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Contagious Insensibility: the Emotional Terrain of Leprosy, Race, and the Enlightenment in the French Antilles Kristen Block (University of Tennessee, Knoxville)

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Contagious Insensibility: the Emotional Terrain of Leprosy, Race, and the Enlightenment in the French Antilles Kristen Block (University of Tennessee, Knoxville) Contagious Insensibility: The Emotional Terrain of Leprosy, Race, and the Enlightenment in the French Antilles Kristen Block (University of Tennessee, Knoxville) Presented for the Brown University Early Modern Studies Workshop, October 22, 2019 He is a leper because he feels nothing [il est ladre car il ne sent rien] – Old French proverb1 He is a leper who feels nothing: insults don’t touch him at all [C’est un ladre qui ne sent rien: les affronts ne le toucherent point.] – Gloss on RIEN, Dictionnaire universel françois & latin (1704)2 Two medical professionals recently removed from Provence to the French Antilles learned the hard way that their professional reputations and emotional equilibrium could be seriously shaken in just a heartbeat. It happened to the first man in 1728, a newly-appointed royal physician by the name of Jean- André Peyssonnel. Two months after he had collaborated with the colonial government in Guadeloupe to formalize plans to create a new colony for leprosy sufferers on a nearby deserted island of La Désirade, he received news that his well-established colleague in Martinique, also a royal physician, had written an excoriating response to their joint report. He railed against Peyssonnel personally for his lack of learning, of prudence, and of compassion—peppering his text with scathing lines sharp enough to make anyone 1 Archives nationales d’outre mer, France (hereafter FR ANOM), Col. C7A10. Louis de Bordegaraye, Remarques sur le procès-verbal de Mont Saint Remy et Mesnier, 7 mai 1728 (hereafter Bordegaraye, Remarks). Cette maladie ancienne qu’on apelloit lespre [sic], parce que la peau de ceux qui en etoient attaqués, etoit raboteuse et Ecailleuse comme cela d’un Elephant inpenetrable aux insultes des objets tactiles, qui ne pourroient aller jusqu’aux papilles nervées de la peau pour y Causer la sensation du Toucher : D’où est venu le vieux proverbe, il est ladre car il ne sent rien. Many thanks to Joanna Merkel and Marie-Claude Marianne dit Gerard Joseph who assisted by transcribing most of these manuscript documents for me. Translations from the French, unless otherwise noted, are my own. Please alert me to any possible errors in transcription/translation. 2 Several of the multiple entries for LADRE (leper/leprous) and LADRERIE (leprosy) in eighteenth-century dictionaries include similar “figurative meanings” with pejorative connotations, whether to describe a person unfeeling to others’ suffering, or to describe miserly, impure or wicked behavior. Another common proverb noted under Ladrerie: “Poverty is not a vice, but a kind of leprosy—everyone flees from it” (La pauvreté n’est pas vice, mais c’est une espece de ladrerie, chacun la fuit). The quoted example above seems to have also been used in reverse, according to one example under LADRE: “I really felt that blow—I’m not a leper! (J’ay bien ressenti ce coup, je ne suis pas ladre). Dictionnaire universel françois & latin: contenant la signification et la définition tant des mots de l'une & de l'autre langue, avec leurs différens usages… avec des remarques d'érudition et de critique (Trevaux, 1704), Vol 2. https://books.google.com/books?id=MVpZ4zxi3sgC OR ARTFL ? K Block / DRAFT PLEASE do not circulate or cite without express written permission. cringe: “all of his work is an embarrassment.”3 In another incident, in Martinique in 1742, a master surgeon by the name of François-Joseph Ruffy found himself shouted down in the middle of a public presentation in which he described his intellectual awakening and his expertise in curing maladies that he believed lay acheminement à la lèpre (“on the road to leprosy”). So flustered was Ruffy by this aggressive dismissal of his ideas that he left without his umbrella. The royal physician (whose house Ruffy had fled), seeing the last remnant of Ruffy’s offending presence, responded by flinging the umbrella “out the window onto the street.”4 Two overlapping “emotional communities” or “moral economies” of the French Antilles were at play in these dramatic incidents of rejection.5 One was centered on the professional values of careful observation, learnedness, and reputation in the burgeoning “Age of Reason.”6 The other perhaps should be called the “nervous state” of an expanding French empire, an anxious cadre of elites that both heralded French growth as a global power and carefully watched the colonies for signs of corruption—especially given periodic critiques of brutality towards Amerindians and enslaved Africans, and fears of French bodily degradation from the dramatically different climate.7 Moreover, diseases without cures unsettled 3 Aix-en-Provence, France. Archives nationales d’outre mer, Sección Col. (hereafter FR ANOM COL), C7A10, Bordegaraye, Remarks, ff. 220r, 221r-v. Voila, tout l’œuvre qu’embrasse son[…] ingenieuse construction ? Idée satisfaisante ? j’en laisse juger ceux qui lisont le procés verbal qui decrit si mal une maladie imaginée dont on fait tant de bruit en France et dans les isles… voila bien du Bruit pour peu de chose… 4 FR ANOM COL C8B 10, N° 22, p. 16 /Image 132 [provided for better access to the digitized manuscript], http://anom.archivesnationales.culture.gouv.fr/ark:/61561/zn401xxuqvh]. ledit sieur Ruffy se retira, et ayant par hazard oublié son parasol, le sieur médecin le jetta par la fenestre dans la rue. 5 Barbara H. Rosenwein’s “emotional communities” are defined as “groups in which people adhere to the same norms of emotional expression, and value—or devalue—the same or related emotions.” Emotional Communities in the Early Middle Ages (Ithaca & London: Cornell University Press, 2006), p. 2. Lorraine Daston articulated a similar concept in “The Moral Economy of Science” (Osiris Vol. 10, “Constructing Knowledge in the History of Science” (1995)) where the term refers to as “a web of affect-saturated values… [both] psychological and … normative… a balanced system of emotional forces, with equilibrium points and constraints” (4). One could also add William Reddy’s coinage for “emotional regimes,” which places more emphasis on the power differentials among members of different emotional communities, and the importance of learning to navigate the most powerful regimes well, to conform or transgress. 6 Steven Shapin, A Social History of Truth: Civility and Science in Seventeenth-Century England (Chicago & London: University of Chicago Press, 1985); Dan Edelstein, “Worldliness, Politeness, and the Importance of Not Being Too Radical,” Ch. 13 in The Enlightenment: A Genealogy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010). 7 Doris Garraway, The Libertine Colony: Creolization in the Early French Caribbean (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2005); Carolyn Vellenga Berman, Creole Crossings: Domestic Fiction and the Reform of Colonial Slavery (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2006); Myriam Cottias, “La séduction colonial: Damnation et stratégies, Les Antilles, XVIIe-XIXe siècle,” Séduction et sociétés: approaches historiques, ed. Cécile Dauphin & Arlette Farge (Paris: Seuil, 2001): 125-40; Guillaume Aubert, “‘The Blood of France’: Race and Purity of Blood in the French Atlantic 2 K Block / DRAFT PLEASE do not circulate or cite without express written permission. both communities, and it is no surprise that contested diagnoses of leprosy8 lay at the heart of their dramas demonstrating both cold dread and fierce anger. For French men of science, leprosy had faded to the point where it was almost unknown, and thus became an open terrain for contestation in the battle between the ancients and the moderns. French colonial society—increasingly becoming a slave society— was especially unsettled by the fact that this ailment came from Africa, but had quickly spread to white habitants, even “the Heads of the Colony, and the most reasonable people [les plus sensés] within it.”9 This article first engages with the terminology of sensibility, or as Diderot described it in the Encyclopédie, “that which opposes death.”10 The expression at the head of this article—“He is a leper because he feels nothing” falls under sensibility’s embodied realm of both sensation and sympathy. The moral and philosophical charge of this keyword and its related terms (sense; sensible; sensation; sentiment, etc.) ordered eighteenth-century French science and affective society. I argue that the opposite of these terms, notably that of insensibilité, may be used as a kind of cipher for apprehension about the absence of this most valued quality of body, mind, and spirit.11 Sensibility was the opposite of leprosy, World,” WMQ 61, no. 3 (2004): 439-78. ALSO ? Nancy Rose Hunt, A Nervous State: Violence, Remedies, and Reverie in Colonial Congo (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2016). 8 Leprosy’s causative bacterial agent was not discovered until 1874, by Norwegian doctor Gerhard A. Hansen, for whom the disease is now named—in large part to counter historical stigmas. For a good short overview of Hansen’s Disease, see Natalie Angier, “Leprosy, Still Claiming Victims,” The New York Times June 30, 2014, http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/01/science/leprosy-still-claiming-victims.html?_r=0. 9 ANFr Marine G//102, No. 113. Dumonville, "Dissertation sur une Maladie observée dans quelques Îles de Vent de l’Amerique en 1748," no pagination. Les Chefs de la Colonie, et les gens les plus sensés qui la composent. 10 Quote from Henry Martyn Lloyd, “Introduction” to The Discourse of Sensibility: The Knowing Body in the Enlightenment, ed. H.M. Lloyd (Switzerland: Springer International Publishing, 2013), p. 5 11 Lloyd argues that these related terms should “be read, as they were in used in the period, with a good deal of imprecision; as will become clear, the terms bleed into one another such that they are perhaps best described as a family of concepts” (Lloyd, “Introduction,” p. 3). I have drawn on the insights of literary scholars like Anne Vila and Jessica Riskin, and so many others intrigued by the Enlightenment era’s interest in “sense and sensibility.” R Most sensibility scholarship deals with the latter half of the eighteenth century.
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