Hidden Depths: The Story of Hypnosis (15 page)

If a system lacks coherence, drawing up its main points as a list can disguise its lack of coherence only to a limited extent. D'Eslon thought that they had failed with the Faculty because Mesmer was too vague and obscure; he focused too much on cosmology and not enough on the concrete matter of the cures. Perhaps too he had failed to impress the Faculty because of his thick German accent. So in 1780 d'Eslon published his
Observations sur le magnétisme animal
, a lucid account of a number of cures. But this only made him too a target for abuse. He was ordered to withdraw his allegiance from this new fad, but he refused and was stripped of certain privileges as a member of the medical Faculty, which at the same time unequivocally rejected Mesmer's ideas, and bullied other members who had shown signs of interest in animal magnetism to give it up.

Mesmer was fed up, and he decided to leave Paris. Marie Antoinette herself was persuaded to try to get him to stay by offering him, in the name of the king, a substantial income per year, provided a commissioned report was favourable. Even when the king relaxed this condition to a clause that Mesmer should accept some men of the government's choice as students, Mesmer was affronted. He saw
such students as spies rather than a disinterested committee. He wrote an astonishingly arrogant and paranoid open letter to the queen, in which he demanded not just the annuity she had offered but a country estate where he could continue his work. He could have got away with such a letter only because these were the declining years of the monarchy in France. It is easy to see why he was gaining a reputation as a crank.

Naturally enough, Marie Antoinette did not deign to answer, and in May 1781 Mesmer left Paris for Spa in Belgium, accompanied by a few of his wealthier patients. In Spa he perhaps hoped to pick up further patients from the various clinics, as well as restore his own health which had been battered by the stresses of Paris. He was bitterly angry and disappointed, but perhaps he also had the hidden agenda of wanting to arouse public opinion to wield against the authorities. ‘If they miss me,' he might have thought, ‘their protests will reach official ears.' His constant rejection by the medical authorities (which he attributed to envy, presumption and incredulity) had only hardened his determination to achieve recognition as a great pioneer and the saviour of humankind. He wanted d'Eslon to join him in Spa, but d'Eslon refused, stayed in Paris and set up his own clinic. One can sympathize with d'Eslon's position: he did not want to abandon his patients, and could not understand how Mesmer could do so. But Mesmer took offence: he thought that d'Eslon was stealing his patients, and regarded him as a traitor.

In Spa, as well as taking the waters to calm his disgruntled nerves, he wrote his
Short History of Animal Magnetism
. With d'Eslon in bad odour, his two main cronies were the lawyer Nicolas Bergasse and the banker Guillaume Kornmann, who were dividing their time between Paris and Spa. They came up with a proposal which was designed to attract Mesmer back to Paris, and to assuage his worries about losing clients and hence income to d'Eslon. They wanted to found a special academy for the propagation of animal magnetism, where Mesmer would instruct others. At the end of 1781 Mesmer returned to Paris to discuss the rules and regulations of this academy with Bergasse and Kornmann, who had prepared the way well: Mesmer found that there were more than enough people prepared to pay the exorbitant subscription to found the academy, and he
gave Bergasse and Kornmann the go-ahead. He returned to Spa in July 1782, with Bergasse as his unwilling secretary; their relationship was never sound, and would soon lead to the project's collapse.

While in Spa he heard that d'Eslon had again been reprimanded by the Faculty, and had suffered the indignity of having further privileges removed. While he was pleased by his disciple's loyalty to the cause, he still felt betrayed. He raged that d'Eslon had no right to set up on his own, that he was incompetent, that he didn't know enough about animal magnetism and so on. Though there were some attempts at reconciliation, the two of them never again saw eye to eye, one of the bones of contention being that d'Eslon felt that only qualified medical men should be allowed to study animal magnetism, whereas now, with his academy, Mesmer was opening it up to anyone who could afford the fee. Finally, in January 1784 d'Eslon published a brief account of his quarrels with Mesmer and formally announced that he was setting up as an animal magnetist in his own right. By now he had been expelled from the Faculty, but his aristocratic connections guaranteed him a wealthy practice – or, as Mesmer saw it, deprived Mesmer of a number of wealthy clients. Mesmer threatened to sue him, but in the end backed down from this silly posturing.

Anyway, back in Paris at the end of 1782, Bergasse, Kornmann and Mesmer put their plans into operation: 100 of Mesmer's followers gave a subscription of 100 louis d'or each, and further money was raised from provincial societies where the charge was 50 louis d'or. They called the Parisian academy by the Masonic-sounding name of the Lodge of Harmony (later the Society of Universal Harmony). Mesmer was named Founder and Perpetual President of all the societies. Members were sworn to secrecy: they were not to divulge Mesmer's instruction (which took place not only in classes, but also by the reading of his written works), nor set up as practising animal magnetists on their own. This last clause was presumably inspired by Mesmer's resentment of d'Eslon, because there was no rational reason for it and it went directly against the original plan of Bergasse and Kornmann, for whom the whole point of the academy was that it would teach future teachers. Torn apart by this contradiction and by the dissension between Mesmer and Bergasse, the Paris society lasted no more than two years from its foundation in March 1783.
As well as witnessing cures and learning the techniques and the theory of the action of animal magnetism on the nervous system, the students discussed the metaphysical, cosmological and political aspects of magnetism – the type of work that in 1784 would result in Bergasse's
The Theory of the World and of Living Organisms According to the Principles of Mesmer
. This book was written partly in code: over 100 of the key terms were given symbols rather than spelled out, so as to exclude non-initiates of the society. But then Bergasse was even more given to mystery than his master.

The founding members of the Paris society included some illustrious names. Of especial interest to us in this book is that all three de Puységur brothers, whom we will meet more thoroughly in the next chapter, were original members, along with some of the great names of the French aristocracy – Duc de Lauzun, Duc de Coigny, Baron de Talleyrand, and the Marquis de Jaucourt, for example. Ironically, given Benjamin Franklin's hostility towards mesmerism (as we shall see in the next section), his grandson William Temple Franklin was an early member of the Paris society. The flamboyant Marquis de Lafayette (1757–1834) was also one of the original members. He had recently made a name for himself by taking a ship across the Atlantic to offer his help in the American War of Independence and inflicting a heavy defeat on the English at Barren Hill. Mesmer encouraged this disciple of his in his enthusiasm both for animal magnetism and for the new republic across the ocean, since he saw de Lafayette as a suitable apostle of the new therapy in America. De Lafayette did talk to George Washington privately about animal magnetism, but he does not appear to have spread the word more widely than giving one or two lectures. However, Thomas Jefferson, who was then the American representative in Versailles, was worried enough to send back home a number of anti-mesmerist pamphlets and copies of the negative reports of the two 1784 commissions.

Mesmer was either giving up the idea of official recognition, or was biding his time, but d'Eslon, motivated perhaps by a desire to advertise his clinic, succeeded where Mesmer had failed. As a result of his requests, on 12 March 1784 Louis XVI appointed a committee from the Faculty of Medicine, who co-opted some members from the Academy of Sciences. Their brief was to investigate animal magnetism, and they chose to do so in d'Eslon's clinic, not Mesmer's. Mesmer protested, but it shouldn't have made any difference, since they were investigating animal magnetism, not personalities. In any case, the fact that it was d'Eslon who was investigated, not Mesmer, eventually worked to Mesmer's advantage. Subsequent to the commission's report, the threat to forbid the practice of animal magnetism was defused by the legal technicality that Mesmer's work had not been examined. In any case, Mesmer had always been convinced that he had more magnetic power than most people, and so could work the cures better.

The committee was chaired by Benjamin Franklin, then an old man of seventy-eight, who was one of the envoys to France of the newly recognized country, the United States of America. Franklin's position was honorary rather than active, because of his age and infirmity, but some of the meetings took place in his house at Passy. The deputy chairman was Jean-Sylvain Bailly, an astronomer and statesman, who later became Mayor of Paris until his death on the guillotine. Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier was also prominent; he was an eminent chemist who had isolated and identified oxygen in the air, and had established the principle of atomic weights and the classification of chemicals. He was a tax-collector in Paris during the early years of the Revolution, until he was sent to the guillotine on the trumped-up charge of having added water to tobacco supplies. The names of other committee members – there were nine in all – have not survived the passage of time well, but it is worth mentioning
Joseph-Ignace Guillotin, who was himself spared from beheading by the instrument he had envisaged only by the death of Robespierre.

Franklin and his colleagues on the committee were members of a Masonic lodge in Paris called the Neuf Soeurs (Nine Sisters). The membership of this lodge overlapped with that of a mystical lodge called Philalethes (Love of Truth), whose Grand Master, Savalette Delanges, had convened an international conference to consider the occult implications of mesmerism in the very month that the committee met. Reports were already coming in from the provinces that magnetized subjects were demonstrating clairvoyant abilities. The stage was set for a battle between empiricism and cumulative knowledge, on the one side, and on the other the claim that mesmerism opened one up as a sensitive to more comprehensive knowledge.

There is no doubt that the commission did an effective hatchet job on mesmerism, but there were also gaping holes in their procedures. They proved that the magnetic fluid does not exist, but oddly ignored the question of how Mesmer and d'Eslon had cured so many people. They did not want to disturb the sensibilities of d'Eslon's eminent clients – ‘The distinguished patients could not be questioned too closely without the risk of annoying them' – so they experimented on themselves rather than them, but they were healthy people, so the fact that they felt no effect is, on Mesmer's own terms, no proof or disproof: their fluid was already in equilibrium. They tried to magnetize others themselves, but since they were sceptics, the healing power of suggestion was not present, and so it is no wonder that they failed. They suspected that cures might be due to spontaneous remission, and thought that convulsions could be damaging and addictive. As the 1784 comedy
The Baquet of Health
ironically puts it, when one character asks another if she is getting better: ‘Much better, madame. I used never to have more than one crisis a week. Now I have two a day.'

It is hard not to reproach the commission for short-sightedness. There were hundreds of testimonials of cures available to them. It would surely have been worthwhile for them to investigate them. As the Marquis de Puységur later complained, they thought that the facts did not prove anything. All right, they dismissed animal
magnetism as nonsense; but
something
was causing the cures, and as scientists they should have looked into what it was: they might have appreciated the power of suggestion. The immediate problem was that they took themselves to be scientists investigating the existence of a supposed new substance, rather than physicians looking into an effective way of curing patients. The broader problem has been well expressed as follows: ‘Science is the outgrowth of human curiosity, but the trained scientist often appears to be the least curious of mortals because he has imposed upon himself such rigorous conditions for satisfying his need.'

But for all the gaps in their approach to the cures, their debunking of animal magnetism was telling. They tried to repeat Mesmer's cures under controlled conditions and found that it was only when patients could see which parts of their bodies the magnetic fluid was being directed towards that they felt the required prickling sensations and were cured. When patients knew they were being treated by an operator, they would reach the crisis in a few minutes; when they did not know, no crisis was reached, even when the magnetizer was in the same room. Conversely, blindfolded patients who believed in animal magnetism reached crisis when they believed that d'Eslon was in the room even when he was not. Or again, they had one of five trees mesmerized, and then sent a patient to find which tree would effect the cure: the patient went into crisis at the wrong tree. They falsely told a patient in an adjoining room that he was being mesmerized, with the result that he went into crisis, even though nothing was in fact going on. They tried to detect the magnetic fluid with measuring devices, and failed. They concluded that ‘imagination without magnetism produces convulsions, and that magnetism without imagination produces nothing', that ‘the existence of the fluid is absolutely destitute of proof, and that the fluid, having no existence, can consequently have no use'.

The committee's emphasis on imagination is odd, in an ironic fashion. They were appealing to something psychic and hardly more liable to scientific procedures than animal magnetic fluid. Perhaps this is why they did not leave imagination to carry the whole burden of their argument. While stressing it as the main factor involved in Mesmer's cures, they also noted that sometimes the magnetist would actually touch his patient, and they thought that this touching could
itself be therapeutic in some cases. Finally, along with imagination and touching, they pointed out the power of imitation: the fact that one patient feels better, and goes into convulsions, is likely to provoke the same reactions in the next and so on.