Charcot was a médecin des hôpitaux de Paris and headed a department at the Salpêtrière in 1862; he became a professor of pathology at the Faculty of Medicine of Paris in 1872; and the chair of a department of the diseases of the nervous system created for him at La Salpêtrière in 1882. Emmanuel Broussolle, Jacques Poirier, François Clarac, and Jean-Gaël Barbara, “Figures and Institutions of the Neurological Sciences in Paris from 1800 to 1950. Part IV: Psychiatry and Psychology,” Revue Neurologique 168, no. 4 (2012): 301–320.
In 1656, Louis XIV signed an edict establishing an institution named “l’Hôpital Général pour le Renfermement des Pauvres de Paris,” General Hospital for the Confinement of the Poor. This newly founded institution was to intern the poor, destitute, homeless and other forms of socially marginal persons, for they were considered to disturb the social order of Paris and stain its image. The Pitié was established for the children, Bicêtre was the hospice for men, and la Salpetrière for women and girls. The location of the old arsenal, sited in what was then the outskirts of Paris, because explosives could not be stored within the city limits without considerable risk, was conveniently out of sight. “Le 3 septembre 1792 des hommes ivres du Sang versé dans toutes les Prisons de Paris, allèrent à l’Hôpital de la Salpêtrière, se firent représenter les prisonnières au nombre de quarante-cinq et … les assommèrent sur le place, la femme Desrues fut une des premières victimes.” (“On September 3, 1792, men drunk on blood spilled in all the prisons of Paris, went to the Salpêtrière Hospital, asked to be presented with the forty-five (female) prisoners and … knocked them out in place, the Desrues woman was one of the first victims.”) Translation mine. Inscription on the back of “Massacre of Prostitutes at the Salpêtrière Hospital on September 3, 1792, current 13th arrondissement.” Journal des Révolutions de Paris, September 1-8, 1792.
Expression employed in Georges Didi-Huberman and J. M. Charcot. Invention of Hysteria: Charcot and the Photographic Iconography of the Salpêtrière (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003), xi.
Guy de Maupassant, “Une femme,” Gil Blas, August 16th, 1882. “Vous êtes ceci, vous êtes cela, vous êtes enfin ce que sont toutes les femmes depuis le commencement du temps. Hystérique!” (“You are this, you are that, you are at last what all women are from the beginning of time. Hysteric!”)
Olivier Walusinski, “The Girls of La Salpêtriere,” Frontiers of Neurology and Neuroscience, Hysteria: The Rise of an Enigma 35 (2014).
At the time of the founding of La Salpêtriere, madwomen were treated as beasts. They were chained, often naked, and lived in underground quarters, behind bars. Their daily provisions consisted of bread and water, and they slept on a floor covered with straw which would be changed monthly. It was not until 1792, when Dr. Pinel revolutionized the status of madness by claiming “the mad are ill”, that they started being considered patients, unchained, and offered treatment. But even from then on, there was only one bed per six inmates: two women would sleep on the floor until they were relayed by scheduled rotation. Le Bal Des Folles, Une Grande Fête à la Salpêtriere, Le Matin Derniers Télégrammes de la Nuit, March 21, 1884.
Termed “Pavillion Vitrine” by Yann Diener, psychoanalyst, in an interview for France Culture, February 15, 2020.
Julie Froudière, “Littérature et Aliénisme: Poétique Romanesque de l’Asile (1870-1914),” Université Nancy (2010), 138. Michel Caire, “Le Bal des Folles de la Salpêtriére,” interview for France Culture.
Idem: “un joyeux divertissement pour le public parisien.”
Maxime Du Camp, Paris, ses organes, ses fonctions et sa vie dans la seconde moitié du XIXème siècle 6 (Paris: Hachette, 1893–1894).
“But this… ball is like a break, a pause for all those victims of the great disease of the century, neurosis, for all those heads devoid of reason or peopled with incoherent thoughts, called the crazy. The ball is everything, a fortnight before and fifteen days after… More than one agitated madwoman calms down. More than one atrophied or softened brain seems to regain a flash of thought. What do you want, women remain women everywhere and always, at the Salpêtrière as elsewhere. You have to look pretty for the ball.” Le Bal Des Folles, Une Grande Fête à la Salpêtriere, Le Matin Derniers Télégrammes de la Nuit, March 21,1884.
“Les aliénées se donnent en spectacle dans une aliénation que le costume travestit, rendant floues les barrières entre le monde de la folie et de la raison. (“The alienées offer themselves as spectacle in an alienation that the costume travestis, blurring the boundaries between madness and reason”.) Yannick Ripa, La ronde des folles: femme, folie et enfermement au XIXe siècle, 1838-1870 (Paris: Aubier, 1986), 135–136.
Charles Féré, “Sensation and Mouvement,” Revue Philosophique 20 (1885): 337–368. Cited in Bertrand Marquer, Les Romans de la Salpêtrière: Réception d’une Scénographie Clinique: Jean-Martin Charcot dans l’Imaginaire fin-de-siècle (Genève: Droz, 2008), 130.
Charcot explained “it is a characteristic of hysterical patients to exaggerate their phenomena and they are more prone to do so when observed or admired,” Christopher G. Goetz et al., Charcot: Constructing Neurology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 173. “There were crazy girls, whose disease, called ‘hysteria,’ consisted above all in simulating it.” “Il y avait ces folles filles, don la maladie, denominéee “hysterie”, consistait surtout à la simuler.” Avril Jane, Mes Mémoires (Paris: Phébus, 2005), 437.
Docteur Frédet, “Un bal à la Salpêtrière,” Mélanges nouvelles historiques et scientifiques, Bulletin historique et scientifique de l’Auvergne (1889). Cited in Froudiére, 142.
Docteur Frédet, cited in Froudiere, 142: “Il y a là environ cent cinquante femmes, jeunes pour la plupart et dont quelques-unes sont fort belles, qui se promènent, en attendant l’appel de l’orchestre, revêtues des costumes les plus variés, les plus pittoresques, les plus frais, et dont quelques-uns, je dois le dire, sont portés avec une crânerie, une aisance tout aristocratique. On se croirait vraiment dans le monde et dans une société des plus élégantes.” (“There are about a hundred and fifty women there, young for the most part and some of whom are very beautiful, who walk around, waiting for the call of the orchestra, dressed in the most varied, the most picturesque, the freshest costumes, and some of which, I must say, are worn with a cranial, quite aristocratic ease. It really feels like being in the world and in a most elegant society.”)
Doctor Frédet, cited in Froudiere, 141: “Ce sont ceux-là, je dois le dire, qui sont les moins tranquilles, qui font le plus de bruit, qui s’agitent le plus, et qu’un spectateur impartial prendrait peut-être, à première vue, pour les habitants de la maison.” (“These are the ones, I must say, who are the least quiet, who make the most noise, who are the most agitated, and whom an impartial spectator would perhaps take, at first sight, for the inhabitants of the house.”)
Froudière, cited in Froudiere, 135: “L’imitation de la raison pour les fous, l’imitation de la folie par les invités, ne sont au fond qu’une parodie; le travestissement dévore l’identité et devient en lui-même source de folie.” (“The imitation of reason for the insane, the imitation of madness by the guests, are basically only a parody; the disguise devours the identity and becomes in itself a source of madness.”)
Charcot’s reputation on both national and international levels came from the lectures he gave on Tuesdays (less technical and aimed at general public) and his private Friday lectures, reserved for scientists and medical students which attracted Parisian intelligentsia. Freud’s assiduity is well documented, as are Charcot’s faithful followers, including cultural figures such as: the brothers Goncourt, Guy de Maupassant, Octave Mirbeau, the patient and writer Alphonse Daudet, the patient and Moulin Rouge dancer Jane Avril, the acclaimed stage actress known as Rachel, and her successor Sarah Bernhardt, who was to develop maximalist expressiveness in acting for the stage. Charcot’s public performances also became highly regarded by the national and international medical community. Sarah Bernhard visited La Salpétrière in 1884, when she was preparing the madness scene in Adrienne Lecouvreur. Marquer, Les Romans de la Salpêtrière, 129.
Didi-Huberman, 281. “He was not a brilliant speaker, and loathed grandiloquence as much as he despised clichés. He spoke slowly with impeccable diction; he did not gesture; sometimes he sat and sometimes he stood. His presentation was always remarkably clear. He gave the impression of wanting to instruct and convince.” Georges Guillain, JM Charcot (1825-1893). His life, his work (Paris, Masson et Cie, 1955), 53–54. “Ces malades sont inconnus du Professeur qui cherche à établir séance tenante le diagnostic, le pronostic et le traitement de l’affection dont ils sont atteints. — M. Charcot fait assister ainsi ses auditeurs au travail qu’il accomplit pour élucider ces diverses questions.” (“These patients are unknown to the Professor, who seeks to establish the diagnosis, prognosis and treatment of the condition from which they are affected. Mr. Charcot thus assists his auditors in the work he does to elucidate these various questions.”) MM. Blin, Charcot, and H. Colin, Lecons du mardi a la Salpetriere (Paris: Aux Bureau du Progres Medical, 1892), 2.
Charcot quoted in Didi-Huberman, 183.
Expression by Didi-Huberman.
Delboeuf, Une Visite à la Salpêtrière (Brussels: Merzbach/Falch, 1886), 49.
Such as the “ovarian compressor.”
This deceptively gain-gain situation would have indefinitely perpetuated the dynamic named hysteria. Didi-Huberman, 171–174.
Mirbeau considered the spectacle offered by the lecons a “dream” from “troubled sleep.” In Marquer’s words, it was “the erotic dream of male omnipotence.” “Voici une femme qui entre. C’est là que le rêve commence.” Octave Mirbeau, “Le siècle de Charcot,” L’Événement, May 29, 1885. “Ce rêve, c’est celui, érotique, de l’omnipotence masculine.” Marquer, Les Romans de la Salpêtrière, 7.
This painting features Dr. Jean Martin Charcot, credited to be the founder of Neurology and leading investigator of hysteria of the time; Paul Richer, medical artist; Albert Londe, chrono-photographer, Jules Claretie, journalist and author of Les Amours d’ un Interne (1881) and who later became the administrator of the Comedie Francaise; and Blanche Wittman, one of Charcot´s most famous patients. Brouillet is not known to have sat in the room to portray the event while it was unfolding. We do not know whether he composed the group portrait from individual studies of each person represented; we do not know either if Miss Wittman posed for him or if her portrait was painted based on the abundant photographic documentation which was being produced and circulated by La Salpêtrière as an institution.
Octave Mirbeau, “La névrose au village,” L’Événement, March 29, 1885.
Mirbeau’s description closely resembles Brouillet’s painting except, and tellingly, for the lighting of the space and its windows. Mirbeau underlines the controlled low light that Charcot preferred to submerge his audience in. Starting from a dark space, Charcot chose which effects to employ.
Charcot, op.cit., p.6.
Marquer, Les Romans de la Salpêtrière, 232: “Le caractère épidémique de l’hystérie, métaphore de son intrinsèque pouvoir de séduction.” (“The epidemic character of hysteria, is a metaphor of its power of seduction.”)