Authors: Steven Levingston
The judge informed Henri Robert that he understood the seriousness of the case but he also recognized Voisin’s reticence. He told the doctor he would be free to say as much or as little as he pleased, but he must first take the oath.
“Make your statement,” the judge instructed.
“I can say nothing,” Voisin persisted. “Professional confidentiality prohibits it.”
Henri Robert interjected again: “Over the past eleven months, Dr. Voisin performed many hypnotic experiments on Gabrielle Bompard. There is perfect reason—”
“I think he made a big mistake,” prosecutor Quesnay de Beaurepaire
interrupted, unhappy that Voisin had taken such a liberty with Gabrielle.
“And I as well!” chimed in the judge.
“Whether he was right or wrong,” Henri Robert continued, “it does not lessen the fact of the experiments. He received some very important confidences.”
Henri Robert reminded the judge and prosecutor that he had requested permission to have Jules Liégeois, his expert witness on hypnotism and crime, interview Gabrielle. It was only fair, since the state had conducted its own exhaustive examination of Gabrielle, which included hypnotizing her. Shouldn’t the defense have a similar opportunity? “This authorization was refused,” Henri Robert said. He had called Dr. Voisin as a witness hoping for some enlightenment into Gabrielle’s mental state. “But now we are in a situation where Liégeois cannot see Gabrielle and Voisin cannot speak.” He insisted that the question of confidentiality be ruled upon by the court.
The judge asked Henri Robert how he would resolve the matter.
“Gabrielle Bompard could release Dr. Voisin from his professional confidentiality,” Robert proposed.
The courtroom, tantalized by the prospect of hearing Voisin’s secrets about Gabrielle, broke into chatter. Quesnay de Beaurepaire stepped to the front, explaining that Liégeois had no standing to visit with Gabrielle. In a condescending tone, he pointed out that Liégeois was not a doctor and that three doctors, one of them the head of the medical faculty at the University of Paris, had already spent months studying the mental condition of the accused. What could Liégeois possibly offer that the distinguished medical men could not? “They do not have to be checked by a professor of law.” The prosecutor demanded that Voisin’s testimony remain private. “Dr. Voisin was there to care for the illnesses of the prisoners and not to stand as an expert on other matters,” he said. “The doctor should adhere to the sanctity of his profession.”
The judge had heard enough and indicated his agreement.
But before he could rule, Henri Robert tried to speak again: “Just a word—”
“The matter is closed,” the judge decreed.
But Henri Robert wouldn’t let it go, pleading with the judge: “Would you permit me to respond?”
To which the judge roared: “I permit you nothing at all!”
Henri Robert approached the bench and there commenced a prolonged, angry exchange that the spectators strained to hear. Although the words were unintelligible, the gestures and facial expressions attested to the incivility on both sides. Suddenly, breaking from the heated colloquy, the judge cried out:
“Guards! Clear the room! Everyone goes! The trial is suspended.”
But the crowd refused to go: A furor broke out. The guards tried to sweep the room but the protestors dug in.
“Tumult. Uproar,” observed Inspector Jaume. “Some applaud. Others yell. The audience is divided into two camps: there are the Eyraudistes and the Bompardeurs. The atmosphere becomes bizarre. One will say that a wind of madness blew through the courtroom.” The elite spectators managed to brush off the police and stay in their seats, while the riffraff, more vulnerable on their back benches, were bullied out of the courtroom for the recess.
In the dock, Gabrielle watched the hullabaloo, laughing. Every so often, she threw her head back and brought a small bottle to her lips, tipping into her mouth a sedative called syrup of ether that a doctor had supplied. For his part, Eyraud sat motionless, dark-eyed and smoldering.
Some twenty minutes later, after the spectators had filed back to their seats, the judge resumed the session. Henri Robert had lost his battle. Dr. Voisin was allowed to keep Gabrielle’s secrets to himself and the defense was not allowed to hypnotize her. The last hope of the defense was the final witness of the day, Jules Liégeois, the world’s leading expert on the link between hypnotism and crime. His appearance was historic: No expert had ever argued in court that a murder defendant had killed under hypnosis, without free will and therefore without responsibility. Gabrielle’s fate was in Liégeois’s hands. Only he could save her from the guillotine.
Henri Robert asked the law professor for his thoughts on the medical report by the three experts for the prosecution.
“They do not think that hypnotism plays a role in this trial,” Liégeois said, adding: “My explanation will be long.” He was a fifty-seven-year-old professor of administrative law at the University of Nancy. His testimony would require a detailed explanation of hypnotism and crime for the jury. “And I do not want to be interrupted,” he told the judge in a dry, professional voice. He cited article 319-s-2 of the criminal code, which allowed a witness to deliver his deposition without interruption.
“I don’t understand what you are insinuating,” Judge Robert countered. “You will be free to testify. How much time do you think you’ll need?”
“One and a half to two hours.”
Noting the late hour, the judge said, “It will be better to do your deposition tomorrow. You could say a few words today.”
“But then Professor Liégeois would be interrupted,” Henri Robert pointed out.
“In that case,” the judge said, turning to Liégeois, “we’ll hear from you tomorrow.”
He adjourned the session at five forty-five.
Writing in
Le Figaro
, the court reporter Albert Bataille set the stage for the following day’s performance.
“We haven’t finished with hypnotism?” he mused. “We will attend this interesting spectacle of a law professor from Nancy discussing criminal suggestion in the case of a woman he has never seen.”
On Friday, December 19, 1890, the fourth day of the trial, the snow began to melt as the temperature climbed to forty-three degrees. Jules Liégeois returned to the packed courtroom as the man of the hour and an unlikely celebrity. He was widely respected but also something of an oddity, an obsessive and stodgy defender of his landmark research linking hypnosis and crime. At eleven forty-five, he began speaking in a tone that was so dull that the anticipation leading up to this moment instantly withered and the air seemed to drain from the courtroom. Unhappy ticket holders girded themselves for a painstaking presentation. An extraordinary subject was suddenly rendered mundane. From the dock Eyraud watched stony-eyed and Gabrielle, seated next to Dr. Floquet, had drifted miles away.
“I didn’t seek the perilous honor of addressing you,” Liégeois told the court, explaining that he was appearing in place of Dr. Hippolyte Bernheim, who had broken his leg and was unable to travel to Paris. Though Liégeois was the recognized expert on the question at hand, Bernheim was by far the more compelling speaker, and his absence was felt all the keener as the rumpled professor droned on. “I consider it a matter of honor and conscience to come here to present to you the doctrines of the Nancy school.”
Mercifully Liégeois refrained from dragging his listeners back to the eighteenth century and the discoveries of Mesmer, but he did reminisce about the past two decades, declaring: “The idea that I had developed in my report in 1884 was the following: The subject in a hypnotic state loses all spontaneity. It is as if the free will is abolished.” His many experiments, he said, proved his point. Among them was a hypnotized woman who fired a revolver at a man Liégeois introduced to her as a judge. “A friend verified that the gun was not loaded,” the professor said, with a laugh. The woman popped off a round, and the man dropped to the floor. The woman said she saw the victim lying
there dying in a puddle of blood. She felt no remorse—she had been ordered to shoot and she did. There was another woman, Liégeois continued, who fired a pistol at her own mother. When Liégeois blew on her eyes and woke her from her trance, the woman was confronted by her mother who asked, “How could you fire at me?” And the woman replied, “Because you are there.” On yet another occasion, Liégeois gave a man some sugar and told him it was arsenic, then ordered him to poison his nephew, which he did willingly. The experiment was carried out realistically and the boy’s aunt was so frightened she refused to bring her nephew back to the laboratory ever again.
Laughter rippled through the courtroom.
But what did such laboratory experiments tell us about the commission of a real crime under hypnosis? The answer, Liégeois said, required an understanding of what he called the second state. “The second state, and I am, I think, the first who perceived it, is the special state in which crimes could be committed by hypnotic suggestion or by a suggestion made to someone in a waking state,” he explained. The second state was not a normal condition. He likened it to the state of an insane person who gets an idea in her head and allows it to grow bit by bit until all checks on it have been eliminated. Several published cases had shown the influence of the second state. There was a man who stole a watch while in a second state after a hypnotist placed the idea in his mind. Liégeois noted the similarity between the second state and intense religious experiences in which congregants were whipped into action.
Turning to the trial, he complained that he had been prohibited from seeing Gabrielle. “Perhaps that’s legal,” he said. “I do not know if it is just.” He attacked Quesnay de Beaurepaire for ridiculing his credentials. Doctors—and only doctors—should examine the accused? “Monsieur prosecutor contests my competence. If I were incompetent, what danger would there be in letting me see Gabrielle Bompard? If I am competent, isn’t it an outrage against morality and justice in preventing a full defense for the accused? What a situation I’m in! The experts had three hundred days to examine Gabrielle Bompard. Me, not a minute!”
With that the judge called a recess. It was one forty-five. Liégeois had already filled two hours.
“I arrive now at the basis of the trial,” Liégeois said when he
resumed his testimony at two twenty. “What is my opinion on the possibility that Gabrielle Bompard executed acts by virtue of a suggestion? It seems to me it is possible that Gabrielle received some criminal suggestions and that she realized them in a second state.”
He addressed the charges that Gabrielle was fundamentally immoral and that she lied. What explained her different stories about the crime? Why did she appear indifferent to the brutality? Why did she seem more like a witness than a participant in the murder? Liégeois provided a simple explanation, one that absolved her. “She forgot all that had happened to her,” he said. “She forgot things that had been done to her. There was a complete rupture of memory. If this is true, then all that has seemed inexplicable about her attitude and her testimony finds a complete and luminous explanation.” When she was in a waking state, he continued, she remembered nothing. In her second state, she would remember everything. Therefore, he declared, “it would be necessary to put her back into a second state so that she could tell all.” He complained again about not being permitted, adding that if Dr. Voisin had discovered anything about her during his unauthorized hypnotic sessions, the jury ought to hear about it. It was true, Liégeois acknowledged, that Gabrielle had been a difficult suspect; she was not forthcoming; she changed her story; at times she had been confused. But, he said, there was a reason for all that. “If someone had made a suggestion to her while she was in a second state that she should forget everything on reawakening, it is not surprising that she doesn’t remember any of the acts in which she participated.”
Next he addressed the key question: Did Eyraud even hypnotize Gabrielle? The claim that Eyraud never accomplished it seemed absurd. “All those who wanted to put her to sleep succeeded,” he pointed out. “And only Eyraud could not do it?” Look at Gabrielle’s behavior. “How then do we explain this undeniable link between him and this young woman who with her appeal certainly didn’t have to worry about loneliness? She was tied to him like a dog to its master. Is there anything that can explain it? Nothing outside of suggestion.”
The judge interrupted. “It wasn’t only Eyraud who said he couldn’t hypnotize her. Monsieur Risler said he saw Eyraud fail.”
That was easily explained, Liégeois said: What if Eyraud purposely failed for the sake of an alibi? Suppose Eyraud knew it was to
his advantage for someone to believe he couldn’t hypnotize Gabrielle. What would he do? Eyraud certainly knew the power of suggestion. He could announce that he wanted to put her to sleep but, knowing how suggestible she was, he could say in her presence, directly to her, that she was difficult to hypnotize. He planted the idea that he wouldn’t be able to do it. He would provide a negative suggestion rather than a positive one—and that would be enough to ensure that she would be impossible to hypnotize at that time. If the question ever came up that he controlled her through hypnosis, he would have his alibi, and he would have a witness to support him.
Liégeois then attacked the doctors Brouardel, Motet, and Ballet for the way they handled Gabrielle when they hypnotized her. What happened? She had a hysterical crisis. “She had terrifying hallucinations,” Liégeois reminded the court. “As soon as she was put to sleep, she found the memory she had forgotten in the waking state.” After her crisis—and still in her hypnotic state—she could have been questioned about the crime. But the doctors chose not to seek the truth from her. Instead of using hypnosis to fully explore her role in the crime, they simply concluded that she was an immoral person and responsible for her actions. To his amazement, Liégeois said, their report asserted that hypnotism was of no use in investigating a criminal case.
“That’s not quite what we said,” objected Dr. Motet.