At a time when parliamentary channels broadcast heated debates within the Nationwide Meeting, whilst consensus, in a politically torn France, turns out an increasingly more inaccessible horizon, theorists and playwrights at the eve of the French Revolution requested whether or not and the way a majority opinion may just emerge from a crowd of heterogeneous people. The closed environments that make up theaters have been an acceptable laboratory for fascinated with emotional contagion and the emergence of collective intelligence.
The efficiency halls of seventeenth and 18th century France are very other from what we’re used to. Huge chandeliers vaguely light up the level and the room, other folks input and go out all the way through the efficiency, and above all, greater than 80% of the target market is status, within the large house this is situated under the level and which we name the parterre.
This all-male target market is especially boisterous. They whistle, yawn, scream, name out to one another, assault the actors, interrupt the efficiency. Because of this, they have been ceaselessly and harshly criticized, as an example in 1780, in some of the greatest newspapers of the time, the place the target market was once in comparison to “a multitude of young people, mostly crazy, tumultuously on muddy feet”: the ft have been “muddy”, as a result of those spectators, even if with numerous sociological profiles, that have been the principle profiles, weren’t contributors of the hotel.
Plenty of promise
On the other hand, since the second one part of the 18th century, sure playwrights and philosophers have increasingly more observed this multitude as filled with promise: the commotion it produced would, in essence, constitute an power that we simply wish to understand how to channel. In 1777, Marmontel, a person of letters just about the Enlightenment motion, was once amazed on the energy contained within the demonstrations of those assembled spectators:
“What the common emotion of a gathered and bustling crowd adds to a particular emotion cannot be calculated: imagine five hundred mirrors reflecting to each other the light they reflect, or five hundred echoing the same sound.”
It’s because, in line with him, the instance is contagious: we snort to be observed giggling, we cry to be observed crying, we yawn to be observed giggling. Feelings multiply and, above all, have a tendency to converge jointly in opposition to the expression of a unmarried emotion.
Theater flooring thus develop into laboratories from which the prerequisites for the emergence of consensus are regarded as. As a result of within the pleasure of a theater consultation, when people are disturbing, when they’re ceaselessly too scorching and are troubled by means of an excessively uncomfortable place, a robust emotion is conveyed.
On the antipodes of chilly reasoning, a in reality emotional collective intelligence would then emerge, because of the circulate of power that eludes essentially the most rational a part of reason why. But, in line with Marmontello, the sort of contagion of feelings provokes a judgment of style this is as dazzling as it’s only: “We are surprised to see with what unanimous and sudden vivacity all the features of fineness, finesse, greatness of soul and heroism (…) (…) (are) seized in an instant by five hundred men in the same way, at least, and in the same way, with the weakest; (…) they are seen by a class of men, each of whom separately seems to suspect nothing of this.”
It resonates with the physics of the time
The valorization of this distinctive collective emotion is in large part in response to fashionable electrical energy paintings. Or relatively, on what we then known as electrical fluid, which the physicists Jean-Antoine Nollet and Francois Boisier de Sauvage, amongst others, confirmed to be very similar to nerve fluid. An object that receives an electrical surprise turns into {an electrical} supply itself, and in flip is more likely to electrify others.
This conductivity is the principle function of electrical energy.
From a bodily phenomenon to a metaphor, it’s only one step and electrical energy is invited to mark the unanimity that happens a number of the audience. Marmontel states that “especially in the parterre, and in the standing parterre, this kind of electricity is sudden, strong and quick.”
Playwright Louis-Sebastien Mercier notes with unhappiness, after the Comédie Française put in seats within the pit and the target market was once compelled to take a seat down, that “the electricity has been cut off, since the benches no longer allow heads to touch and mingle.”
Representation taken from an Essay at the Electrical energy of Our bodies, by means of Mr. Abbe Nollet, of the Royal Academy of Sciences. 2d version, 1765. BNF Gallica
Marmontel and Mercier didn’t invent this symbol of a crowd of people seized by means of the similar impulse. They draw it from scenes of collective electrification which have been an actual social phenomenon for a number of many years. The scientist Pierre van Mussenbreck become well-known via an experiment referred to as the “Leyden bottle”, a capacitor that made it imaginable to ship a normal and fast commotion in a series of people retaining arms: an electrical liquid, manifesting itself at the floor by means of sparks, is transmitted throughout the organism and connects the other our bodies in combination. After Abbe Nolet, Joseph Priestley, who carried out equivalent experiments the place a bunch of people shaped a type of circle, famous that “it is often very amusing to see them start at the same moment.”
An implausible superorganism
The invention, throughout the electric fashion, of this collective intelligence in theaters has political implications. If, in line with this fashion, the spectators within the target market, renouncing their particular person bodily convenience, can hope to create a real neighborhood, delicate and united by means of the circulate of the similar fluid in it, this is because the perspective of the spectator, status or sitting, in addition to the distance through which it’s situated, open or closed, divulge the power of this target market to represent an actual frame politic and constitute the folk.
Los angeles Petite Loge (1776 or 1779), by means of Charles-Emmanuel Patas (1744-1802), The 3rd set of prints for use within the historical past of style and dress in 18th-century France (1783), engraving by means of Jean-Michel Moreau, referred to as Moreau the More youthful. BNF Gallica.
Spectators status within the pit are contrasted with spectators sitting within the packing containers: those crowded seats shape small cells that separate and divide the target market, whilst the spectators within the pit are with each and every different in a big house designed to house all of them on the similar time.
Electrical energy spreading homogeneously between all our bodies, the ground is not observed as a heterogeneous juxtaposition of spectators, however as a coherent frame that thinks and feels in a single motion. The holistic nature of this proposition, which needs the entire to be greater than the sum of its portions, makes transparent how the fashion promoted by means of Marmontel and Mercier is an idealized projection of society.
Experiment with a bottle Leiden, Louis-Sebastien Jacques de Malzet, In Summary de l’electricite ou Ektrait ekperimental et theoretique des Phenomena Electrikues, Vienne, J. T. de Trattnern, (1775), plate V, fig. 36. CNUM/CNAM
On the first light of the French Revolution, the tumult of a disorderly crowd might be observed as an power able to growing actual political concord out of a relative consensus, which was once constructed in opposition to any other workforce. Whilst the political context was once already inevitably growing French divisions, the theater offered itself as a laboratory the place a social fiction, in response to an irrational collective intelligence, might be embodied in motion, in a restricted house. This instinct “connects” (inter-legere), actually, the contributors of the meeting bathed in electrical fluid, except the remaining, those that don’t occupy the ground and who so visibly include the hierarchies and inequalities of the Ancien Regime.
This superorganism, which illustrates the enlightened judgment of the multitude, was once indubitably extra imagined than actual. However he had the advantage of attempting for some time to constitute the emergence of a bunch whose political cohesion and legitimacy had to be confirmed.
This newsletter was once revealed as a part of the Pageant of Science (which takes position from 3 to 13 October 2025), partnered by means of The Dialog France. This re-creation makes a speciality of the subject of “Intelligence(s)”. In finding the entire occasions to your area at the Fetedelascience.fr web site.
