Elena Bovo
Université de Franche-Comté
Abstract
The crowd is instinctive, violent, irrational: in a word, it’s a woman. Late19th Italian and French crowd psychologists associated the crowd with the stereotypes of sexus infirmitas, held to be scientific presuppositions based on the laws of nature, without ever justifying their choice. In spite of the different ideological horizons, the common point between all the crowd psychologists of the late 19th century, is the opposition between the triad “individual- male-rationality” and that of the “crowd-female-natural instincts”.
This raises the following questioning : pretending to study crowd behavior, have the crowd psychologists expressed only their fear and their need to control a new potential protagonist of the political scene, associated with images of woman (supposedly closer to nature than man) in order to disqualify it ? Or may we suggest another interpretation ?
Keywords
Le Bon – Sighele – Woman – Crowd – State of nature
DOI: 10.13131/2611-9757/t0kb-tb73
