The “Physico-Medical Superstition”: Enlightenment Debates over Mesmerism and Miracles

In 1778, Franz Anton Mesmer (1734-1815) arrived in Paris, heralding his monumental discovery: an invisible, universal force or “fluid” that pervaded all bodies and their surroundings. According to Mesmer, the obstruction of this fluid, known as animal magnetism, caused disease. However, the natural balance of the body could be restored by “magnetizing” its poles. This was done in a variety of ways—through massaging with “magnetized” hands or metal rods, or in group sessions by gathering around tubs of iron filings (baquets), among other methods. Mesmerists, or “magnetizers” as they were commonly called, carefully regulated the environment with thermometers, barometers, and hygrometers, as well as with music. Despite the theatrical characteristics, those who championed this healing method insisted that it was a scientific medical procedure that had been developed through careful observation of natural laws. ^[1]

In 1784, the royal government created two commissions to investigate these cures, one drawn from the Royal Society of Medicine and the other from the Paris Faculty of Medicine and the Academy of Sciences. Both reported unequivocally that the healings were a sham. Only those who were judged ignorant or impoverished felt any discernible change after the treatments. Above all, the commissioners could find no physical proof of the existence of a universal fluid. They concluded that the effects some felt were solely the result of the imagination.[2] That the controversy over mesmerism resulted in the publication of twice as many pamphlets in France as the political crisis surrounding the first meeting of the Assembly of Notables reveals the degree to which this controversy captivated French readers.[3] The commissioners from the Academy of Sciences printed upwards of 12,000 copies of their report in hopes of winning the hearts of the reading public and dealing a final, devastating blow to the mesmerist movement in France. Still, many remained convinced of Mesmer’s theory and frustrated that the testimony of hundreds of cured people was not considered sufficient proof of his healing technique.[4]

Scholars have often focused on the professional and political implications of the debate over mesmerism, arguing that it pitted the privileged and exclusive institutions of the Ancien Régime against those practitioners who took a more populist approach to medicine. Most famously, in Mesmerism and the End of the Enlightenment of France Robert Darnton stressed the link between political radicalism and mesmerists who attacked the academic establishment and elite medical practitioners as “aristocrats” of philosophy.[5] Laurence Brockliss and Colin Jones have similarly characterized mesmerists as “Grub Street” scientists and argued that “the ‘despotic’ way in which mesmerism had suffered at the hands of the core of the medical community became the hallmark of a broadening campaign attacking the improper confluence of the corporative structures of power and knowledge.”[6] Geoffrey Sutton and François Zanetti have compared the formal investigations of mesmerism and electric medicine, revealing the crucial role that professional ties and other social networks played in determining the fate of magnetizers in France.[7] For these scholars, debates over mesmerism in France were intimately linked to Ancien Régime power structures and the emergence of both political radicalism and Romanticism in the years leading up to the French Revolution.

This article shifts the analysis of the mesmerism controversy in two ways. First, while scholars have focused heavily on the goals and social position of practitioners, this article examines instead the evidence presented in favor of the cures as well as the arguments used to contest the validity of that evidence. Because the bulk of evidence was drawn from patients' testimony, it also shifts the focus from how participants in the debate viewed practitioners to how they viewed patients. Second, while scholars have often studied mesmerism in France with eyes fixed on the coming revolution, this article instead looks back in time to reveal how the memory of historical events—many of which inspired similar controversies in their own time—shaped debates over Mesmer’s healing technique.[8] This alternative approach reveals that debates over animal magnetism were part of a larger ongoing discussion about the nature of the human mind, and in particular, whether or not witness testimony could serve as reliable scientific evidence. Historians of early modern science have shown that certain types of testimonial evidence were not only acceptable, but crucial for verifying scientific theories. When determining the reliability of a person’s testimony various factors came into play, including professional training, wealth, birth, and sex.[9] Although the universalist principles of the Enlightenment suggested that all people were capable of finding truth through reason, some people were commonly considered less capable of rational thought and more prone to the misguided powers of the imagination, including women, poor people, and those the philosophes associated with religious fanaticism.[10] Authors who sought to disprove Mesmer’s healing technique took advantage of these associations by highlighting the unreliability of the untrained eye and forging an association between animal magnetism and reported supernatural events that had become objects of Enlightenment criticism.

The similarities between Mesmer’s healing techniques and those attributed to supernatural causes (such as faith healings, exorcisms, or saints' interventions) were difficult to ignore. Skeptics especially scoffed at the laying of hands to induce healing and the “crisis” that followed treatment, which typically took the form of bodily convulsions. One of Mesmer’s leading critics in France, the physician Jean-Jacques Paulet (1740-1826), noted that “[t]hese sorts of examples, which one can collect by the thousands, all well attested and signed, are good for nothing but to prove the weakness of the human mind, and how easy it is to influence it, especially when the body is sick.”[11] His most celebrated contribution to the debate was L’antimagnétisme (1784), which contained a section titled “Other examples of the crazed imagination and proofs that one believes to see that which one does not, in fact, see.” He provided extensive examples of charlatans throughout history who had exploited the imagination of the sick, including Léon le Juif, who was famous for alleging he could heal people using a mirror. Paulet went on to examine several cases in which, he insisted, the “crazed imagination” brought about real effects on the body (at least temporarily). Among these, he examined the cures of Johann Gassner (1727-1779), an eighteenth-century Austrian priest who claimed to heal people through exorcism invoked by a laying of hands.[12]

For authors trying to appeal to the French reading public, there were several other historical examples that seemed to beg comparison, including the works of the Irish faith healer, Valentine Greatrakes (1628-1682), and the convulsive behaviors of the allegedly possessed nuns of Loudun.[13] Their most common comparison however, related Mesmer’s cures to the series of miracles that reportedly occurred after the death of the popularly acclaimed (although officially condemned) Jansenist saint, François de Pâris, in 1727.[14] These alleged miracles, which took place principally in the cemetery of Saint-Médard in Paris, often followed bodily convulsions and became infamous for the excessive, and some argued obscene, behaviors of the devotees. The precise circumstances of the healings varied. Some reports contained elements typical of miracle narratives the Catholic Church publicized throughout the seventeenth century—an incurable sick person with unwavering faith prayed to a holy intercessor (usually for nine days to complete a novena), often in the presence of a relic, and was granted divine healing. For example, Elisabeth de la Loë, known for her piety and resignation to God’s will, suffered from a painful mass on her breast. All of her surgeon’s efforts failed to improve her condition. After a long period of suffering, her friends brought her a piece of wool from Pâris’ mattress, which she placed on her breast and the next day the mass miraculously disappeared.[15]

Starting in July 1731, many reports began to include accounts of the patients’ experience of painful convulsions. When three men placed Aimée Pivert, who suffered from paralysis and tremors, on Pâris’ tomb, she claimed “while I was there I felt terrible pain and movements so violent that the assistants thought I would fall.” When she returned to the tomb a second time, she experienced the painful convulsions again, then felt “a great tranquility without feeling any further pain” before fully recovering from her ailments.[16] Hundreds of witnesses from all walks of life attested to these miraculous recoveries. Although perhaps the most well-attested miracles of all time, they became immensely controversial because they were publicized as proof that God approved of the Jansenist cause. Thus, they quickly became embroiled in royal and ecclesiastical politics.[17]

The controversy raged in print and among parishes for decades. Between 1731 and the middle of the century, at least 300 collections of miracle reports, pamphlets, and other works appeared in support of the miracles and convulsions.[18] In addition, each week Jansenist polemicists published between 2,000 and 6,000 copies of the illegal newspaper, the Nouvelles ecclésiastiques, which was moderately priced and targeted a broad audience. This newspaper featured extensive narratives recounting miraculous healings from various ailments, ranging from paralysis to nervous disorders to blindness, accompanied by the statements of healed people and other eyewitnesses.[19] Published accounts generally included an analysis of the significance and meaning of the miracle, composed by an author who linked the miracle to the Jansenist cause, a first-person account of the sick person who was healed (or a third-person account if the healed could not write), and first-person testimonials of other eye-witnesses (including family members, onlookers, physicians, surgeons, and priests). Most printed accounts of the miracles reserved considerably more space for witness attestations than for the narrative of the miracle itself. While the testimony of medical practitioners—many of whom had ties to elite institutions like the Faculty of Medicine in Paris—lent the narratives a scientific legitimacy, it was the testimony of the untrained eye that provided perhaps the most crucial evidence of all.[20] These witnesses, supporters insisted, were so naïve that they were incapable of lying; they simply recounted the miracle as they experienced it. The Nouvelles ecclésiatiques celebrated the testimony of the common person, and asserted that

The testimony of simple, often illiterate, witnesses intentionally lent an unbiased air to the miracle accounts. Critics of the miracles discounted this testimony, however, claiming that religious fervor had corrupted the testimony of common people. Furthermore, they claimed that the testimony of priests, doctors, and surgeons was similarly unreliable because they were all, at least allegedly, Jansenist partisans.

The first-person testimony of those who claimed to have been healed (called miraculés) proved more difficult to discount, and these personal accounts continued to be an object of debate throughout the century. Of the 116 people reportedly healed at the cemetery before its closure in January 1732, the majority lived in the commercial and artisanal districts of Paris and more than fifty percent came from families of artisans, tradesmen, merchants, or other professionals. Another thirteen percent were identified as “bourgeois” men of law, six percent were clergy, and the remaining miraculés were primarily domestic servants and apprentices, with only a single peasant healed at the cemetery. The social backgrounds of the miraculés were mixed and did not provide easy ammunition for those who wanted to discredit their testimonies based on social standing alone. The clear disparity between men and women, however, was more commonly highlighted in printed debates. Of those healed at the cemetery twelve were children, twenty-three were men, and eighty-one were women.[22] This imbalance encouraged many critics to interpret the reported miracles as the result of menstrual irregularity or other “maladies des femmes.”[23]

Opponents of the miracles, often Jesuits, published a mass of printed works—ranging from pastoral letters to pamphlets to plays—in which they mocked Pâris’ devotees and represented the miracles and convulsions as ridiculous impostures, manufactured by heretical Jansenists, acted out by impressionable women, and accepted by superstitious fools. In 1731, an article in the Nouvelles ecclésiastiques from Toulon complained that “[t]he entire Kingdom is flooded with [the Jesuits’] plays” in which “the so-called Jansenists are represented as scoundrels.”[24] In the most successful of these plays, The Lady Theologian, or Theology Abated, the Jesuit Guillaume-Hyacinthe Bougeant mocked the overwhelming appeal Jansenism had for women and characterized the cult of Pâris as a commercial enterprise.[25] In two subsequent plays, The Saint Exposed, and The French Quakers, or the New Tremblers, Bougeant similarly mocked the miracles and convulsions, portraying the Jansenists as hypocritical barristers who flaunted their rigorous piety à la Tartuffe. These plays were so successful that some grew concerned about the impact they might have. In 1733, one of the most prestigious French-language journals of the period, The Hague’s Journal littéraire, expressed concern about the broad readership of these plays, noting that “[s]erious and austere books are only read by a small number of people, who still are not all knowledgeable enough to judge them, but these plays are read by women and by all kinds of people.”[26]

The miracles of Saint-Médard were so widely known both within France and internationally that they served a variety of purposes throughout the century, ranging from tools of religious apology to objects of anti-Christian aggression. Although miracle reports declined after the 1730s, Jansenist polemicists continued to publicize reported miracles they attributed to François de Pâris, the Eucharist, the Virgin Mary, and other intercessors as proof that God continued to intervene in human affairs, especially for those who supported the Jansenist cause. These publicized reports helped to keep the memory of the earlier miracles at Saint-Médard alive. Furthermore, the miracles and convulsions at Saint-Médard figured prominently in Enlightenment criticisms of religious fanaticism and superstition. For example, in his Critical History of Jesus Christ, D’Holbach argued that piety and deceit often went together, reminding his readers that “[o]ne saw all of Paris run to see miracles, healings, convulsions, and to hear the predictions that were obvious frauds” invented by the pious Jansenists only “to support their party, which they qualified as the cause of God.”[27] In Philosophical Thoughts Diderot similarly mocked the miracles at Saint-Médard, which he had witnessed first-hand, insisting that “all those who saw miracles in that place, had already been well resolved to see some.”[28] Other philosophes, including Voltaire, Rousseau, and d’Argens all incorporated the Jansenist miracles and convulsions into their works, linking these events to deceit, superstition, and partisanship. ^[29]

With the Saint-Médard miracles alive and well in the French imagination, they served as a convenient comparison for the healings attributed to mesmerism. Pierre-Jean-Baptiste Nougaret (1742-1823), a celebrated author of diverse subjects, noted in his Tableau mouvant de Paris (1787) that “[i]t is certain that one can only be struck by the justice of the parallel. One had convulsions at Saint-Médard at the tomb of M. Pâris and one was healed of convulsions. Is this not the same operation in the treatment and cures of M. Mesmer?”[30] Charles Devillers (1724-1809), naturalist and member of the Académie des sciences, belles-lettres et arts in Lyon, devoted some fifteen pages of his polemical The Colossus on Clay Feet (1784) to a direct comparison of mesmerist cures and those reported at the cemetery. The likeness was striking: the sick had similar ailments (many fevers and nervous disorders), reacted similarly to their “treatments” (often with convulsions), and the patients’ long-term prognoses were equally favorable. Rather than treating these cures as “all fanciful,” he insisted that the similarities were proof that “the imagination had the greatest influence on the human body.”[31] Like many others, Devillers insisted that both showcased the dangers of imitation—that those with weak minds would imitate the behavior of those around them, believing that they were experiencing something they were not.[32] Devillers identified only one notable difference: the miracles at Saint-Médard seemed to be more effective than mesmerist treatments, a discrepancy that he attributed to the devotees at Pâris’ tomb having more faith in God than Mesmer’s devotees had in his system.[33]

Like in the case of the Saint-Médard miracles, hundreds of witnesses testified to having seen or experienced cures through the manipulation of animal magnetism.[34] Partisans of Mesmer’s system published extensive collections of its cures. Some works featured magnetizers celebrating their successful cures, while others favored first-hand testimonials of witnesses who had observed mesmerist séances. Like the miraculés at Saint-Médard, those who claimed to have been cured suffered from a wide variety of ailments, including paralysis, nervous disorders, stomach problems, and fevers, and their recoveries were commonly preceded by bodily convulsions. One Swiss minister, Charles Moulinié, reported having seen Mesmer treat a thirteen-year-old cataleptic girl who was attracted to him “like iron by a magnet” and who in this state appeared “to gnash her teeth” and “have convulsions.”[35] Perhaps the most striking parallel between the mesmerist cures and the miracles of Saint-Médard was the apparent gender imbalance. Critics of Mesmer’s movement commonly highlighted the overabundance of women at séances and the commissioners who investigated animal magnetism argued that women were more susceptible to the fraudulent healing techniques because of the intimacy of the procedure and the effects of the female imagination.[36] Thus, these authors' techniques echoed those from earlier decades that had been used to discount the testimony of women claiming to have been healed by the intercession of François de Pâris.

While mesmerism appealed to the lower classes in the provinces—some magnetizers even held séances specifically for the poor[37]—the typically high cost of treatment and privileged clientele led many to associate the movement with high society. Even the queen, Marie Antoinette, showed a fascination for it.[38] The high social status of many of Mesmer’s partisans, however, did little to assuage the ferocity of critics. For opponents of mesmerism, the large number of patients who attested to being healed was insignificant because the rich were not immune to the effects of the imagination. Nougaret insisted that Mesmer’s followers were the same as “people who were simple enough, credulous enough, to have faith in convulsions and the miracles operated at the tomb of the deacon Pâris.”[39] The anonymous author of Reflections on animal magnetism (1784) was willing to admit that many reputable people were partisans of Mesmer. Still, the author warned that “[t]he history of the religious of Loudun and that of the convulsionaries of Saint-Médard are still recent. The first farce was played out by people of distinction. The other lacked neither authenticity nor certificates.”[40] Even Condorcet weighed in on the issue, claiming that despite all the testimony in favor of animal magnetism, he remained unconvinced. After all, he reminded his readers, “[o]ne is shocked by the names that one encounters at the bottom of [certificates attesting to] some of the miracles of Saint-Médard.”[41] That mesmerist healings were widely attested proved nothing. After all, these other healings, here assumed to be obvious fakes, were at least as well attested. There could be only one conclusion: mesmerism was just another superstition that impressed itself on vulnerable minds, although this one found support in scientific theory, rather than theology.

By invoking the memory of the Saint-Médard miracles, opponents of mesmerism attempted to impress upon the minds of their readers an association between this alleged scientific remedy and a series of supernatural events that were now widely (although as we will see, not universally) derided. One defender of animal magnetism noted that “I doubt [those healed by animal magnetism] would be flattered to find themselves likened to the convulsionaries of Saint-Médard.”[42] In his Research and doubts on animal magnetism (1784), the physician Michel-Augustin Thouret (1749-1810) stressed the absurdity of accepting mesmerist cures when they were so similar to other healings that had long been derided by intellectuals of the age. He claimed,

For Thouret and many others, these historical events only exhibited the weakness of the human mind and the sad delusions of Mesmer's followers, echoing past "healings".

Thouret might have been surprised to learn that some were not, in fact, afraid to defend the reality of these historical events. Recognizing the inescapable parallel, some defenders actually coopted miraculous healings of the historical record in order to suit them to Mesmer’s system. Indeed, Mesmer himself argued that many cures long attributed to the supernatural—sorcery, magic, “and in our day, possessions and convulsions”—should be reevaluated in light of his discovery.[44] He claimed that these events were “often the result of the observation of certain natural phenomena, which lacking enlightenment ... were one after another distorted.”[45] Charles Moulinié similarly argued that animal magnetism was only long-forgotten ancient medicine and that "the key [to understanding the miracles and convulsions] could well be now within our hands.”[46]

The strongest mesmerist apology for the miracles at Saint-Médard was made by Galart de Monjoie (1746-1816), a lawyer in the parlement of Aix and professor of French law who became a journalist during the revolution. In his Letter on Animal Magnetism (1784), Montjoie argued that many extraordinary historical events had been poorly understood in their own time. “One example will give my thought a useful extension,” he wrote. “No one dares to cite this example seriously, out of fear of ridicule. But I, who do not fear ridicule, I will cite it.”[47] Montjoie claimed that the cause of the Jansenist miracles and convulsions was never properly examined, “first, because religion was mixed up in it, and then, because of the jokes of a sect that have been honored with the title 'philosophers,' although I cannot understand why.”[48] Although he claimed the healings were not miracles, many were nevertheless real. Saint-Médard was extraordinary only in the unlikely coincidence that François de Pâris’ tomb acted as a baquet magnétique, like those used in Mesmerist séances. Calling the 1730s an “unpleasant age,” he claimed that “[i]t was necessary to choose a side, to stop and to contain the people, and above all the persuaded, and unfortunately too zealous, people, who were impressed by [Pâris’] respectable character, by his genuine wisdom, by his simple fortitude.”[49] “That today the causes are known,” explained how it could be that “people of great clout” attested to these cures.[50] Here it is, he claimed, “the solution to this famous problem.”[51] While stressing the absurdity of a belief in miracles, Montjoie demanded a reevaluation of the evidence in light of the recent discovery of animal magnetism.

Not everyone was satisfied with this explanation, however. Paulet, for example, wondered why, if it was the cemetery of Saint-Médard that had special properties, miracles had been reported all over France.[52] For him, the answer was simple: the miracles spread due to imitation.[53] Others objected on religious grounds and resented the attribution of these miracles to animal magnetism. In 1785, Louise Guélon was reportedly healed of severe headaches and stomach aches, among other ailments, in Troyes after praying to François de Pâris.[54] One anonymous author took this as an opportunity to reinforce the veracity of the miracles that had occurred at the cemetery of Saint-Médard a half century earlier and to reject claims that manipulations of animal magnetism, rather than God, was responsible for them. The anonymous author of the Relation of Louise Guélon insisted that the healings at Saint-Médard were far more evident than “those that one boasts today.”[55] If the cures of animal magnetism were as well attested as those worked by Pâris, then “one would soon abandon all your systems of medicine as pure charlatanry, and all the drugs of chemists as poisons that one would allow to decay in the boutiques of apothecaries.”[56]

Still, according to our author, more disturbing yet were those who used the Jansenist miracles and mesmerism to denounce the validity of witness testimony all together. He attacked Thouret, for example, whom he claimed was driven by a “medical enthusiasm” and “trembles at the sight of all that which could favor mesmerism.”[57] Thouret and others who compared Mesmer’s cures to the miracles of Saint-Médard “cited the relations of miracles worked by the intercession of the saintly deacon, relations accompanied by the most authentic, and least suspect certificates” only “to prove that it was little necessary to familiarize themselves with the innumerable certificates which provide evidence for the effects of animal magnetism.”[58] Thus, he had taken the “dishonest, but very convenient” position of arguing that the witnesses of alleged healings by animal magnetism were just like those who attested to the miracles of François de Paris, that is, unreliable.[59] Like the miracles at Saint-Médard, mesmerist healings were “[a]ttested and certified mostly by people in the learned class, recounted by the sick themselves, of which a certain number appeared to be from a higher social position” and “these healings seemed necessarily to offer all the characteristics of truth.”[60] Thouret, however, used “two magic words imitation, imagination” in order to reject all of the evidence before him. The author of the Relation of Louise Guélon found his logic unsustainable. Did he really mean “to condemn multiple, irreproachable witnesses, distinguished military men, men of the Art [of medicine], doctors and surgeons of the highest reputation, men of all classes, of all countries, let us add, of all religions”?[61] That would be “to annihilate all certitude of testimonies.”[62] Supporters of miracles and animal magnetism disagreed as to the origin of the healings, but they agreed that the testimony of non-medical experts was enough to verify the reality of a healing, no matter how extraordinary it seemed, and no matter how harshly authorities condemned it.

Scholars have often argued that Mesmer’s theory was rejected by elite medical and scientific institutions in France largely due to professional elitism but accepted by a considerable proportion of the elite reading public due to an intensified penchant for the extraordinary and a rejection of the “cold rationalism” of the Enlightenment. Linking mesmerism to the emergence of Romanticism, Robert Darnton argued that mesmerism was so popular in France because “[t]he literate French of the late 1780s tended to reject the cold rationalism of the midcentury in favor of a more exotic intellectual diet” in order to satiate their “fascination with the supernatural.”[63] That so many authors used historical parallels with reported supernatural events to disprove mesmerist healings seems to suggest that the reading public of France was perhaps not yet as comfortable with allowing the supernatural to seep back into intellectual life as some scholars have assumed. Many mesmerists went to great lengths to establish a clear distinction between animal magnetism and supernatural forces. According to this logic, miracles were supernatural but Mesmer’s cures, despite superficial similarities, were natural. Some failed to see the distinction, of course, and insisted that animal magnetism was just a novel superstition cloaked in fake science. The Memoirs for the Royal Society of Medicine stated that “[f]ew physicians believed in the blessed Pâris, and only five or six of them certified his miracles. Yet a large number of physicians believe in Doctor Mesmer. Let us be charitable enough to suggest that it is because today superstition is a physico-medical superstition.”[64] While “superstition” had traditionally implied religious error—attributing qualities to objects or forces that rightfully belonged to God alone—at the end of the eighteenth century, the term was also used to denote beliefs in invisible powers that could not be demonstrated or proven through observation.[65] In the case of mesmerism, both definitions seemed applicable, given the invisible nature of animal magnetism and the close association between miraculous and mesmerist cures.

Does the fact that so many medical practitioners were willing to accept animal magnetism suggest that even the medical community was growing more comfortable with invisible forces than they had been decades earlier? Certainly, scientific minds of the day accepted things they could not see. They believed in gravity, which like animal magnetism was a universal, invisible force. They studied electricity, which like animal magnetism was difficult to observe and poorly understood, but widely believed to have potential healing properties. However, the evidence presented above suggests that the key aspect of the debate over mesmerism, and that which linked it most intimately with earlier debates over supernatural healings, was not whether or not invisible forces acted on human bodies. Rather, the key issue was whether or not one accepted the available evidence, in this case the testimony of non-medical experts, as adequately scientific. In this sense, the fate of mesmerism in France was determined not only by whether or not outsiders were accepted into the corporative structures of the medical profession, but also, and perhaps more importantly, by whether or not the experience of patients was accepted as evidence for effective medical remedies. Scholars have clearly identified a growing divide between those who wished to keep the medical community closed and exclusive and those who wanted it to be more accessible. The evidence presented here reveals another, equally significant divide between those who had faith in the stability and reliability of the human mind and those who feared the mind’s tendency to be misled by the imagination.

1. Laurence Brockliss and Colin Jones, The Medical World of Early Modern France (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), 788-92.

2. Jessica Riskin has highlighted the role that “sentimental empiricism”—the idea that natural knowledge comes from a mix of experience and emotion—played in the debate over mesmerism in France. Facing the popularity of mesmerism, Riskin argues that the commissions tasked with investigating animal magnetism constructed “a new theory of their own” to explain how the mind could construct feelings without real sensory experience of an outside force. This theory was that there was a mental faculty independent of the five senses : the imagination. Jessica Riskin, Science in the Age of Sensibility: The Sentimental Empiricists of the French Enlightenment (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2002), 192.

3. Robert Darnton, Mesmerism and the End of the Enlightenment in France (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1968), 41.

4. Some prominent physicians in Paris remained avid supporters, as did many practitioners in the provinces who learned the technique. Unlike most journals printed in Paris, the provincial press was relatively neutral, publicizing both sides of the debate equally. On Mesmerism in the provinces, see Lindsay Wilson, Women and Medicine in the French Enlightenment: The Debate over “Maladies des Femmes” (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), 116-122.

5. Darnton, Mesmerism and the End of the Enlightenment, 164.

6. Brockliss and Jones, Medical World, 795.

7. François Zanetti, “Contretemps et contrepoints au mesmérisme: Savoirs et acteurs des marges à la fin de l’ancien régime,” Annales historiques de la Révolution française 391, no. 1 (2018): 57-80; Geoffrey Sutton, “Electric Medicine and Mesmerism,” Isis 72, no. 3 (1981): 375-392.

8. In her work on the maladies des femmes, Wilson identifies important commonalities between the debate over Mesmerism and earlier debates, including that over the convulsionaries of Saint-Médard, which will be discussed below. However, while she reveals commonalities between the methods medical and royal authorities used to assess these two episodes, her study does not include an analysis of the connections contemporaries made between these two debates. Wilson, Women and Medicine, 104-124.

9. For example, Steven Shapin’s work on seventeeth-century England revealed the qualities of the “gentleman”—principally birth, wealth, and cultured behavior—that made them trustworthy and their scientific observations reliable. Steven Shapin, A Social History of Truth: Civility and Science in Seventeenth-Century England (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1994). Ken Adler’s study of engineering in France suggests that birth and social connections were not always viewed as appropriate designators of trustworthiness in scientific matters by the end of the eighteenth century, but that an air of merit-based professional status was crucial. Ken Adler, “French Engineers Become Professionals; or, How Meritocracy Made Knowledge Objective” in The Sciences in Enlightened Europe, eds. William Clark, Jan Golinski, and Simon Shaffer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 94-125.

10. As Jessica Riskin’s analysis of the formal investigation of mesmerism has shown, commissioners attempted to counter the popularity of mesmerism by arguing that the body could feel things without external stimuli, that is, they explained the cures by arguing that they were inventions of the imagination and that the poor and women were most susceptible. Riskin, Science in the Age of Sensibility, 215-16. On the gendering of scientific reasoning as masculine, see Mary Terrall, “Metaphysics, Mathematics, and the Gendering of Science in Eighteenth-Century France” in The Sciences in Enlightened Europe, 246-271. On views of the judgment of women in eighteenth-century France, see Anne C. Vila, Enlightenment and Pathology: Sensibility in the Literature and Medicine of Eighteenth-Century France (Baltimore & London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998); Cathy McClive “Blood and Expertise: The Trials of the Female Medical Expert in the Ancien-Régime Courtroom,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 82, no. 1 (2008): 86-108.

11. Jean-Jacques Paulet, L’antimagnétisme, ou origine, progrès, décadence, renouvellement et réfutation du magnétisme animal (London, 1784), 196. All translations from the French are my own.

12. This highly publicized affair in the 1770s produced over 150 publications. For more on this controversy, see H. C. Erik Midelfort, Exorcism and Enlightenment: Johann Joseph Gassner and the Demons of Eighteenth-Century Germany (New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 2005).

13. Wilson has argued that mesmerism never took hold in Loudun precisely because of the lingering memory of these alleged possessions and the sham trial of Urbain Granadier that followed. Wilson, Women and Medicine, 116-7.

14. The trend of comparing mesmerism and the miracles of Saint-Médard continued into the nineteenth century. See for example, C. Burdin Jeune and Fréd. Dubois, Histoire académique du magnetism animal accompagnée de notes et de remarques critiques (Paris, 1841), 196-7.

15. Recueil des Miracles Operés au Tombeau de M. de Pâris Diacre: Contenant les informations faites par l’Ordre de Feu M. le Cardinal de Noailles, au sujet des Miracles operas sur Pierre Lero, Jeanne Orget, Elisabeth la Loë, & Marie-Magdelaine Mossaron (1732), 61-80.

16. Quoted in Catherine Maire, Les convulsionnaires de Saint-Médard: miracles, convulsions et prophéties à Paris au XVIIIe siècle (Paris: Gallimard/Julliard, 1985), 104.

17. For more information about the miracles and convulsions at Saint-Médard, see Maire, Les convulsionnaires de Saint-Médard; Robert B. Kreiser, Miracles, Convulsions, and Ecclesiastical Politics in Eighteenth-Century Paris (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1978); Ephraim Rader, Spirit and Nature: The Saint-Médard Miracles in 18th-Century Jansenism (New York: Crossroad Publishing, 2002); Brian Strayer, Suffering Saints: Jansenists and Convulsionnaires in France, 1640-1799 (Brighton, U.K.: Sussex Academic Press, 2008); Daniel Vidal, Miracles et convulsions jansénistes au XVIIIe siècle: Le Mal et sa Connaissance (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1987).

18. Maire, Convulsionnaires, 24.

19. On the distribution and publication of the Nouvelles ecclésiastiques and the Jansenist “machine propagandiste” in general, see Catherine Maire, De la cause de Dieu à la cause de la Nation: Le jansénisme au XVIIIe siècle (Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 1998), 115-162.

20. On the organization of these testimonies and their polemical uses, see Michèle Bokobza Kahan, Témoigner des miracles au siècle des Lumières: Récits et discours de Saint-Médard (Paris: Classiques Garner, 2015).

21. Nouvelles ecclésiastiques ou mémoires pour servir à l'histoire de la constitution Unigenitus (Paris and Utrecht, Jan., 1738), 1-2.

22. Maire, Les convulsionnaires de Saint-Médard, 87-88.

23. Wilson, Women and Medicine, 17-33.

24. Nouvelles ecclésiastiques (Mar. 20, 1731), 53.

25. In Rennes, the Jesuits held free performances for male audiences, which many artisans and people of the lower classes attended. Nouvelles ecclésiastiques (Sep. 25, 1731), 183. The Nouvelles reported that the play was sold publicly in Rouen and Montpellier, and printed in Lyon and Nevers. Nouvelles ecclésiastiques (Jan. 19, 1731), 16; (Jan. 31, 1731), 24; (Mar. 8, 1731), 48; (Mar. 14, 1731), 51. The play also found international success, and translated versions were published for audiences in Italy, Holland, Poland, and Spain. André Dubezies, “Érudition et humeur: Le Père Bougeant (1690-1743),” Dix-Huitième Siècle 9 (1977): 265.

26. Journal littéraire de l’année 1733 (The Hague, 1733), 20: 194.

27. Paul-Henri Thiry, Baron d'Holbach, Histoire critique de Jésus-Christ, ou, analyse raisonnée des Evangiles (1770), 337-338.

28. Denis Diderot, Pensées philosophiques (The Hague, 1746), 115.

29. These events were so well attested that they were used as a tool to explain a variety of phenomena. As is made clear across a wide array of Enlightenment publications, including the Encyclopédie, French philosophes like Voltaire, Diderot, and d’Alembert used the miracles and convulsions to display what they believed to be the corrupting influence of revealed religion and enthusiasm. News of these events also spread internationally. David Hume argued that the miracles of Saint-Médard proved that no amount of witness testimony could verify an unnatural event. David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, ed. Stephen Buckle (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 102-110. For John Wesley they proved that, contrary to the belief of most English Protestants, God still intervened on earth in their own time. Jean-Robert Armogathe, “A propos des miracles de Saint-Médard: les preuves de Carré de Montgeron et le positivisme des Lumières,” Revue de l’histoire des religions 180, no. 2 (1971): 159n3.

30. Pierre-Jean-Baptiste Nougaret (1742-1823), Tableau mouvant de Paris, ou variétés amusantes, ouvrage enrichi de Notes historique & critiques, & mis au jour par M. Nougaret (London, 1787), 242.

31. Charles Devillers, Le colosse aux pieds d’Argille (1784), 54.

32. Paulet compared magnetism to miracles similarly, insisting that “It is this compulsion to act out convulsions, joined with the ease of imitating them that gave rise to almost all the miracles observed at the tomb of Pâris.” Paulet, L’antimagnétisme, 234.

33. Devillers, Le colosse aux pieds, 55. Paulet likewise noted that although the healings of Gassner were fake, nevertheless “the prodigies that Gassner worked are far beyond all those of Mr. Mesmer.” Paulet, L’antimagnétisme, 229.

34. According to Darnton many hand-written testimonies were also notarized, giving them an air of legal authenticity. Darnton, Mesmerism and the End of the Enlightenment, 59.

35. Charles Moulinié, Lettre sur le magnétisme animal, adressée à Monsieur Perdriau, Pasteur & Professeur de l’Eglise, & de l’Académie de Geneve ; par Charles Moulinié, Ministre du Saint Evangile in Receuil des pièces les plus intéressantes sur le magnétisme animal (Paris, 1784), 309.

36. Riskin, Science in the Age of Sensibility, 215-216. It is not clear whether or not the claim that most cured by the manipulation of animal magnetism were women was accurate. For example, of the sixty-two cases of cures by animal magnetism reported in Buzancy, nearly half were operated on men. Cures opérées à Buzancy, dans l’espace de six semaines, par le moyen du Magnétisme animal in Receuil des pièces, 335-353.

37. Zanetti, "Contretemps et contrepoints au mesmérisme,” 79.

38. Darnton, Mesmerism and the End of the Enlightenment, 51.

39. Nougaret, Tableau mouvant, 205.

40. Muletier [?], Réflexions sur le magnétisme animal, d’après lesquelles on cherche à étabir le degré de croyance que peut mériter jusqu’ici le sytème de M. Mesmer (Bruxelles, 1784), 42-43.

41. Appendix 6, “An Antimesmerist View,” in Darnton, Mesmerism and the End of the Enlightenment, 189.

42. Marie-André-Joseph Bouvier, Lettres sur le magnétisme animal où l’on discute l’Ouvrage de M. Thouret, intitulé Doutes & Recherches sur la découverte du Magnétisme animal, & le Rapport de MM. les Commissaires sur l’existence & l’efficacité de cette découverte (Brussels, 1784), 30.

43. Michel-Augustin Thouret, Recherches et doutes sur le magnétisme animal (Paris, 1784), 221.

44. Franz Anton Mesmer, Mémoire de F.A. Mesmer, docteur en médecine, sur ses découvertes (Paris: 1798-1799), 64.

45. Ibid.

46. Moulinié, Lettre sur le magnétisme, 307.

47. Galart de Montjoie, Lettre sur le magnétisme animal, où on examine la conformité des opinions des Peuples Anciens & Modernes, des Sçavans, & notamment de M. Bailly avec celles de M. Mesmer ; & où l’on compare ces mêmes opinions au Rapport des Commissaires chargés par le Roi de l’Examen du Magnétisme (Philadelphia, 1784), 9-10.

48. Ibid., 10.

49. Ibid., 10-11.

50. Ibid., 10n.

51. Ibid.

52. The Nouvelles ecclésiastiques alone reported eighty-two Jansenist miracles in the provinces between 1728 and the middle of the century. Of these eighty-two miracles seventy-one were worked by the intercession of Pâris and the remaining eleven were worked by the intercession of other thaumaturges ranging from the former bishop of Senez, Soanen, to the Virgin Mary. Although a disproportionate number of miracles were reported in North-Central France where Jansenism was strongest—between Tours in the South and Arras in the North—the thaumaturgic power of the deacon reportedly reached even the most distant regions of the kingdom. Miracles were reported as far from the capital as Saint Malo, Bayeux, and Nantes in the West, and Toulon and Bayonne in the South. J.I. Engels, “Une grammaire de la vérité. Les miracles jansénistes en province d’après les Nouvelles ecclésiastiques, 1728-1750,” Revue d’histoire ecclésiastique 91 (1996): 438-451.

53. Paulet, L’antimagnétisme, 232.

54. For a full account of the miracle and controversy surrounding the verification process, see Réflexions sur le miracle operé à Troyes, sur Mlle Guélon, le 27 Février 1785, pour l’édification des fideles, qui s’intéressent aux biens & aux maux de l’Eglise; & quelques prieres en l’honneur du Bienheureux Taumaturge (n.p., 1785).

55. Relation de la maladie et de la guérison miraculeuse de Mlle. Louis Guélon, de Troyes (n. p., n.d.), 46.

56. Ibid., 48.

57. Ibid., 40.

58. Ibid., 2.

59. Ibid.

60. Thouret quoted in Ibid., 41.

61. Ibid., 43. Italics in the original.

62. Ibid.

63. Darnton, Mesmerism and the End of the Enlightenment, 165.

64. Quoted in Brockliss and Jones, Medical World, 792-3.

65. On the shifting definition of superstition during the Enlightenment, see Michael D. Bailey, Magic and Superstition in Europe: A Concise History from Antiquity to the Present (Plymouth, UK: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2007), 206-213.