Institutionalizing Gender Madness, the Family, and Psychiatric Power in Nineteenth-Century France Jessie Hewitt Copyright © by Cornell University The text of this book is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution- NonCommercial-NoDerivatives . International License: https://creativecommons. org/licenses/by-nc-nd/./. To use this book, or parts of this book, in any way not covered by the license, please contact Cornell University Press, Sage House, East State Street, Ithaca, New York . Visit our website at cornellpress.cornell.edu. First published by Cornell University Press Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Hewitt, Jessie, – author. Title: Institutionalizing gender: madness, the family, and psychiatric power in nineteenth-century France / Jessie Hewitt. Description: Ithaca [New York]: Cornell University Press, . | Includes bibliographical references and index. 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Acknowledgments ix Gender and the Founding “Fathers” of French Psychiatry Medical Controversy and Honor among (Mad)Men Domesticating Madness in the Family Asylum Scandalous Asylum Commitments and Patriarchal Power Rehabilitating a Profession under Siege Reforming the Asylum and Reimagining the Family The “Mad” Woman in a Man’s World Notes Bibliography ­ Writing a scholarly monograph is a labor of love, but it is also labor. I would have never completed this book without the privilege of full-time employment. It was only aer several years as a contingent faculty member that I secured a tenure-track job and with it, the nancial security and time to work on this book. I am grateful to have had the chance to complete it at all. Acknowledging the luck involved in my being able to do so seems both obvious and necessary. I am thrilled to thank those who supported me over the years, beginning with Ted Margadant at the University of California, Davis. Ted is extremely knowl- edgeable and endlessly curious. Our many hours of conversation have shaped my thinking about French history in countless ways, and I will always be grateful for his willingness to supervise work so thematically distinct from his own. Cather- ine Kudlick likewise le her mark on this project, introducing me to disability history and serving as an inspiring example of how to mesh scholarly priorities with political ones. I have also been lucky to have Edward Ross Dickinson as a reader, sounding board, mentor, and friend. More recently Kathleen Feeley has proven a most generous departmental colleague at the University of Redlands, reading and commenting on my entire manuscript, not to mention welcoming me from the moment I arrived on campus. Many individuals have helped clarify the arguments presented in this book. Some of my rst readers include Liz Covart, Alison Steiner, and Shelley Brooks. I will always think fondly of my time spent talking about history with Robyn Douglas and Kim Hogeland. Andrew Denning sat with me though many a seminar and has oered extremely useful feedback on this project. I have also presented parts of this book at numerous conferences, including the Society for French Historical Studies and the Western Society for French History, where I’ve been fortunate to nd colleagues who have become friends. I would like to single out Andrew Israel Ross, Sun-Young Park, Naomi Andrews, Jo Burr Mar- gadant, Nina Kushner, Rachel Chrastil, Denise Davidson, Anne Verjus, Stephen Harp, Jonathyne Briggs, Aude Fauvel, and Jann Matlock for oering generous comments at just the right time. ix x Acknowledgments My editor at Cornell, Emily Andrew, has been a dream to work with, as has acquisitions assistant Alexis Siemon. I thank them both for all they have done to bring this project to fruition, as well as the two anonymous readers whose comments have transformed this work so much for the better. I am also grateful to the Mellon Foundation. Their grant in support of the Sustainable History Monograph Pilot has made this work accessible to more readers than I ever imag- ined possible. A version of Chapter originally appeared in “Women Working ‘Amidst the Mad’: Domesticity as Psychiatric Treatment in Nineteenth-Century Paris,” French Historical Studies , no. (): –. Part of Chapter was rst published in “Married to the ‘living dead’: madness as a cause for divorce in late nineteenth-century France,” Contemporary French Civilisation , no. (): –. I have likewise been lucky to receive indispensable research support from the Department of History, the College of Arts and Sciences, and the Institute for Women and Research at the University of California, Davis; the Institute for German and European Studies at the University of California, Berkeley; the So- ciety for French Historical Studies; the Western Society for French History; the University of San Francisco; the University of Redlands; and the Rotary Foun- dation. Equally vital has been the work of librarians and archivists in France, especially those of the Bibliothèque Nationale, the Archives de l’Assistance Pub- lique – Hôpitaux de Paris, the Archives de Paris, and the municipal archives at Saint-Mandé. Finally, I would like to thank my family. My dad, Frank, is the most gener- ous person I know. His sense of empathy inspires my approach to history and life. My mom, Kim, is my dearest friend. She introduced me to my rst bits of historical knowledge watching Jeopardy! with me as child, and she continues to handily beat me at trivia on a regular basis. The support, creativity, and intel- ligence of my little brother, Matt, blows me away, as does the adorableness of my sweet niece Vedette. My husband, Brian, is equal parts smart and kind. He has read every word and listened to every rant, entertaining me and loving me all the while. I adamantly do not thank our cats. If they had their way, I would spend all my time feeding them, snuggling them, and allowing them to trot upon my keyboard. Introduction , François Leuret published an account of what he considered the successful treatment of a particularly willful patient I named Dupré. The middle-aged man, a former army o cer who found him- self committed to a series of French mental institutions throughout the s and s, supposedly held onto a number of delusional thoughts and had not responded to the usual methods of treatment. He alternated between claiming that he was the Emperor Napoleon and the head of a “tartar clan”—a leader much renowned for his sexual prowess and for “constantly tasting the pleasures of love.” Furthermore, Dupré claimed he was the only man in the Bicêtre asy- lum, having long insisted that the other patients, the employees, and even his doctors were actually women (some of whom, he conceded, wore masks and fake beards). The doctor, Leuret, took a special interest in this case, engaging his patient in strategically planned dialogues, punctuated with the threat of force, in order to convince the recalcitrant inmate to renounce his beliefs and reclaim his identity as the former soldier Dupré. Leuret defended his aggressive tactics against critics within the profession, implying that the ends justi ed the means. “I had reason to celebrate my conviction,” he wrote, “because having begun the treatment of Monsieur Dupré on June, , he called me him and not her on the th. On the st, he began to obey; on the nd, he worked the land and occupied himself that evening with reading.” At rst glance, it would appear Leuret and his patient had very little in com- mon. Dupré spent much of his life sequestered by French authorities for failing to live up to contemporary standards of rationality. Leuret, for his part, reached the height of his profession despite coming from a relatively humble background. One of these men was a postrevolutionary success story—a self-made bourgeois, the famous doctor son of a bread baker—while the other was a cautionary tale, a veteran o cer of the Napoleonic Wars unable to thrive in the society he once called home. Yet their interactions, like so many that occurred inside the mental institutions of nineteenth-century France, reveal not only the creation of cruel new hierarchies but the constraints imposed on all Frenchmen, even those for- tunate enough to nd themselves on top.