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greatest attention was paid to this ordering of life and conscience, which throughout the eighteenth century would more and more clearly appear as the reason d'etre of confinement. In 1765, new regulations were established for the Charite of Chateau-Thierry; it was made quite clear that "the Prior will visit all the prisoners at least once a week, one after the other, and separately, to console them, to exhort them to better conduct, and to assure himself that they are treated as they should be; the subordinate officer will do this every day."
All these prisons of moral order might have borne the motto which Howard could still read on the one in Mainz:
"If wild beasts can be broken to the yoke, it must not be despaired of correcting the man who has strayed." For the Catholic Church, as in the Protestant countries, confinement represents, in the form of an authoritarian model, the myth of social happiness: a police whose order will be entirely transparent to the principles of religion, and a religion whose requirements will be satisfied, without restrictions, by the regulations of the police and the constraints with which it can be armed. There is, in these institutions, an attempt of a kind to demonstrate that order may be adequate to virtue. In this sense, "confinement" conceals both a metaphysics of government and a politics of religion; it is situated, as an effort of tyrannical synthesis, in the vast space separating the garden of God and the cities which men, driven from paradise, have built with their own hands. The house of confinement in the classical age constitutes the densest symbol of that "police" which conceived of itself as the civil equivalent of religion for the edification of a perfect city.
Confinement was an institutional creation peculiar to the seventeenth century. It acquired from the first an importance that left it no rapport with imprisonment as practiced
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in the Middle Ages. As an economic measure and a social precaution, it had the value of invendveness. But in the history of unreason, it marked a decisive event: the moment when madness was perceived on the social horizon of poverty, of incapacity for work, of inability to integrate with the group; the moment when madness began to rank among the problems of the city. The new meanings assigned to poverty, the importance given to the obligation to work, and all the ethical values that are linked to labor, ultimately determined the experience of madness and inflected its course.
A sensibility was born which had drawn a line and laid a, cornerstone, and which chose—only to banish. The concrete space of classical society reserved a neutral region, a blank page where the real life of the city was suspended;
here, order no longer freely confronted disorder, reason no longer tried to make its own way among all that might evade or seek to deny it. Here reason reigned in the pure state, in a triumph arranged for it in advance over a frenzied unreason. Madness was thus torn from that imaginary freedom which still allowed it to flourish on the Renaissance horizon. Not so long ago, it had floundered about in broad daylight: in King Lear, in Don Quixote. But in less than a half-century, it had been sequestered and, in the fortress of confinement, bound to Reason, to the rules of morality and to their monotonous nights.
III
THE INSANE
from the creation of the Hopital General, from the opening, in Germany and in England, of the first houses of correction, and until the end of the eighteenth century, the age of reason confined. It confined the debauched, spendthrift fathers, prodigal sons, blasphemers, men who "seek to undo themselves," libertines. And through these parallels, these strange complicities, the age sketched the profile of its own experience of unreason.
But in each of these cities, we find an entire population of madness as well. One-tenth of all the arrests made in Paris for the Hopital General concern "the insane," "demented" men, individuals of "wandering mind," and "persons who have become completely mad." Between these and the others, no sign of a differentiation. Judging from the registries, the same sensibility appears to collect them, the same gestures to set them apart. We leave it to medical archaeology to determine whether or not a man was sick, criminal, or insane who was admitted to the hospital for
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"derangement of morals," or because he had "mistreated his wife" and tried several times to kill himself.
Yet it must not be forgotten that the "insane" had as such a particular place in the world of confinement. Their status was not merely that of prisoners. In the general sensibility to unreason, there appeared to be a special modulation which concerned madness proper, and was addressed to those called, without exact semantic distinction, insane, alienated, deranged, demented, extravagant.
This particular form of sensibility traces the features proper to madness in the world of unreason. It is primarily concerned with scandal. In its most general form, confinement is explained, or at least justified, by the desire to avoid scandal. It even signifies thereby an important change in the consciousness of evil. The Renaissance had freely allowed the forms of unreason to come out into the light of day; public outrage gave evil the powers of example and redemption. Gilles de Rais, accused, in the fifteenth century, of having been and of being "a heretic, an apostate, a sorcerer, a sodomite, an invoker of evil spirits, a soothsayer, a slayer of innocents, an idolater, working evil by deviation from the faith," ended by himself admitting to crimes "sufficient to cause the deaths of ten thousand persons" in extrajudiciary confession; he repeated his avowal in Latin before the tribunal; then he asked, of his own accord, that "the said confession should be published in the vulgar tongue and exhibited to each and every one of those present, the majority of whom knew no Latin, the publication and confession to his shame of the said offenses by him committed, in order the more easily to obtain the remission of sins, and the mercy of God for the pardon of the sins by him committed." At the trial, the same confession was required before those assembled: he "was told by the Presiding Judge that he should state his case fully, and the shame that he would gain thereby would serve to lessen the pun-
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ishment he would suffer hereafter." Until the seventeenth century, evil in all its most violent and most inhuman forms could not be dealt with and punished unless it was brought into the open. The light in which confession was made and punishment executed could alone balance the darkness from which evil issued. In order to pass through all the stages of its fulfillment, evil must necessarily incur public avowal and manifestation before reaching the conclusion which suppresses it.
Confinement, on the contrary, betrays a form of conscience to which the inhuman can suggest only shame. There are aspects of evil that have such a power of contagion, such a force of scandal that any publicity multiplies them infinitely. Only oblivion can suppress them. In a case of poisoning, Pontchartrain orders not a public trial but the secrecy of an asylum: "As the facts of the case concerned a good part of Paris, the King did not believe that so many people should be brought to trial, many of whom had committed crimes unawares, and others only by the ease of doing so; His Majesty so determined the more readily insofar as he is persuaded that there are certain crimes which must absolutely be thrust into oblivion."1 Beyond the dangers of example, the honor of families and that of religion sufficed to recommend a subject for a house of confinement. Apropos of a priest who was to be sent to Saint-Lazare: "Hence a priest such as this cannot be hidden away with too much care for the honor of religion and that of the priesthood."2 Even late in the eighteenth century, Malesherbes would defend confinement as a right of families seeking to escape dishonor. "That which is called a base action is placed in the rank of those which public order does not permit us to tolerate. ... It seems that the honor of a family requires the disappearance from society of the individual who by vile and abject habits shames his relatives." Inversely, liberation is in order when the danger of
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scandal is past and the honor of families or of the Church can no longer be sullied. The Abbe Bargede had been confined for a
long time; never, despite his requests, had his release been authorized; but now old age and infirmity had made scandal impossible. "And besides, his paralysis persists," writes d'Argenson; "he can neither write nor sign his name; I think that there would be justice and charity in setting him free." All those forms of evil that border on unreason must be thrust into secrecy. Classicism felt a shame in the presence of the inhuman that the Renaissance had never experienced. Yet there is one exception in this consignment to secrecy:
that which is made for madmen.8 It was doubtless a very old custom of the Middle Ages to display the insane. In certain of the Narrturmer in Germany, barred windows had been installed which permitted those outside to observe the madmen chained within. They thus constituted a spectacle at the city gates. The strange fact is that this custom did not disappear once the doors of the asylums closed, but that on the contrary it then developed, assuming in Paris and London almost an institutional character. As late as 1815, if a report presented in the House of Commons is to be believed, the hospital of Bethlehem exhibited lunatics for a penny, every Sunday. Now the annual revenue from these exhibitions amounted to almost four hundred pounds; which suggests the astonishingly high number of 96,000 visits a year.4 In France, the excursion to Bicetre and the display of the insane remained until the Revolution one of the Sunday distractions for the Left Bank bourgeoisie. Mirabeau reports in his Observations d'un voyageur anglais that the madmen at Bicetre were shown "like curious animals, to the first simpleton willing to pay a coin." One went to see the keeper display the madmen the way the trainer at the Fair of Saint-Germain put the monkeys through their tricks.5 Certain attendants were well known
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for their ability to make the mad perform dances and acrobatics, with a few flicks of the whip. The only extenuation to be found at the end of the eighteenth century was that the mad were allowed to exhibit the mad, as if it were the responsibility of madness to testify to its own nature. "Let us not slander human nature. The English traveler is right to regard the office of exhibiting madmen as beyond the most hardened humanity. We have already said so. But all dilemmas afford a remedy. It is the madmen themselves who are entrusted in their lucid intervals with displaying their companions, who, in their turn, return the favor. Thus the keepers of these unfortunate creatures enjoy the profits that the spectacle affords, without indulging in a heartlessness to which, no doubt, they could never descend."6 Here is madness elevated to spectacle above the silence of the asylums, and becoming a public scandal for the general delight. Unreason was hidden in the silence of the houses of confinement, but madness continued to be present on the stage of the world—with more commotion than ever. It would soon reach, under the Empire, a point that had never been attained in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance; the strange Brotherhood of the Blue Ship had once given performances in which madness was mimed; now it was madness itself, madness in flesh and blood, which put on the show. Early in the nineteenth century, Coulmier, the director of Charenton, had organized those famous performances in which madmen sometimes played the roles of actors, sometimes those of watched spectators. "The insane who attended these theatricals were the object of the attention and curiosity of a frivolous, irresponsible, and often vicious public. The bizarre attitudes of these unfortunates and their condition provoked the mocking laughter and the insulting pity of the spectators."7 Madness became pure spectacle, in a world over which Sade extended his sovereignty and which was offered as a diversion
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to the good conscience of a reason sure of itself. Until the beginning of the nineteenth century, and to the indignation of Royer-Collard, madmen remained monsters—that is, etymologically, beings or things to be shown.
Confinement hid away unreason, and betrayed the shame it aroused; but it explicitly drew attention to madness, pointed to it. If, in the case of unreason, the chief intention was to avoid scandal, in the case of madness that intention was to organize it. A strange contradiction: the classical age enveloped madness in a total experience of unreason; it re-absorbed its particular forms, which the Middle Ages and the Renaissance had clearly individualized into a general apprehension in which madness consorted indiscriminately with all the forms of unreason. But at the same time it assigned to this same madness a special sign: not that of sickness, but that of glorified scandal. Yet there is nothing in common between this organized exhibition of madness in the eighteenth century and the freedom with which it came to light during the Renaissance. In the Renaissance, madness was present everywhere and mingled with every experience by its images or its dangers. During the classical period, madness was shown, but on the other side of bars; if present, it was at a distance, under the eyes of a reason that no longer felt any relation to it and that would not compromise itself by too close a resemblance. Madness had become a thing to look at: no longer a monster inside oneself, but an animal with strange mechanisms, a bestiality from which man had long since been suppressed. "I can easily conceive of a man without hands, feet, head (for it is only experience which teaches us that the head is more necessary than the feet). But I cannot conceive of man without thought; that would be a stone or a brute."8
In his Report on the Care of the Insane Desportes describes the cells of Bicetre as they were at the end of the eighteenth century: "The unfortunate whose entire furni-
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ture consisted of this straw pallet, lying with his head, feet, and body pressed against the wall, could not enjoy sleep without being soaked by the water that trickled from that mass of stone." As for the cells of La Salpetriere, what made "the place more miserable and often more fatal, was that in winter, when the waters of the Seine rose, those cells situated at the level of the sewers became not only more unhealthy, but worse still, a refuge for a swarm of huge rats, which during the night attacked the unfortunates confined there and bit them wherever they could reach them; madwomen have been found with feet, hands, and faces torn by bites which are often dangerous and from which several have died." But these were the dungeons and cells long reserved for the most dangerous and most violent of the insane. If they were calmer, and if no one had anything to fear from them, they were crammed into wards of varying size. One of Samuel Tuke's most active disciples, Godfrey Higgins, had obtained the right, which cost him twenty pounds, to visit the asylum of York as a volunteer inspector. In the course of a visit, he discovered a door that had been carefully concealed and found behind it a room, not eight feet on a side, which thirteen women occupied during the night; by day, they lived in a room scarcely larger.
On the other hand, when the insane were particularly dangerous, they were constrained by a system which was doubtless not of a punitive nature, but simply intended to fix within narrow limits the physical locus of a raging frenzy. Sufferers were generally chained to the walls and to the beds. At Bethlehem, violent madwomen were chained by the ankles to the wall of a long gallery; their only garment was a homespun dress. At another hospital, in Bethnal Green, a woman subject to violent seizures was placed in a pigsty, feet and fists bound; when the crisis had passed she was tied to her bed, covered only by a blanket; when she
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was allowed to take a few steps, an iron bar was placed between her legs, attached by rings to her ankles and by a short chain to handcuffs. Samuel Tuke, in his Report on the Condition of the Indigent Insane, gives the details of a complicated system devised at Bethlehem to control a reputedly dangerous madman: he was attached by a long chain that ran over the wall and thus permitted the attendant to lead him about, to keep him on a leash, so to speak, from outside; around his neck had been placed an iron ring, which was attached by a short chain to another ring; this latter slid the length of a vertical iron bar fastened to the floor and ceiling of the cell. When reforms began to be instituted at Bethlehem, a man was found who had lived in this cell, attached in this fashion, for twelve years.
When practices reach this degree of violent intensity, it becomes clear
that they are no longer inspired by the desire to punish nor by the duty to correct. The notion of a "resipiscence" is entirely foreign to this regime. But there was a certain image of animality that haunted the hospitals of the period. Madness borrowed its face from the mask of the beast. Those chained to the cell walls were no longer men whose minds had wandered, but beasts preyed upon by a natural frenzy: as if madness, at its extreme point, freed from that moral unreason in which its most attenuated forms are enclosed, managed to rejoin, by a paroxysm of strength, the immediate violence of animality. This model of animality prevailed in the asylums and gave them their cagelike aspect, their look of the menagerie. Coguel describes La Salpetriere at the end of the eighteenth century: "Madwomen seized with fits of violence are chained like dogs at their cell doors, and separated from keepers and visitors alike by a long corridor protected by an iron grille;
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