How do the tumults of History affect the psychological life of individuals ? Laure Murat explores the links between madness and politics XIXe century, taking an interest in both asylum patients, many of whom thought they were Napoleon, and the medical and political elites who tried to exclude or stigmatize them.
No one escapes history and especially not the madness of its wildest events. Each crisis leads to a reaction of the mind and its destabilization, sometimes to the point of unreason, as Laure Murat magnificently proves in her latest book. If we go crazy because of God, money or love, we also become crazy under the pressure of “ crises » historical, and how we delirious History ? How is it developed and articulated, since the end of the XVIIIe century and until 1871, the discourse between the ideological and the pathological ? What happened between the Revolution and the return to order, between 1789 and 1871 ?
The period studied is not lacking in chaos. Starting with the moment when heads fall under the guillotine, an infernal machine, invented at the time when “ psychiatry ”, which aims to take care of those who “ lose their minds » while dissociating. At the time when the law abolished the lettres de cachet, which authorized the authorities to imprison any person without the intervention of a doctor or judge, a science was invented which quickly recognized in the Revolution one of the causes of the entry into madness ; in the Terror, a good reason to lose one’s reason, in the extremely violent spectacle of decapitation, a reason to take refuge in another reality, necessarily less painful. Dumas, Hugo and others will speak of the unreason of history, hardly less than among those whose reason succumbs.
Asylum policy
Laure Murat takes up the registers of medical observations from the large asylums in the Seine department, questions clinical sources, to analyze the reasons for admission, the diagnoses about those whose story was the source of inspiration , which led them to frequent the porous areas of “ madness “. She warns from the outset: rebels have often been given psychiatric designations reserved for the mad. Still close to us, the “ crazy people of the May Square », who met every week to go around in circles in Buenos Aires, were none other than mothers nicknamed thus by the military junta which had kidnapped their children. Who exactly is the madman? ? The definition changes depending on situations where the political question is often involved. Likewise, the places serve in turn and sometimes at the same time as a health center, charity and political prison. Thus, from the Revolution to the July Monarchy, the madman and the opponent of the regime, the alienist who protects it and the collaborator of the power in place, capable in passing of saving prisoners of conscience, are confused. The asylum is also a theater that responds to the spectacle of the street and Sade enters the corpus, in his own way.
We knew, but not necessarily as well as that, the episode of his second incarceration in Charenton, when he was sent back there in 1803, while the asylum had changed considerably, under the reign of the worldly philanthropist, François Simonnet de Coulmier. The latter will reign in the fantasy of his absolute power, without being accountable to anyone, without internal regulations and without a board of directors. Former abbot of the Premonstratensians, he is, like Sade, a supporter of the Revolution, libertine and great theater lover, to the point of entrusting the writer with the direction of the plays which are performed at the asylum, giving the madmen their freedom for a moment. to change your life. He will fall when his abuses of power, including sexual ones – on the internees – are denounced by Royer-Collard, who embodies the moralist side of the regime by proposing the suppression of any form of catharsis through games or dancing, for the benefit of the sole work: sewing workshops for women and agriculture for men.
If history is not sparing in theatrical stagings, it is also not lacking in models for anyone who would like to capture its eccentric characters, Napoleon, for example: we count the arrival of five emperors in 1818 in Charenton (on 92 patients) ; then, when the ashes returned, in December 1840, there were fourteen in Bicêtre, while madness of grandeur or monomania were seriously analyzed in the chapter of social ills, in the same way as melancholy. At least in part, Laure Murat tells us, we will have to take these recyclings of grandeur as the symptoms and responses of a society where money and boredom triumph, while dreams of revolution are collapsed and romanticism tries by all means to re-enchant a world without grandeur.
Say madness
Without prosecution, it gives a voice to everyone but also to those who are internalized to the extent that the sources allow it. Yes, mad people have an opinion on politics, just as politicians (and psychiatrists) have a discourse on madness, but the latter ultimately leave more traces than the former, and it is through them that the We know the internees, through their short presentation of the situation, as quick as the doctors’ visits.
Laure Murat strives to make us better acquainted with the main protagonists: Philippe Pinel, the man of the Enlightenment, the enlightened stutterer, good writer, specialist in hygiene and nosology, combining politics and psychiatry by showing that social regimes have a impact on the human body ; freedom and progress on mental balance, even if revolutionary episodes can have unfortunate consequences on people, and even on himself, who witnesses the death of the king crying. Full of contradictions, he builds the psychiatric edifice by describing what madness is, a disease of sensitivity whose causes must be sought in the throes of existence: mourning, despair, love of glory, excess in all genre, especially of religious study or devotion. In doing so, he moves from the Kantian regime, where madness is entirely Other than reason, to the Hegelian regime, where it becomes a simple disturbance of the mind, comparable to any illness of the body. His method of treating her is less liberal but his “ imposing device of terror », in Bicêtre, in a spirit of radical reform, is still better than the hell before the Revolution. Obsessed with the new order, he practices a largely empirical medicine and even a trick, which consists of entering into the patient’s delirium, to prove him right, in some ways. His student Jean-Étienne-Dominique Esquirol, another liberal, former ecclesiastic who became a doctor, placed at the head of the Salpêtrière, will have less inspiration when he treated Théroigne de Méricourt for ten years, a sulphurous revolutionary who is said to have sunk into the unreason. He makes her the prototype where revolutionary violence, animality and madness merge: predisposed to mental illness, the events of the Revolution would have suspended her dementia before the stability of the Directory sent her back to her disorder.
Democratic dementia
The Revolution of 1848 will provoke the analyzes of doctors also convinced that political events and commotions have an influence on “ the development of madness » (Jacques-Étienne Belhomme), even though admission figures drop during events and then rise again. Baillarger or Morel will impose their views, the first thinking that political events form a sort of happy diversion for those who are threatened by madness. More numerous, however, are those who see social movements as agents of disruption for all and even detonators. Better, they consider the programs as crazy objects and the protest leaders as “ stamped », suffering from morbus democraticus. For 1848, the Trélats, Blanqui and Barbès were thus treated as madmen, and even by Tocqueville. Lamartine sums up the situation: “ It was the madness of freedom », and we should add, the egalitarian passion, the democratic and republican dementia. In 1850 the thesis of the German Carl Theodor Groddeck was translated: “ Of the democratic disease, a new species of madness », and, a little later, Brierre de Boismont will ask for asylums for the Communards where class boundaries are harshly displayed: at Bicêtre and Salpêtrière, 60 % of internees come from the poor, sometimes taking the asylum as a refuge from poverty and the danger of remaining destitute. These communards will have the choice between the status of criminal or madman, in both cases good for internment, without the discussion focusing for a single moment on their political motivations. The one who is considering it is Vallès, elected representative of the Commune and founder of Cry of the peoplewho saw his friend the artist André Gill sink into madness and die in Charenton in 1885: it was because he had fled political commitment for art, instead of devoting himself to “ the assault on the bastilles “, of the “ madhouses » like “ houses of kings “.
Prior work existed on which Laure Murat can rely, paying homage to them: those of Foucault of course, or that of Jan Goldstein, but this book is essential and unique, including in its way of working, starting from the archive above all, with new eyes. We knew the author’s works, including The House of Doctor Blanchewho had inured her to psychiatric literature. In all her books, she had already demonstrated her taste for archives, with her “ immense and paltry joys “, and those who are used in this latest opus are among the driest and most mechanical, she tells us, classifying and counting them as much as possible. Without dramatization (in this, far from Michelet and Foucault), without stigmatization of the madman or his doctor, it offers us a complex and living picture of a double rhetorical delirium, of the man who speaks of his madness and of the one who records it, the alienist ; with behind the texts that remain – where every sign counts, every comma and every erasure – entire lives in the chaos of history. Without emphasis, she thus recounts the fate of the vagabonds, the anonymous and the revolutionaries considered as demented of a people of whom Freud said that they were “ the people of psychic epidemics, of historical mass convulsions “. This means that asylum in France targets a large population.
Laure Murat is interested in past history but her book focuses on the present, which we should also judge in terms of the way we treat mad people. However, a sinister contemporary picture, in a postamble where we do not mince our words: the return to security, the stigmatization of patients rather than their appropriate care, the imperative of economic return served by the pharmaceutical industry, the acceleration widespread, which condemns slow and patient work. With, finally, this terrible observation: the anti-psychiatric movement, in the wake of 1968, condemned – without obviously wanting to – asylums by opening the path into which the liberal economy rushed, which tends to liquidate care for profit. of the MCQbehavioral screening “ abnormal “, from kindergarten, aggressive medication, and all with almost no records, for fear of legal proceedings, since the files were opened to the patients’ families. Regaining language with madness is more difficult than declaring it inaudible. The author says she did not emerge from such a trip unscathed: neither did we.