During the war, Le Bon organised a division of military ambulances. He maintained his passion for writing and authored several papers on physiological studies, as well as an 1868 textbook about sexual reproduction, before joining the French Army as a medical officer after the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War in July 1870. ![]() Life in Paris Īfter his graduation, Le Bon remained in Paris, where he taught himself English and German by reading Shakespeare's works in each language. This work dealt with the definition of death, preceding 20th-century legal debates on the issue. He published several other about loa loa filariasis and asphyxia before releasing his first full-length book in 1866, La mort apparente et inhumations prématurées. During his university years, Le Bon wrote articles on a range of medical topics, the first of which related to the maladies that plagued those who lived in swamp-like conditions. From that time on, he referred to himself as "Doctor" though he never formally worked as a physician. He completed his internship at Hôtel-Dieu de Paris, and received his doctorate in 1866. ![]() In 1860, he began medicinal studies at the University of Paris. Little else is known of Le Bon's childhood, except for his attendance at a lycée in Tours, where he was an unexceptional student. Nonetheless, the town was proud that Gustave Le Bon was born there and later named a street after him. When Le Bon was eight years old, his father obtained a new post in French government and the family, including Gustave's younger brother Georges, left Nogent-le-Rotrou never to return. Le Bon was a direct descendant of Jean-Odet Carnot, whose grandfather, Jean Carnot, had a brother, Denys, from whom the fifth president of the French Third Republic, Marie François Sadi Carnot, was directly descended. At the time of Le Bon's birth, his mother, Annette Josephine Eugénic Tétiot Desmarlinais, was twenty-six and his father, Jean-Marie Charles Le Bon, was forty-one and a provincial functionary of the French government. ![]() Ĭharles-Marie Gustave Le Bon was born in Nogent-le-Rotrou, Centre-Val de Loire on to a family of Breton ancestry. Le Bon's works were influential to such disparate figures as Theodore Roosevelt and Benito Mussolini, Sigmund Freud and José Ortega y Gasset, Adolf Hitler and Vladimir Lenin. Ignored or maligned by sections of the French academic and scientific establishment during his life due to his politically conservative and reactionary views, Le Bon was critical of democracy and socialism. Le Bon maintained his eclectic interests up until his death in 1931. At the same time he created his psychological and sociological theories, he performed experiments in physics and published popular books on the subject, anticipating the mass–energy equivalence and prophesising the Atomic Age. ![]() Le Bon developed the view that crowds are not the sum of their individual parts, proposing that within crowds there forms a new psychological entity, the characteristics of which are determined by the " racial unconscious" of the crowd. In the 1890s, he turned to psychology and sociology, in which fields he released his most successful works. He analysed the peoples and the civilisations he encountered under the umbrella of the nascent field of anthropology, developing an essentialist view of humanity, and invented a portable cephalometer during his travels. He then travelled widely, touring Europe, Asia and North Africa. Defeat in the war coupled with being a first-hand witness to the Paris Commune of 1871 strongly shaped Le Bon's worldview. He published a number of medical articles and books before joining the French Army after the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War. He opted against the formal practice of medicine as a physician, instead beginning his writing career the same year of his graduation. Ī native of Nogent-le-Rotrou, Le Bon qualified as a doctor of medicine at the University of Paris in 1866. He is best known for his 1895 work The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind, which is considered one of the seminal works of crowd psychology. Charles-Marie Gustave Le Bon ( French: – 13 December 1931) was a leading French polymath whose areas of interest included anthropology, psychology, sociology, medicine, invention, and physics.
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