The doctor who never practised wrote the book on crowds and foresaw atomic blasts
Gustave Le Bon called himself Doctor all his life without ever treating patients. Instead he wrote a best-seller arguing that people in a crowd become a new creature, translated into nineteen languages within a year, and predicted that splitting atoms would release enough force to flatten a laboratory and its neighbours.
Born in Nogent-le-Rotrou in 1841, Le Bon earned a medical doctorate in Paris in 1866 and immediately turned to writing, starting with a book on apparent death and premature burial. He taught himself English and German by reading Shakespeare in both. In the Franco-Prussian War he organised military ambulances, and his notes on how soldiers behave in total defeat were later studied at Saint-Cyr. Watching revolutionary crowds burn the Tuileries Palace and the Hotel de Ville during the Commune of 1871 marked him for good.
Through the 1870s and 1880s he travelled across Europe, Asia and North Africa, inventing a pocket cephalometer for measuring heads and becoming the first Frenchman to visit Nepal. His anthropology rested on biological determinism and ranked races and sexes in a hierarchy, views now discredited. Yet in 1889 he told a colonial congress that local customs, institutions and laws should be left alone rather than assimilated, and his praise of Arab civilisation later inspired early Arab nationalists.
A near-fatal fall from a spirited horse in 1892 led him to photograph and analyse riding, producing a respected cavalry manual and, through it, an interest in psychology. The Crowd, published in 1895, argued that a mass of people forms a fresh psychological entity rather than a sum of individuals. His conservative hostility to socialism and majority rule left much of the French academy cold, though figures such as Henri Bergson, Paul Valery and Raymond Poincare attended the weekly luncheons he hosted from 1902.
Physics tempted him too. In 1896 he announced a radiation he called black light, never confirmed and now considered non-existent, yet it earned him a Nobel nomination in 1903. His 1905 book on matter anticipated mass-energy equivalence, and in 1922 Albert Einstein replied to his complaint by granting that others had proposed the idea while insisting only relativity had proven it. Le Bon died in 1931.
Source: Gustave Le Bon
