AN ENLIGHTENING READ
Mesmerism and the End of the Enlightenment in France – Robert Darnton
Author Robert Darnton’s academic study of mesmerism’s involvement in 18th Century rationalism and the French Revolution through to its demise amidst the rise of the Romantic era is an enlightening – if somewhat involved – read.
I studied the French Revolution during my A-Levels and revisited the topic in my late 20s after a couple of works of fiction piqued my interest again. I wish I’d have had a refresher course on the Revolution before reading this book, as I struggled to map the politics of mesmerism against the bigger picture of the time. The same was true for the players, in terms of appreciating how the likes of Danton, Robespierre, and Lafayette interacted (literally or just contextually) with Mesmer and his acolytes.
That aside, the book provides invaluable context and richness in understanding mesmerism and its fate against the geopolitical and social backdrops of this turbulent and terror-ridden time. That’s because most books about Mesmer and mesmerism fall into three categories. Firstly, there are biographies about Mesmer, the man, which focus on him in isolation, invariably painting him as a misunderstood and complex person who was right about some things but wrong about most (or simply writing him off as a cynical, loopy charlatan). Then there are books about mesmerism as a phenomenon, and which bring Mesmer’s acolytes, such as Puységur, to the fore. But these still tend to focus only on mesmerism and a few key figures, ignoring the wider geopolitical, social, and cultural influences. Finally, there are, of course, plenty of contemporary books, pamphlets, and works written by mesmerists – all biased, self-involved, flawed, and, frankly, pretty bonkers.
Irrespective of your interests in the French Revolution and the history of science, Darnton’s study is revelatory for those of us used to Mesmer- and mesmerism-centric tellings of the man and the phenomenon.
For instance, there are too many names of mesmerists to mention that I hadn’t come across before; but suffice to say Puségur gets a disproportionate amount of attention in most other tellings, thanks to his discovery of somnambulism rather than in reflection of his role at the time. With that wider network in mind, portrayals of Mesmer as a lone madman penning letters to Marie Antoinette to implore her to his cause seem misrepresentative – many mesmerists organised to lobby, scribbling away to powerful figures to argue in favour of their ’science’ around the time of the Royal Commission.
Indeed, more interesting still are the factions that mesmerists divided into – and the acrimony that ensued between them. This is largely because of how quickly mesmerism descended into magic; its amateur-scientist-practitioners quickly lost interest in such banalities as pain relief in favour of psychic somnambulism and searches for astral intelligence. Many of these esoteric factions seem to have been omitted from histories of Mesmer and mesmerism because they slunk into Spiritualism, martinism, and Swedenborgianism rather than the credibility of Braid’s hypnotism.
I knew Mesmer and his acolytes hoped to prove mesmerism a valid science. But what this book highlights are those who saw it as a radical political theory that could be leveraged for a very different (and less bloody) coming revolution. There seems to have been no clear consensus on this ideology, but you can probably appreciate the mental leap from harnessing and harmonising magnetic fluids in an individual to a whole society. One key figure believed that harnessing these macro “physico-moral forces” would usher in the revolution... sort of like en masse “hopes and prayers” ending gun violence in the USA..? But it turned out relieving the corrupt ruling elite of their heads proved more effective in creating real change.
Ultimately, the book ends with mesmerism having disgraced itself; come the 1840s and ‘50s, most of France’s ‘mesmerists’, be they shut-eyes or charlatans, were busily – and profitably – communing with the dead (via table rapping) and prophesising for the future. In his final pages, Darnton illustrates its role in the backlash against rationalism in favour of the emotion and individualism of Romanticism courtesy of writer and politician Victor Hugo. The author of Les Misérables turned to mesmeric somnambulist Madame de Girardin to commune with his beloved dead daughter – a miserable, shameful end for a great hope of the rationalist era.
