotic barbarism with shared social identity. His observations on mass persuasion still describe campaigns and advertising.

A filing page separates what survives from what failed.

Images

Late-nineteenth-century reading room with empty chairs and newspapers on stands — public opinion as print, not a mob.

Connected

Links in both directions: what this page points to, and what points here.

CountryFrance

Articles

Desk pieces that belong with this record.

2026-10-06Gustave Le BonOn May 7, 1841, in Nogent-le-Rotrou, Eure-et-Loir, Charles-Marie Gustave Le Bon was born into a provincial French family. He took his medical doctorate at Paris in 1866, served as an army medical officer during the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–1871, and observed the violent rise and fall of the…Read

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