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Upcast Eyes: Medico-Legal Discourse, Spectacle, and Deviance in France, 1870-1914 Author: Jason Robert Cavallari Persistent link: http://hdl.handle.net/2345/989 This work is posted on eScholarship@BC, Boston College University Libraries. Boston College Electronic Thesis or Dissertation, 2009 Copyright is held by the author, with all rights reserved, unless otherwise noted. Boston College The Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Department of History UPCAST EYES: MEDICO-LEGAL DISCOURSE, SPECTACLE, AND DEVIANCE IN FRANCE, 1870-1914 a dissertation by JASON R. CAVALLARI submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy December 2009 © copyright JASON ROBERT CAVALLARI 2009 ABSTRACT “Upcast Eyes: Medico-Legal Discourse, Spectacle, and Deviance in France, 1870-1914” by: Jason Cavallari Advisor: Paul Breines This dissertation attempts to problematize the question of agency in disciplinary societies by examining the symbolic importance in fin-de-siècle French culture of the abject deviants who were the target of medico-legal discourse in the Third Republic. In particular, I develop three main propositions. First, I am making a broad anthropological claim that the power implicitly given to deviants to establish boundaries between normality and abnormality paradoxically enabled them to shift borders of cleanliness and pollution in public discourse. Whereas others have argued that borderline deviants are powerless in their abjection, I propose the opposite: by giving deviants the power to shape the order of the Third Republic, medico-legal authorities unwittingly gave them precisely that – enormous power. Second, I contend that this power largely took shape within the context of the rise of consumer society and urban spectacle. Spectacularization and widespread accessibility to information engendered a populace capable of suspicion, resistance, and resignification. Others have interpreted the spectacularization of narratives of deviance as being foisted upon passive consumers lacking intellectual agency and therefore accepting these narratives as the standards for bourgeois behavior. I suggest instead that spectacularization provided the precondition of possibility for the invention of a resistant and even potentially revolutionary populace. Third and finally, I make the claim that those who are seen are also capable of seeing, and hence, of questioning, negotiating, and redefining. Others, particularly those influenced by the work of Michel Foucault, have argued that “the public” was a docile, passive crowd, stripped of agency, helplessly accepting of ideas of republican virtue embodied by medico-legal discourses of deviance and the clinical gaze. In particular, the paradigm of the “Panopticon” has perhaps overly influenced notions of bourgeois society. In the panoptic society, being self-conscious of always being (hypothetically) seen, actors police themselves to the point of inaction. I contend that this position assumes the desirability of a “correct” form of behavior to which all others must conform. Therefore, I argue for a very different conception of bourgeois society. If we look not to the Panopticon, but rather to venues of spectacularization and consumer culture, we will see that, contrary to the marginalization implied by the panoptic model, deviance was celebrated as a symbol of freedom and release from the deterministic medico-legal gaze and helped to create multiple competing “scopic regimes.” As a result, the consumer culture of the grands boulevards was not a sterile, depoliticized world of uncritical engagement defined by passive observation and consumption of spectacle and commodity, but rather a culture that celebrated spectacle as a venue for re-infusing the public sphere with social and political ambiguity against the rigid boundaries erected by the medico-legal discourses of the Third Republic. Table of Contents INTRODUCTION 1 CHAPTER I: THE LIVING MUSEUM 38 CHAPTER II: THE FLÂNEUR AND THE VOYEUR: MEDICO­LEGAL DISCOURSE, SPECTATORSHIP, AND THE FIN­DE­SIÈCLE NOVEL 86 CHAPTER III: LIBERALISM WITHOUT RATIONALITY: REASON, REVOLUTION, AND THE SEARCH FOR NARRATIVE IN FIN­DE­SIÈCLE FRANCE 134 CHAPTER IV: SPECTACULAR FANTASIES: SEXUAL DEVIANCE, PORNOGRAPHY, AND THE FREEDOM OF ALIENATION 187 CHAPTER V: PERFORMING DEVIANCE: THE THÉÂTRE DU GRAND GUIGNOL, 1887­ 1914 235 CONCLUSION 286 APPENDIX: ILLUSTRATIONS 297 BIBLIOGRAPHY 310 i ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS The completion of this project could not have been accomplished without the help of the following people: To my advisory committee – Professors Paul Breines, Stephen Schloesser, S.J., and Julian Bourg – thank you for your inestimable contributions to this project from your keen intellectual insights to your much-needed emotional support. To the curators and staff at the Bibliothèque National de France, sites Richelieu and Mitterrand, and especially Catherine Johnson-Roehr at the Kinsey Institute for Research in Sex, Gender, and Reproduction at Indiana University-Bloomington, for going above and beyond the call of duty to help a young scholar navigate the labyrinthine intricacies of the archival system. To my friends, especially my fellow graduate students in the Boston College Department of History, thank you for your guidance, your help in reading drafts, but most especially for the laughter. And last, to my family – my parents, my sister, and especially my partner Bryan – thank you for your love and support. My appreciation for your continued presence in my life cannot possibly be measured. ii INTRODUCTION UPCAST EYES: MEDICO-LEGAL DISCOURSE, SPECTACLE, AND DEVIANCE IN FRANCE, 1870-1914 Behold! human beings living in an underground den, which has a mouth open towards the light and reaching all along the den; here they have been from their childhood, and have their legs and necks chained so that they cannot move, and can only see before them, being prevented by the chains from turning round their heads. Above and behind them a fire is blazing at a distance, and between the fire and the prisoners there is a raised way; and you will see, if you look, a low wall built along the way, like the screen which marionette players have in front of them, over which they show the puppets. ... And now look again, and see what will naturally follow if the prisoners are released and disabused of their error. -Plato, The Republic1 On May 2, 1908, at the small Théâtre du Grand Guignol, located in the bohemian Montmartre section of Paris, eager ticket holders gathered to witness the debut of the latest masterpiece from the so-called “Prince of Terror,” and the Grand Guignol’s chief playwright, André de Lorde. Since its founding in 1897, the Théâtre du Grand Guignol had served its diverse audience a constantly changing assortment of gruesome spectacles, all incorporating the latest technologies available to represent as accurately as possible the worst and most grotesque aspects of human nature in realistically gory detail. The Grand Guignol had steadily fed the public appetite for deviant behavior by depicting, among other things, appropriately bloody eye-gougings at the hands of asylum inmates, the agonizing death throes of rabies patients frothing at the mouth, and highly symbolic 1 Benjamin Jowett, trans., The Republic of Plato (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1908), 514-515. 1 Dante-esque murders borne of revenge. By 1908, the Grand Guignol’s audience expected nothing less than a visceral experience of human depravity at the debut of de Lorde’s play Une Leçon à la Salpêtrière [A Lesson at the Salpêtrière]. And they were not disappointed. The audience that night was treated to a graphic depiction of madness, revenge, human callousness, cruelty, and amorality. The play concerns Paris’ Salpêtrière hospital, which by 1908 had garnered a reputation as a leading academic institution for the study of mental disease, but which had also curiously developed into something of a theater itself. Beginning with Dr. Jean- Martin Charcot’s public lectures, in which the Parisian public was invited to witness real, live hysterics as Charcot himself demonstrated aspects of his neurological theories, the Salpêtrière had become fully integrated into Parisian life as both a hospital and an entertainment venue. On the one hand, the Salpêtrière was a symbol of order and rationality in battle with the forces of irrationality and chaos, a “humanistic” venue; on the other hand, it used diseased patients as an attraction – a venue of cruelty. De Lorde’s play brought this contradictory situation, in which the hospital is the site of healing but also the site of clinical cruelty, into question. In the play, the Salpêtrière’s staff is shown callously treating their patients as nothing more than subjects to be used in experiments, which themselves are used to entertain the masses. Ultimately, it is this disregard for humanity that brings about the play’s dénouement. One former patient and subject of an experiment, Claire, has returned to the Salpêtrière to take revenge on her tormenter. When no one believes her, she takes matters into her own hands by barging in on one of the public demonstrations and throwing sulfuric acid in her 2 doctor’s face. Although by this point the Grand Guignol’s audience had received the requisite thrill of seeing a man’s face melt off, André de Lorde was never one to give up an opportunity for dramatic irony. In the play’s final scene, the now disfigured doctor – once the scientific observer and man of reason – has now himself become the spectacle, as the Salpêtrière’s

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