Little Demon in the City of Light: A True Story of Murder and Mesmerism in Belle Epoque Paris (8 page)

A chief bone of contention was the matter of who among the general population was hypnotizable: The Paris school, associated with the Salpêtrière Hospital, believed hypnosis was a form of neurosis and hysterics were the most susceptible to hypnosis; evidence of the hysteric’s hypnotic state was her neuromuscular reactions that occurred in a set pattern of contractions, anesthesia, and catalepsy.

The Nancy experts, based at the University of Nancy, had a broader interpretation; in their view, nearly anyone could be placed into a hypnotic state through the power of suggestion. Hypnosis had
nothing to do with the narrowly defined sequence of physical reactions so crucial to the Salpêtrière school. The Nancy school’s emphasis on suggestion implied that hypnosis was grounded in psychology rather than in neurology.

The two sides were already at war long before they gathered for the conference. Joseph Delbœuf, a Belgian philosopher and psychologist, questioned the scientific methods at the Salpêtrière, a grave charge given the towering authority of Charcot. The basis of the challenge was that the hypnotic behavior that supported the Paris school’s conclusions—the pattern of muscular reactions—was nearly impossible to replicate outside the walls of the Salpêtrière Hospital. Delbœuf charged that what took place at the Salpêtrière was at best questionable, at worst outright fakery.

On a visit to the Salpêtrière, Delbœuf had watched two disciples of Charcot work with one of the star patients, a hysteric named Blanche Wittman, who obviously took pleasure in satisfying whatever the doctors wished to prove. Delbœuf concluded that her eagerness to provide the doctors with the behavior they sought tainted the credibility of the Salpêtrière research.

Challenging the Paris scientific community was a tricky matter. The majesty of French science resided in Paris, and any opposition to the capital’s leadership was dismissed out of hand and often met with ridicule and disdain. But the hypnosis theories of the Nancy school were making inroads by the force of their own truths. Indeed, at several sessions of the congress, suggestion held sway as a key in understanding hypnosis. Some scholars believed the gathering was a turning point in the battle between the Salpêtrière and Nancy schools. “It is a remarkable fact that this Congress was dominated by Bernheim and the Nancy School,” Henri F. Ellenberger wrote some years later in
The Discovery of the Unconscious.

It was as if a fuse had been lit and was burning toward the explosive moment when Liégeois took the stage to present the Nancy views on crime and hypnosis in front of a restive army of Salpêtrière disciples poised to defend their positions.

Gilles de la Tourette was the commander of the Salpêtrière troops. In anticipation of Liégeois’s appearance, he had stationed in the audience, young doctors and interns who were awaiting his order to attack.

The enmity between Liégeois and Gilles de la Tourette was both
scholarly and personal. Gilles de la Tourette had reviled Liégeois for at least five years, ever since the law professor delivered his first major report on crime and hypnosis to the Academy of Moral and Political Sciences in 1884 and followed it up with an important book on the subject. Gilles de la Tourette had fired back with a book of his own, and now both men considered themselves preeminent scholars on crime and hypnosis and, like politicians on opposite sides of an issue, agreed on almost nothing. Although their books explored similar avenues of hypnosis and crime—cases of rape and experiments in simulated attacks and poisonings—they stood at odds on two key issues. Since Liégeois believed in the power of suggestion, he argued that almost anyone could be hypnotized and therefore could commit a crime under hypnosis, a view that implied a person’s morality was malleable—under hypnosis, even the most upright citizen could be coerced into committing a crime. To Gilles de la Tourette, these were absurd propositions. In line with Charcot, he asserted that only people with severe hysterical neuroses could succumb to hypnosis and therefore the population of possible hypnotic criminals was limited; moreover, he and Charcot insisted that morality was fixed and could not be manipulated by a hypnotist.

The combatants were striking in their physical differences. Gilles de la Tourette was a neurologist at the Salpêtrière who had found a place in medical history for his work on a disorder characterized by motor and vocal tics, which has come to be known as Tourette’s syndrome. He was an unattractive, argumentative man with skeletal cheekbones and heavy-lidded eyes. Lacking in social graces, he was loud and impulsive, foul to anyone who dared contradict him. He had no illusions about how he came across, describing himself as
“ugly as a louse, but very intelligent.”

Liégeois had the demeanor of an absentminded professor; he wore tiny, wire-rimmed spectacles, and his pants pockets were stuffed with notes. He was famous for boring his audiences, partly because his research was so voluminous and his recitation so detailed, but also because he was arrogant in supposing that his listeners hung on his every word.

Stepping to the podium on the final day of the congress, he opened by admitting to the delegates that he was undertaking a
“perilous task” in speaking before them, but the risk was a worthy one. “Of all
the questions submitted to the Congress,” he told the amphitheater, “there are few as important as the reports” on crime and hypnotism.

And with that, he gave himself license to drone on as long as he wished. Launching into his presentation, he said,
“In this case, the only thing that can be done, gentlemen, is a complete history of the subject.” Then he strolled leisurely through the dusty archives of his own work until he finally came to his point: that his research proved an individual was capable of committing a serious crime in a hypnotized state. He’d seen it again and again in his laboratory. He had repeatedly produced what he described as
“experimental crimes.”

Crucial to his argument was that the hypnotized individual committed the crime without consciousness and therefore without responsibility. The hypnotized person was an automaton acting without free will under the command of the hypnotist. Liégeois told the audience that the spiritual father of the Nancy movement, the country doctor Ambroise-Auguste Liébeault, had confirmed his conclusions.
“I am convinced as much as you, my dear friend,” Liébeault wrote to Liégeois, “that certain somnambules will commit criminal acts by hypnotic suggestion and will do so irresistibly while asleep or while awake afterward—and therefore without any responsibility. They go to their goal the way a rock falls to earth.”

Liégeois had argued for years that the guilty party was not the person who committed the crime but rather the hypnotist who instigated it. If the act was undertaken without consciousness, if the actor was indeed an automaton, then the hypnotist—the author of the suggestion—should be punished.

But how does one root out the author of the crime? It would be very difficult to do in some cases, Liégeois warned. If the hypnotist were crafty, he would ensure that his automaton had no recollection. The hypnotist would suggest to his subject that after the fact he would have total amnesia about the planning of the crime. It would simply never occur to the innocent perpetrator that the hypnotist had planted the crime in his mind. This, Liégeois concluded, made it nearly impossible to locate and punish the author of the criminal suggestion.

From his spot in the audience, Gilles de la Tourette listened, his fuse burning. Finally, unable to control himself, he shot to his feet and in a voice laced with contempt denounced Liégeois for speaking
on medical matters that were beyond his qualifications as a mere lawyer. Gilles de la Tourette’s cronies—the interns and medical students he’d planted in the audience—broke into wild applause. Then he ridiculed Liégeois’s history of hypnotism and crime, and the gang erupted again.

Delbœuf was astonished by the rudeness of the Salpêtrière contingent, although he was awed by the eloquence of Gilles de la Tourette’s harangue.
“I had never heard someone use sarcasm with such mastery, such volubility, such aplomb,” he recalled.

Delbœuf had seen the conspiracy forming around him. “It comprised a crowd of young men, students of M. de la Tourette, without doubt,” he wrote. “A young man who was in front of me had to have been one of the leaders because at each instant during the lecture of M. Liégeois he turned toward his master and made signs of collusion.”

Now Gilles de la Tourette attacked Liégeois for unnecessarily stirring up the public’s darkest fears. If, as Liégeois contended, hypnotists can turn anyone into an automaton, then a cunning devil could put the entire society under his spell. A political adventurer could stir up mass unrest.
“You cannot look at someone too rigidly across the table or on a train for fear of letting yourself be hypnotized,” Gilles de la Tourette scoffed. And then what? First one person, then another, and before you know it, the entire population is marching like an army of zombies in support of its hypnotic new leader. The country falls into the grip of a despot! At that, the Salpêtrière soldiers hooted and stamped their feet. They cried: “
Vive
Boulanger!”

It was only months earlier that a nightmarish coup had nearly befallen the nation. Georges Boulanger, a rugged general on horseback, had won the hearts of the masses prancing about the streets atop his black stallion. He was the strong hand the country needed at a time of government weakness, rampant crime, and immorality. His admirers wanted him to seek a vacant Paris seat in the nation’s legislative assembly known as the Chamber of Deputies. The newspapers sang his praises. His image was plastered everywhere. A nation hungry for renewal took pride in the powerful general. When he was elected in a landslide in January 1889, his supporters wanted more: A mob took to the streets urging Boulanger to march on the Élysée presidential palace and claim it as his own. The masses were as if mesmerized, and the nation stood on the edge of an uprising. The general,
watching events from his headquarters at the restaurant Durand on the place de la Madeleine, went to the balcony to greet his supporters and heard the crowd chanting for him to seize power:
“À l’Élysée! À l’Élysée!”
Someone cried: “Say the word,
mon général
, and we march. Give the order!”

At the Élysée, President Sadi Carnot sat with his cabinet ministers in a state of gloom, worried that they were presiding over the death of the Republic. If Boulanger chose to seize power, there was little they could do to stop him. Most of the police force—including the few guards at the palace—were Boulangists. So were the Republican Guard and the army. There was nothing the ministers could do but await Boulanger’s next move.

But the general didn’t act. He was of two minds: He lusted for absolute power but also adored the companionship of his mistress, the Vicomtesse de Bonnemains, a striking beauty with long blond hair and sensuous lips who was about twenty years his junior. The vicomtesse, who was waiting in a private room at the restaurant, had a grip on the general that was more powerful than the cries of
“Vive
Boulanger!” Leaving his supporters, Boulanger went to join her. Later she would claim she gave him no advice. But after some time alone together Boulanger emerged with her, and the couple went downstairs and into the street. They climbed into a carriage, and the horses moved slowly through the crowd. The couple didn’t answer the public outcry; the carriage didn’t roll on to the Élysée. Boulanger and his mistress went to the apartment they shared as illicit lovers on the rue du Faubourg-Saint-Honoré and went to bed.

That night, Boulanger chose his mistress over the Republic. But his supporters didn’t give up hope. Days passed with Parisians awaiting Boulanger’s decision. Soon a month had elapsed. March arrived and still no action from the general. The government, sensing his hesitation, saw an opening and considered putting Boulanger on trial for plotting to overthrow the Republic. But turning on the general raised a host of delicate issues. His arrest could send his supporters back into the streets, and the result could be exactly the opposite of the intent—instead of quashing the threat, the action could precipitate a revolution that would sweep Boulanger into power.

In its impotence, the government instead chose to spread rumors that it was on the verge of arresting the general. For his part, Boulanger
seemed paralyzed. Tipped off to his possible indictment, he lost his will. On April Fool’s day 1889, he fled to Belgium with the lovely Vicomtesse de Bonnemains. The threat to the nation was over. Two years later so was his romance. The vicomtesse became ill—the diagnosis was tuberculosis and cancer of the stomach—and on July 16, 1891, she died at age thirty-five. Two and a half months after her death, the general visited her grave, sat with his back against her tombstone, put a revolver to his temple, and shot a bullet into his brain.

The cries of “
Vive
Boulanger!” at the congress were meant to highlight the lingering fears of a mass uprising at the hands of a hypnotic leader. But there was something else inherent in the outburst: It was meant to scorn Liégeois and put his theories in the darkest light. If everyone was hypnotizable, as Liégeois insisted, then the nation had good reason to fear a Boulanger or any similar opportunist who might follow him. The young doctors and interns pounding their feet and roaring seemed intent on literally stamping out the fear.

Delbœuf, white-bearded and balding, had never seen such a spectacle among intellectuals.
“It was the noisiest occasion that I have ever been to,” he recalled. “I could not imagine that these scholars belonged to France which had a reputation for politeness—no, never in my life.”

Gilles de la Tourette wasn’t finished, and he moved in for the final attack. He demanded proof of the absurd proposition that a person would kill at the command of a hypnotist.
“Back in 1887 I asked M. Liégeois to cite me a single case of crime by suggestion,” he reminded the audience. And what was Liégeois’s reply? He admitted that the only way he could quiet his critics was for him to deliver not only a poor soul who was ordered to murder under hypnosis but the cadaver as well—and that was something he knew he simply could not do.