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punishment or despair only in the dimension of error. Its dramatic function exists only insofar as we are concerned with a false drama; a chimerical form in which only supposed faults, illusory murders, ephemeral disappearances are involved.
Yet this absence of seriousness does not keep madness from being essential—even more essential than it had been, for if it brings illusion to its climax, it is from this point that illusion is undone. In the madness in which his error has enveloped him, the character involuntarily begins to unravel the web. Accusing himself, he speaks the truth in spite of himself. In Melite, for example, all the stratagems the hero has accumulated to deceive others are turned against himself, and he becomes their first victim, believing that he is guilty of the deaths of his rival and his mistress. But in his delirium, he blames himself for having invented a whole series of love letters; the truth comes to light, in and through madness, which, provoked by the illusion of a denouement, actually resolves the real imbroglio of which it is both cause and effect. To put it another way, madness is the false punishment of a false solution, but by its own virtue it brings to light the real problem, which can then be truly resolved. It conceals beneath error the secret enterprise of truth. It is this function of madness, both ambiguous and central, that the author of L'Ospital des fous employs when he portrays a pair of lovers who, to escape their pursuers, pretend to be mad and hide among madmen;
in a fit of simulated dementia, the girl, who is dressed as a boy, pretends to believe she is a girl—which she really is— thus uttering, by the reciprocal neutralization of these two pretenses, the truth which in the end will triumph.
Madness is the purest, most total form of qui pro quo; it takes the false for the true, death for life, man for woman, the beloved for the Erinnys and the victim for Minos. But it is also the most rigorously necessary form of the qui pro
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quo in the dramatic economy, for it needs no external element to reach a true resolution. It has merely to carry its illusion to the point of truth. Thus it is, at the very heart of the structure, in its mechanical center, both a feigned conclusion, pregnant with a secret "starting over," and the first step toward what will turn out to be the reconciliation with reason and truth. It marks the point toward which converge, apparently, the tragic destinies of the characters, and from which, in reality, emerge the lines leading to happiness regained. In madness equilibrium is established, but it masks that equilibrium beneath the cloud of illusion, beneath feigned disorder; the rigor of the architecture is concealed beneath the cunning arrangement of these disordered violences. The sudden bursts of life, the random gestures and words, the 'wind of madness that suddenly breaks lines, shatters attitudes, rumples draperies—while the strings are merely being pulled tighter—this is the very type of baroque trompe-l'oeil. Madness is the great trompe-l'oeil in the tragicomic structures of preclassical literature.
This was understood by Georges de Scudery, who made his Comedie des comediens a theater of theater, situating his play, from the start, in the interacting illusions of madness. One group of actors takes the part of spectators, another that of actors. The former must pretend to take the decor for reality, the play for life, while in reality these actors are performing in a real decor; on the other hand, the latter must pretend to play the part of actors, while in fact, quite simply, they are actors acting. A double impersonation in which each element is doubled, thus forming that renewed exchange of the real and the illusory which is itself the dramatic meaning of madness. "I do not know," Mondory says in the prologue to Scudery's play, "what extravagance has today come over my companions, but it is so great that I am forced to believe that some spell has robbed them of their reason, and the worst of it is that they
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are trying to make me lose mine, and you yours as well. They wish to persuade me that I am not on a stage, that this is the city of Lyons, that over there is an inn, and there an innyard where actors who are not ourselves, yet who are, are performing a Pastoral." In this extravaganza, the theater develops its truth, which is illusion. Which is, in the strict sense, madness.
The classical experience of madness is born. The great threat that dawned on the horizon of the fifteenth century subsides, the disturbing powers that inhabit Bosch's painting have lost their violence. Forms remain, now transparent and docile, forming a cortege, the inevitable procession of reason. Madness has ceased to be—at the limits of the world, of man and death—an eschatological figure; the darkness has dispersed on which the eyes of madness were fixed and out of which the forms of the impossible were bom. Oblivion falls upon the world navigated by the free slaves of the Ship of Fools. Madness will no longer proceed from a point within the world to a point beyond, on its strange voyage; it will never again be that fugitive and absolute limit. Behold it moored now, made fast among things and men. Retained and maintained. No longer a ship but a hospital.
Scarcely a century after the career of the mad ships, we note the appearance of the theme of the "Hospital of Madmen," the "Madhouse." Here every empty head, fixed and classified according to the true reason of men, utters contradiction and irony, the double language of Wisdom:
". . . the Hospital of incurable Madmen, where are recited from end to end all the follies and fevers of the mind, by men as well as women, a task no less useful than enjoyable, and necessary for the acquisition of true wisdom." 10 Here each form of madness finds its proper place, its distinguishing mark, and its tutelary divinity: frenzied and ranting
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madness, symbolized by a fool astride a chair, straggles beneath Minerva's gaze; the somber melancholies that roam the countryside, solitary and avid wolves, have as their god Jupiter, patron of animal metamorphoses; then come the "mad drunkards," the "madmen deprived of memory and understanding," the "madmen benumbed and half-dead," the "madmen of giddy and empty heads" ... All this world of disorder, in perfect order, pronounces, each in his turn, the Praise of Reason. Already, in this "Hospital," confinement has succeeded embarkation.
Tamed, madness preserves all the appearances of its reign. It now takes part in the measures of reason and in the labor of truth. It plays on the surface of things and in the glitter of daylight, over all the workings of appearances, over the ambiguity of reality and illusion, over all that indeterminate web, ever rewoven and broken, which both unites and separates truth and appearance. It hides and manifests, it utters truth and falsehood, it is light and shadow. It shimmers, a central and indulgent figure, already precarious in this baroque age.
Let us not be surprised to come upon it so often in the fictions of the novel and the theater. Let us not be surprised to find it actually prowling through the streets. Thousands of times, Francois Colletet has met it there:
I see, in this thoroughfare,
A natural, followed by children.
. . . Consider this unhappy wretch;
Poor mad fool, what will he do
With so many rags and tatters? . . .
I have seen such wild lunatics
Shouting insults in the streets . . .
Madness traces a very familiar silhouette in the social landscape. A new and lively pleasure is taken in the old confraternities of madmen, in their festivals, their gather-
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ings, their speeches. Men argue passionately for or against Nicolas Joubert, better known by the name of Angoulevent, who declares himself Prince of Fools, a tide disputed by Valenti le Comte and Jacques Resneau: there follow pamphlets, a trial, arguments; his lawyer declares and certifies him to be "an empty head, a gutted gourd, lacking in common sense; a cane, a broken brain, that has neither spring nor whole wheel in his head." Bluet d' Arberes, who calls himself Comte de Permission, is a protege of the Crequis, the Lesdiguieres, the Bouillons, the Nemours; in 1602 he publishes—or someone publishes for him—his works, in which he warns the reader that "he does not know how to read or write, and has never learned,"
but that he is animated "by the inspiration of God and the Angels." Pierre Dupuis, whom Regnier mentions in his sixth satire, is, according to Brascambille, "an archfool in a long robe"; he himself in his "Remontrance sur le reveil de Mattre Guillaume" states that he has "a mind elevated as far as the antechamber of the third degree of the moon." And many other characters present in Regnier's fourteenth satire.
This world of the early seventeenth century is strangely hospitable, in all senses, to madness. Madness is here, at the heart of things and of men, an ironic sign that misplaces the guideposts between the real and the chimerical, barely retaining the memory of the great tragic threats—a life more disturbed than disturbing, an absurd agitation in society, the mobility of reason.
But new requirements are being generated:
A hundred and a hundred times have I taken up my lantern, Seeking, at high noon . . ,11
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II
THE GREAT CONFINEMENT
Compelle intrare.
by a strange act of force, the classical age was to reduce to silence the madness whose voices the Renaissance had just liberated, but whose violence it had already tamed.
It is common knowledge that the seventeenth century created enormous houses of confinement; it is less commonly known that more than one out of every hundred inhabitants of the city of Paris found themselves confined there, within several months. It is common knowledge that absolute power made use of lettres de cachet and arbitrary measures of imprisonment; what is less familiar is the judicial conscience that could inspire such practices. Since Pinel, Tuke, Wagnitz, we know that madmen were subjected to the regime of this confinement for a century and a half, and that they would one day be discovered in the
wards of the Hopital General, in the cells of prisons; they would be found mingled with the population of the workhouses or Zuchthausern. But it has rarely been made clear what their status was there, what the meaning was of this proximity which seemed to assign the same homeland to the poor, to the unemployed, to prisoners, and to the insane. It is within the walls of confinement that Pinel and nineteenth-century psychiatry would come upon madmen; it is there —let us remember—that they would leave them, not without boasting of having "delivered" them. From the middle of the seventeenth century, madness was linked with this country of confinement, and with the act which designated confinement as its natural abode.
A date can serve as a landmark: 1656, the decree that founded, in Paris, the Hopital General. At first glance, this is merely a reform—little more than an administrative reorganization. Several already existing establishments are grouped under a single administration: the Salpetriere, rebuilt under the preceding reign to house an arsenal; Bicetre, which Louis XIII had wanted to give to the Commandery of Saint Louis as a rest home for military invalids; "the House and the Hospital of La Pitie, the larger as well as the smaller, those of Le Refuge, situated in the Faubourg Saint-Victor, the House and Hospital of Scipion, the House of La Savonnerie, with all the lands, places, gardens, houses, and buildings thereto appertaining."1 All were now assigned to the poor of Paris "of both sexes, of all ages and from all localities, of whatever breeding and birth, in whatever state they may be, able-bodied or invalid, sick or convalescent, curable or incurable." These establishments had to accept, lodge, and feed those who presented themselves or those sent by royal or judicial authority; it was also necessary to assure the subsistence, the appearance, and the general order of those who could not find room, but who might or who deserved to be there. This responsibility was
entrusted to directors appointed for life, who exercised their powers, not only in the buildings of the Hopital but throughout the city of Paris, over all those who came under their jurisdiction: "They have all power of authority, of direction, of administration, of commerce, of police, of jurisdiction, of correction and punishment over all the poor of Paris, both within and without the Hopital General." The directors also appointed a doctor at a salary of one thousand livres a year; he was to reside at La Pitie, but had to visit each of the houses of the Hopital twice a week.
From the very start, one thing is clear: the Hopital General is not a medical establishment. It is rather a sort of semijudicial structure, an administrative entity which, along with the already constituted powers, and outside of the courts, decides, judges, and executes. "The directors having for these purposes stakes, irons, prisons, and dungeons in the said Hopital General and the places thereto appertaining so much as they deem necessary, no appeal will be accepted from the regulations they establish within the said hospital; and as for such regulations as intervene from without, they will be executed according to their form and tenor, notwithstanding opposition or whatsoever appeal made or to be made, and without prejudice to these, and for which, notwithstanding all defense or suits for justice, no distinction will be made."2 A quasi-absolute sovereignty, jurisdiction without appeal, a writ of execution against which nothing can prevail—the Hopital General is a strange power that the King establishes between the police and the courts, at the limits of the law: a third order of repression. The insane whom Pinel would find at Bicetre and at La Salpetriere belonged to this world.
In its functioning, or in its purpose, the Hopital General had nothing to do with any medical concept. It was an instance of order, of the monarchical and bourgeois order being organized in France during this period. It was di-
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rectly linked with the royal power which placed it under the authority of the civil government alone; the Grand Almonry of the Realm, which previously formed an ecclesiastical and spiritual mediation in the politics of assistance, was abruptly elided. The King decreed: "We choose to be guardian and protector of the said Hopital General as being of our royal founding and especially as it does not depend in any manner whatsoever upon our Grand Almonry, nor upon any of our high officers, but is to be totally exempt from the direction, visitation, and jurisdiction of the officers of the General Reform and others of the Grand Almonry, and from all others to whom we forbid all knowledge and jurisdiction in any fashion or manner whatsoever." The origin of the project had been parliamentary, and the first two administrative heads appointed were the first President of the Parlement and the Procurator General. But they were soon supplemented by the Archbishop of Paris, the President of the Court of Assistance, the President of the Court of Exchequer, the Chief of Police, and the Provost of Merchants. Henceforth the "Grand Bureau" had no more than a deliberative role. The actual administration and the real responsibilities were entrusted to agents recruited by co-optation. These were the true governors, the delegates of royal power and bourgeois fortune to the world of poverty. The Revolution was able to give them this testimony: "Chosen from the best families of the bourgeoisie, . . . they brought to their administration disinterested views and pure intentions."3
This structure proper to the monarchical and bourgeois order of France, contemporary with its organization in absolutist forms, soon extended its network over the whole of France. An edict of the King, dated June 16, 1676, prescribed the establishment of an "hopital general in each city of his kingdom." Occasionally the measure had been anticipated by the local authorities; the bourgeoisie of Lyons
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had already organized in 1612 a charity establishment that functioned in an analogous manner. The Archbishop of Tours was proud to declare on July 10, 1676, that his "archepiscopal city has happily foreseen the pious intentions of the King and erected an hopital general called La Charite even before the one in Paris, whose order has served as a model for all those subsequently established, within or outside the kingdom." The Charite of Tours, in fact, had been founded in 1656, and the King had endowed it with an income of four thousand livres. Over the entire face of France, hopitaux generaux were opened; on the eve of the Revolution, they were to be found in thirty-two provincial cities.
Even if it had been deliberately excluded from the organization of the
hopitaux generaux—by complicity, doubtless, between royal power and bourgeoisie—the Church nonetheless did not remain a stranger to the movement. It reformed its own hospital institutions, redistributed the wealth of its foundations, even created congregations whose purposes were rather analogous to those of the Hopital General. Vincent de Paul reorganized Saint-Lazare, the most important of the former lazar houses of Paris; on January 7, 1632, he signed a contract in the name of the Congregationists of the Mission with the "Priory" of Saint-Lazare, which was now to receive "persons detained by order of His Majesty." The Order of Good Sons opened hospitals of this nature in the north of France. The Brothers of Saint John of God, called into France in 1602, founded first the Charite of Paris in the Faubourg Saint-Germain, then Charenton, into which they moved on May 10, 1645. Not far from Paris, they also operated the Charite of Senlis, which opened on October 27, 1670. Some years before, the Duchess of Bouillon had donated them the buildings and benefices of La Maladrerie, founded in the fourteenth century by Thibaut de Champagne, at Chateau-
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Thierry. They administered also the Charites of Saint-Yon, Pontorson, Cadillac, and Romans. In 1699, the Lazarists founded in Marseilles the establishment that was to become the Hopital Saint-Pierre. Then, in the eighteenth century, came Armentieres (1712), Mareville (1714), the Good Savior of Caen (1735); Saint-Meins of Rennes opened shortly before the Revolution (1780).
Madness and Civilzation ( A History of Madness) Page 5