Cartes de visite from the other world: Spiritism and the discourse of Laïcisme in the early third republic

French Historical Studies

Volumn 26, Issue 1, 2003, Pages 119-153

  Monroe, John Warne ^a  

^a IOWA STATE UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 13844268030     PISSN: 00161071     EISSN: 15275493     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1215/00161071-26-1-119     Document Type: Article

References (72)

1. Xavier Ternisien, "Adoption définitive par les députés de la loi anit-sectes," Le monde, 1 June 2001
2. René Rémond, L'anticléricalisme en France de 1815 ànos jours, rev. ed. (Paris, 1999), 18
3. The most thorough previous discussion of this trial is one and a half pages in Marion Aubrée and François Laplantine, La table, le livre et les esprits: Naissance, évolution et actualité du mouvement social spirite entre France et Brésil (Paris, 1990), 89-90
4. Rémond, L'anticléricalisme, 124-27
5. Philip Nord, The Republican Moment: Struggles for Democracy in Nineteenth-Century France (Cambridge, Mass., 1995), 15-30, 212-17
6. Claude Nicolet, L'idée républicaine en France (1789-1924), essai d'histoire critique (Paris, 1982), 161
7. For the "cult of progress," see, e.g., D. G. Charlton, Secular Religions in Modern France, 1815-1870 (London, 1963). Nord (Republican Moment) makes a compelling case for the importance of the visionary mode to Third Republic republican discourse, especially in his chapters on Freemasonry, 15-30, and political culture, 190-217
8. Historians have recently begun to turn their attention to some aspects of heterodox religious innovation in nineteenth-century France. See Nicole Edelman, Voyantes, guérisseuses et visionnaires en France, 1785-1914 (Paris, 1995)
9. John Warne Monroe, "Evidence of Things Unseen: Spiritism, Occultism, and the Search for a Modern Faith in France, 1853-1925" (Ph.D. diss., Yale University, 2002)
10. and Lynn Louise Sharp, "Rational Religion, Irrational Science: Men, Women, and Belief in French Spiritism, 1853-1914" (Ph.D. diss., University of California, Irvine, 1996)
11. See Allan Kardec [Hippolyte Léon Dénizard Rivail], Le livre des esprits, contenant les principes de la doctrine spirite (1860; rpt., Paris, 1996), i
12. William Crookes and Pierre-Gaétan Leymarie, eds., Actualité, William Crookes, ses notes sur des recherches faites dans le domaine des phénomènes appelés spirites, pendant les années 1870-1873, publiées par le Quarterly, trans. Samuel Chinnery and Jane Raick (Paris, 1874), 30. These figures come from Leymarie's afterword. Other titles of Kardec's enjoyed a more modest, but still considerable, success. Le livre des médiums, for example, published three years after Le livre des esprits, was in its fourteenth edition in 1875
13. Kardec presents a reasonably complete summary of his doctrine in the introduction to Le livre des esprits, ix-xiv
14. For an excellent history of English psychical research, see Janet Oppenheim, The Other World: Spiritualism and Psychical Research in England, 1850-1914 (Cambridge, 1985)
15. Crookes and Leymarie, Actualité, 29
16. See also Revue spirite 17 (1874): 167
17. The sociologist Bertrand Méheust has produced a useful study of the debates over Mesmerism that took place in the Académie de médecine during the 1820s and 1830s. He is particularly good on the 1838 Affaire Piégaire, which marked the end of Mesmerism's career as a subject of formal academic study in France. See Bertrand Méheust, Le défi du magnétisme animal, vol. 1 of Somnambulisme et mé diumnité (Le Plessis-Robinson, 1999), 412-69
18. Revue spirite (1862): 37
19. Revue spirite 6 (1863): 85. Kardec's phrasing of this injunction is the same as that used on the official forms Second Empire nonpolitical organizations filed when announcing their incorporation
20. Kardec published Lachâtre's definition in Revue spirite 9 (1866): 31-32
21. For more on Lachâtre, see Jacqueline Lalouette, La libre pensée en France, 1848-1940 (Paris, 1997)
22. For a useful study of the Ligue de l'Enseignement, see Katherine Auspitz, The Radical Bourgeoisie: The Ligue de l'Enseignement and the Origins of the Third Republic, 1866-1885 (Cambridge, 1982)
23. for Kardec's reservations, see Revue spirite 10 (1867): 79-80, 110-18
24. Vauchez's connection with Spiritism is discussed in J. Malgras, Les pionniers du spiritisme en France (Paris, 1906), 191-97
25. Revue spirite 18 (1875): 14
26. See Malgras, Pionniers du spiritisme, 102-5
27. For a skeptical discussion of Hudson's photographs, see John Beattie's articles in Photographic News 17 (1873): 334, 371, 383, 406-7, 443-44
28. For rather less skeptical but considerably more comprehensive histories of British and American spirit photography in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, see James Coates, Photographing the Invisible: Practical Studies in Spirit Photography, Spirit Portraiture, and Other Rare but Allied Phenomena (London, 1911)
29. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, The Case for Spirit Photography (London, 1922)
30. and J. Traill Taylor, The Veil Lifted: Modern Developments in Spirit Photography (London, 1894)
31. Revue spirite 16 (1873): 127
32. For a discussion of Buguet's visit to England, and excerpts from the Spiritualist Stainton Moses's articles on Buguet - which were published in the journal Human Nature under the pseudonym "M. A. Oxon" - see Mrs. Henry Sidgwick, "On Spirit Photographs, a Reply to Mr. A. R. Wallace," Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research 7 (1891-92): 282-88
33. Another brief account of Buguet's time in London appears in Charles Maurice Davies, Mystic London; or, Phases of Occult Life in the British Metropolis (New York, 1875), 283-84
34. Davies, though skeptical, claimed that he could detect no signs of fraud by the photographer. A writer for the British Journal of Photography, similarly unconvinced but also not able to catch Buguet in fraud, noted with suspicion that the photographer's spirits had "an unmistakable French cast of features" (British Journal of Photography 21 [1874]: 346)
35. Leymarie's wife reproduces a letter from Buguet announcing his success with Crookes in Marina Leymarie, Le procès des spirites (Paris, 1874), 114
36. In Paris during this period, a set of small portrait photographs cost between twelve and thirty-five francs. Only the best studios, like that of the fashionable portraitist Nadar, charged the higher price. See Leymarie, Procès des spirites, 68
37. S. Delbos, "L'homme qui dit aux morts: Ne bougeons plus!" Petit moniteur universel, 8 May 1874, 1
38. Jules de Randon, "Une visite chez M. Buguet, protographe spirite," Gazette des étrangers, 20 Aug. 1874, 1
39. Archives de la Préfecture de Police de Paris, dr. BA 880, report dated 22 Apr. 1875, 3
40. Qtd. in Francisque Sarcey, "Ce que c'est que la foi," XIXe siècle, 23 June 1875, 2
41. For a useful introduction to French law and courtroom practice under the Third Republic, see Maurice Garçon, La justice contemporaine, 1870-1932 (Paris, 1933)
42. Charles-Alexandre Lachaud and a discussion of the emotional, verbose courtroom oratory he was famous for appear on pp. 570-71. A more complete biography appears in Pierre Larousse, Grand dictionnaire universel du XIXe siècle, vol. 10, part 1 (Geneva, 1982), 30
43. For an overview of the French press during this period, along with a guide to the political affiliations of various newspapers, see Claude Bellanger et al., eds., Histoire générale de la presse française, vol. 3 (Paris, 1972), 149-238
44. The Bonapartist newspaper Le Gaulois also included extensive commentary on the case. It tended to follow the Catholic lead by stressing the essential irrationality of human beings but also argued against the systematic repression of Spiritism. The best way to solve the problems this new belief posed, according to Le Gaulois, was to ensure that the most fanatical Spiritists were placed in insane asylums. See Le Gaulois, 19 June 1875, 3
45. See Ruth Harris, Lourdes: Body and Spirit in the Secular Age (London, 1999)
46. See Raymond Jonas, France and the Cult of the Sacred Heart: An Epic Tale for Modern Times (Berkeley, Calif, 2000), esp. 177-223
47. for a discussion of "Cujas," the police spy who reported on materialism in medical school classes, see Jan Goldstein, Console and Classify: The French Psychiatric Profession in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, 1987), 359-60
48. For more on the development of the "maladie nerveuse" as a psychological concept, see Goldstein, Console and Classify, 331-38
49. Louis Veuillot, L'univers, 20 June 1875, 1
50. Depelchin, "Chronique parisienne," Le monde, 21-22 June 1875, 3
51. L'univers, 20 June 1875, 1
52. Arthur Loth, L'univers, 6 July 1875, 1
53. Depelchin, "Chronique parisienne," 3
54. Thomas Grimm, "Le monde des esprits," Le petit journal, 19 June 1875, 1
55. Achille Dubuc, "Cour d'appel de Paris, le procès des photographies spirites," Le national, 7 Aug. 1875, 3
56. The gender composition of French Spiritism during the Second Empire and early Third Republic is difficult to determine with certainty. During this period, spirit societies were unusual among sociétés savantes for their openness to women. At the same time, however, men were considerably more likely to be society leaders; judging by published spirit communications, men also figured quite prominently in the ranks of French public and professional mediums. In the Revue spirite from 1858 to 1869, for example, about 60 percent of the mediums who published communications were male. Of course, this figure is incomplete, because it only includes mediums who succeeded in publishing; many female mediums could well have chosen to keep their dialogues with the beyond private, or have been denied the opportunity to publish their automatic writings. In her work on Spiritism, Nicole Edelman makes a very different argument, presenting "mediumism" as an overwhelmingly female concern, but she draws her evidence on this point from the 1880s and 1890s, when women became considerably more visible as professional and publishing mediums (Edelman, Voyantes, guérisseuses et visionnaires en France). In the 1860s and 1870s, the situation was quite différent: while women were undoubtedly present, so were surprising numbers of men. In this respect, then, French Spiritism differs from its Anglo-Saxon counterpart, in which women played a more prominent role. For further discussion of this issue, see Monroe, "Evidence of Things Not Seen," 177-82
57. For a useful discussion of the "pathologization of femininity," see Ruth Harris, Murders and Madness: Medicine, Law, and Society in the Fin de Siècle (Oxford, 1989), esp. 203-7
58. Cochinat, "Tribunaux, police correctionnelle de Paris," La petite presse, 19 June 1875, 1
59. For two useful discussions of this subject, see Ian Dowbiggin, Inheriting Madness: Professionalization and Psychiatric Knowledge in Nineteenth-Century France (Berkeley, Calif, 1991)
60. and Robert Nye, Crime, Madness, and Politics in Modern France: The Medical Concept of National Decline (Princeton, N.J., 1984)
61. Grimm, "Le monde des esprits," 1
62. Cochinat, "Tribunaux, police correctionnelle de Paris," 1
63. Francisque Sarcey, "Ce que c'est que la foi," XIXe siècle, 21 June 1875, 2
64. Valère, "Notes Parisiennes," Le bien public, 19 June 1875, 2
65. Auguste Vacquerie, Le rappel, 22 June 1875, 2
66. "Chronique du jour," Le charivari, 24 June 1875, 2
67. E.Villiers, "Pauvre stigmatisée," Le charivari, 23 June 1875, 1
68. "Tribunaux, le spiritisme," Le national, 19 June 1875, 4
69. L. Legas, La photographie spirite et l'analyse spectrale comparées (Paris, 1875), 16
70. and Gustave Simon, ed., Chez Victor Hugo: Les tables tournantes de Jersey (Paris, 1980), which includes numerous other transcripts
71. Auguste Vacquerie, Les miettes de l'histoire (Paris, 1863), 408
72. See Auspitz, Radical Bourgeoisie, 19, for her discussion of the importance of "organizing antagonisms" to the development of republican ideology in France