Paris and Popular Theatre in Robert Michels La foule and the Audience in the Years of Classical Sociology

Michels’ analysis was aimed not only at la foule per se, but, above all, the audience. In his readings of the popular theatre experience and of the everyday life of the café concerts, created by the spread of the popular press as a medium, he hunted for the relevance of the audience, in whom the imi- tative faculties of social actors found an unprecedented development toward a sacralization process. If la foule could therefore be defined within the conceptual frame of Gabriel Tarde’s works