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tance, such persons form a circle around Rameau's Nephew; they do not have his dimensions; it is only in the search for the picturesque that they can pass for his epigones.
And yet they are a little more than a social profile, a caricatural silhouette. There is something inside them that concerns and touches the unreason of the eighteenth century. Their chatter, their anxiety, that vague delirium and that ultimate anguish they experience commonly enough— and in real existences which can still be traced. As with the libertine, the debauchee, or the ruffian of the end of the seventeenth century, it is difficult to say whether they are mad, sick, or criminal. Mercier himself does not quite know what status to give them: "Thus there are in Paris some very good people, economists and anti-economists, who have warm hearts, eager for the public good; but unfortunately they have cracked heads; that is, they are shortsighted, they do not know what century they are in, nor what men they are dealing with; more unbearable than idiots, because with pennies and false lights they start from an impossible principle and reason falsely therefrom." They really existed, these schemers with "cracked heads," adding a muffled accompaniment of unreason to the reason of the philosophers, and around those plans for reform, those constitutions, those projects; the rationality of the Enlightenment found in them a sort of darkened mirror, an inoffensive caricature. But is it not essential that in a movement of amused indulgence, a personage of unreason is allowed back into daylight, at the very moment he was believed to be most profoundly hidden in the space of confinement? As if classical reason once again admitted a proximity, a relation, a quasi-resemblance between itself and the images of unreason. As if, at the moment of its triumph, reason revived and permitted to drift on the margins of order a character whose mask it had fashioned in
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derision—a sort of double in which it both recognized and revoked itself.
Yet fear and anxiety were not far off: in the reaction of confinement, they reappeared, doubled. People were once afraid, people were still afraid, of being confined; at the end of the eighteenth century, Sade was still haunted by fear of what he called "the black men" who lay in wait to put him away. But now the estate of confinement acquired its own powers; it became in its turn the birthplace of evil, and could henceforth spread that evil by itself^ instituting another reign of terror.
Suddenly, in a few years in the middle of the eighteenth century, a fear arose—a fear formulated in medical terms but animated, basically, by a moral myth. People were in dread of a mysterious disease that spread, it was said, from the houses of confinement and would soon threaten the cities. They spoke of prison fevers; they evoked the wagons of criminals, men in chains who passed through the cities, leaving disease in their wake; scurvy was thought to cause contagions; it was said that the air, tainted by disease, would corrupt the residential quarters. And the great image of medieval horror reappeared, giving birth, in the metaphors of dread, to a second panic. The house of confinement was no longer only the lazar house at the city's edge;
it was leprosy itself confronting the town: "A terrible ulcer upon the body politic, an ulcer that is wide, deep, and draining, one that cannot be imagined except by looking full upon it. Even the air of the place, which can be smelled four hundred yards away—everything suggests that one is approaching a place of violence, an asylum of degradation and infortune."3 Many of these centers of confinement were built in the very places where the lepers had once been kept; it was as if, across the centuries, the new tenants had received the contagion. They revived the blazon and
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the meaning that had been borne in those places: "Too great a leper for the capital! The name of Bicetre is a word no one can pronounce without an inexpressible feeling of repugnance, of horror and contempt. ... It has become the receptacle for all the most monstrous and vile things to be found in society."4
The evil which men had attempted to exclude by confinement reappeared, to the horror of the public, in a fantastic guise. There appeared, ramifying in every direction, the themes of an evil, both physical and moral, that enveloped in this very ambiguity the mingled powers of corrosion and horror. There prevailed, then, a sort of undifferentiated image of "rottenness" that had to do with the corruption of morals as well as with the decomposition of the flesh, and upon which were based both the repugnance and the pity felt for the confined. First the evil began to ferment in the closed spaces of confinement. It had all the virtues attributed to acid in eighteenth-century chemistry: its fine particles, sharp as needles, penetrated bodies and hearts as easily as if they were passive and friable alkaline particles. The mixture boiled immediately, releasing harmful vapors and corrosive liquids: "These wards are a dreadful place where all crimes together ferment and spread around them, as by fermentation, a contagious atmosphere which those who live there breathe and which seems to become attached to them."5 These burning vapors then rise, spread through the air, and finally fall upon the neighborhood, impregnating bodies and contaminating souls. Thus the idea of a contagion of evil-as-rottenness is articulated in images. The palpable agent of this epidemic is air, that air which is called "tainted," the term obscurely suggesting that it is not in conformity with the purity of its nature, and that it acts as the communicating element of the taint. It is sufficient to remember the value, both moral and medical, ascribed at about the same period to country air
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(bodily health, spiritual vigor), to realize the whole complex of contrary meanings conveyed by the corrupted air of hospitals, prisons, houses of confinement. By this atmosphere laden with maleficent vapors, entire cities were threatened, whose inhabitants would be slowly impregnated with rottenness and taint.
And these are not only reflections halfway between morality and medicine. We must doubtless take into account an entire literary development, a whole emotional, perhaps political exploitation of vague fears. But in certain cities there were movements of panic as real, as easy to date, as the great crises of horror that wracked the Middle Ages from time to time. In 1780 an epidemic spread through Paris: its origin was attributed to the infection of the Hopital General; there was even talk of burning the buildings of Bicetre. The police lieutenant, faced with the frenzy of the population, sent a commission of inquiry which included, together with several staff doctors, the Dean of the Faculte and the physician of the Hopital General. According to their findings, Bicetre was subject to a "putrid fever" which was linked to the bad quality of the air. As for the original source of the disease, the report denied that it lay in the internees and the infection they might spread; it must be attributed quite simply to the bad weather that made the disease endemic in the capital; the symptoms that were to be observed at the Hopital General were "in accordance with the nature of the season and exactly the same as the illnesses observed in Paris at the same period." The population had to be reassured and Bicetre cleared of its guilt: "The rumors that have begun to spread concerning a contagious illness at Bicetre that is capable of infecting the capital are without foundation." Evidently the report did not check the rumors completely, since some time later the physician of the Hopital General issued another in which he made the same statement; he was forced
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to acknowledge the poor sanitary conditions of Bicetre, but "matters have not, for all that, reached the cruel extremity of converting the refuge of these unfortunates into another source of inevitable evils much more lamentable than those which require a remedy as prompt as it is efficacious."
The circle was closed: all those forms of unreason which had replaced leprosy in the geography of evil, and which had been banished into the remotest social distance, now became a visible leprosy and offered their running sores to the promiscuity of men. Unreason was once more present;
but marked now by an imaginary stigma of disease, which added its powers of terror.
Thus it is in the realm of the fantastic and not within
the rigor of medical thought that unreason joins illness and draws closer to it. Long before the problem of discovering to what degree the unreasonable is pathological was formulated, there had formed, in the space of confinement and by an alchemy peculiar to it, a melange combining the dread of unreason and the old specters of disease. From a great distance, the old confusions about leprosy functioned once again; and it is the vigor of these fantastic themes which was the first agent of synthesis between the world of unreason and the medical universe. They first communicated through the hallucinations of fear, combining the infernal mixtures of "corruption" and "taint." It is important, perhaps decisive for the place madness was to occupy in modem culture, that homo wiedicus was not called into the world of confinement as an arbiter, to divide what was crime from what was madness, what was evil from what was illness, but rather as a guardian, to protect others from the vague danger that exuded through the walls of confinement. It is easy to suppose that a free and generous sympathy awakened interest in the fate of the confined, and that a more diligent and informed medical attention could recognize disease where previously the authorities
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had indiscriminately punished transgressions. As it happened, the atmosphere was not one of such benevolent neutrality. If a doctor was summoned, if he was asked to observe, it was because people were afraid—afraid of the strange chemistry that seethed behind the walls of confinement, afraid of the powers forming there that threatened to propagate. The doctor came, once the conversion of images was effected, the disease having already assumed the ambiguous aspects of fermentation, of corruption, of tainted exhalations, of decomposed flesh. What is traditionally called "progress" toward madness's attaining a medical status was in fact made possible only by a strange regression. In the inextricable mixture of moral and physical contagions,6 and by virtue of that symbolism of Impurity so familiar to the eighteenth century, very early images rose again to the surface of human memory. And it was as a result of this reactivation of images, more than by an improvement of knowledge, that unreason was eventually confronted by medical thought. Paradoxically, in the return to that fantastic life which mingles with the contemporary images of illness, positivism would gain a hold over unreason, or rather would discover a new reason for protecting itself against it.
The question, for the moment, was not to suppress the houses of confinement, but to neutralize them as potential causes of a new evil. The problem was to organize them while purifying them. The great reform movement that developed in the second half of the eighteenth century originated in the effort to reduce contamination by destroying impurities and vapors, abating fermentations, preventing evil and disease from tainting the air and spreading their contagion in the atmosphere of the cities. The hospital, the house of correction, all the places of confinement, were to be more completely isolated, surrounded by a purer air: this period produced a whole literature con-
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cerning the airing of hospitals, which tentatively approaches the medical problem of contagion, but aims more specifically at themes of moral communication. In 1776 a decree of the Council of State appointed a commission to determine "the degree of amelioration of which the various hospitals in France are in need." Viel was instructed to rebuild the wards of La Salpetriere. The ideal was an asylum which, while preserving its essential functions, would be so organized that the evil could vegetate there without ever spreading; an asylum where unreason would be entirely contained and offered as a spectacle, without threatening the spectators; where it would have all the powers of example and none of the risks of contagion. In short, an asylum restored to its truth as a cage. It is this "sterilized" confinement, if we may employ an anachronistic term, that was still, in 1789, the dream of the Abbe Desmonceaux, in a little work dedicated to National Benevolence; he planned to create a pedagogical instrument—a spectacle conclusively proving the drawbacks of immorality: "these guarded asylums ... are retreats as useful as they are necessary. . . . The sight of these shadowy places and the guilty creatures they contain is well calculated to preserve from the same acts of just reprobation the deviations of a too licentious youth; it is thus prudent of mothers and fathers to familiarize their children at an early age with these horrible and detestable places, where shame and turpitude fetter crime, where man, corrupted in his essence, often loses forever the rights he had acquired in society."
Such are the dreams by which morality, in complicity with medicine, tried to defend itself against the dangers contained but insufficiently restricted by confinement. These same dangers, at the same time, fascinated men's imaginations and their desires. Morality dreams of exorcising them, but there is something in man which makes him dream of experiencing them, or at least of approaching
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them and releasing their hallucinations. The horror that now surrounded the fortresses of confinement also exercised an irresistible attraction. Such nights were peopled with inaccessible pleasures; such corrupt and ravaged faces became masks of voluptuousness; against these dark landscapes appeared forms—pains and delights—which echoed Hieronymus Bosch and his delirious gardens. The secrets that escaped from the chateau in the One Hundred and Twenty Days of Sodom have been murmured ever since:
"There, the most infamous excesses are committed upon the very person of the prisoner; we heal" of certain vices practiced frequently, notoriously, and even publicly in the common room of the prison, vices which the propriety of modem times does not permit us to name. We are told that numerous prisoners, simillimi feminis mores stuprati et constupratores; that they return from this obscure, forbidden place covered over with their own and others' debaucheries, lost to all shame and ready to commit all sorts of crimes."7 And La Rochefoucauld-Liancourt in his turn evoked those figures of Old Women and Young Women in the correction wards of La Salpetriere, who from generation to generation communicate the same secrets and the same pleasures: "The correction ward is the place of greatest punishment for the House, containing when we visited it forty-seven girls, most of them very young, more thoughtless than guilty. . . . And always this confusion of ages, this shocking mixture of frivolous girls with hardened women who can teach them only the art of the most unbridled corruption." For a long time these visions would prowl insistently through the nights of the eighteenth century. For a moment they would be picked out by the pitiless light of Sade's work and placed by it in the rigorous geometry of Desire. They would be taken up again and wrapped in the murky light of Goya's Madhouse, or the twilight that surrounds the Quinta del Sordo. How closely
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the faces of the Disparates resemble them! A whole imaginary landscape reappears, conveyed by the Great Fear confinement now inspires.
What the classical period had confined was not only an abstract unreason which mingled madmen and libertines, invalids, and criminals, but also an enormous reservoir of the fantastic, a dormant world of monsters supposedly engulfed in the darkness of Hieronymus Bosch which had once spewed them forth. One might say that the fortresses of confinement added to their social role of segregation and purification a quite opposite cultural function. Even as they separated reason from unreason on society's surface, they preserved in depth the images where they mingled and exchanged properties. The fortresses of confinement functioned as a great, long silent memory; they maintained in the shadows an iconographic power that men might have thought was exorcised; created by the new classical order, they preserved, against it and against time, forbidden figures that could thus be transmitted intact from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century. In this abolished time, the Brocken joined Dulle Griet in the same imaginary landscape, and Noirceuil, the great legend of the Marechal de Rais. Confinement allowed, indeed called for, this resistance of imagery.
But the images liberated at the end of the eighteenth century were not identical at all points with those the seventeenth century had tried to eliminate. Something had h
appened, in the darkness, which detached them from that secret world where the Renaissance, after the Middle Ages, had found them; they had lodged in the hearts, in the desires, in the imaginations of men; and instead of manifesting to sight the abrupt presence of the insane, they seethed as the strange contradiction of human appetites: the complicity of desire and murder, of cruelty and the longing to suffer, of sovereignty and slavery, of insult and humilia-
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