instinct. He possesses the spontaneity, the
violence, the ferocity, and also the enthusiasm and heroism of primitive
beings.

An individual in a crowd is a grain of sand amid other grains of sand,
which the wind stirs up at will. It is for these reasons that juries are
seen to deliver verdicts of which each individual juror would
disapprove, that parliamentary assemblies adopt laws and measures of
which each of their members would disapprove in his own person. Taken
separately, the men of the Convention were enlightened citizens of
peaceful habits. United in a crowd, they did not hesitate to give their
adhesion to the most savage proposals, to guillotine individuals most
clearly innocent, and, contrary to their interest, to renounce their
inviolability and to decimate themselves.

The conclusion to be drawn from what precedes is that the crowd is
always intellectually inferior to the isolated individual, but that,
from the point of view of feelings and of the acts these feelings
provoke, the crowd may, according to circumstances, be better or worse
than the individual. All depends on the nature of the suggestion to
which the crowd is exposed. This is the point that has been completely
misunderstood by writers who have only studied crowds from the criminal
point of view. Doubtless a crowd is often criminal, but also it is often
heroic. It is crowds rather than isolated individuals that may be
induced to run the risk of death to secure the triumph of a creed or an
idea, that may be fired with enthusiasm for glory and honor, that are
led on--almost without bread and without arms, as in the age of the
Crusades--to deliver the tomb of Christ from the infidel, or, as in '93,
to defend the fatherland. Such heroism is without doubt somewhat
unconscious, but it is of such heroism that history is made. Were
peoples only to be credited with the great actions performed in cold
blood, the annals of the world would register but few of them.

3. The Crowd Defined[304]

A crowd in the ordinary sense of that term is any chance collection of
individuals. Such a collectivity becomes a crowd in the sociological
sense only when a condition of _rapport_ has been established among the
individuals who compose it.

_Rapport_ implies the existence of a mutual responsiveness, such that
every member of the group reacts immediately, spontaneously, and
sympathetically to the sentiments and attitudes of every other member.

The fact that A r