In the Age of Enlightenment, the Viennese doctor Franz Anton Mesmer (1734-1815) is interested in the distribution of a “ fluid In the body. Magnetism was born. Between science and charlatanism, this new discipline opens the way to hypnosis.
Who was Franz Anton Mesmer ? An adventurer ? A charlatan ? A magician ? A show hypnotist ? The historian Bruno Belhoste offers a solid biography of this doctor who lights up and specifies many poorly known points, too often romanticized or caricatured.
A patron
Bruno Belhoste uncovers the complex debates that the therapies of this man arouse about “ animal magnetism And replaces them in the political and scientific upheavals of a Europe transformed by the thinkers of the Enlightenment and shaken by the French Revolution.
Born in 1734 in Iznang on the shore of Lake Constance, Mesmer was formed in Germanic land in a monastic school and then a Jesuit college. Aimed at the ecclesiastical state, he studied theology, but changed orientation and registered at the Faculty of Law in Vienna in 1759 to finally become a doctor, with a thesis defense in 1766. This Physico-Medica Planetarum influxu dissertation is centered on the influence of stars on the human body where music and harmony play a big role, subject to atypical months that it seems and that Bruno Belhoste analyzes at length.
The thesis of Mesmer combines in an original way the Newtonian theory of gravitation extended in fact to all the properties of material bodies and the physiological model of the circulation of the nervous fluid. (p. 50)
Doctor, Mesmer exercised in Vienna from 1767 to 1778, recognized and respected (at least until 1775), especially since he married in 1768 a rich widow who brought him a Viennese palace XVIIe century for work and life. He deploys his taste for music, theater and sculpture as a real patron. The Little Opera Bastien and Bastienne De Mozart is played in his home.
Animal magnetism is still to be invented: a chapter of the book relates the chain of complicated and disparate events which lead to its conceptualization in 1775, “ more intellectual than experienced », Writes Bruno Belhoste (p. 83).
First cures
The process begins a year earlier with a founding cure, that of a young woman named Franzl, and her complex course is agitated by disputes, even scandals. After having carefully described this invention of animal magnetism, detailing its forms, its practices, its therapeutic issues and its anchoring in the theory of a “ fluid Universal, Bruno Belhoste focuses on the confrontation of this method with that of Gassner, a priest successfully practicing exorcisms that make the evils of those who submit to it.
Faced with these processes, animal magnetism, paradoxically supported on a medical positivism, becomes the slayer of superstition and a “ political weapon at the service of theAufklärung Catholic and enlightened absolutism. Mesmer wins allies there and official recognition »In Vienna who, unfortunately, does not last (p. 127).
The doctor refines his cures by adding to magnetism the use of the magnet, but also of water, music and electricity (whose discovery is still in the infancy). These care always ends with a violent and often painful crisis, considered beneficial to find a harmonious distribution of fluid in the body. Magnetism therefore seemed to be an innovative and simple to practice therapy, but Mesmer does not manage, despite everything, to prove its effectiveness.
The cure of Maria Teresia Paradis, a young prodigy musician who became blind in December 1762, was finally to bring this demonstration. On the contrary, she triggered a scandal that forced Mesmer to leave Vienna for Paris. Bruno Belhoste takes up step by step the sources of this affair and in nuance the interpretation, stressing how much the failure is to measure a painful break.
The question of therapeutic efficiency
The second part of the book focuses on the evolution of mesmerism, its public successes in particular (with the invention of the bucket), but also at its disparate reception by French doctors. Charles-Nicolas Deslon, first ordinary doctor of the Count of Artois, the king’s brother, was one of the first to engage alongside Mesmer. He puts all his relations at his service, but he cannot prevent conflicts with members of the Faculty of Medicine of Paris for theoretical reasons of interpretation of what disease is, but also and above all of power.
Animal magnetism nevertheless increased with the creation of the Harmony Society in 1783, which largely disseminates the process and its doctrine. The high price of the subscription quickly enriches Mesmer, who wins notoriety and fortune, but loses control of his discovery. The book brings many and precise lights to this society and on the thought of Mesmer as on the character himself, recusing many caricatures towards him.
Mesmer benefits shortly from his successes and his Parisian triumph is ephemeral, since in August 1784, the existence of a “ saving fluid Is denied and the ridiculed doctrine after the investigation of two commissions from one of the Academy of Sciences, the other of the Academy of Medicine. A chapter of the book reflects the course of the training of commissions, experiences and the official report.
Bruno Belhoste stresses that beyond the question of the therapeutic efficiency of animal magnetism, the issue of the controversy “ is more broadly to determine who is in the camp of the Enlightenment and who in that of obscurantism (P. 291). At the end of XVIIIe A century, it was the scholars more than doctors who fight against false sciences and superstition. The condemnation of magnetism is therefore their fact: “ Fluid does not exist and all its effects are the product of imagination and imitation “, They had concluded (p. 291).
Towards hypnosis
It is in this context that another part of the history of magnetism opens, with the birth of magnetic sleepwalking in 1784 (called “ hypnosis After 1843), whose discoverer was the Marquis de Puységur, member of the Harmony Society. This modified state of consciousness was not unknown to Mesmer, but he had considered him dangerous for his patients, preferring him the saving crises without speech. Bruno Belhoste studies the conflicts that develop between the members of the Harmony society and specifies the thought of Mesmer through some of his writings, often poorly known.
On this date, the public role of Mesmer is finished. The man continues to travel: after 1785, he went to England several times, then in the south of France with disciples, left in Switzerland in Zurich, Germany and returns to Vienna. When the French Revolution broke out, it is favorable to its principles, but, fearing for him, takes refuge in Switzerland where he remains five years. The last two chapters of his biography are very rich in details on his meetings, his political and moral conceptions, which are located far beyond magnetism.
Little interested in the scientific research of his contemporaries (since neither galvanism nor alienism aroused his comments), Mesmer reflects on a political theory based on harmony and continues to write until his death, at the age of 81, on March 5, 1815, in his retirement from Thurgovie. THE Mesmerismushis big and last work, was published a year earlier, still poorly known and of a difficult reading.
Franz Anton Mesmer is therefore both a doctor with original and sometimes innovative conceptions and a thinker of the lights confronted with the upheavals of the revolutions of the end of XVIIIe century. Thanks to rigorous work and the updating of little exploited sources, dispersed in libraries and archives, Bruno Belhoste was able to retrace the originality of this long life of scientist.