Abstract
In Part II of this volume, Matt Reed and Elizabeth Williams analyzed certain new constructions of the self in the fin de siècle, constructions in large part framed by middle-class professionals in the rapidly developing field of psychiatry. The concept of neurasthenia, broadly applied to seemingly inexplicable behaviors, suggests the period’s contorted relationship between modern medicine and traditional authorities, especially in longstanding institutions like the Roman Catholic Church, whose belief systems were often in conflict with modern science. The body, everyone’s most precious property, had become a contested site as scientists challenged pervasive notions of human reason and individual will, which defensive bastions of social, political, and cultural power attempted to maintain.
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Notes
See J.-K. Huysmans, Là-Bas (1891; Paris: Gallimard, 1985), p. 332. (Unless otherwise indicated below, all translations from the French are the author’s.)
Note, Papus [Gérard Encausse], ‘Là-Bas par J.-K. Huysmans,’ L’Initiation (May 1891): 97–114, in part a response to Huysmans’s insult of Papus as ‘se contenter de ne rien savoir’: Huysmans, Là-Bas, p. 331. Huysmans’s dismissive judgment of Papus was clearly derived from his principal source on the occult, the defrocked priest Joseph Boullan, one of Papus’s many spiritualist adversaries.Compare Christopher McIntosh, Eliphas Lévi and the French Occult Revival (London: Rider, 1972), pp. 177–94, on Huysmans and the occult.
See a careful review of Joseph Boullan’s allegations in Papus [Gérard Encausse], Peut-on envoûter? Etude historique, anecdotique et critique sur les plus récents travaux concernant l’envoûtement (Paris: Chamuel, 1893), pp. 3–19, whose criticisms of Boullan had apparently elicited Jules Bois’s ire.
Jules Bois, ‘L’Envoûtement et la mort du docteur Boullan,’ Gil Blas (9 January 1893): 2. Bois is best known for his popular survey of satanic practices and magic, generously prefaced by J.-K. Huysmans, who endorsed Bois’s thesis of the occult as a genuine force for evil: ‘C’est cette étude que Jules Bois a tentée, dans ce volume qui est certainement le plus consciencieux, le plus complet, le mieux renseigné que l’on ait encore écrit sur l’au-delà du mal,’ in Bois, La Satanisme et la magie (1894; Paris: Jean de Bonnot, 1996), p. xiii.
See the embroidered account of the duel by Jules Bois quoted at length in Philippe Encausse,Papus le ‘Balzac de l’occultisme.’ Vingt-cinq années d’occultisme occidental (Paris: Pierre Belfond, 1979), pp. 18–19. Many features of Bois’s version of events are not corroborated by other sources. Compare the accounts in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Papus and http://www.hermetic.com/sabazius/papus.htm with the much better informedhttp://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Papus, all three accessed 16 January 2007.
Philippe Encausse, Papus (Dr. Gérard Encausse). Sa Vie. Son Oeuvre. Documents inédits sur Philippe de Lyon. Maître spirituel de Papus. Opinions et jugements. Portraits et illustrations (Paris: Editions Pythagore, 1932), p. 18, repeated in idem., Papus le ‘Balzac de l’ occultisme’, p. 18.
Compare Marie-Sophie André and Christophe Beaufils, Papus biographie. La Belle Epoque de l’occultisme (Paris: Berg International, 1995), pp. 105–6, a well-researched and thorough study of the occultist. Unless otherwise cited, background related to Papus in this chapter is taken from André and Beaufils’s work.
I focus on Robert A. Nye’s Masculinity and Male Codes of Honor in Modern France (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), but also his Crime, Madness, and Politics in Modern France: the Medical Concept of National Decline (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984), where professional discourses play a more important role.
The historical literature on this phenomenon is rich. See, for example, James F. McMillan, Housewife or Harlot: the Place of Women in French Society,1870–1940 (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1981);
Karen Offen, ‘Depopulation, Nationalism, and Feminism in Fin-de-Siècle France,’ American Historical Review, 89(2) (1984): 648–76;
and Mary Louise Roberts, Disruptive Acts: the New Woman in Fin-de-Siècle France ( Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002 ).
A recent example is Elinor Accampo,Blessed Motherhood, Bitter Fruit: Nelly Roussel and the Politics of Female Pain in Third Republic France (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press,2006)
Felicia Gordon, The Integral Feminist: Madeleine Pelletier, 1874–1939 (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1990), pp. 16, 17, 88–9.
Judith F. Stone, ‘The Republican Brotherhood: Gender and Ideology,’ in Gender and the Politics of Social Reform in France,1870–1914, ed. Elinor A. Accampo, Rachel G. Fuchs, and Mary Lynn Stewart ( Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995 ), p. 46.
This same point is well made by John Warne Monroe, Laboratories of Faith: Mesmerism, Spiritism, and Occultism in Modern France ( Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2008 ), pp. 233–50.
Compare the perspective in Robert A. Nye, ‘Medicine and Science as Masculine Fields of Honor,’ Osiris, 12 (1997): 60–79.
Papus, Hypothèses (Paris: Coccoz, 1884), quoted in André and Beaufils, Papus biographie, p. 23.
See the extensive scholarly literature on the occult in modern France, for example, McIntosh, Eliphas Lévi and the French OccultRevival; Marie-France James, Esotérisme, occultisme, franc-maçonnerie et christianisme aux XIXe et XXe siècles. Explorations bio-bibliographiques (Paris: Nouvelles Editions Latines, 1981);
René Le Forestier, L’Occultisme en France aux XIXe et XXe siècles. L’Eglise gnostique, ed. Antoine Faivre (Milan: Archè, 1990 );
and David Allen Harvey, Beyond Enlightenment: Occultism and Politics in Modern France ( DeKalb, IL: Northern Illinois University Press, 2005 ).
See Eliphas Lévi [Alphonse-Louis Constant], Dogme et rituel de la haute magie (Paris: G. Baillière, 1856), 2 vols. The translation of the Nuctameron appears in the second volume. Compare McIntosh, Eliphas Lévi and the French Occult Revival, pp. 101–4.
See ‘William Emmette Coleman, “Sources of Madame Blavatsky’s Writings,”’ in Gertrude Marvin Williams, Priestess of the Occult: Madame Blavatsky (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1946), Appendix M, pp. 337–8.
Papus, Qu’est-ce que l’occultisme? ( 1900; Paris: Librairie et Editions Leymarie, 1989 ), p. 17.
On Papus’s penchant for associational life, see Robert Amadou, ‘Papus,’ Encyclopédie de la franc-maçonnerie, ed. Eric Saunier ( Paris: Librairie Générale Française, 2000 ), pp. 639–40.
See Johann Malfatti di Monteregio, Studien überAnarchie und Hierarchie des Wissens, mit besonder Beziehung auf die Medicin (Leipzig: F.A. Brockhaus, 1845), which first appeared in French translation as Etudes sur la mathèse, ou Anarchie et hiérarchie de la science, avec une application spéciale à la médecine, trans. Christien Ostrowski (Paris: A. Frank, 1849). The analogy that Papus appropriated was already widely known, however. For example, Geneviève Bréton, the prolific diarist, was much taken by Plato’s tripartite scheme.
See Bréton, ‘In the Solitude of My Soul’: the Diary of Geneviève Bréton,1867–1871, ed. James Smith Allen, trans. James Palmes ( Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1994 ), p. 47.
On Mathias Duval, see Edouard Retterer, ‘Mathias Duval (1844–1907). Sa vie et son oeuvre,’ Journal de l’anatomie et de la physiologie, 43(3) (1907): 241–331.
Cf. Eugen Weber, ‘Some Comments on the Nature of the Nationalist Revival in France Before 1914,’ International Review of Social History, 3(2) (1958): 220–38, and idem., The Hollow Years: France in the 1930s ( New York: W.W. Norton, 1994 ), pp. 111–46.
Papus, Du traitement de l’obésité locale (Paris: Chamuel, 1898), quoted in André and Beaufils, Papus biographie, p. 167. In 1911 Papus would actually advertise a paid course of instruction in physiology ‘à l’usage des magnétiseurs, masseurs et gens du monde,’ in L’Initiation (January 1911): endpage. He clearly knew his market.
Emile Gary and Georges Polti, La Théorie des tempéraments et leur pratique ( Paris: G. Carré, 1889 ).
I draw on the broad definition of misogyny provided by David D. Gilbert, Misogyny: the Male Malady (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001), p. 9: ‘Misogyny, then, is a sexual prejudice that is symbolically exchanged (shared) among men, attaining praxis. It is something that is manifest in the ways people relate to each other. It is, of course, specifically acted out in society by males, often in ritualistic ways.’
Philippe Encausse, ‘A propos des groupements martinistes’ (1960), in Encausse, Papus le ‘Balzac de l’occultisme’, pp. 56–7.
For more on the place of women in Masonic and para-Masonic associations in modern France, see James Smith Allen, ‘Sisters of Another Sort: Freemason Women in Modern France, 1725–1940,’ Journal of Modern History, 75 (4) (2003): 783–835.
Papus, Au pays des esprits, ou roman vécu des mystères de l’occultisme (Paris: Edition de l’Initiation, 1903), p. ii.
Note the discussion of this novel in the context of the ‘New Woman’ phenomenon and the images of Masonic women in France, in James Smith Allen, ‘Rebelles without a Cause? Images of Masonic Women in France,’ Labour History Review, 71 (2) (2006): 43–56.
Jan Goldstein, The Post-Revolutionary Self: Politics and Psyche in France, 1750–1850 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006), pp. 316–29; and Monroe, Laboratories of Faith, pp. 243–57.
On the relationship between Freemasonry and the women’s movement, see James Smith Allen, ‘Freemason Feminists: Masonic Reform and the Women’s Movement in France, 1840–1940,’ in Women’s Agency and Rituals in Mixed and Female Masonic Orders, ed. Jan Snoek and Alexandra Heidle (Amsterdam: Brill, 2008), pp. 219–34 and pictures 3–11.
Karen Offen, European Feminisms: a Political History,1700–1950 ( Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000 ), pp. 20–3.
Céline Renooz, ‘A Revelation,’ trans. James Smith Allen, in Nineteenth-Century Women Seeking Expression: Translations from the French, ed. Rosemary LIoyd (Liverpool: University of Liverpool, 2000), p. 95.
For more on the curious intellectual trajectory of one of Papus’s female followers, see James Smith Allen, ‘Writing the Body and Women’s Madness: the Historiographical Implications of l’Ecriture Féminine in Céline Renooz’s “Une Révélation” (1888),’ in Women Seeking Expression: France 1789–1914, ed. Rosemary Lloyd and Brian Nelson (Melbourne: Monash Romance Studies, 2000), pp. 194–205.
See the sensitive treatment of this theme in Richard Herr, Tocqueville and the Old Regime ( Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1962 ).
See Pierre Rosanvallon, The Demands of Liberty: Civil Society in France since the Revolution, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (2004; Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), esp. pp. 247–65.
See Stanley Hoffmann’s work on the stalemate society in his ‘Paradoxes of the French Political Community,’ in In Search of France: the Economy, Society, and Political System in the Twentieth Century, ed. Stanley Hoffmann et al. (New York: Harper and Row, 1965), pp. 1–117; and idem., ‘The State: For What Society?’ in Decline or Renewal? France since the 1930s (New York: Viking Press, 1974), pp. 443–86.
See Claire Duchen, Feminism in France from May’68 to Mitterrand ( London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1986 ), pp. 1–13.
Eugen Weber, France, Fin de Siècle ( Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1986 ).
See Léo Taxil et la franc-maçonnerie. Lettres inédites publiées par les amis de Monseigneur Jouin (Chatou: British-American Press, 1934) and Eugen Weber, Satan franc-maçon. La mystification de Léo Taxil (Paris: Julliard, 1964) for documentation of the unscrupulous activities of an entrepreneurial publicist who was once an ardent Masonic anti-cleric and then an equally ardent anti-Masonic writer. The occasional resemblance of his mystifications to those of Papus is no accident.
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Allen, J.S. (2010). Papus the Misogynist: Honor, Gender, and the Occult in Fin-de-Siècle France. In: Forth, C.E., Accampo, E. (eds) Confronting Modernity in Fin-de-Siècle France. Genders and Sexualities in History. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230246843_6
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