Criminal Crowds

Given that crowds lack a rational faculty and, when excited, act automatically to suggestion, it seems difficult to qualify them as criminal - their actions are entirely without premeditation. By that standard of law they are no more "criminals" as a stampeded of cattle. However, because of their wantonness and powers of destruction, they are often classified as such.

The violence done by crowds can be horrific. Consider the example of the governor of the Bastille, beset by an angry mob that beat him savagely, stabbed him multiple times, hanged, shot, disgorged, and then beheaded him. This behavior is typical of crowds, whose raw savagery is not sated by merely killing their victims, but in mutilating their bodies.

It's also noted that the crowd of murderers on this occasion was a rather small and heterogeneous crowd, composed of ordinary persons such as shopkeepers, clerks, masons, clerks, messengers, and the like. They later regarded their murder of the governor and several other persons without remorse, as a patriotic duty, and did not for a moment regard themselves as criminals in spite of their actions.

(EN: The rest of the chapter provides a number of additional examples, all of the same nature.)