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Mesmerism and the end of the enlightenment
102
Book Reviews
Mesmerism and the End of the Enlightenment, Robert Darnton (Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 1968, 1986) ix + 218pp., cloth $16.50; paper $7.95.
Mass:
This is one of several books in which Professor Robert Darnton has explored the irrational underside of the Enlightenment and helped us, better than most historians, to understand how the age of reason evolved into the age of revolution and romanticism. Franz Anton Messmer is generally remembered rather as a charlatan of the salons than as a philosophe of the consulting rooms, but he deserves some credit as the founder of a form of scientific activity which has survived, however precariously, as hypnotism andpsychoanalysis. He was not a total fraud, and Professor Darnton shows that his importance extends beyond the frontiers of medicine. Messmer was very much a man of his time, and one of those thinkers who seem to flourish as gurus in societies which have grown too sophisticated for traditional religion, but are willing to accept any doctrine which is new and exciting and can express itself in an idiom to which the times are attuned. Messmer, who arrived in Paris in February 1778 at the age of44, was an Austrian doctor who had devised a form of therapy he called ‘animal magnetism’, a variant of ‘mineral magnetism’ which he contrived to perform without the aid of minerals. His fellow doctors in Paris were sceptical, but he recruited the support of some scientists in other fields, and, what was more important, the backing of several millionaires. Publicity generated by quarrels between his admirers and detractors only served to make him famous, and fame, in turn, seems to have made his methods work. His use of a tub in the service of group therapy introduced a sort of social life, like that of a spa, among the better-off invalids and hypochondriacs of Paris, and the cures he effected were certainly no fewer than those of orthodox French medicine, which had then very little to boast about. What emerges most forcefully from Prof. Darnton’s book, however, is the extent to which Messmer moved from being a fashionable healer to being an ideologue, a social and political theorist suggesting a solution to the problems of mankind at large. His precepts were crude, but exciting. Down with reason. To hell with the academies. Back to nature. Forward to universal harmony and the ultimate triumph of mind over matter. Where Messmer’s imagination faltered, his followers pressed onwards. Prof. Darnton devotes a chapter to Nicolas Bergasse, who outlined a Messmerist programme for the salvation of humanity. He promised to reverse the historical trend of causality, to change institutions in France by changing Frenchmen: improved health, he claimed, would produce improved morality, and improved morals would eventually revolutionise the nation politically. Prof. Darnton observes that this proposal would ‘hardly satisfy the revolutionaries of 1787-1789’, but that it nevertheless served earlier in the decade to ‘crystallise radical ideas and to communicate a vulgar kind of Rousseauism to a reading public that had not yet awakened to political issues’. Like Prof. Darnton’s other work on the Enlightenment, this book is based on original research in manuscripts, pamphlets and journals of the period, but the scholarly apparatus is never allowed to hinder the flow of the writing, which is witty and stylist in the best Voltairian tradition, except that while Voltaire was usually concerned to unhorse public heroes, Prof. Darnton has set out to reassess the significance of a man with a battered image. Maurice London Schoo/ of Economics
Cranston
Book Reviews
Mesmerism and the End of the Enlightenment, Robert Darnton (Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 1968, 1986) ix + 218pp., cloth $16.50; paper $7.95.
Mass:
This is one of several books in which Professor Robert Darnton has explored the irrational underside of the Enlightenment and helped us, better than most historians, to understand how the age of reason evolved into the age of revolution and romanticism. Franz Anton Messmer is generally remembered rather as a charlatan of the salons than as a philosophe of the consulting rooms, but he deserves some credit as the founder of a form of scientific activity which has survived, however precariously, as hypnotism andpsychoanalysis. He was not a total fraud, and Professor Darnton shows that his importance extends beyond the frontiers of medicine. Messmer was very much a man of his time, and one of those thinkers who seem to flourish as gurus in societies which have grown too sophisticated for traditional religion, but are willing to accept any doctrine which is new and exciting and can express itself in an idiom to which the times are attuned. Messmer, who arrived in Paris in February 1778 at the age of44, was an Austrian doctor who had devised a form of therapy he called ‘animal magnetism’, a variant of ‘mineral magnetism’ which he contrived to perform without the aid of minerals. His fellow doctors in Paris were sceptical, but he recruited the support of some scientists in other fields, and, what was more important, the backing of several millionaires. Publicity generated by quarrels between his admirers and detractors only served to make him famous, and fame, in turn, seems to have made his methods work. His use of a tub in the service of group therapy introduced a sort of social life, like that of a spa, among the better-off invalids and hypochondriacs of Paris, and the cures he effected were certainly no fewer than those of orthodox French medicine, which had then very little to boast about. What emerges most forcefully from Prof. Darnton’s book, however, is the extent to which Messmer moved from being a fashionable healer to being an ideologue, a social and political theorist suggesting a solution to the problems of mankind at large. His precepts were crude, but exciting. Down with reason. To hell with the academies. Back to nature. Forward to universal harmony and the ultimate triumph of mind over matter. Where Messmer’s imagination faltered, his followers pressed onwards. Prof. Darnton devotes a chapter to Nicolas Bergasse, who outlined a Messmerist programme for the salvation of humanity. He promised to reverse the historical trend of causality, to change institutions in France by changing Frenchmen: improved health, he claimed, would produce improved morality, and improved morals would eventually revolutionise the nation politically. Prof. Darnton observes that this proposal would ‘hardly satisfy the revolutionaries of 1787-1789’, but that it nevertheless served earlier in the decade to ‘crystallise radical ideas and to communicate a vulgar kind of Rousseauism to a reading public that had not yet awakened to political issues’. Like Prof. Darnton’s other work on the Enlightenment, this book is based on original research in manuscripts, pamphlets and journals of the period, but the scholarly apparatus is never allowed to hinder the flow of the writing, which is witty and stylist in the best Voltairian tradition, except that while Voltaire was usually concerned to unhorse public heroes, Prof. Darnton has set out to reassess the significance of a man with a battered image. Maurice London Schoo/ of Economics
Cranston