The scattered crowd: Interpretations of mass society and the sacred in interwar France

Focusing on interwar France, this dissertation examines a culturally-pervasive view of the modern media and fascism as "mass" phenomena with the power both to erode individuality and introduce new forms of the sacred into secular liberal society. It traces the emergence of this interpretation in the work of numerous cultural critics and political observers: liberal and conservative elites, religious leaders, surrealists, and an avant-garde group of social theorists called the College of Sociology. Its central thesis is that these groups all connected "massification" to the "sacred," and that this basic connection shaped their otherwise disparate assessments of the media, fascism, and modern French society more generally. The dissertation thus reveals important but previously unexplored continuities among the various mainstream and avant-garde constituents of interwar French political culture.;A key argument of the dissertation is that the link between "mass" phenomena and the sacred owed its cultural origins to fin-de-siecle crowd psychology. Gustave Le Bon's 1895 Psychologie des foules, for example, fostered the belief that new audio-visual media (mainly radio and "talking" cinema) were transforming the public into a diffuse or "scattered" crowd---one whose constituents, though individuated in space, nonetheless displayed an atrophied, "feminine" mental state allegedly similar to that of an individual engulfed in a mob. My discussion of crowd psychology focuses not on its ideational or disciplinary evolution, but rather on how rhetorical tropes active within it circulated throughout interwar discourses on so-called mass phenomena. Considerable attention is devoted to how concepts like the crowd leveraged thinking about relationships such as individual to society, masculine to feminine, secular to religious. Above all, the chapters try to establish that the discursive legacy of crowd psychology generated both dominant and avant-garde constructions of modern mass society.;The methodological framework of this project construes "mass society" and "the sacred" as unstable, historically-contingent categories. Thus, the dissertation does not presume that the media or fascism were homogenizing or quasi-religious mass phenomena, but rather demonstrates how and why, in the French context, they were constituted as such.