Aude Fauvel
(English version below)
Docteure en histoire de l'EHESS et diplômée de l'IEP-Paris ('sciences-po'), j'ai effectué des recherches postdoctorales à l'Université d'Oxford, de Cambridge et à l'Institut Max Planck de Berlin, avant d'être élue en 2014 Maître de recherche et d'enseignement à l'Institut des humanités en médecine (IHM, CHUV-Université de Lausanne).
Mes travaux portent sur l'histoire de la médecine en général et celle de la psychiatrie en particulier. Spécialiste des interactions entre art, politique et médecine, j'ai notamment travaillé sur l'histoire de l'anti-aliénisme et des antipsychiatries, ainsi que sur la formation des premiers mouvements de patients au XIXe siècle en France et en Grande-Bretagne. Plus récemment, je me suis intéressée à l'histoire des femmes-médecins, de la sexualité et de la criminalité au féminin.
Pour les non-familiers de la terminologie universitaire suisse, il est sans doute utile de préciser ici que je suis habilitée à diriger des thèses de doctorat.
I am a Senior Lecturer at the Institute of Humanities in Medicine (IHM, CHUV-University of Lausanne, Switzerland). After graduating from 'Sciences-Po' Paris, I defended my PhD at the EHESS (School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences, Paris), before completing postdoctoral research at the University of Oxford, the University of Cambridge, and the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Berlin.
My work deals with the history of medicine, focusing in particular on the history of psychiatry. As a specialist of the interactions between artistic, scientific and lay discourses in the shaping of the medical realm, I have explored the history of 'anti-alienism' and antipsychiatry, studying the emergence of patients' movements in 19th-century France and Britain. More recently, I became interested in female physicians, sexuality, and the history of women's criminality.
I welcome applications from PhD students interested in the above fields.
Address: CHUV
Histoire de la médecine (IUHMSP)
rue du Bugnon 46
CH-1001 Lausanne
SWITZERLAND
Docteure en histoire de l'EHESS et diplômée de l'IEP-Paris ('sciences-po'), j'ai effectué des recherches postdoctorales à l'Université d'Oxford, de Cambridge et à l'Institut Max Planck de Berlin, avant d'être élue en 2014 Maître de recherche et d'enseignement à l'Institut des humanités en médecine (IHM, CHUV-Université de Lausanne).
Mes travaux portent sur l'histoire de la médecine en général et celle de la psychiatrie en particulier. Spécialiste des interactions entre art, politique et médecine, j'ai notamment travaillé sur l'histoire de l'anti-aliénisme et des antipsychiatries, ainsi que sur la formation des premiers mouvements de patients au XIXe siècle en France et en Grande-Bretagne. Plus récemment, je me suis intéressée à l'histoire des femmes-médecins, de la sexualité et de la criminalité au féminin.
Pour les non-familiers de la terminologie universitaire suisse, il est sans doute utile de préciser ici que je suis habilitée à diriger des thèses de doctorat.
I am a Senior Lecturer at the Institute of Humanities in Medicine (IHM, CHUV-University of Lausanne, Switzerland). After graduating from 'Sciences-Po' Paris, I defended my PhD at the EHESS (School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences, Paris), before completing postdoctoral research at the University of Oxford, the University of Cambridge, and the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Berlin.
My work deals with the history of medicine, focusing in particular on the history of psychiatry. As a specialist of the interactions between artistic, scientific and lay discourses in the shaping of the medical realm, I have explored the history of 'anti-alienism' and antipsychiatry, studying the emergence of patients' movements in 19th-century France and Britain. More recently, I became interested in female physicians, sexuality, and the history of women's criminality.
I welcome applications from PhD students interested in the above fields.
Address: CHUV
Histoire de la médecine (IUHMSP)
rue du Bugnon 46
CH-1001 Lausanne
SWITZERLAND
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Talks by Aude Fauvel
2 réprésentations : 14/12/2017 I'm no angel - 22/12/2017 My little chickadee avec une présentation d'Aude Fauvel
26 septembre 2016 « Lausanne, capitale de l'onanisme », programme :
- 17h : visite guidée de l'exposition La sexualité, toute une histoire par Daniela Vaj
- 17h30-20h : projection du film Oh my God de Tanya Wexler, suivie d'une table ronde animée par Vincent Barras et Aude Fauvel
Du 15 au 18 août 2016, Anne Baecher vous propose de découvrir l'histoire de la psychiatrie. Intervenante: Aude Fauvel, maitre d’enseignement et de recherche auprès de l’Institut universitaire d’histoire de la médecine et de la santé publique à Lausanne (iuhmsp).
1. La médicalisation de la folie
Le premier rendez-vous de cette série vous emmène à la fin du XVIIIe siècle, une époque qui voit apparaître une véritable médicalisation de la folie.
2. Le quotidien des fous
Le deuxième épisode de cette série se penche sur les conditions et les lieux de vie des personnes souffrant de pathologies psychiatriques au tournant du XXe siècle.
3. Les traitements de la folie
Dans ce troisième épisode, zoom sur les traitements psychiatriques à travers l’histoire.
4. La fin de l'asile psychiatrique ?
Au fil de l’histoire, il y a eu des périodes durant lesquelles le malade psychique était considéré comme traitable ou, au contraire, qu'il fallait se contenter de l’enfermer. Va-t-on vers la fin de l'asile psychiatrique? C'est la question de l'ultime épisode de cette série.
Pour écouter l'émission : http://www.rts.ch/la-1ere/programmes/cqfd/7944333.html
Pour la podcaster (valable pendant 30 jours) : http://www.rts.ch/la-1ere/programmes/cqfd/podcast/
Call for papers by Aude Fauvel
Papers by Aude Fauvel
In 1845, a painter named Adèle Lauzier published an autopathography where she described how she had been institutionalized after attempting to ‘destroy’ her body. By recounting Lauzier’s little-known story and examining how she originally tied art, feminism and body experiments, this article sheds light on the underexplored history of self-mutilation in the French context.
Ce numéro porte un regard différent sur ce lien entre animaux et sciences du psychisme et montre que les secondes ne se sont pas seulement construites contre les bêtes mais aussi en collaboration avec elles, dans des rapports d’influences mutuelles, au dedans et au dehors des laboratoires. À côté des cobayes d’expériences, les psys ont fait surgir d’autres figures de l’animalité, percevant les animaux comme des partenaires, des patients, et même, comme des thérapeutes. En revisitant l’histoire psy sous cet angle, l’objectif n’est pas seulement de contribuer au renouvellement du regard sur l’histoire animale, il est aussi de participer à la réflexion sur la façon dont penser avec les animaux peut aider à penser les sciences de l’homme.
Why do some dogs resemble their masters? And what should we think of people who spend more time with their animals than with their relatives? As pets invaded cities in the 19th century, these questions were seriously examined. No one was sure whether animals and humans were meant to share such a level of intimacy. Worried that this might be dangerous, psychiatrists questioned the psychological effects of these contacts. This article deals with the evolution of this debate in nineteenth-century French
psychiatric discourses, tracing the changes in the meaning of the word ‘zoophilia’, from a laudatory connotation to a pathological one. I begin by analysing the little-known participation of alienists to the creation of the French Society for Animal Protection in 1846. I then show how French mad-doctors, who were thus initially favourable to interspecies contacts, finally changed their opinion and came to believe that humans and animals were damaging each other’s soundness of mind.
Beyond the asylum – An other view on the history of psychiatry in the modern age
Abstract. If one thinks medicine, madness and the past, one image immediately pops into mind: that of the mental asylum. Following the famous work by Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason, many historians have thus considered that the medicalization of insanity in the modern age had mostly led to a “great confinement” and a greater segregation of all individuals deemed mentally unfit during the “asylum era”. However, new research demonstrates that this classic narrative of the psychiatric past needs to be revised. It discloses that, ever since the 19th century, a whole other medical culture existed as a challenge to asylums, a culture that advocated the integration of the mad and fought to disassociate psychiatry from the dominant model of confinement all throughout the occidental world. This article aims at presenting the results of these historical works that depict another aspect of the psychiatric history, exploring “boarding out” practices, instead of asylum ones.
Hector Malot est aujourd’hui surtout connu pour ses livres destinés aux enfants. Pourtant ce n’est pas là ce qui l’avait rendu célèbre en son temps, mais plutôt Un beau-frère, une de ses premières œuvres qui, défrayant la chronique en 1868, le fit alors apparaître comme le porte-parole de la cause des fous. Avec ce livre, véritable roman-charge contre l’institution asilaire, Malot se signala comme le premier auteur « anti-aliéniste » de sa génération, initiant une veine littéraire nouvelle, celle du « roman d’asile ». Il fut aussi le premier écrivain « aliéniste amateur » que de parfaits inconnus venaient consulter pour lui demander de juger de l’état mental d’un proche. Cet article offre donc de redécouvrir cet aspect méconnu de l’œuvre de Malot et, en suivant le fil de son engagement en faveur des fous, d’aborder la culture « anti-aliéniste » de la fin du XIXe siècle, époque où l’on se demanda soudain qui du fou ou du psychiatre était le plus dangereux.
Nowadays, Hector Malot is mainly known for his books for children. However, that was not what made him famous in the 19th century, a time when he was much more notorious for Un beau-frère (A stepbrother). In this novel, first published in 1868, Malot gave a dreadful depiction of the French asylum system. It was a great success and the controversy was such that from this time on Malot was considered as a defender of the insane. Malot was thus the first “anti-alienist” author of his time, and he created a new kind of literary “genre”, which I called “asylum novels”. He was also the first writer to be seen as an “amateur psychiatrist” : people would come to consult him, ask him to examine their mental state or request that he visited a confined relative. By studying this forgotten aspect of Malot’s work and life, this article aims to shed light on the “anti-alienist” culture of the fin de siècle, a time when people wonder who was the most dangerous, the mad or their psychiatrists.
When patients were boiled in bathtubs. Nightmare, fantasy and reality of the French alienist medicine (19th-20th c.)
Abstract: In 19th-century France, hydrotherapy was considered a privileged cure for mental illness. Yet there were rumours that inmates had been found dead and boiled in so-called ‘‘continuous baths’’, where they had been left for hours by a neglectful staff. This paper aims to distinguish between truth and fantasy, through an analysis of French patient testimonies, literature and medical discourse. The reader will discover that what was at the time often dismissed as fiction, just another dreadful story on madhouses, was in fact a reality, which some rare iconoclastic psychiatrists such as Dr Evariste Marandon de Montyel (1851-1908) tried to alleviate.
Punishment, degeneration or ill fate ? The madness of André Gill (1840-1885). Famous late 19th-century French caricaturist André Gill was suddenly confined to the mental asylum of Charenton near Paris in 1881. He died there in 1885. The literary and artistic circles were really shocked by this tragic destiny as Gill showed no sign of mental derangement before. If someone like him – so sturdy, so well-balanced – became insane that meant nobody was really safe from lunacy. Therefore it was compulsory to find a meaning to that apparently absurd event. Many articles were written in the press – as if everyone wanted to seize the opportunity to express one’s own perception of insanity. However, one testimony, possibly the most important one, was oddly missing. Actually, it seemed that no one cared about the opinion of the lunatic himself. Yet Gill expressed himself on that topic in some documents which were made inside the asylum but also outside when he was free for a short period in 1882. The historian thus acquires the unprecedented occasion to compare the different perceptions of the insane in late 19th-century French society. What did being lunatic mean at this time? How were you seen and how did you see yourself? The history of Gill helps to answer these fundamental questions. In particular, it reveals that the medical analysis, which was based on the notion of degeneration, was not the only way to interpret madness at the end of the 19th century. To say the least, French society was ambivalent towards its mentally estranged and its psychiatric medicine. Gill brilliantly showed this ambivalence in his texts and maybe in a more expressive way in his drawings. Thus, the reader will discover in this article some unpublished documents from a private collection which help to understand what it meant for the inmate to live in a mental asylum.
2 réprésentations : 14/12/2017 I'm no angel - 22/12/2017 My little chickadee avec une présentation d'Aude Fauvel
26 septembre 2016 « Lausanne, capitale de l'onanisme », programme :
- 17h : visite guidée de l'exposition La sexualité, toute une histoire par Daniela Vaj
- 17h30-20h : projection du film Oh my God de Tanya Wexler, suivie d'une table ronde animée par Vincent Barras et Aude Fauvel
Du 15 au 18 août 2016, Anne Baecher vous propose de découvrir l'histoire de la psychiatrie. Intervenante: Aude Fauvel, maitre d’enseignement et de recherche auprès de l’Institut universitaire d’histoire de la médecine et de la santé publique à Lausanne (iuhmsp).
1. La médicalisation de la folie
Le premier rendez-vous de cette série vous emmène à la fin du XVIIIe siècle, une époque qui voit apparaître une véritable médicalisation de la folie.
2. Le quotidien des fous
Le deuxième épisode de cette série se penche sur les conditions et les lieux de vie des personnes souffrant de pathologies psychiatriques au tournant du XXe siècle.
3. Les traitements de la folie
Dans ce troisième épisode, zoom sur les traitements psychiatriques à travers l’histoire.
4. La fin de l'asile psychiatrique ?
Au fil de l’histoire, il y a eu des périodes durant lesquelles le malade psychique était considéré comme traitable ou, au contraire, qu'il fallait se contenter de l’enfermer. Va-t-on vers la fin de l'asile psychiatrique? C'est la question de l'ultime épisode de cette série.
Pour écouter l'émission : http://www.rts.ch/la-1ere/programmes/cqfd/7944333.html
Pour la podcaster (valable pendant 30 jours) : http://www.rts.ch/la-1ere/programmes/cqfd/podcast/
In 1845, a painter named Adèle Lauzier published an autopathography where she described how she had been institutionalized after attempting to ‘destroy’ her body. By recounting Lauzier’s little-known story and examining how she originally tied art, feminism and body experiments, this article sheds light on the underexplored history of self-mutilation in the French context.
Ce numéro porte un regard différent sur ce lien entre animaux et sciences du psychisme et montre que les secondes ne se sont pas seulement construites contre les bêtes mais aussi en collaboration avec elles, dans des rapports d’influences mutuelles, au dedans et au dehors des laboratoires. À côté des cobayes d’expériences, les psys ont fait surgir d’autres figures de l’animalité, percevant les animaux comme des partenaires, des patients, et même, comme des thérapeutes. En revisitant l’histoire psy sous cet angle, l’objectif n’est pas seulement de contribuer au renouvellement du regard sur l’histoire animale, il est aussi de participer à la réflexion sur la façon dont penser avec les animaux peut aider à penser les sciences de l’homme.
Why do some dogs resemble their masters? And what should we think of people who spend more time with their animals than with their relatives? As pets invaded cities in the 19th century, these questions were seriously examined. No one was sure whether animals and humans were meant to share such a level of intimacy. Worried that this might be dangerous, psychiatrists questioned the psychological effects of these contacts. This article deals with the evolution of this debate in nineteenth-century French
psychiatric discourses, tracing the changes in the meaning of the word ‘zoophilia’, from a laudatory connotation to a pathological one. I begin by analysing the little-known participation of alienists to the creation of the French Society for Animal Protection in 1846. I then show how French mad-doctors, who were thus initially favourable to interspecies contacts, finally changed their opinion and came to believe that humans and animals were damaging each other’s soundness of mind.
Beyond the asylum – An other view on the history of psychiatry in the modern age
Abstract. If one thinks medicine, madness and the past, one image immediately pops into mind: that of the mental asylum. Following the famous work by Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason, many historians have thus considered that the medicalization of insanity in the modern age had mostly led to a “great confinement” and a greater segregation of all individuals deemed mentally unfit during the “asylum era”. However, new research demonstrates that this classic narrative of the psychiatric past needs to be revised. It discloses that, ever since the 19th century, a whole other medical culture existed as a challenge to asylums, a culture that advocated the integration of the mad and fought to disassociate psychiatry from the dominant model of confinement all throughout the occidental world. This article aims at presenting the results of these historical works that depict another aspect of the psychiatric history, exploring “boarding out” practices, instead of asylum ones.
Hector Malot est aujourd’hui surtout connu pour ses livres destinés aux enfants. Pourtant ce n’est pas là ce qui l’avait rendu célèbre en son temps, mais plutôt Un beau-frère, une de ses premières œuvres qui, défrayant la chronique en 1868, le fit alors apparaître comme le porte-parole de la cause des fous. Avec ce livre, véritable roman-charge contre l’institution asilaire, Malot se signala comme le premier auteur « anti-aliéniste » de sa génération, initiant une veine littéraire nouvelle, celle du « roman d’asile ». Il fut aussi le premier écrivain « aliéniste amateur » que de parfaits inconnus venaient consulter pour lui demander de juger de l’état mental d’un proche. Cet article offre donc de redécouvrir cet aspect méconnu de l’œuvre de Malot et, en suivant le fil de son engagement en faveur des fous, d’aborder la culture « anti-aliéniste » de la fin du XIXe siècle, époque où l’on se demanda soudain qui du fou ou du psychiatre était le plus dangereux.
Nowadays, Hector Malot is mainly known for his books for children. However, that was not what made him famous in the 19th century, a time when he was much more notorious for Un beau-frère (A stepbrother). In this novel, first published in 1868, Malot gave a dreadful depiction of the French asylum system. It was a great success and the controversy was such that from this time on Malot was considered as a defender of the insane. Malot was thus the first “anti-alienist” author of his time, and he created a new kind of literary “genre”, which I called “asylum novels”. He was also the first writer to be seen as an “amateur psychiatrist” : people would come to consult him, ask him to examine their mental state or request that he visited a confined relative. By studying this forgotten aspect of Malot’s work and life, this article aims to shed light on the “anti-alienist” culture of the fin de siècle, a time when people wonder who was the most dangerous, the mad or their psychiatrists.
When patients were boiled in bathtubs. Nightmare, fantasy and reality of the French alienist medicine (19th-20th c.)
Abstract: In 19th-century France, hydrotherapy was considered a privileged cure for mental illness. Yet there were rumours that inmates had been found dead and boiled in so-called ‘‘continuous baths’’, where they had been left for hours by a neglectful staff. This paper aims to distinguish between truth and fantasy, through an analysis of French patient testimonies, literature and medical discourse. The reader will discover that what was at the time often dismissed as fiction, just another dreadful story on madhouses, was in fact a reality, which some rare iconoclastic psychiatrists such as Dr Evariste Marandon de Montyel (1851-1908) tried to alleviate.
Punishment, degeneration or ill fate ? The madness of André Gill (1840-1885). Famous late 19th-century French caricaturist André Gill was suddenly confined to the mental asylum of Charenton near Paris in 1881. He died there in 1885. The literary and artistic circles were really shocked by this tragic destiny as Gill showed no sign of mental derangement before. If someone like him – so sturdy, so well-balanced – became insane that meant nobody was really safe from lunacy. Therefore it was compulsory to find a meaning to that apparently absurd event. Many articles were written in the press – as if everyone wanted to seize the opportunity to express one’s own perception of insanity. However, one testimony, possibly the most important one, was oddly missing. Actually, it seemed that no one cared about the opinion of the lunatic himself. Yet Gill expressed himself on that topic in some documents which were made inside the asylum but also outside when he was free for a short period in 1882. The historian thus acquires the unprecedented occasion to compare the different perceptions of the insane in late 19th-century French society. What did being lunatic mean at this time? How were you seen and how did you see yourself? The history of Gill helps to answer these fundamental questions. In particular, it reveals that the medical analysis, which was based on the notion of degeneration, was not the only way to interpret madness at the end of the 19th century. To say the least, French society was ambivalent towards its mentally estranged and its psychiatric medicine. Gill brilliantly showed this ambivalence in his texts and maybe in a more expressive way in his drawings. Thus, the reader will discover in this article some unpublished documents from a private collection which help to understand what it meant for the inmate to live in a mental asylum.
Un siècle avant les anti-psychiatres, les anti-aliénistes s’interrogeaient déjà sur la nature de la médecine mentale, étonnés de ce que les fous ne semblaient pas guérir dans les asiles, Et, plutôt que d’entendre les aliénistes, ils cherchèrent alors les aliénés, jugeant qu’il fallait les écouter pour y voir plus clair. Or autant les historiens se sont intéressés au « pouvoir psychiatrique », autant cette question du désordre psychiatrique et de la désobéissance des patients a moins attiré l’attention. C’est donc la notion de dérèglement asilaire que cette contribution vise inversement à éclairer, explorant d’abord les éléments communs de la contestation anti-aliéniste dans les pays leaders du xixe en matière psychiatrique (la France et la Grande-Bretagne) et s’attardant ensuite sur le cas de l’Écosse. Car au lieu de rejeter les critiques comme leurs confrères, les médecins écossais choisirent plutôt d’écouter et allèrent même jusqu’à diffuser des journaux écrits par leurs malades. La psychiatrie prit alors un autre visage en Écosse, les médecins finissant par y penser que l’asile devait être un espace thérapeutique à définir avec les patients, un espace qu’il fallait ouvrir aussi, un tiers des malades écossais faisant déjà l’objet d’une prise en charge hors les murs en 1870. Le cas écossais montre ainsi que la transformation de l’asile en « institution totale » n’était pas inéluctable et qu’il y eut, parfois, de la place pour le dérèglement d’une certaine parole aliénée.
Summary
One century before the surge of anti-psychiatry, British and French anti-alienists of the 1860s were already questioning the nature of the medicine for the mind. Seeing that the creation of state-funded asylums had in fact led to the increase of mental cases, these challengers pondered the relevance of the system. To get another perspective, they thus decided to listen to the other actors of the asylum: the patients.
Yet, if many historians have studied the « psychiatric power », few have investigated this aspect and sought to examine how patients might have contravened said power in the past. This article therefore aims at exploring this issue of asylum disorders and patients' disobedience, by shedding light on the 19th-century anti-alienist battles that took place in Britain and France, and then focusing on the case of Scotland. For contrarily to their colleagues, Scottish alienists did not reject critics; they chose to hear them and even went so far as to edit newspapers, where the mad could vent to the public. Not surprisingly then, psychiatry took another turn in Scotland, where alienists began to associate patients to the definition of their treatments and allowed them, whenever possible, to leave asylums, one third of Scottish patients being already treated ‘outdoor’ in the 1870s. The Scottish case thus shows that asylums were not necessarily fated to become « total institutions », at least not when physicians agreed to leave some room for the disorder of mad voices.
Under the Influence: Alcohol, Literature and Psychiatry
abstract: The 19th-century was the time of an impressive increase of alcoholism all throughout Europe. This soon had visible detrimental effects on the health of populations, so that anti-alcoholism became a priority mission of many physicians. In France, psychiatrists were among the first to fight the consumption of alcohol, thinking that there was an obvious link between alcohol and mental illness. However, as most of their fellow countrymen, they were not ready to accept that wine could also be a potentially dangerous beverage. So they developed a two-level analysis, distinguishing between so-called "hygienic" beverages and nefarious spirits, likeable drunks and degenerate alchololics. In so doing they deprived the anti-alcohol message of all its substance. So why then continue to write endless papers on alcoholism? In this article, I argue that the "alcoholic peril" was more of a literary theme for French psychiatrists, who used it as a pretext to demonstrate their lyrical talents.
Summary
In France the Penal Code of 1810 deemed that ‘female rapists’ could exist, which resulted in several women being charged with ‘rape’ – the victims being male – in the first part of the 19th century. But in the latter half of the century, French legislators suddenly changed their mind and decided that rape was an exclusively male crime. Why? This is what this paper seeks to explore by cross-examining nineteenth-century judiciary and medical discourses, and by analysing how, in France, law and science interacted in the rejection of abusive women. For it is by invoking the medical expertise on the ‘feminine nature’ that French legislators were led to discard the idea that women could be sometimes utterly cruel, display sexually aggressive behaviour and even molest men. Therefore, if a history of rape is essentially a history of male violence, a history of how women have been mistreated by the so-called ‘stronger sex’ throughout centuries and civilisations, yet studying the inverse situation – that of women raping men – also gives crucial insights on the shaping of gender clichés and their ambivalent roles in the history of women/men relationship. As abusive women called into question the ‘fin-de-siècle’ vision of female sexuality (what it was and should be), legislators and physicians chose to close their eyes, thus leading to this paradoxical situation where female criminals were sometimes free to act, while their male victims could not even sue them – quite an infringement to the ‘weaker’/’stronger’ sex hierarchy.
These discoveries not only shed new light on the French past. They also suggest that the role played by patients in the history of psychiatry should be studied in a more transnational perspective, as it appears that several lunatics were able to transcend boundaries and to trigger debates on a larger scene. Such was the case of Baron Raymond Seillière, whose various encounters with mind-doctors (including Jean-Martin Charcot) caused an international stir, forcing France and the United States to compare their views on the management of the insane. Seillière‟s psychiatric wanderings thus provide an interesting insight into patients‟ participation in the circulation of “anti-alienist” conceptions at the end of the nineteenth century, a time when many believed that what the insane had to say was as important as their physicians‟ jargon.
In stern contrast with these American and British historiographies, almost no historical research on the relationships between gender and madness has been conducted in France. Was insanity a ‘female malady’ in that country as well? This is what this article aims to examine, seeking to assess the part played by sexual differences on the construction of ‘mental vulnerability’ by focusing on one particular aspect: that of statistics. As I analyse the ratio of women and men who were locked up in France during the ‘great age’ of the asylum (from 1838 to 1939), I show that there exists a discrepancy between the 19th century, a period where French women and men were almost equally ‘insane’, and the 20th century, where women were significantly more numerous than men to be sent to psychiatric facilities. These findings lead to reconsider the links between gender and psychiatric confinement.