A Little Bit Mad/Almost Mad/Not Quite Mad? Eccentricity and the Framing of Mental Illness in Nineteenth-Century French Culture

Abstract

In 1894 Paul Moreau, the alienist and son of the considerably more famous alienist Jacques-Joseph Moreau de Tours, published a short work entitled Les Excentriques.¹ Plagiarizing substantially from existing medical literature, in particular his father’s analysis of eccentricity from 1859,² the work narrates episodes of incomprehensible yet generally harmless behaviour, such as eccentric journeys, marriages, duels, and testaments. One doctor commented that it looked like little more than selected highlights from the daily newspapers,³ and indeed Moreau blames the press for feeding an ‘epidemic’ of eccentricity by implicitly encouraging readers to emulate the bizarre actions they read about in the fait divers (22–4). His conclusion, however, suddenly strikes an alarming note. Whilst in times of political stability such episodes are of little social import, during periods of unrest ‘the peaceful eccentrics we have just seen will be unleashed and transformed into wild animals, thirsty only for blood and for massacre’ (117). Drawing implicitly upon the language of hypnotism, Moreau argues that eccentrics’ weak and suggestible personalities make them highly vulnerable to political demagoguery. Alexandre Cullerre’s Les Frontières de la folie, a popularizing work of psychiatry written three years previously, also treats eccentricity at length.⁴