What’s the Difference Between a Rampaging Mob and a Righteous Protest?

In the beginning was the mob, and the mob was bad. In Gibbon’s 1776 “Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire,” the Roman mob makes regular appearances, usually at the instigation of a demagogue, loudly demanding to be placated with free food and entertainment (“bread and circuses”), and, though they don’t get to rule, they sometimes get to choose who will. Gibbon was a sort of conservative radical—contemptuous of Christianity and attached to free-thinking Epicureanism, but fearful of social disorder—and by “the mob” he meant the lumpenproletariat of any big city, his own London as much as his remembered Rome. What do you do when two mobs are shouting at each other during a public election? So Mr. Pickwick is asked in Dickens’s “Pickwick Papers,” set in the eighteen-twenties. “Shout with the largest,” is Mr. Pickwick’s protective advice.

In time, this fearful conception gave way to an image of the crowd that was, mostly, good, and when bad more comic than anything else. In Charles Mackay’s 1841 “Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds,” the people who swarm to buy tulip bulbs in Holland or shares in the South Sea Company in London are frantic and mutually reinforcing, but their victims are chiefly one another. In a capitalist society, the crowd turns inward, focussed more on making money than on extorting it from power. Indeed, the crowd could now be thought of as the “people”—a concept that might merit approval, as in “We, the People,” or abhorrence, as when the Nazis promoted the purity of the Volk, whose blood was being poisoned by outsiders. More recently, the crowd returned as a wholly positive force, full of collective savvy. We got books on the wisdom of crowds, while on “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?” the best way of answering a specialized question was often to sample the audience, smarter as a group than any shrewd contestant alone. “Crowdsourcing” became a cheery thing. Then January 6th happened, and suddenly the twenty-first-century quiz-show crowd seemed to dissolve back into the Roman mob, violent seditionists instigated by a demagogue and aimed at the destruction of the very idea of law.

Any such willfully succinct summary will, of course, be bound by a thousand quavers and qualifications, and by a larger question: Have crowds actually changed, or is it simply that the words we use to describe them have altered over time? Are crowds, in reality, only ever-shifting gatherings of rational individuals? Or do people, assembled together into a seething group, become, as the Bulgarian British writer Elias Canetti believed, a thing unto itself, acting in ways that none of the individuals in the group would have undertaken alone? The January 6th crowd was clearly composed of some who wanted to act and many who merely went along. Canetti distinguished between “closed” and “open” crowds: the open crowd, like the one that stormed the Bastille, is the kind in which many people of different allegiances come together for a common, if often ill-defined, cause; the closed crowd is an organized gathering for a predefined purpose. Whether you think the Trumpite mob was a closed crowd (an assembly of paramilitaries with a clear goal of creating enough chaos to end the electoral count) or an open one (a confused agglomeration that scarcely knew where it was going or what it would do until it got there) probably affects your degree of panic or fear about what another Trumpite mob might do.

Closed or open, crowds persist as historical agents, and have become a field of study all their own. In his new book, “The Crowd in the Early Middle Ages” (Princeton), Shane Bobrycki, a medieval historian at the University of Iowa, describes a hinge moment in the way people have thought about crowds. It was a period when the rapid de-urbanization of society had reduced or eliminated the Roman vulgus, or mob, but when memories of Roman order and disorder lingered. Bobrycki has devoted himself to a blessedly old-fashioned kind of scholarship, digging through ever-finer shades of meaning, sifting through all the Latin terms that refer to crowds and mobs and gatherings. If you have long wanted to discern the subtle differences in medieval Europe between vulgus, plebs, turba, populus, and rustici, here at last is the book to assist you. And these differences do indeed have weight and significance. It’s fascinating to learn how, when the vulgus was forced out of the dying cities and into the countryside, it became the rustici—the peasants with pitchforks. Plebs, meaning, in classical Latin, “common folk,” came to mean, more neutrally, “the community.” Bobrycki assures us, “Even vulgus could be just another equivalent of the broad populus that was now the lodestar of all crowd words.”

Bobrycki has an ambivalent attitude toward the era of his attention. You would not take up medieval history as a subject if it held no appeal to you as an object. Gibbon’s take could be simple: life had been better, and then it was worse, and though the causes were complex—Christians and barbarians both playing a part—the result was clear. Bobrycki, by contrast, describes what looks like a catastrophe but labors not to characterize it as such. One day there were hot baths in Britain; the next there weren’t. The thinning of the population which attended what he does not call the Dark Ages, we are assured, “did not make for a better or worse society.” Yes, it did. Prosperous and library-bound Roman civilization—however lamed by cruelty, public executions, slavery—was clearly a better place to be than one where all those evils persisted, along with some new ones, and none of the good things did.

In any case, early medieval Europe, noted for its de-urbanization, seems like the nadir of crowds, closed and open; Bobrycki notes, in a beautiful understatement, that it “was under-supplied with gatherings.” (On the other hand, he writes, monks and nuns were “crowd specialists,” too, in that they connected themselves to a community that encompassed the living and the departed—a lovely poetic point, though not really what we mean by crowds.) What he finds is the rise of the mini-mob: given that travel was dangerous, dignitaries on the move surrounded themselves with an entourage. This invention proved so potent that we still see it today, as in the history of American hip-hop, whose top men, too, are often uneasy travellers. At the same time, the macro-mob was demoted. In fact, the once powerful idea that crowds had a well-earned veto on rulers’ bad actions was anathema in medieval Europe, where crowds were often “gendered” and likened to hysterical women.

The closed crowds of the period, in turn, included all of the liturgical processions and staged gatherings designed to create at least an illusion of what Bobrycki calls “spontaneous unanimity.” In one memorable incident—after a municipal feud in Ravenna, around the year 700, ended in a Red Wedding-like murder of one clan by another under the pretext of breaking bread—the local archbishop “commanded the whole city to perform a three-day liturgical procession,” Bobrycki writes. Open crowds inclined to homicide could be turned to closed crowds performing penance.

Bobrycki ends with a series of questions. His purpose is to demystify the idea of a crowd as a single thing and instead make us feel it as ever changing and contingent, sometimes being exploited by the ruling class for its own ends—held responsible for acts the rulers want both to encourage and to disavow—and sometimes eerily amplifying the long echo of Roman ritual and literature. The New Testament, the holiest of texts at the time, is itself a Roman document, depicting circumstances of a bygone era, including the city mob crying “Give us Barabbas.” “Arguably the most important discursive function of the tumultuous crowd,” Bobrycki concludes, “was not to condemn its activities, but to obfuscate them. Crowds in discourse were, above all, a tool of plausible deniability.” Even in an uncrowded historical time, the idea of the crowd mattered, as a concept, a dream, a way of thinking about the forms of popular sovereignty when none that we would recognize as such quite existed.

In the past couple of centuries, speculations about the role of crowds have tended to center on the French Revolution—and yet the whirligig of classical and medieval terms remains relevant. Is the crowd merely a vulgus, the unlettered raving, or is it the populus—the community speaking? The French Revolution looms large in the philosophy of crowds because it was the first time that a “mob” or what looked like one was responsible for a decisive turn in the history of humankind. The Roman Republic was always an upper-class affair, with the mob a mere chorus, and even the American Revolution was, as students of Samuel Adams have learned, very much a legislative revolution, made by the manor, with the crowds much smaller than they are remembered to have been. The Boston Tea Party was more a publicity stunt than a significant popular protest. But the French Revolution, though managed by an assemblage of grandees and ideologues, did involve a significant role for large groups of citizens acting on their own. Americans celebrate a group of merchants and planters signing a document on July 4th; the French celebrate a crowd of citizens storming the monarchical prison called the Bastille on July 14th. There is a difference.

Yet the nature and role of the crowd in the French Revolution have always been contested. For British conservatives of the late eighteenth century, Burke most memorably, the swarming humanity on display was a vengeful monster of bloodlust and violence. This idea, taken over by the reactionary Thomas Carlyle in his history of the French Revolution, and then even more memorably dramatized by the radical Dickens in “A Tale of Two Cities,” was given a more scholarly treatment in the French historian Gustave Le Bon’s “The Psychology of Crowds” (1895). “By the mere fact that he forms part of an organized crowd, a man descends several rungs in the ladder of civilization. Isolated, he may be a cultivated individual,” Le Bon wrote. “In a crowd, he is a barbarian—that is, a creature acting by instinct.”

Against this view comes a counter-tradition that saw the crowd effectively as the people enacting choices. This line of French left-wing interpretation reached its apotheosis in Jean-Paul Sartre’s 1960 account of the storming of the Bastille, in which Sartre introduces the notion of a “fused group” to indicate the power of a crowd to mobilize chaotic emotion into compelling action.

Sartre was too familiar with modern history not to see the fascistic potential of any street mob. But his is mainly a positive view of mob action, which could not only bring about political change but provide a kind of shared existential epiphany: in moments of decisive action, we reach as a community beyond our mortal despair. Sartre’s melodrama of the mob rather understates a larger truth: when the Bastille was at last stormed, there were perhaps seven confused prisoners left inside, the population having been reduced by reform over time. The existential epiphany, as so often with Sartre, was purely theatrical. (Camus once mocked Sartre for snoozing during the liberation of Paris, in a comfortable armchair at the Comédie-Française.)

In the British historian George Rudé’s classic book “The Crowd in the French Revolution” (1959), one gets a more nuanced view of the same gang-ups. Rudé breaks down the mobs of the Revolution into their elements, and shows that, far from being the kind of enraged, unitary monster of Le Bon’s fearful description, they were made of precise social kinds—not the true lower ranks of French society but what we could call the petite bourgeoisie, whose specific demands on the state seemed best answered by group action. Neither a bloodthirsty out-of-control monster nor an awakened community, the revolutionary mob was made of craftsmen, small traders, and so on—people who wanted highly specific things, such as more bread and better wages. Very much like their lower-middle-class inheritors among today’s French gilets jaunes, they wanted to protect their modest allotments from the vagaries of big government and the mercantile classes. The Bastille-busters would not, in truth, have been disappointed to find only seven prisoners in the hoosegow. They aimed to make a point, not a prison break.

And when the Revolution was turned into the Empire? There’s a sense in which the rabble was reassembled when the emperor’s Grande Armée arose. Indeed, as the military historian John Keegan says, “inside every army is a crowd struggling to get out,” and the single thing that commanders fear most is that their regimented forces will devolve back into a disorganized crowd.

The British journalist Dan Hancox, in his new book, “Multitudes: How Crowds Made the Modern World” (Verso), goes much further than his scholarly forebears in the effort to defend the crowd from its defamers. He is an unstinting admirer of crowds and crowd action, not just as a means of social change but as a heady social experience of transcendence. He evokes “the thrilling energy generated by a political crowd,” in which one feels “the crackle of history in the air. It follows the realisation that your elected leaders will always fail you, to one degree or another, whether by accident or by design, and flows from the refusal to accept these failings, taking democracy into your own hands, indeed your own body, and letting it guide you out into the town square.” When you experience “crowd power,” he says, “you are lifted out of the present and commune with the eternal crowd, the Bastille crowd.” The crowd is how popular passion opposes power.

His book contains, to be sure, a few “to be sure” moments, in which he acknowledges that crowds may not have an unstained record. But he is reluctant to categorize the more unappealing gatherings as crowds at all. And the criterion for distinguishing virtuous crowds from vicious mobs turns out to be whether they share Hancox’s politics. His position can be defended only by a series of Humpty Dumpty-like equivocations, in which words mean what the speaker wants them to mean. The January 6th protesters who stormed the Capitol—were they not a crowd as confident of taking democracy into their own hands as any other street army? Well, Hancox explains, they were not really a crowd—they were “not a spontaneous, organic outpouring of mass popular resistance, but something instigated from the very top of American political life.” Even if one shares his horror at the Trumpian rhetoric that helped to set them off, no one can doubt that the massed protesters certainly understood themselves to be an outpouring of popular resistance, and, once unleashed, acted violently, incoherently, opportunistically, sometimes with a clear purpose and often without, and all about as “organically” as you could ever want.