This paper compares the thinking about the notion of the sacred, in terms necessarily affected by their literary styles and modes of diffusion, and with goals at times at cross-purposes, of on the one Gustave Le Bon, Gabriel Tarde and Émile Durkheim, and on the other Stéphane Mallarmé. At the turn of the century, Mallarmé’s Divagations (1897) stage and give visual content to two hypotheses of which the least that can be said is that they are daring : if it is first necessary to understand that the divine depends on the existence of a community and must therefore be grasped as a social object, one can then go further and say that it dissolves and disappears into what Mallarmé calls “the crowd.” This key term, “la foule,” which is especially present in his essays on the arts, enables the articulation of an aesthetic, or poetic, discourse, with a reflection about society.