The Crowd in History 17301848 Author:George Rude This book is a pioneering and at the same time, definitive attempt to present "the crowd" as a living and many-sided historical phenomenon, rather than a stereotype or abstract formula. Dr. Rude asks new questions about the crowd in history and uses new documentary materials to arrive at the answers. — Dr. Rude contends that the aims, composition... more » and behavior of the crowd have varied with the type of society, industrial or pre-industrial, in which the crowd appeared. In this book, he is especially concerned with determining the nature of the crowd in England and France in the eighteenth and first half of the nineteenth centuries, before and during the early stages of the Industrial Revolution.
The book is divided into two parts; one broadly descriptive, the other broadly analytical. The first deals with the crowd in action in the French and English rural and provincial riots of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, French and English city riots, industrial disturbances, popular movements in the French Revolutions of 1789 and 1848, "Church and King" riots, and in the Chartist era in England. The second part establishes the general characteristics of the crowd through discussion of "faces in the crowd," motives and beliefs, patterns of disturbance, and the behavior of the crowd. The book concludes with an assessment of the successes and failures of the "pre-industrial" crowd. Throughout the book, Dr. Rude makes use of relevant interpretations developed by sociologists and social psychologists.« less