Slowly, and still in a very scattered fashion, the eighteenth century constituted, around its awareness of madness and of its threatening spread, a whole new order of concepts. In the landscape of unreason where the sixteenth century had located it, madness concealed a meaning and an origin that were obscurely moral; its secrecy related it to
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sin, and the animality imminently perceived in it did not make it, paradoxically, more innocent. In the second half of the eighteenth century, madness was no longer recognized in what brings man closer to an immemorial fall or an indefinitely present animality; it was, on the contrary, situated in those distances man takes in regard to himself, to his world, to all that is offered by the immediacy of nature; madness became possible in that milieu where man's relations with his feelings, with time, with others, are altered; madness was possible because of everything which, in man's life and development, is a break with the immediate. Madness was no longer of the order of nature or of the Fall, but of a new order, in which men began to have a presentiment of history, and where there formed, in an obscure originating relationship, the "alienation" of the physicians and the "alienation" of the philosophers—two configurations in which man in any case corrupts his truth, but between which the nineteenth century, after Hegel, soon lost all trace of resemblance.
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VIII
THE NEW DIVISION
every psychiatrist, every historian yielded, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, to the same impulse of indignation; everywhere we find the same outrage, the same virtuous censure: "No one blushed to put the insane in prison." And Esquirol, listing the fortress of Ha in Bordeaux, the houses of correction in Toulouse and Rennes, the "Bicetres" still existing in Poitiers, in Caen, in Amiens, the "Chateau" of Angers, continues: "Moreover, there are few prisons where the raving mad are not to be found; these unfortunates are chained in dungeons beside criminals. What a monstrous association! The calm madmen are treated worse than malefactors."
The entire century echoes him; in England, it was the Tukes, who had turned historians and apologists for their ancestral occupation; in Germany, after Wagnitz, it was Reil who groaned over those wretches "thrown, like State criminals, into dungeons where the eye of humanity never penetrates." The age of positivism, for over half a century, constantly claimed to have been the first to free the mad
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from a lamentable confusion with the felonious, to separate the innocence of unreason from the guilt of crime.
Yet it is simple enough to show the vanity of this claim. For years the same protests had been raised; before Reil, there had been Franck: "Those who have visited the insane asylums of Germany recall with dread what they have seen. One is horrified upon entering these asylums of misery and affliction; one hears only cries of despair, yet here dwells the man distinguished by his talents and his virtues." Before Esquirol, before Pinel, there had been La Rochefoucauld-Liancourt, there had been Tenon; and before them, an incessant murmur throughout the eighteenth century, composed of insistent protests, lodged year after year even by those whom one would have thought the most indifferent, the most eager perhaps that such a confusion should subsist. Twenty-five years before the exclamations of a Pinel, we must invoke Malesherbes "visiting the State prisons with the intention of breaking down their gates. Prisoners whom he found to be insane . . . were sent to houses where the society, the exercise, and the care he had scrupulously prescribed would be sure, he said, to cure them." Still earlier in the century, and in a lower voice, there had been all those directors, those bursars, those overseers who from generation to generation always asked and sometimes achieved the same thing: the separation of madmen from convicts; there had been the Prior of La Charite in Senlis who begged the police to remove several prisoners and confine them instead in any of several fortresses; there had been that overseer of the House of Correction in Brunswick who asked—and this was only in 1713—that the madmen not be allowed to mingle with the internees assigned to the workshops. Had not what the nineteenth century formulated so ostentatiously, with all the resources of its pathos, already been whispered and indefatigably repeated by the eighteenth? Did Esquirol and Reil and the
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Tukes do anything more than shout at the top of their lungs what had been, for years, commonplaces of asylum practice? The slow emigration of the mad which we have mentioned, from 1720 to the Revolution, was probably no more than the most visible effect of that practice.
And yet, let us listen to what was being said in this half-silence. When the Prior of Senlis asked that madmen be separated from certain convicts, what were his arguments? "He is deserving of mercy, as well as two or three others who would be better off in some citadel, because of the company of six others who are mad, and who torment them night and day." And the meaning of this sentence would be so clearly understood by the police that the internees in question would be set free. And the demands of the Brunswick overseer have the same meaning: the workshop is disturbed by the cries and the confusion of the insane; their frenzy is a perpetual danger, and it would be better to send them back to the cells, or to keep them in chains. And already, we can anticipate that from one century to the next, the same protests did not have, at bottom, the same value. Early in the nineteenth century, there was indignation that the mad were not treated any better than those condemned by common law or than State prisoners; throughout the eighteenth century, emphasis was placed on the fact that the prisoners deserved a better fate than one that lumped them with the insane. For Esquirol, the scandal is due to the fact that the mad are only mad; for the Prior of Senlis, to the fact that the convicts are, after all, only convicts.
A difference which is perhaps not of such significance, and which ought to have been easily perceived. And yet, it is necessary to emphasize it in order to understand how the consciousness of madness was transformed in the course of the eighteenth century. It did not evolve in the context of a humanitarian movement that gradually related it more
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closely to the madman's human reality, to his most affecting and most intimate aspect; nor did it evolve under the pressure of a scientific need that made it more attentive, more faithful to what madness might have to say for itself. If it slowly changed, it was within that simultaneously real and artificial space of confinement. Certain imperceptible shifts in its structures, or at times certain violent crises, gradually formed the awareness of madness contemporaneous with the Revolution. No medical advance, no humanitarian approach was responsible for the fact that the mad were gradually isolated, that the monotony of insanity was divided into rudimentary types. It was the depths of confinement itself that generated the phenomenon; it is from confinement that we must seek an account of this new awareness of madness.
A political more than a philanthropic awareness. For if the eighteenth century perceived that there were among the confined—among the libertines, the debauched, the prodigal sons—certain men whose confusion and disorder were of another nature, and whose anxiety was irreducible, this perception was the result of the confined themselves. They were the first to protest, and with the most violence. Ministers, police officers, magistrates were assailed with the same endless and tirelessly repeated complaints: one man writes to Maurepas, indignant at being "forced to mingle with madmen, some of whom are so violent that at every moment I risk suffering dangerous abuse from them"; another—the Abbe de Montcrif—makes the same complaint to Lieutenant Berryer: "This is the ninth month that I have been confined here in this dreadful place with fifteen or twenty raving madmen, pell-mell with epileptics." The farther we advance into the century, the stronger grow these protests against confinement: increasingly, madness becomes the specter of the internees, the very image of their humiliation, of their reason vanquished and reduced to si-
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lence. The day soon comes when Mirabeau recognizes in the shameful promiscuity of madness both a subt
le instrument of brutality against those to be punished and the very image of despotism, bestiality triumphant. The madman is not the first and the most innocent victim of confinement, but the most obscure and the most visible, the most insistent of the symbols of the confining power. Tyranny secretly persists among the confined in this lurid presence of unreason. The struggle against the established powers, against the family, against the Church, continues at the very heart of confinement, in the saturnalia of reason. And madness so well represents these punishing powers that it effectively plays the part of an additional punishment, a further torment which maintains order in the uniform chastisement of the houses of correction. La Rochefoucauld-Liancourt bears witness to this in his report to the Committee on Mendicity: "One of the punishments inflicted upon the epileptics and upon the other patients of the wards, even upon the deserving poor, is to place them among the mad." The scandal lies only in the fact that the madmen are the brutal truth of confinement, the passive instrument of all that is worst about it. Is this not symbolized by the fact—also a commonplace of all the literature of confinement in the eighteenth century—that a sojourn in a house of correction necessarily leads to madness? Having to live in this delirious world, amid the triumph of unreason, how may one avoid joining, by the fatality of the site and the event, the very men who are its living symbol? "I observe that the majority of the insane confined in the houses of correction and the State prisons have become so, the latter through the excess of ill-treatment, the former through the horror of the solitude in which they continually encounter the harassments of an imagination sharpened by pain."1
The presence of madmen among the prisoners is not the
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scandalous limit of confinement, but its truth; not abuse, but essence. The polemic instituted by the eighteenth century against confinement certainly dealt with the enforced mingling of the mad and the sane; but it did not deal with the basic relation acknowledged between madness and confinement. Whatever attitude is adopted, that, at least, is not in question. Mirabeau, the Friend of Man, is as severe about confinement as about the confined themselves; in his eyes, no one confined in "the celebrated State prisons" is innocent; but his place is not in these costly institutions, where he drags out a useless life; why confine "daughters of joy who, transported to provincial manufactories, could become daughters of labor"? Or "rascals who are waiting only for freedom in order to get themselves hanged? Why are these people, attached to walking fetters, not employed at those tasks which might prove harmful to voluntary workers? They would serve as an example . . ." Once this entire population was removed, who would remain in the houses of confinement? Those who could not be placed anywhere else, and who belong there by right: "Some prisoners of State whose crimes must not be revealed," to whom may be added "old men who, having consumed in debauchery and dissipation all the fruit of their life's labor, and having cherished the ambitious prospect of dying in a hospital, come there in peace"; finally, the mad, who must wallow somewhere: "These last can vegetate anywhere."2 Mirabeau the younger conducts his demonstration in the opposite direction: "I formally defy anyone in the world to prove that State prisoners, rascals, libertines, madmen, ruined old men constitute I do not say the majority, but the third, the fourth, the tenth part of the inhabitants of fortresses, houses of correction, and State prisons." For him the scandal is thus not that the mad are mingled with the criminal, but that they do not constitute, together, the essential part of the confined population; who then can com-
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plain of being forced to mix with criminals? Not those who have lost their reason forever, but those who in their youth spent their time in wildness: "I might ask . . . why rascals and libertines are mingled together. ... I could ask why young men with dangerous dispositions are left with men who will rapidly lead them to the last degree of corruption. . . . Finally, if this confusion of libertines and villains exists, as is all too true, why do we, by this odious, infamous, atrocious combination, make ourselves guilty of the most abominable of all crimes, that of leading men into crime?" As for madmen, what other fate could be desired for them? Neither reasonable enough not to be confined, nor wise enough not to be treated as wicked, "it is all too true that those who have lost the use of reason must be hidden from society."3
We see how the political critique of confinement functioned in the eighteenth century. Not in the direction of a liberation of the mad; nor can we say that it permitted a more philanthropic or a greater medical attention to the insane. On the contrary, it linked madness more firmly than ever to confinement, and this by a double tie: one which made madness the very symbol of the confining power and its absurd and obsessive representative within the world of confinement; the other which designated madness as the object par excellence of all the measures of confinement. Subject and object, image and goal of repression, symbol of its blind arbitrariness and justification of all that could be reasonable and deserved within it: by a paradoxical circle, madness finally appears as the only reason for a confinement whose profound unreason it symbolizes. Still so close to this eighteenth-century notion, Michelet would formulate it with an astonishing rigor; he returns to the very movement of Mirabeau's thought, apropos of the stay the latter made at Vincennes at the same time as Sade:
First, confinement causes alienation: "Prison makes men
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mad. Those found in the Bastille and in Bicetre were stupefied."
Secondly, what is most unreasonable, most shameful, most profoundly immoral in the tyranny of the eighteenth century is represented in the space of confinement, and by a madman: "We have seen the frenzies of La Salpetriere. A dreadful lunatic existed at Vincennes, the poisonous de Sade, writing in the hope of corrupting the time to come."
Thirdly, it is for this one madman alone that confinement ought to have been reserved, and nothing of the kind was done: "He was soon set free, and Mirabeau kept in confinement."
Hence an abyss yawns in the middle of confinement; a void which isolates madness, denounces it for being irreducible, unbearable to reason; madness now appears with what distinguishes it from all these confined forms as well. The presence of the mad appears as an injustice; but for others. The undifferenriated unity of unreason had been broken. Madness was individualized, strangely twinned with crime, at least linked with it by a proximity which had not yet been called into question. In this confinement drained of a part of its content, these two figures—madness, crime—subsist alone; by themselves, they symbolize what may be necessary about it; they alone are what henceforth deserves to be confined. Having taken its distance, having finally become an assignable form in the confused world of unreason, did not liberate madness; between madness and confinement, a profound relation had been instituted, a link which was almost one of essence.
But at the same moment, confinement suffered another, still deeper crisis that called into question not only its repressive role but its very existence; a crisis which arose not from within, and which was not attached to political pro-
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tests, but which slowly appeared on the entire social and economic horizon.
Poverty was gradually being freed from the old moral confusions. Men had seen unemployment assume, during crises, an aspect that could no longer be identified with that of sloth; had seen indigence and idleness forced to spread into the countryside, where men had supposed they could recognize precisely the most immediate and the purest forms of moral life; all this revealed that poverty was perhaps not only of the order of transgression: "Mendicity is the fruit of poverty, which itself is the result of accidents occurring either in the cultivation of the land or in the production of manufactures, or in the rise of commodity prices, in an excess of population, etc. . . ,"4 Poverty had become an economic phenomenon.
But not contingent—nor destined to be suppressed forever. There was a certain quantity of indigence which man would not succeed in eliminating—a ki
nd of fatality of poverty which must accompany all the forms of society to the end of time, even where all the idle were employed: "There need be, in a well-governed state, only those poor born in indigence, or those who fall into it by accident."5 This basic poverty was in a sense inalienable: birth or accident, it formed a part of life that could not be avoided. For a long time, it was inconceivable to have a state in which there were no paupers, so deeply did need appear to be inscribed in man's fate and in the structure of society: property, labor, and poverty are terms which remain linked in the thought of philosophers until the nineteenth century.
Necessary because it could not be suppressed, this role of poverty was necessary too because it made wealth possible. Because they labor and consume little, those who are in need permit a nation to enrich itself, to set a high value on its fields, its colonies, and its mines, to manufacture prod-
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