Old and New Paris: Its History, Its People, and Its Places, v. 2

by H. Sutherland Edwards

The apologists—not merely of the Revolution, which, as a whole, brought immeasurable benefit to the French people, but even of the[{222}] crimes which accompanied it—have tried to justify the massacres committed in the prisons of Paris by bands of fanatical ruffians, who had somehow persuaded themselves that the persons confined were all aristocrats or priests, and that in slaughtering these enemies of society it mattered but little if a few inoffensive persons were also put to death. The allied German powers who were marching upon Paris, and whose outposts were gradually approaching the capital, had already taken the fortress of Verdun, and were prepared, if they continued their successful campaign, to inflict terrible vengeance on the Revolutionists and on the French nation generally. A counter-revolutionary movement had suddenly set in among the Royalist proprietors and the loyal, if superstitious, peasants of Brittany and La Vendée. With the exaggeration sure to manifest itself at moments of great popular excitement, it was declared that the enemy was at the gates of Paris; and it was proclaimed among the fanatics of the Revolution that in a few hours the nobles and ecclesiastics thrown into prison, in some cases with a view to trial, in others only as a precautionary measure, would soon be at liberty and ready to take part, in the slaughter of the Republicans. The people had been summoned by Danton to the Champ de Mars in order to be enrolled for service against the enemy. Alarm-bells were sounded, cannons were fired, and a general war-cry resounded through Paris. “The tocsin,” says a journal of the period, “was heard on all sides. Everyone ran to take up arms. Everyone cried out, ‘To the enemy!’ But the enemy is not in the field alone. The enemy is at Paris, as well as around Verdun. Our foes are in the Paris prisons. Shall we leave our women, our children, our aged persons, to the mercy of these wretches? Let us hurry to the prisons. Let us exterminate these monsters, who will profit by our absence with the army to murder our wives and our children, to liberate Louis XVI. from his tower, and to rally the Royalist battalions.” This terrible cry was at once taken up in a unanimous, universal manner throughout the streets and public places, at all public meetings, and finally in the National Assembly itself.

Apart from the purely spontaneous, impulsive movement, meetings were held after formal deliberations, and it was decided by a resolution that the aristocrats and priests confined in the prisons must be put to death.

To return, however, to Bicêtre, which is associated in more than one way with the Revolution and with the Reign of Terror. In a little courtyard adjoining the amphitheatre of Bicêtre, on the 15th of April, 1792, was tried for the first time on a corpse (previous experiments had been made with live animals) the “decapitating machine,” whose invention, wrongly attributed to Dr. Guillotin, belongs really to Dr. Louis, perpetual secretary of the Royal Society of Surgery: whence the name of “Louisette” given in the first instance to the guillotine.

Some time afterwards, towards the end of 1792, Bicêtre, which had just been the theatre of such tragic scenes, had the glory of seeing accomplished within its walls the reforms in the treatment of lunacy introduced by Pinel. This excellent man, chief physician at Bicêtre, had begged the Commune of Paris for authority to unchain the violent lunatics. The next day the fanatical Couthon went to Bicêtre to make sure that Pinel was “not concealing the enemies of the people among his madmen.” Astounded and somewhat frightened by the confused shrieking and howling of the maniacs, and by the rattling of their chains, the surly Jacobin turned to Pinel and said to him “Why, you must be mad yourself, citizen, to think of unchaining such animals.”

“I am convinced,” replied Pinel, “that these lunatics are only so intractable because they are deprived of air and liberty.”

“Well, do what you like,” cried Couthon, as he went away; “do what you like: I abandon them to you.”

Pinel at once entered the cage of the most terrible of his madmen: an English captain who had been shut up for forty years, and who, a few days previously, had killed one of the keepers with a blow from his fetters. Full of faith, the physician unlocked his irons; and the madman becoming at once gentle and calm, was, during the two years he had still to live, Pinel’s most useful assistant. Pinel restored successively to liberty an old officer who, in a moment of frenzy, had stabbed one of his own children; a young poet mad from love, who, after leaving Bicêtre, perished on the scaffold; a soldier formerly in the Royal Guard; Chevingé, an athlete, the terror of his keepers, who soon afterwards gave his liberator a striking proof of gratitude by snatching him from a band of fanatics at the very moment when they were about to hang him; and fifty others, of all conditions and all countries, who, as soon as they were treated with humanity, gave up their habits of violence.[{223}]

Finally, it may be mentioned that in the old dungeons of Bicêtre Victor Hugo lays the scene of his “Dernier Jour d’un Condamné.”

It has been seen that neither at Bicêtre nor at La Salpêtrière are lunatics alone confined. The one recognised madhouse in or near Paris, to which those whose ideas or actions excite the disapproval of their friends are told familiarly to go—as, in England, they would be sent to Hanwell—is Charenton. The Maison de Charenton, situated at about four miles south-east of Paris, on the road to Lyons, close to the confluence of the Seine and the Marne, dates from the year 1641, when Sebastien Leblanc, counsellor of the king and minister of war, presented it ready furnished to the brothers of La Charité, or of St. Jean de Dieu. A few years after their installation in the house presented to them, the brothers of La Charité arranged to receive madmen and epileptic patients; when, like all the madhouses of the time, Charenton became a house of detention, where were confined by lettres de cachet prisoners of state, prodigals, libertines, and others who were thought worthy of a milder treatment than they would receive in the Bastille or at Vincennes. In the eighteenth century, and up to the time of the Revolution, Charenton had accommodation for nearly 100 lunatics, each of whom had his separate room. The attendance was in the hands of ten religious persons and fifty-two servants. A few years after the Revolution, both monastery and hospital were suppressed, and the monks, together with the lunatics under their charge, dispersed. Soon afterwards, however, the Directory issued a decree, which forms the legal basis of the hospital of Charenton as it now exists. “Refuge for the Mad” was the title given to it; and it was now placed under the immediate direction of the Minister of the Interior. Insane persons of both sexes were to be admitted; the indigent ones gratuitously, and others at a fixed rate of payment. The Abbé de Coulmier, a former member of the Constituent Assembly, was named director of the establishment; and, as if in compensation for the injury done to the establishment by its sudden dispersion, it had additional land assigned to it. The building could now be enlarged, and a special division was erected for the women.

M. de Coulmier conducted the house in the most despotic manner; and on the death of the principal surgeon, M. Gastaldi, in 1805, he assumed such powers in the medical department that the School of Medicine was obliged to intervene, when the medical direction was placed in the hands of Dr. Royer-Collard, brother of the celebrated orator of the same name. With all his tyranny, M. de Coulmier had many agreeable ways. Remembering the fury of Saul, calmed by the harp of the youthful David, and the quieting of savage animals by the lyre of Orpheus, the director, carried away by his artistic feeling, determined to apply a similar treatment to the demented ones of Charenton. To carry out his idea he introduced dancing, dramatic performances, fireworks, and even ballets, with the assistance of some of the choregraphic celebrities of the epoch. The imprisoned Marquis de Sade, known by books that no decent person can read, was the organiser of these entertainments, which were attended by all Paris.