In a sensitive story, Juliette Rigondet retraces the history of her childhood village, where people with mental disorders are taken in by families. She thus highlights a little-known experience that is at the origin of therapeutic family reception.
The name Dun-sur-Auron, a town of 4,300 inhabitants located in the Cher department, about twenty minutes from Bourges, probably doesn’t mean much to the majority of French people. Those who know that it took place there, at the dawn of the XXe century, an unprecedented experience in the history of assistance to the mentally ill, are among the historians of psychiatry who have come across his name in the archives or learned of it because they lived there.
For Juliette Rigondet, who spent part of her childhood there, Dun-sur-Auron was first a place to live, before becoming a subject of writing. If the book she devotes to it finds its origin in an intimate experience, evoked with modesty in the prologue and the epilogue, its ambition is however not autobiographical. By going back in time, the author tells the story of this village to “bring out of the shadows and oblivion the suffering people who inhabit (it) or (have) inhabited it” (p. 14).
Freedom for patients
It was in 1891 that the General Council of the Seine decided to create a “family colony for the insane” in Dun-sur-Auron to accommodate senile old women. Considered harmless, these patients, who had been interned until then, were chosen to come and settle with villagers in the countryside.
The circumstances in which this astonishing idea was born are set out in the first part of the book, which shows how the project met both the expectations of the department, faced with the overcrowding of asylums and the increasing cost of caring for the insane, and the aspirations of a few doctors, looking for an alternative method of treating mental illness. Juliette Rigondet thus brings out of oblivion the figure of Doctor Auguste Marie who, although he did not act alone, played a key role in convincing the public authorities to attempt such an experiment (pp. 19-30).
The story of the founding of the colony is followed by a description of the residents, their daily lives with their “nursers” and, more broadly, their place in the village. The second part is structured around the portraits of several patients whose medical records were chosen at random, “from among the countless cardboard boxes” stored in the mezzanine of the medical archives of the former colony (p. 60).
The third part, which focuses on the foster families, explains their motivations but also their fears, and raises the question of their status: neither parents nor nurses, the “fosterers” are nevertheless those who take care of the sick on a daily basis. The fourth part finally gives an idea of the place occupied in the village by the colony, which became a specialized hospital center in 1976.
By evoking the places that the institution and the patients invest, particularly in the context of their work or after their death, in the communal cemetery, Juliette Rigondet draws attention to the gamble that doctors and public authorities have been making for a century by placing these patients “in freedom”, in permanent contact with the population, despite the risks of accidents and abuse of which they could be victims.
Inventiveness in psychiatry
It is impossible, when reading Juliette Rigondet’s book, not to think of the fascinating essay that the psychosociologist Denise Jodelet devoted to the neighboring village of Ainay-le-Château, located in Allier. From 1901, the general council of the Seine decided to set up a second family colony there, this time for men. Taking this other village as its site, the book focuses on the social representations of madness and the relationship with the mentally ill that they reflect.
Many passages ofA village for the peacefully insane echo this work, cited in the bibliography, without however seeking to discuss it or to explore it in depth. Juliette Rigondet chooses another approach: by cross-referencing press articles, doctors’ reports and patient files with interviews conducted with psychiatrists, nurses, managers, residents and patients, the journalist mixes past and present to offer a series of insights into the history of the colony.
This description by touches constitutes for the general public a very interesting introduction to the world of family colonies. However, it leaves several questions unanswered. Can we, for example, affirm that the treatments and therapies at Dun-sur-Auron “were or are, broadly speaking, the same as in any other psychiatric institution” (p. 197)? What allows us to consider that “the assimilation of patients almost took place” in 1914-1918, or to compare scenes dating from the First World War with others observed during the Football World Cup in 1998 (p. 186)?
For researchers, the book therefore confirms the interest in undertaking large-scale work. Dun-sur-Auron and Ainay-le-Château are indeed privileged observation posts for the study of multiple phenomena. They show the porous border between the normal and the pathological and the rubbing shoulders between the learned world and the profane world in the management of madness, but also the effects of uprooting and the invention of a new family framework, or even the inventiveness in psychiatry and the reiteration of its questions.
Moreover, if these two villages were indeed “separate places”, recent developments in the history of psychiatry invite us to ask why and to what extent. To find answers to these questions, posed by the author in the last pages of the book, we must no longer observe family colonies for the insane in isolation. We could thus place Dun-sur-Auron and Ainay-le-Château in the history of family placement and alternative psychiatric systems to internment, more broadly still in the history of the relationship between disciplinary institutions and confinement, and, finally, in that of French society.