CRIMINAL FESTIVALS. 763 



aggregate of many men presents some characteristics that are not 

 found in the unities that compose it.* The psychology of a multi- 

 tude of men is a special psychology ; for the passions, the inclina- 

 tions, and the thoughts of the individuals who compose it are com- 

 bined in such a way that the conduct of a man mixed with a crowd 

 will be quite different from that which he would observe if he 

 were alone. The phenomenon we are studying is the effect of a 

 similar difference between the characters of an aggregate of men 

 and the characters of its units. A crowd of men is always more 

 afraid of the new, more conservative, than are the men who com- 

 pose it. For that reason a usage is more stable and less subject 

 to variation in proportion to the number of men who observe it. 

 The larger the multitude grows the more intense does its misone- 

 ism (hatred of novelty) become. 



Every one can observe that it is easy for a man to change his 

 individual habits, but that the habits of a family, being more 

 fixed, are changed with greater difficulty. In fact, in some fam- 

 ilies there are ways that are preserved for two or three gen- 

 erations. But fixed as family customs are, they are unstable 

 enough if we compare them to the usages of large aggregates, 

 to the whole population of a city, for example. In all Europe, 

 in Italy, France, and Germany some of the cities still cele- 

 brate the festivals of the middle ages, occasionally even Ro- 

 man festivals, which plunge a whole population every year into 

 the past again. The costumes, the banners, and the signals, every- 

 thing in these festivals is old, and no one would be satisfied to 

 use anything modern in them, for all their beauty would then 

 seem to vanish. We find yet more superannuated usages when 

 we consider still larger human aggregates ; for while in the usages 

 of a city we find survivals of its history, in the usages com- 

 mon to all civilized men we find survivals of the ancient primitive 

 life, customs which appertain to the savage period. Of such, for 

 example, is the worship of ancestors ; for that exists no longer 

 among peoples of high civilization, and rites relating to it have 

 been nearly entirely abandoned. Yet these rites, which exist no 

 longer in individual practice, still survive as a general usage 

 among all Roman Catholic peoples, for the ceremony of the day 

 of the dead is nothing else than a survival from the ancient 

 ancestral religion. On that day all turn back in a mass to 

 perform acts relating to that religion visiting of the graves, re- 

 newing of the floral crowns, etc. like those we find in use among 

 savage tribes, although no thought or notion of the worship of 

 ancestors is left among us. What does not exist as an individual 

 practice still survives as a general usage. 



* La Foule criminelle, Paris, 1892. 



