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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 February 2024
In the spring of 1784 the Marquis of Puységur, a great landowner and colonel in an artillery regiment, was called to the bedside of Victor, the son of his steward, who was suffering from pneumonia. Puységur was a follower of the new holistic medicine taught in an atmosphere of intense enthusiasm and scandal by Franz-Anton Mesmer, an Austrian doctor who had been living in Paris for several years. As a disciple of Mesmer, he intended to direct his ‘vital fluid’ onto the young patient, by means of ‘magnetic passes’, to provoke ‘spasms’ which would lead to a calm state and an improvement in health. But things did not go as anticipated. Instead of displaying the anticipated spasms, the young Victor sank into a strange state of unconsciousness which, at first sight, resembled a deep sleep. Then he revived once more and came to life with a new personality. Freed from his inhibitions, he no longer spoke his habitual dialect, but the French of aristocrats, and he had no hesitation in berating his school teacher, whose secret thoughts he appeared to be able to read. Finally, he forecast the stages by which he would be cured and the remedies which would be suitable for him. Puységur wrote down all these strange facts and the following year he published a report which caused a sensation. Soon, throughout France, somnambulists appeared and observations about their subjects gathered. From that time onwards, the incomprehensible facts apparently evident in ‘provoked’ or ‘artificial somnambulism’ and also in ‘magnetic sleep’ - such expressions were used by Puységur and his followers for the state that he had just discovered - were to give rise to huge controversy. The Marquis of Puységur triggered the development nineteenth century of a movement of reflections and practices which have generally been referred to by the expression ‘animal magnetism’, invented by Mesmer. On the eve of the Revolution and throughout the nineteenth century this movement held a real fascination for philosophers, writers, and scholars. But there has been a tendency to overlook this episode in European culture, which has ultimately become a “lost continent” in our own period.
1. "These ‘passes' were long, sweeping movements of the hands skimming the surface of the skin without actually touching it, so close that each felt the heat of the other's body". Alison Winter (1999). Mesmerized: Powers of Mind in Victorian Britain. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, p. 2.
2. Henry Ellenberger (1974). A la découverte de l'inconscient, histoire de la psychiatrie dynamique. Villeurbanne: Simep. [Original English edition: (1970), The Discovery of the Unconscious: The History and Evolution of Dynamic Psychiatry; London: Allen Lane].
3. Léon Chertok and Raymond de Saussure (1973). Naissance du psychanalyste: De Mesmer à Freud. Paris: Payot.
4. Franklin Rausky (1977). Mesmer ou la révolution thérapeutique. Paris: Payot.
5. François Azouvi (1978). Introduction et notes pour Charles de Villers. Le magnétisme amoureux. Paris: Vrin.
6. Robert Darnton (1984). La fin des Lumières: le mesmérisme et la Révolution. Librairie académique: Perrin. [Original English edition (1968): Mesmerism and the End of the Enlightenment in France.]
7. Alan Gauld (1992). A History of Hypnotism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
8. Jean-Pierre Peter (1993). Le'sommeil paradogmatique': Les découvertes et avancées du marquis de Puysegur. Chimères, 20, autumn.
9. Alison Winter (1999), op. cit.
10. Bertrand Méheust (1999). Somnambulisme et médiumnité. I. Le défi du magnétisme animal. II. Le choc des sciences psychiques. Paris: Institut d'Édition SYNTHÉLABO, coll. Les Empêcheurs de penser en rond, 1.
11. Ian Hacking (1999). Mind over Matter. New York Review of Books, 46: 5, March, p. 37, col. 2.
12. Ian Hacking (1999), op. cit.
13. Méheust devotes many pages to refuting this argument, which he calls "the argument of marching boots". Moreover, this discussion runs through his entire work, and is one of his constant themes. It is probable that the argument in question cannot be entirely grasped without having read his work.
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