Das lange 18. Jahrhundert
Le long XVIIIe siècle
The Long Eighteenth Century
Herausgegeben von /dirigé par /edited by Nathalie Ferrand, Marian Füssel, Claire Gantet, Helmut Zedelmaier
Volume 2
1. Circles, Networks, Circulation j Cercles, réseaux, circulations
Bruno Belhoste: Mesmer après Mesmer :lavie posthume du fondateur du magnétisme animal (1815–1860).
Markus Meumann, Olaf Simons: Illuminatism Versus Mesmerism?
Johann Joachim Christoph Bode’sEncounters With Animal Magnetism on His Journey to Paris in the Summer of 1787
Anne Jeanson: La petite République du magnétisme. Le réseau international du Journal du Magnétisme
Bastiaan van Rijn: AProvidentialScience. The Role of Experimentation in the Efforts of George Bush (1796–1859)toHybridize Animal Magnetism and Swedenborgianism
Kapil Raj: When Scottish Medicine Met Indian Magic. Dr. JamesEsdaile’ s Mesmeric Enterprise in Mid-19th Century Calcutta 151
2. Therapeutic Uses and Issues j Usages et enjeux thérapeutiques
Yvonne Wübben: Mesmerism and Madness. Narrative Techniquesin Mesmeristic, Psychiatric and Literary Cases
Chloé Conickx: «Crises», Convulsions and Discomfort in the 1784 Mesmerism Debate
Claire Gantet: Samuel Hahnemann,oul’homéopathisation du magnétisme animal
Kaat Wils: Transnational Encounters in theHistory of Animal Magnetism in Belgium, 1830–1848
3. Political and Social Uses and Issues j Usages et enjeux politiques et sociaux
Olivier Ritz: Les origines magnétiques de la Révolution française. Mesmérisme et travail de l’opinion de 1789 à1801 251
David Armando: Le magnétisme animal et la Restauration de 1814 : l’invention d’ une continuité ..
Francisco Javier Ramón Solans: Science, Politics, and Religion. The Diffusion of Animal Magnetism in Spain, 1799–1848 295
Andrea Ceci: Animal Magnetismand Romantic Socialism. Circulations and Reinterpretations Along aPorous Border .. .. .. ...
Nicole Edelman: Le magnétisme a-t-il modifié le rapport entre les hommes et les femmes (première moitié du XIXe siècle)? 341
4. Magnetism Between Artistic Practices and LiteraryRepresentations j
Le magnétisme entre pratiques artistiques et représentations littéraires
Mélanie Traversier: «Dans le salon des crises, j’ai vu se pâmer des Marquises […]aux douxsons de l’harmonica».La diffusion de l’harmonica de verreenFrance àl’épreuve du mesmérisme.
Francesca Pagani: «Lascience des fluides impondérables ». L’imaginaire littéraire du magnétisme de Révéroni Saint-Cyr àBalzac .. .
Jürgen Barkhoff: Gazes, Attractions and the Law of Gentleness. Mesmerism in Adalbert Stifter’ s Brigitta
Emily Ogden: The Magnetic Style of Edgar
Table of Illustrations j Table des illustrations
use of drugs. Although it claimed to be aform of medicine, animal magnetism shared certain effects,including supposed cures, with exorcism, which hascontributed to its decline. Mesmer’sinterventioninthe controversy surrounding the exorcist Gassner brought him ameasure of fame and theonly academic recognition of his career, namely admission to the Munich Academy. Although his discovery aroused some interest among doctors, echoing developments in medical electricity and vitalist theories,4 the medical authorities were sceptical. After the failure of his cure for the blind pianist Maria Theresia Paradis (1759–1824), which caused ascandal in Vienna, Mesmer, now discredited, left for Paris in February 1778 to seek official recognition from the learned world. When the latter refused to support him,Mesmer turned to the public, for whom animal magnetism becameanobject of curiosity. Always in search of novelty, newspapers like the Journal de Paris were eager to lend an attentive ear.The Société de l’Harmonie (Society of Harmony), which brought together the disciples to whom Mesmer promised to reveal his secret, reached several hundred members in just afew months, despite very high membership fees.
The year 1784 marked thepeak of mesmerism, but also its decline.5 Animal magnetismhad attained such popularity that the French government became concerned. Two commissions of inquiry were set up by Louis XVI, one composed of members of the Royal Academy of Sciences and the Faculty of Medicine, the other of members of the Royal Society of Medicine. The first conducted several single-blind experiments which appeared to refute the hypothesis of a universal magnetic fluid. The final reports, published in August 1784, officially condemnedanimal magnetism, attributing its effects mainly to the action of the patients’ imaginations.6 In addition, asecret report sent to the kingwarnedof the dangers to morality;from then on, medical questions were to be mixed with moral and political considerations, ashift that would weigh heavily on the subsequent history of mesmerism.Antoine-Laurent Jussieu (1748–1836), one of the members of the second commission, separately published amore nuanced report in which he mentioned the possibility of animal heat acting in place of Mesmer ’sfluid.7 Mesmer, deeplyaffected by thecondemnation of the official authorities, but also by disagreements with his disciples, preferred to retire. After several journeys, including areturn to Paris underthe Directoire, he settled on the shores of Lake Constance, where he died in 1815. Shortly before his death, however, his research sparked new interest in Germany among doctors and philosophers, who recognized him as aprecursorof Naturphilosophie.
4 Brockliss and Jones 1997;Williams 2003;Zanetti 2017;Coquillard 2022.
5 The famous debate on mesmerism that broke out in 1784 is analyzed below by Chloé Conickx. See also Mercier-Faivre 2012.
6 Belhoste 2021;onimagination, see Vermeir 2015;Armando 2024.
7 Geneix 2022.
delay in the historical study of mesmerism in France, where it did not really begin until the 1990s or even 2000s. Ellenberger’sview of animal magnetism as a precursor to psychoanalysis carries inherent teleological risks.13 These have been overcome by more critical studies of nineteenth-century magnetism in France, such as those by Jaqueline Carroy and Nicole Edelman,14 which have helped to revive interest in animal magnetism in thehistory of psychology.15 While recent work has made it possible to take afresh look at the history of the idea and movement, the phenomena of circulationand reappropriation on aEuropean and even global scale have yet to be explored.
1. The Project
This volume, theresult of asymposium held at the University of Fribourg in October 2002, is the culmination of along process, some of the stages of which are outlined below. Since the 1980s, anumber of authors have worked on the subject of animal magnetism, particularly in the nineteenth century.16 However, it was not until the colloquium Le mesmérisme en contexte. Nouveaux regards sur un mouvement pluriel,organized by Bruno Belhoste and Nicole Edelman in 2009, that acollectiveproject began to take shape.17 Two years later, in 2011, a panel at the 13th Congress of the International Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies raised thequestion of the international spread of mesmerism.18 It was a prelude to the presentationofa research project on the Société de l’Harmonie and its networks, promoted by Bruno Belhoste.
This collaborativeproject, entitled Harmonia universalis. For aprosopography of the actors of the mesmeristmovement, 19 led in its first phase (2013–2018)
Mesmer’swritings by the historian of esotericism Robert Amadou (Mesmer 1971), the work of the historian of philosophy François Azouvi, and finally studies which, following Ellenberger, placed the concept at the source of psychoanalysis or hypnosis (Chertok and de Saussure 1973; Rausky 1977).
13 See Armando and Iacarella 2023.
14 Carroy 1991;Edelman 1995.
15 See, for example, Carroy 2012;Arnaud 2014, 251–258;Gantet 2012, 263–266;Morabito 2019.
16 Gallini 1983/2013;Carroy 1991;Edelman 1995, and Edelman (dir.) 2009;Méheust 1998; Walser 2000;Edelman, Montier and Peter 2009;Montiel 2009;Peter 2009;Goldstein 2010. For what was taking place in German, see below.
17 Belhoste and Edelman (dir.) 2015.
18 These are two sessions on La diffusion du mesmérisme:Vienne, Paris, le monde,atthe 13th Congress of the International Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies, held in Graz in July 2011.
19 Directed by Bruno Belhoste and David Armando, it was supported by the HASTEC (Histoire et Anthropologie des Savoirs, des Techniques et des Croyances)Laboratory of Excel-
Another correspondence, recently published by Isabelle Havelange, between the Marquise de Livry and her friend from ToulouseÉlisabeth Du Bourg, who was fascinated by animal magnetism, illustrates the importance of this type of source for reconstructing, almost day by day, the sequence of events surrounding mesmerism and, above all, for understanding the mechanisms and stakes involved in its spread.29 The archives of the Société de l’Harmonie d’Amiens also open up perspectives that go far beyond its local roots.30 However, the reconstruction of the network of Harmony societies remains alargely undeveloped subject. The list that can be drawn up, essentially on the basis of Nicolas Bergasse ’stestimony, needs to be verified. Recent studies have shown that it is necessary to distinguish between affiliated societies that were genuinely organized and active, and experiments carried out by individual personalities.31 Much research remains to be done on this point. The only two specific studies currently available on provincial societies, those of Toulouse and Bergerac, date from the beginning of the last century.32 Among the local branches of theSociété de l’Harmonie, the bestknown case is, surprisingly, that of the French colony of Saint-Domingue (now Haiti). There are anumber of studiesonthe introduction of mesmerism in thecolony by the Count de Chastenet (1752–1809), the younger brother of the Marquis de Puységur.These studies offer different interpretations, both of how mesmerism was integrated into the social and cultural dynamics of the colonial environment, including its relationshipwith the metropolis, and of the presence – real or imagined – of syncretic phenomena with the beliefs and practices of African slaves such as voodoo.33
Mesmer spent his life between France and Germany.34 The spread of mesmerism in Germany is an ideal casestudy for addressing thequestion of the spatial and disciplinary circulationofanimal magnetism and the issues it raised. Moreover, this arearemains less well known for our theme than France, despite its importance in the transition from mesmerism at the end of theeighteenth century to the different varieties of animal magnetism in the Romantic period, as Ellenberger has already pointed out. Let’stake alook at the history of this diffusion between 1780 and 1840, which had aprofound effect on the way it was told.35
29 Livry 2023.
30 Armando 2019, 881–882. The Amiens archives are kept in the United States at the Bakken Museum in Minneapolis.
31 Armando and Belhoste 2018, 19;Armando 2018, 135–137. It is from the studies on Servan that we began to learn more about mesmerism in Grenoble. See Kastler 2023.
32 Tournier 1911;Labroue 1913.
33 Weaver 2006;Regourd 2008;Regourd 2011;Gorelick 2013;Gainot 2018.
34 Belhoste «Ein Leben»2024.
35 See Bruno Belhoste’schapter in this volume.
of Mesmer which had alasting effect on theRomantic image historians had of him.45 The first truly historical biography of Mesmer was published in 1941 by Karl Bittel, and was followed in 1994 by that of the American historian Frank Pattie. The life of the German physician has been now thoroughly revised by Bruno Belhoste.46
Two elements in particular have attracted the attention of researchers, namely the symbiosis between animal magnetism and medicine, on the one hand, and on the other,the formulation of new knowledge about man around 1800, stimulated by mesmerism. In the first case, the mutual contributions of animal magnetism and Naturphilosophie have been the subject of several studies;47 more recently, Jürgen Barkhoff and later Yvonne Wübben have explored how animal magnetism becamea literary resource of thefirst order, integrated into Romantic efforts to reconcile nature and the subject, or to question boundaries and limits.48 In terms of new knowledge about man, HelmutZander and his team have examined mesmerism as aboundary object that may have had acritical or productive effect on religion. In their view, mesmerism marks an important stage both in the shift from the demonological to the psychological around 1800, and in theloss of control by clerical institutions over religious mattersin the nineteenth century.49
3. European and Global Circulation:AnOverview
Until recently, the affirmation and development of the theories and practices of animal magnetism, as well as the passions they aroused, seemed to concern only either Frenchmen involved in the late Enlightenment, in esoteric Freemasonry, and later hypnotism or German Romantic doctors and Naturphilosophen.50 The spatial extension of these circulations is the subject of ongoing research and dissertations, unpublished conference papers and collaborativeprojects. At this stage then, we can only draw up aprovisional and incomplete balance sheet which, in our opinion, justifies theinterest in the subject of circulationona European or even global scale. The overview that follows highlights the contributions made in this volume.
45 Kerner 1856.
46 Bittel 1941;Pattie 1994;Belhoste Mesmer 2024.
47 Poggi 2000;Montiel 2008 and 2009.
48 See the essential work done by Barkhoff (Barkhoff 1995)and that of Wübben (Wübben 2016), as well as their contributions to the present volume.
49 Sziede and Zander (dir.) 2015.
50 However, contributions on the English-speaking world are included in Schott (ed.) 1985, and the global dissemination of the debate on magnetism is reflected in bibliographical directories such as Crabtree 1988.
opposition to thespread of animal magnetism are particularly visible,59 as are the continuities between magnetism and spiritualism.60 The opening of the Inquisition’sarchives at the end of thetwentieth century also highlighted the central role played by the Curia in the development and dissemination of adoctrinal response to mesmerism,which had preoccupied it since thetrial of the impostor Cagliostroin1791.61 As the center of avast network of correspondence, Rome thus became apoint of reference for theopponentsofmagnetism. In the context of the resurgence of demonology in the nineteenth century, for instance, magnetism’sorrather(magnetic)somnambulism’sextraordinary manifestations were part of the denunciationsbythe theorist of revolutionary conspiracy.62 This did not prevent the organs of the Pontifical Curia from being the target of efforts by some Catholic magnetists who aimedtolegitimate their views, while afew theologists proposed the prodigies of somnambulists as an argument to refute materialism.63
Animal magnetism also spread to Switzerland, mainly from Lyon, where a Swiss trading colony had been active for several centuries. It was through people with linksto Lyon, such as Marguerite-Henriette Pigott and theGenevan doctor Pierre Butini, that Lavater learned of the existence of Illuminist-inspired animal magnetism. However, theonly solid study of mesmerism in Switzerland, written in 1953 by aZurich doctor, completely ignores the Lyon origins of this version of animal magnetism, which Lavater ardently spread.64 Other Swiss magnetists, such as the Bernese physician DanielLanghans (1728–1813), were trained directly by the Société de l’Harmonie in Paris.
In The Discoveryofthe Unconscious,Ellenberger had already noted the contrasting spread of animal magnetism in Britain. He mentionedthe episode of collective madness that it provoked in Scotland in 1851 but above all focused on the crucial role played by the Manchester physician James Braid (1795–1860), who was introducedtomagnetism by attending the demonstrations of Charles Lafontaine(1803–1892)and revised its theories and practices in the light of brain physiologyand phrenology. Braid is credited with coining the term «hypnosis»toreplace the term «magnetic somnambulism»; his work, and that of his
59 Armando «A Case»2023.
60 Scaramella 2021;deCeglia and Leporiere 2018.
61 Armando «Documenti»2005;Armando 2015.
62 Armando 2014.
63 Armando 2013 and 2022.
64 Milt 1953. Lisa Magnin (University of Fribourg/Université Paris 1Panthéon-Sorbonne) is currently working on athesis on magnetic practices in Switzerland, where she has recorded more than 100 cases of therapy, while Olivier Verhaegen (University of Fribourg/Université Paris 1Panthéon-Sorbonne)isdevoting his thesis to the influences of the version promoted by Naturphilosophie in Switzerland.