Trials of Passion

by Lisa Appignanesi

  The dependence on a physical test to determine the patient’s state – to diagnose that hysterical illness of which hypnotizability is one sign – points to the underlying difference between the Salpêtrière and Nancy schools: the first is ultimately neurophysiological in its explanations. Hysteria or insanity are mental states based on neurological disorder. The Nancy school is more psychological: for them, ideas can influence the patient’s body, her physical state. Freud, though he studied with Charcot and admired him, was to be more greatly influenced by Bernheim, the leader of the Nancy school, whose work he also translated and went to see in 1889. The experiments he witnessed in Nancy gave him ‘the profoundest impression of the possibility that there could be powerful mental processes which nevertheless remained hidden from the consciousness of man’.

  In court, when asked whether Gabrielle had told him that she sometimes simulated hypnotic sleep, Dr Brouardel smiled and answered: ‘That’s what all the women we put to sleep say. They seem to be both capable of being put to sleep and capable of pretending to be asleep.’

  BrouardePs reply teases: he wants to suggest that all women are hysterics to a degree – though not necessarily grandes hystériques – and that all women lie, which would also seem to devalue the use of hypnosis as a diagnostic tool for hysteria. But Brouardel was a follower of Charcot’s, and adamantly opposed the Nancy doctrine that everyone was hypnotizable. To a jury member’s question about whether it was absolutely necessary to put a person to sleep in order to impose one’s will on her, Brouardel responded in the affirmative. He did not hold with the Nancy school’s notion that suggestion could secretly be practised on people who were fully conscious – that is, in a state of alertness. At the Salpêtrière, they had never seen a person who was awake and alert succumb to suggestion. It might be that a person in a somnambulistic state could be asked to perform a very simple act once she was awake – for example, kissing someone or pulling his ears, an act that was in no absolute contradiction with her temperament. But no more than that. Even patients under hypnosis sometimes refused the suggestion that they should undress. Their modesty, their inner morality, trumped the suggestion.

  Dr Motet backed up BrouardePs comments: Gabrielle Bompard was not insane. She had a lively intelligence, neat and precise, and could perfectly well distinguish good from evil. Only her moral sense was perverted: it was her desires, not her intelligence, that had made her a prostitute. Dr Gilbert Ballet added that no morbidity, no hallucination or delirium, had been found in Gabrielle. She might suffer from a petite hystérie, which manifested itself in a nervous disposition, exacerbated by lasciviousness. But there had been no crime committed under the influence of suggestion.

  The Paris doctors were emphatic in their testimony. They could also impress the jury and the public with the fact that they had had access to Gabrielle over five months. Charcot, interviewed before the trial by the popular paper L’Intransigeant, could of course say all the same things without ever once examining Gabrielle in the flesh. ‘A priori Pm sceptical about her and for the moment, I think of her as a mischievous and cunning woman, who suffers from what the English were first to call moral madness.’ The public, according to Charcot, had an altogether mistaken idea of hypnosis. There was no proof that crimes were, or could be, committed under hypnotic suggestion, whatever the Nancy school claimed. Under laboratory conditions it might be possible to give a hypnotized woman a paper-knife and order her to strike the man across the room – as Gilles de la Tourette had shown – but if she did, she wouldn’t strike very hard.

  Charcot emphasizes in his interview that there is an underlying ‘honest instinct’ in most people which can’t be turned to crime while they’re in a hypnotized state. Even amongst some of his most extraordinary somnambulistic patients at the Salpêtrière – who had a predisposition to be la chose de quelqu’un (someone’s (controlled) thing), mere puppets who went off with charlatan hypnotists to be exhibited in fairgrounds because they needed to lean on someone – he had heard of none who had been turned to crime. If Eyraud really was a hypnotist and Bompard as susceptible as had been claimed, he would never have had any need to hit her. Violence, Charcot implies, sways far more adequately than hypnosis.

  Finally, Charcot states that perhaps Bompard suffers from a folie lucide, a madness without delirium that entails excessive emotion and perhaps some delusion, though whether this is severe enough to undermine ‘responsibility’ he very much doubts. He’s not saying she should have her neck severed, but she does merit punishment. As for what the interviewer calls her monomanie de mensonge, her mania for lying, Charcot reaches for the accepted common knowledge about ordinary ‘little’ hysterics: Gabrielle’s lying can simply be attributed to her need to make herself interesting, to be talked about, to play a part.

  If Charcot was to have his say out of court and before the trial, the French press thought it only fair that Hippolyte Bernheim, should also have his. Asked to give an expert opinion from Nancy for L’Intransigeant on 28 January 1890, Bernheim noted that he could have no firm view, since he hadn’t interviewed Mile Bompard personally. He could only give an impression, which he might have to modify when more material came to light. He compared Bompard to Madame Fenayrou, the accused in a recent murder case, who under her husband’s influence had set a trap for her lover, after which her husband had brutally killed him. Like this woman, Bompard might have no underlying moral sense that could serve as a counterweight to any implanted suggestion.

  Bompard’s psychic state, like that of a sleepwalker, was one that would easily succumb to any external forces. She suffered from an imbécilité instinctive – an imbecility of the instincts to which, from an early age, she had abandoned herself. She had no sense of the monstrosity of her crime. She had spent a night with a murdered corpse. She was astonished that she was to be held in prison until her trial. She had no moral conscience. Her suggestibility was evident in the fact that she – a young, personable woman who could have succeeded in the demi-monde – gave herself up to the domination of a man who beat and exploited her. She followed his lead. Submissive to Eyraud’s suggestions, she brought the bailiff to him, helped or collaborated in his murder, wasn’t haunted by any regrets. She followed her lover across two continents, allowed him to throw her into other men’s arms, and finally found herself in the arms of an intelligent man who captivated her in turn, and who, having learned of her crime, had her deliver herself to the Paris police. A woman who wasn’t suggestible would never have accepted this last suggestion.

  Bernheim elaborates the broad force of the suggestibility he understands as underlying Gabrielle’s acts. It is a suggestibility that has no need of hypnotic sleep. Tn a state of perfect wakefulness, by simple affirmation, I obtain anaesthesia, contracture, and hallucinations from my patients,’ Bernheim states; he adds that, like Gabrielle, ‘sug- gestibles’ lie all the time because they are the dupes of their own imagination. If he suggests a false memory to them – which he dubs a ‘retroactive hallucination’ – they develop that theme, which has been accepted by their imagination as their own. They really think it happened to them. It’s quite possible that Gabrielle, prodded by the interrogation first one way, then another, and also instinctively animated by her desire to wipe out any criminal part she may have played, creates memories in her imagination that she accepts as realities. She can no longer untangle the lived truth from the falsified truth, as she sees it through the autosuggestion of her labile imagination.

  All this bears an uncanny resemblance to those other ‘imaginative’ women letter and journal writers – Mrs Robinson, Christiana Edmunds – faced by the rigours of legal testimony. It also brings to mind the procedures of the infamous memory trials in the US in the 1990s, in which women claimed to have been abused as children by their fathers. In some of these cases, false memories, experienced as real by the subjects, seem to have been implanted via the therapeutic process – though in this slippery area of suggestion and sex in the family, definitive det
erminations of the ‘truth’ of memory and imagination are ever difficult to unravel.

  Bernheim repeats the question put to him. ‘You ask me if a hypnotized subject can be led to crime under hypnotic influence, without his own sense of responsibility coming into play?’ But this question, he counters, ‘can’t really be put about Gabrielle Bompard ... In her the absence or the perversion of any moral sense leaves the terrain open to receive criminal suggestion.’ Bernheim draws a contrast between a person who has a developed moral sense and therefore cannot have it annihilated and be led by suggestion to commit a crime, and those other subjects who are gifted with a nervous impressionability which makes them susceptible. He makes an analogy with ordinary dream states. Some dreamers are not completely identified with the dream; they know they’re dreaming and playing a part, and their habitual consciousness subsists next to the dreamt one. But with other dreamers, they’re incarnated heart and soul in their new role, and their former consciousness is annihilated. These latter would move into crime like ‘impulsive epileptics’.

  Bernheim was ill during the Eyraud–Bompard trial and couldn’t attend to give his expert witness himself. Jules Liégeois, the member of the Nancy school mentioned earlier, though not a doctor, came in his place. He was not permitted access to Gabrielle, but he nonetheless took up his right to speak without interruption. He did so for four hours, describing the doctrine and history of the Nancy school at great length. According to Bataille, his address was so soporific that no enactment of hypnotism was needed to put Gabrielle, as well as much of the audience, to sleep. He was refused permission to hypnotize her in court, so that he could re-enact the murder scene with her.

  Liégeois described experiments showing how he had completely annihilated his subjects’ individual will and liberty and had them commit terrible if unreal crimes. For example, he had a nephew poison his uncle – though the substance used was sugar not arsenic. He showed photographs of women who – through suggestion – had made flaming red words or marks appear on their backs, like stigmata. As for rape under hypnosis, even the Paris school allowed that this took place. Liégeois argued that Bompard had been hypnotized into an état second of long duration – an altered, or second, state of consciousness of which she could have no recollection and during which she participated in the murder without the knowledge of her ‘first’, or ordinary, conscious self. Her lying was in fact an inability to remember events clearly. Throughout, she had acted unconsciously under Eyraud’s command.

  Brouardel’s response to this was to mock and to state emphatically that what Liégeois called ‘suggestibility’ was simply doing something that you were inclined to do in any case under the influence of someone who had a certain sway over you. Lovers and adolescents were contantly acting under the influence of others. This did not mean their acts were involuntary or unwilled. They were not in a sleep state: Bompard was a willing accomplice, and though she might be something of a moral imbecile and depraved, she was not mentally disordered.

  The president of the court was dismissive of Liégeois’s expert opinion: The one outstanding fact that has been true for six thousand years is that the stronger will can possess the weaker: that is no peculiar part of the history of hypnotism; it belongs to the history of the world.’ This was tantamount to saying that one didn’t need newfangled ‘medical’ notions to confirm that women were vulnerable to predatory men. That fact, however, could not absolve them of all responsibility for crime.

  Wild, amoral, Gabrielle was not to win over the compassion of judge and jury: she was simply not a woman in the virtuous image that the times wanted.

  Then, too, Liégeois’s assertion that any nervous woman could simply be hypnotized into succumbing to seduction and rape by the steady gaze of a man overreached and elicited a negative reaction from both judge and jury. Too much was at stake. Not only the freedom of the individual mind, but the stability of the bourgeois family and the virtue of wives and daughters. Hypnotism by gaze alone made women susceptible to any stranger on a train. The court negated such an inflated assumption.

  Yet the dread of hypnotism’s power continued: the huge success of George du Maurier’s bestselling novel about the powers of the hypnotist Svengali to induce a sleepwalking and singing trance in his subject, Trilby, is only one example of the idea’s spread. Society’s underlying fears about women’s vulnerability to predators and mental fragility, a worry too about their unconscious or unspoken sexual desire, together with a concern about an insufficiently educated and ‘degenerate’ underclass – all coalesced in the idea of hypnosis. And all this brought in train an anxiety about the stability of the bourgeois family, which was premised on women’s virtue.

  This fear of hypnosis and the power of the gaze is not so remote as it may seem: in the 1980 and 1990s – another moment of change and anxiety about women’s place, when questions of fundamental weakness or strength went hand in hand with demands for equal rights – American campuses were subject to a wave of accusations of ‘ocular harassment’, in which women students and staff accused more ‘powerful’ male professors of attacking their integrity by staring at them.

  After Liégeois’s sorry performance, Gabrielle’s lawyer put aside the hypnotism defence in his final appeal to the jury: instead he focused on Bompard’s weakness and youthful moral irresponsibility. The president of the court declared that though it was his duty to call for the ultimate sentence, he would be happy if the jury did not take him up on it: his feelings as a compassionate man were not in synchrony with his stern duty as a judge. The jury took up his lead and brought in a ‘guilty with extenuating circumstances’ verdict for Gabrielle Bompard. She was sentenced to twenty years’ penal servitude. Eyraud, whose lawyer had tried to prove that far from being Gabrielle’s master, he had been her slave, completely in thrall to her seductive charms, was given the ultimate sentence. Though he appealed and gained a little time, he faced execution – apparently with great dignity – on 3 February 1891.

  The Paris jury had refused to buy into a psychology which emphatically stated that all humans were suggestible to forces outside their control. But the fear persisted beyond the courtroom. It even reached Parliament, where one deputy demanded that Liégeois and the Nancy school be banned from teaching their doctrine, since it had a destabilizing effect on the nation. In November 1892, France outlawed theatrical performances of mesmerism and hypnotism, in a bid to keep the practice under medical control. The move was echoed throughout Europe.

  Liégeois’s performance in the courtroom showered mockery on the Nancy school. The papers had a field day over the learned professor, and for a while he disappeared from the public eye. But he returned. In 1892, he called for a public programme of ‘moral vaccination’ to protect every nervous woman in the country from the gaze of dangerous magnetizers who might proceed to rape them. The process of inoculation would mean that a nervous woman would first be hypnotized by a reliable practitioner, who would insert a suggestion that immunized her against any later hypnotic influence. His project, of course, was never taken up: underlying it, however, we see the social imperative of the French medico-legal profession: it was their duty on behalf of the state to be responsible for whole populations, not only disturbed individuals.

  In 1903, when Gabrielle was released from prison on parole, Liégeois at last had his opportunity to hypnotize her. She apparently relived the scene in which the murder of Bailiff Gouffé was suggested to her by Eyraud. Dr Albert Moll, in his updated 1909 history, Hypnotism, considers this re-enactment doubtful, particularly with a woman as mischievous and untruthful as Gabrielle; but he states that the possibility of a crime carried out under hypnosis cannot be ruled out.

  Less than three years after the Bompard trial, the moral panic around hypnotism in France occasioned a near-tragedy, this time enmeshing a patient and targeting one of the very medics who had investigated its use.

  At about 6.45 on the evening of 6 December 1893, a young woman walked into the consulting room of
Gilles de la Tourette, Charcot’s colleague at the Salpêtrière, and asked if he was the author of works on hypnotism. When the doctor said yes, the woman told him she had been hypnotized by various practitioners, that she was now in a parlous state and needed a loan of fifty francs. He asked her to leave her name and address and he would see that she got the money. As he stepped towards the door, the woman pulled out a revolver and shot at him three times. He managed to get into the hall before he collapsed.

  Apprehended, it turned out that the woman had been a patient both at Sainte-Anne and at the Salpêtrière, where she had suffered from, amongst other symptoms, delusions of persecution. When released she had decided to avenge herself on her persecutors, whom she imagined had practised hypnotism! on her. She was once again confined, and Gilles de la Tourette, the bullet lodged in his neck removed, healed and returned to his psychiatric practice. Distancing himself in his writing from any belief in criminal suggestion had not saved him from the slippery side-effects of hypnotism. The press furore around the subject had not only stirred debate but heated unstable minds.

  IV

  Naturalizing the Impulsive Feminine