Authors: Steven Levingston
Charcot’s classification of the stages of
grand hypnotisme
would dominate the field and eventually ignite intense controversy. According to his rules, a patient experiencing the lethargic first stage of an induced hypnotic attack seemed to fall into a deep slumber and become unresponsive and even unable to hear; in this state, however, the muscles were alive and could be stimulated to contract by a light blow or massage. Next came catalepsy, in which a kind of paralysis set in, allowing the investigator to manipulate the limbs into any frozen position. The final stage was somnambulism, in which the patient could hear and speak and respond to commands.
The reactions of these women, in Charcot’s view, were involuntary—the result of physiological eruptions that the women could not control; therefore, there was no reason to doubt their
behavior.
“For Charcot, a neurologist accustomed to the examination of patients suffering from locomotor ataxia or lateral sclerosis, the definite symptoms—which could not be counterfeited—were changes in the condition of the muscles, variations in the reflexes, and modifications of sensation,” wrote the psychologist Pierre Janet. “Thus it was that Charcot, in his endeavor to work out a strictly scientific method [for hypnotism], devoted himself to a study of the movements and reflexes of the subjects.”
Hypnotism became Charcot’s life, his career, his obsession in the clinic. It was fundamental to his investigations into the mysteries of the nervous system. But hypnotism maintained a tenuous status in the world of science, a fragile legitimacy. The French Academy of Sciences had repeatedly rejected any claim of scientific validity. Relying on his own prestige, Charcot brought the matter before the academy on February 13, 1882. Inside the wood-paneled chamber, adorned with the marble figure of Molière, curly locks falling to his shoulders, and a portrait of Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier, the father of modern chemistry, Charcot addressed the sixty members of the academy, including Louis Pasteur, who several months earlier had demonstrated his vaccine for treating the fatal sheep and cattle disease anthrax. He had the enormous task of reversing the longstanding damage Mesmer had inflicted on the discipline. Speaking in the most sober tone, Charcot emphasized his
“prudent and conservative” approach in the study of hypnotism. “Every attempt was made,” he told the assembly, “to avoid being attracted by the esoteric or the extraordinary, a peril which in this scientifically unexplored field was encountered, so to speak, at every step of the way.”
He assured the members that he was unwilling to be led by “the unexpected and the mystic” and instead pursued “intense physiologic and neuropathologic studies” of hypnosis. He stressed that he didn’t bother with the most obscure aspects of hypnotism or with anything he did not correlate to a known physiological mechanism. He argued that scientific progress would benefit from a change in perceptions about hypnotism. Proper studies of hypnotism, he concluded, “are certainly destined to bring eventual light to a whole host of questions, not only from a pathologic standpoint but also from the standpoint of physiology and psychology.”
When the members of the academy came back with their answer
in November 1883, Charcot was rewarded: Hypnotism had won approval as a legitimate subject for scientific research from France’s highest academic body after a hundred years of rejection. To bring his investigations to a wider audience, Charcot conducted public lectures on Tuesdays, with hypnosis demonstrations using women from the hysterics ward. Medical students and doctors packed the wooden benches of the amphitheater, eager for a peek into the brain of the eminent neurologist. On any given Tuesday journalists, writers, politicians, and philosophers joined the medical men to witness Charcot’s performance. Charcot, sober as ever, would appear in a dark suit and bow tie, the unflappable medical luminary. He was clean-shaven in a culture of bearded men. His hair was combed straight back over his head and tucked behind his ears. His eyes were deep-set and brooding, bordered underneath by heavy bags. A strong Roman nose gave a hint of his intellectual despotism.
“The arch of the mouth, ironic and taut, bent up slightly higher on the right than the left, as one sees in someone bitterly disappointed,” wrote his student Léon Daudet, the son of Charcot’s close friend the novelist Alphonse Daudet. Another pupil recorded Charcot’s
“frowning eyebrows” and “lips that bespoke silence.” Charcot guarded his emotions behind what Daudet called an
“imperious masked face.” He was so aloof one did not approach without trepidation. But he was also fiercely loved and admired, and his disciples were staunchly loyal.
But the real stars of his lectures were the women hysterics—delusional, vicious, obsessed, haunted. In action, they were unforgettable. There were stars among them: Blanche Wittman,
la reine des hystériques
—the queen of the hysterics. After Charcot blandly walked the audience through his method of diagnosis, prognosis, and treatment, the patient—the living, suffering prop—performed on command. Blanche took to her role with gusto, delivering astonishing trance-induced convulsions, hallucinations, paralyses, numbness. It was always compelling theater: patient and doctor, in an extraordinary dialogue and performance.
“Just like plays,” as one scholar said, “with lines, soliloquies, stage directions, asides by the hero.”
Now the newspapers sought out the hero to hear him expound on the question of murder under hypnosis.
L’Écho de Paris
sent a correspondent to his home at 217, boulevard Saint-Germain in the elegant
neighborhood of Faubourg Saint-Germain. The journalist was appropriately awed by Charcot’s mansion known as Hôtel de Varengeville, which was
“furnished in perfect taste,” with “tapestries, stained glass, Japanese crafts.” Here was the man whose private consultations were sought after by the wealthy and illustrious from Eurasia to South America. He counted among his patients the novelist Ivan Turgenev, the emperor of Brazil, the queen of Spain, and Grand Duke Nicholas of Russia.
“I know what brings you here,” Charcot affably greeted the reporter, “and I have my lesson all ready.”
Charcot warned that he could not say anything definitive about Gabrielle’s condition because he had not personally examined her. But as a matter of principle he was reluctant to go along with the press and the public’s rush “to see everywhere the irresponsible and the mad.” He explained that there are degrees of madness, or levels of hysteria, just as there are degrees of responsibility in crimes. It had still to be determined, he pointed out, how ill Gabrielle was. It would then be up to the jurors to decide what sentence to mete out relative to her illness and responsibility in the murder. But, the correspondent asked, could her incessant lying and her mood swings from joy to tears denote an extreme form of hysteria? And if she were a profound hysteric, could hypnotism have influenced her participation in the crime?
Charcot explained that the most susceptible hypnotic subjects were those who exhibited
grand hypnotisme.
For some newspaper readers, this would be their first encounter with the phrase. While popular aspects of hypnotism were well-known, as were some medical applications, the Gouffé case brought highly detailed academic research on hypnotism before the public. The professor was at pains to explain in clear and simple language how a hysteric responded to the commands of a hypnotist. “The mind of the hypnotized plunged into sleep could be considered as absolutely empty and incapable of any personal will,” Charcot said. “The operator/manipulator could then imprint on the subject sensations and images of his liking and could direct the will to take a designated action.”
If Charcot were to indicate an object—any object—on the floor and tell a hypnotized subject it was a snake, he would get a reaction
of terror. Tell the subject it was actually a hummingbird and the response would be fascination and a desire to caress it. A hypnotized person could also commit small crimes: steal the money purse of a lab assistant, for example, after first resisting, even if the subject were an honest person; or commit the crime several days later at a designated time if this was suggested during hypnosis.
Behavior could be manipulated, Charcot assured his visitor, but, he added, one must interpret this phenomenon in the most limited sense. A major crime committed outside of a controlled experiment in the hospital was another matter altogether. Charcot could induce a hypnotized hysteric in his ward to act out killing the professor himself, but he was adamant the subject would not commit an actual murder. A subject, even under hypnosis, did not lose sight of right and wrong. “That means,” Charcot explained, “that if I ordered one of my subjects to kill the director of the Salpêtrière because he serves bad kidney beans at the lunch table, he would hit him with an ordinary blow on the back with whatever was at hand but it would be done without real conviction and in spite of himself.”
Charcot summoned the words of his colleague Georges Gilles de la Tourette to assert that so far there had only been crimes committed in the laboratory under experimental conditions. The courtroom had never witnessed a case claiming a role for hypnosis in a real murder. “Until now,” Charcot said, “there has not been a single hypnotic crime.” That’s not to say, he continued, that a clever defense attorney would miss this chance to argue for Gabrielle’s lack of responsibility due to her obedience to commands from an unscrupulous hypnotist. But it would be a difficult thing to prove. The defense would have to establish scientifically, Charcot said, that Gabrielle became a submissive accomplice in the premeditation and execution of the crime. It would have to be shown that Gabrielle was a hypnotic automaton responding unconsciously to the will of Eyraud. Should the defense be able to prove such a theory, Charcot acknowledged, the crime would represent a major step in the science of hypnotism.
He didn’t hold out much hope of that, however. He rejected the influence of hypnosis in the murder of Gouffé. Gabrielle was not Eyraud’s marionette dancing blindly to his whims. Like any other common criminal, she knew she was on a dangerous path and that
her actions would have dreadful consequences. “This girl seems to me simply a perverse being,” Charcot concluded. “She could very much have participated consciously in the crime.”
After visiting Charcot, the
Écho de Paris
reporter sought out the thirty-one-year-old psychologist Edgar Bérillon, who was expected to oppose Charcot’s conclusion. Bérillon was a founder of the
Revue de l’hypnotisme
and had been an organizer of the International Congress on Hypnotism at the Hôtel Dieu the previous August; he also had been a student of Charcot’s but had since fallen in with his opponents, including Hippolyte Bernheim and Jules Liégeois. The two camps, which had clashed so bitterly at the congress, were headed for another confrontation, this time on a public stage—and egged on by the press.
“Wouldn’t it be your opinion,” the reporter asked Bérillon, “that Gabrielle’s role in this lugubrious affair could have been imposed by a will stronger than her own?”
Bérillon smiled, and behind his spectacles his face was lean. “You will greatly embarrass me,” he said, “if you put me on notice to make a legal decision in this case.”
He acknowledged that murder under hypnosis was a seductive theory, but now that it had taken on such profound application he was hesitant to leap to a conclusion. Hysterics, he pointed out, often bend to a strong will even without the use of hypnosis. Bernheim, for instance, used the force of his will and a stern voice to suggest actions to his patients. There was a fine line in some cases, Bérillon implied, between the effects of pure suggestion and hypnotic control.
Bérillon had studied the accounts of Gabrielle’s relationship with Eyraud and raised a fascinating question: Was it possible that his brutality could have affected Gabrielle’s behavior as much as the power of hypnotism? The men who interrogated Gabrielle, who examined her medically and psychologically, gave little importance to her lover’s tyrannical dominance. Violence against women was commonplace. There was always a vague supposition that any woman who got pummeled might have deserved it. In Gabrielle’s case, the thinking went, she was a saucy imp who ought to have been at home under her father’s roof in Lille instead of carousing on her own in Paris.
Bérillon’s perspective was extraordinary—and a disheartening one for the hypnotism defense and for the state of French society—for
he was virtually alone in suggesting that Eyraud’s cruelty played a role in Gabrielle’s behavior. “As to her participation in the crime, I do not think she was acting under the influence of a hypnotic suggestion,” Bérillon told the reporter. “She could have been to a certain degree terrorized by her lover and obeyed him without knowing much about what she was doing.”
The Musée Grévin opened in 1882 behind a stone arch façade on boulevard Montmartre in a direct challenge to Madame Tussaud’s, the famous wax museum in London. It took its name from its art director, Alfred Grévin, a well-known caricaturist and theater costume and set designer. To distinguish itself from its London rival, the Musée Grévin strove for a gay Parisian flair, as Grévin himself described in a letter:
“Grévin must be to Tussaud what Paris is to London, what our boulevards are to Regent Street, what the Parisian woman is to the London woman, that-is-to-say, charm, taste, spirit (and if I dare say so) to vastness and bad taste.” The museum catered to the popular tastes of the boulevards, its displays re-creating the sensations of the day as if the newspapers had sprung to three-dimensional life. When some fresh atrocity captured the public’s attention, an old display was rushed out the back and a new one moved in. International revolts and Paris murders ranked high on the Musée Grévin entertainment scale.
The writer Jules Claretie satirized how the museum pandered to a fickle mass audience.
“O glorious transitory wax figures!” he wrote. “Celebrities of the day! Pantheon of the moment!” But what drew crowds was the exhibits’ fidelity to real life. If a scene depicted the arrest of Russian nihilists, the samovar and tea glasses in the staging were imported from Russia. And the wax figures were so lifelike, some visitors believed that pinching them would make them jump.