Mythical Consciousness and Discontinuities the Spectacle of Madness in Tony Robert-Fleury’s Pinel...

UCL – DEPARTEMENT OF ART HISTORY MA DISSERTATION

Candidate Number: TTWS1 TUTOR: Mechthild Fend SEPTEMBRE 2012

Mythical Consciousness and

Discontinuities: the Spectacle of Madness

in Tony Robert-Fleury’s Pinel freeing the

Insane

Words: 11 636

Mythical Consciousness and Discontinuities: the Spectacle of Madness in Pinel freeing the Insane – TTWS1 1

Abstract

This thesis focuses on Tony Robert-Fleury 1876’s mythical depiction of the unchaining of

the madwomen at the Parisian hospital of La Salpêtrière in 1795.

Taking as a starting point the traumatic events of the French defeat against the

Prussians in 1870 and the ensuing civil war of the Paris Commune, the painting is

analysed as a medium fleshing out myth to propose an appeased image of France as a

community, in which the healing of the madwoman embodies a process of national

rejuvenation. Linking the painting to major historical images, this thesis proposes that

Robert-Fleury favours a logic of incorporation of ‘iconic’ images, which displacement

and juxtaposition jeopardise the continuity of the narrative. The concomitant use of a

classical language of expression, embedded in Charles Le Brun’s tradition, and scientific

contemporary references to depict the spectacle of madness is seen as a sign of this

unsettled mode of representation.

In drawing upon Michel Foucault’s definition of madness, those fractures are most of all

understood as the symbolisation of the Foucauldian concept of ‘limit-experiences’ by

which the world of reason protects itself from all risk of contagion from madness. In

displaying attitudes of thankfulness and submission, Robert-Fleury gives forceful

figurability to Foucault’s enunciation of the medical coercive power and the false

freedom conferred to the unchained mad.

Finally, in mobilising Georges Didi-Huberman’s interpretative framework on

anachronism, the breaks and voids which signature the painting are examined as a

montage of colliding temporalities and heterogeneous temporal strata by which the

healing process is given a miraculous quality. The anachronistic figure of the hysteric

woman –a social obsession at the time of the painting’s execution– that Robert-Fleury

purposefully integrated in the painting is given a prominent role in our analysis as the

symptomatic site of this conflation of meanings and times.


Table of Contents

List of Images .................................................................................................................... 3

Introduction ...................................................................................................................... 4

Grandeur and Grand Tradition ...................................................................................... 6

Unstable narrative ........................................................................................................ 8

Chapter One: Phantasy of a Memory .............................................................................. 10

Negotiation of the Past ............................................................................................... 10

A logic of Incorporation............................................................................................... 14

Relics of Madness........................................................................................................ 18

Chapter Two: The Speaking Eye ...................................................................................... 22

Spectacle of Madness ................................................................................................. 22

The Alternative Model of Surveillance ........................................................................ 27

Chapter Three: The Fragmented Narration of Blanks ..................................................... 33

White-spaces and Isolation ......................................................................................... 33

Place of Indeterminacy ............................................................................................... 36

Conclusion....................................................................................................................... 43

Images ............................................................................................................................. 44

Bibliography: ................................................................................................................... 66

Primary Sources .......................................................................................................... 66

Secondary Sources ...................................................................................................... 68

Appendix ......................................................................................................................... 72


List of Images

Figure 1 - Pinel médecin chef à la Salpêtrière en 1795 (Pinel Physician in Chief at the Salpêtrière

in 1795)

Figure 2 – Copy of the State Register of Purchase for 1876 – Letter R

Figure 3 – Wellcome’s Collection Oil Sketch of Pinel Freeing the Insane by Tony Robert Fleury

–ca. 1876

Figure 4 – Early sketch for Pinel Freeing the Insane by Tony Robert-Fleury – ca. 1875?

Figure 5 – Le Réveil du Tiers-Etat (The Awakening of the Third Estate) – 1789

Figure 6 – Terrible massacre de femmes le 3 septembre 1792 (Monstruous Massacre of Women

on 3rd September 1792) – 1792

Figure 7 – Wellcome’s Collection sketch’s close up on the Cockades

Figure 8 – Françaises devenues libres (Freed French Women) - ca. 1791

Figure 9 – Louis XIV guérissant les scrofuleux (Louis XIV Healing the Scrofulous) by Jean Jouvenet

Figure 10 – Bonaparte visitant les victimes de la peste à Jaffa (Bonaparte visiting the Plague

victims of Jaffa) by Baron Antoine-Jean Gros - 1804

Figure 11 – Liberté guidant le peuple (Liberty leading the People) - Eugène Delacroix 1830

Figure 12 – Souvenir de guerre civile – Juin 1848 (Memory of Civil War June 1848) by Jean-Louis-

Ernest Meissonier

Figure 13 – Les Capitulards, Paris livré (The Capitulators, Paris given over) by D. probably Henry

Demare - ca. 1871

Figure 14 – Pinel faisant tomber les fers des aliénés à Bicêtre en 1792 (Pinel unchaining the

Insane at Bicêtre in 1792) by Charles-Louis Müller, ca.1849-1850

Figure 15 – Les Folles de la Sapêtrière (The Madwomen at the Salpêtrière) by Amand Gautier

1857’s lithograph after a painting exhibited at the 1849 Salon

Figure 16 – The Asylum by Wilhelm von Kaulbach, 1835’s drawing

Figure 17 – Untitled photograph part of the 1875 first photographs’ collection by Regnard and

Bourneville

Figure 18 – Untitled photograph part of the 1875 first photographs’ collection by Regnard and

Bourneville

Figure 19 – Jean-Martin Charcot demonstrating Hysteria on a Patient at the Salpêtrière –

Lithograph after a 1887’s painting by PA Brouillet

Figure 20 – View of the so-called ‘Loges Pinel’ built by the architect Viel at the Salpêtrière

hospital

Figure 21 – Photograph of Pinel freeing the Insane taken at the 1876’s Salon for the State register

of purchase

Figure 22 – Goupil’s lithograph of Pinel freeing the Insane taken in 1876


Introduction

‘In the hall in which he [Jean-Martin Charcot] gave his lectures there hung a

picture which showed ‘citizen’ Pinel having the chains taken off the poor

madmen in the Salpêtrière. The Salpêtrière, which had

witnessed so many horrors during the Revolution, had also

been the scene of this most humane of all revolutions’

Sigmund Freud, Charcot, p.18

‘Such images echo down the ages, carrying the full weight of

legend. It would serve little purpose to dispute them, as we have

too few documents that are more trustworthy at our disposal. And

then they are too dense in their naivety not to reveal much of what

they do not say. In their surprising depth, one would need to

identify the concrete situation that they conceal, the mythical

values that they pass off as the truth, and finally the real process

that took place, of which they only provide a symbolic translation’

Michel Foucault, History of Madness, p.464

The massive canvas of academic facture of 3.55 by 4.90 meters [Fig.1] which is the

subject here shows the freeing of the insane by Philippe Pinel, founding father of French

psychiatry during the revolutionary era and promoter of the moral treatment.1 Here, the

painter, Tony Robert-Fleury (1837-1911) depicts a keeper unlocking a loosely standing

inmate cinched at her waist with a broad girdle under the vigilant and imperious gaze of

the physician himself.2 The smoothness of the unchained madwoman’s body and the

limpness of her stance epitomise her innocuousness and passivity, further highlighted

1 The so-called moral treatment stressed the humanity needed in the treatment of madness, and the necessary involvement of the insane in a process which had to be conducted inside appropriate medical facilities. As defined by Dora B. Weimer (1993, p.247) it consisted in the transformation of incurable person into mental patients curable by nonphysical, psychological means. 2 Son of the painter Joseph Nicolas Robert-Fleury; Tony Robert-Fleury studied at the Beaux-Arts and in the studios of Paul Delaroche and then Léon Coignet. He earned mention to the Grand Prix de Rome in 1861. Teacher at the Académie Julian, he was the president of the Société des Artistes Français from 1904 to 1907.


by her remote and evanescent gaze attached towards an invisible point. She presents

the image of a model, harmless patient, displaying the mere absurdity of the locks and

chains Philippe Pinel just instructed to be removed. Her former disarray due to the

barbarous mode of care that was customary during the Old Regime still prevails in her

unkempt dressing. Her slipping dress exposes her right shoulder and a large part of her

bust. Her sliding stockings further underline the lack of care. Bringing to our mind the

image of Ophelia, her long and dishevelled hair flow loose about her shoulders.

Assistants, keepers and one grateful already freed woman cluster around the central

focus of those characters. Beyond this first circle, Robert-Fleury portrays the wildest

world of madness, contained inside the setting of the Salpêtrière’s courtyard, a world

that Philippe Pinel is about to profoundly alter.

The canvas, on which Tony Robert-Fleury spent most of the year 1875 working behind

closed doors, was exhibited at the 1876’s Salon, hung in room two, under the

informative title Philippe Pinel, médecin en chef à la Salpêtrière en 1795 (Philippe Pinel

Physician in Chief at the Salpêtrière in 1795).3 It is now more commonly known in the

Anglo-Saxon world as Pinel freeing the Insane.

This unshackling of the mad purportedly took place at Bicêtre –asylum for men– in 1792

and at the Salpêtrière –asylum for women– in 1795. As unambiguously established by

Gladys Swain, it actually never properly happened this way as it was a gradual process

implemented by the asylum staff, and especially Pinel’s assistant Jean-Baptiste Pussin

and not Pinel’s direct and immediate decision as represented by Tony Robert-Fleury.4

3 On the elaboration of the painting, see Lucy Hooper, the Art Journal correspondent in Paris, New Series, Vol.2, p.123 4 1977


Grandeur and Grand Tradition

Nonetheless it won’t be the object of this thesis to discuss the veracity of this event,

following Michel Foucault’s statement that ‘it would serve little purpose to dispute them

[such images]’. On the contrary the power of the mythical image is one of the key

frameworks through which I wish to analyse Robert-Fleury’s canvas.

In 1876, France’s national pride was still seriously wounded by its 1870’s defeat against

the Prussians at Sedan and the ensuing traumatic experience of the civil war of the Paris

Commune. After 1870 in the context of moral order prevailing in the French Republic, a

return to the ‘Grand tradition’ meaning that of history painting emerged, and therefore

of Academic values. As pointed by Patricia Mainardi, this resurgence was not only

intended to indicate an aesthetic renaissance but also a political rebirth.5 The Second

Empire’s taste for lower categories of art was indeed understood as one of the

symptoms of France’s global decline and the encouragement of Grand Art, and

especially history painting, was seen as a means towards national regeneration. All

political parties from Republicans to monarchists could agree on the importance of

establishing a national identity through art. At the awards ceremony for the 1873 Salon,

for example, the then minister of Public instruction, A.P. Batbie, encouraged artists to

react against their tendency to give into anecdotal painting, and ‘aspire to great works’.6

The government’s commitment found an echo in a proactive buying policy of historical

works at the Salon with from 1876 onward a doubling of the budget earmarked for ‘the

highest art’ exhibited.7

Moreover, the defeat of 1870 against the Prussian produced an almost universal

conviction that France had declined militarily because she ceded her scientific

5 p.43 6 Quoted in Mainardi, p.45 7 In Explication des Ouvrages de Peinture, de Sculpture, Architecture, Gravure et Lithographie des Artistes Vivants, exposés au Palais des Champs-Elysées le 1er mai 1877.


hegemony to the Germans during the nineteenth-century.8 Modern science and

medicine were heralded as preconditions for redemption and recovery by the recently

installed Republican government. This emphasis inscribed itself in a broader trend as

from Waterloo onwards scientific medicine was understood to provide France with

strength and power: medicine could not only cure the sick, it also protected soldiers

from infection during the military campaigns and overall was seen as a mean to enhance

the country’s economic and intellectual strength.9

Clearly, in celebrating one of the foremost historical medical figures Robert-Fleury was

eager to inscribe himself in an asserted propaganda discourse, significant enough to

attract the attention of the Direction des Beaux-Arts.

Actually, the explanation given by the 1876 Salon’s booklet under the entry 1753,

guiding the viewer towards a reading of the painting, stresses the humanity, bravery,

and universality of Pinel’s gesture: ‘Pinel vividly protested against the odious treatment

whose insane were victims: he had the courage to drop their chains and in the midst of

the social movement that aroused on all sides, he called upon them the laws of

humanity. Substituting to violence and abuses, wisely combined means of repression,

he was the promoter of a material and moral reform that would later reach its full

development’.10

The state bought indeed Pinel médecin chef à la Salpêtrière en 1795 for 4 000 francs on

26 June 1876 for the Hôpital de la Salpêtrière [Fig.2]. The painting was selected to be

exhibited again at the 1878’s Exposition Universelle held in Paris, before being hung in

its definitive setting in 1880, the famously known Tuesday’s lectures hall of the French

neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot.11

8 Goldstein, p.348 9 On this subject, see especially J. Goldstein and M. Hunter, 2007 10 1876’s Salon, p.213; except stated otherwise, all translations are mine. The original texts are reproduced in Appendix. 11 See Annick Opinel, p.38


Unstable narrative

Nonetheless, at least two aspects of the painting raise complex questions which cannot

be answered satisfactorily through the conceptual framework of propaganda. First of

all, the paradoxical nature of the attempt to heighten the grandeur of France through

the representation of the mentally ill should be pointed. Secondly, why did Robert-

Fleury choose to represent the event at the feminine setting of La Salpêtrière in 1795

rather than at the hospital of Bicêtre where it first happened in 1792? Most

examinations have favoured a gendered interpretation of the painting stressing the

representation of sexualised feminine figures domesticated by men of reason.12

Nonetheless the fundamental ambiguity of the feminine body at that time,

simultaneously allegorical republican body of Marianne, religious Marian imagery and

painful reminder of the Commune’s pétroleuses, prevents any unequivocal reading and

utter simplification, especially since that Tony Robert-Fleury was himself a conservative

and devoted catholic person.13

In our analysis, two concepts appear therefore central and will support our

argumentation throughout this thesis. The first one is linked to the conceptualisation of

madness then dominant. If the prevalence of hysteria in the figurability of madness in

fin-de-siècle France will be especially investigated, the interpretative framework

favoured will be the one Michel Foucault has proposed in his History of Madness. The

division (partage) between madness and reason will be therefore understood as a

historical construction of meaning.

The second axis stems from the analysis by scholars like Antoine de Baecque or Ewa

Lajer-Burcharth on the traumatic period of the Terror during the French revolution. In

12 Especially Showalter and Kromm. 13 Théolier, p.461.


applying their conceptual approach to this other traumatic period of French history I will

apprehend Robert-Fleury’s painting as an attempt to offer a renewed self-

representation of France as a community. Nonetheless and contrary to the stark

alteration observed at the end of the eighteenth-century in the system of

representation, here Robert-Fleury’s endeavour is in my view one of reconciliation of

diverse traditions to propose a pacified image of a rejuvenated France. Thereby, the

madwoman’s healing here portrayed gives crucial figurability to this very process of

rejuvenation.

In drawing on the seminal studies on anachronism by Georges Didi-Huberman I would

like to demonstrate that this representation of the national community mobilises an

array of references, of schemata and ready-made formulae which continuously

threatens the coherence of the painting, which apparent continuum cannot conceal the

actual juxtaposition of irreducible entities.

My analysis is indeed that Tony Robert-Fleury couldn’t purely inherit his father’s

–Joseph-Nicolas– academic way of painting when modern painting was creating the

event. In the lack of clarity of his relationship to both the tradition and the modern,

stems his representation of grand history painting as fragments, fleeting and partial

visions.

This proposition of analysing Pinel freeing the insane as the image of an unstable

narrative will be underpinned by the examination of the dynamic process of the canvas’

elaboration. Only the acquisition by the Wellcome collection in the first half of 2012 of

an elaborated oil sketch of 35.8 by 50.2 cm [Fig.3], previously in private hands, makes

this conceivable. Indeed, the only other known sketch is a very early drawing kept at the

Bucharest Museum of Fine Art [Fig.4].


Chapter One: Phantasy of a Memory

‘Once imagery is divorced from its original moorings within a stable

culture, iconographic citations can no longer contain or delimit

interpretation. (…)They must rely on the conventions that once

embodied authority, but these conventions, necessary depleted by

new circumstances, become highly unstable and, in and of

themselves, cannot produce the singular, limited readings that

constitute the utopian goal of propaganda’

Darcy Grimaldo-Grisby, Extremities, p. 74

Negotiation of the Past

The painting Pinel Freeing the Insane immediately confronts us with one of the most

powerful images of the successive French republican regimes: the fight for freedom and

equality. As Marina Warner pointed out, the unchaining directly refers to the etymology

of the name of the French nation itself as it represents the act of being un-franchised

and highlights the free roots, the lack of constraint and wilderness of the franc tribes.14

In painting the chains’ discarding, Tony Robert-Fleury proposes a re-enactment of the

fight for freedom the people endured during the French Revolution from the

oppressiveness of the Old Regime. Chains are indeed the very materiality of the absence

of liberty. An instrumental revolutionary trope was the identification of the Third Estate

to unchained slaves, as commonly pictured in early engravings of the Revolution [Fig.5].

Moreover in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries a considerable amount of

indigents were imprisoned at Bicêtre or La Salpêtrière as mental patients. Their arbitrary

incarcerations, epitomised by the lettres de cachet, caused the revolutionary men to

include the lunatics in the crusade for liberation. In substituting the mad to the Third

14 p.248


Estate, Robert-Fleury obviously diminishes the social significance of the painting but also

accentuates the injustice of the chains in mingling two iconic images of the Revolution.

The subjection and oppression of those absent bodies, unaware of their fate and unable

to take care of themselves, guarantee indeed the rhetorical power of their

emancipation, that would allow their transformation into a sane body.

This erection of the revolutionary past as a new antiquity highlights the needs for the

Third Republic to assert its own heroic republican roots in a context accurately qualified

by Linda Nochlin of ‘newly expanded historical sense’.15 To achieve this glorious re-

reading of the past, it was of paramount importance to reject in the shadowy margins of

the painting both the Terror and the Old Regime in simultaneously picturing continuity.

In this, Philippe Pinel is central, his figure fleshing out a reading of the Revolution as an

appeased and humanistic period. The personality of the physician himself, a moderate

republican, later to become physician of the Emperor, is an ideal figure to enact this

visual negotiation of the past. By the emphasis put on identification and gentleness of

care, the character of Pinel could be erected as a symbol of the Republic bourgeoise,

legacy of the post-Terror Thermidorian reaction. It allows Robert-Fleury to create an

image powerful enough to superimpose itself to the terrible one of the September

1792’s massacres that took place at the exact same place and affecting in their

murderous madness all categories of inmates without distinction of their cause of

confinement [Fig.6]. Here Robert-Fleury’s painting precisely conveys the occultation

function of the myth Jacques Postel identified in relation to the account of the

unchaining of the mad by Pinel.16

15 1971, p.25 16 p.131


An analysis of the differences between the detailed oil sketch and the oil painting

underpins this reading of the painting as new self-representation stepped in

compromise and serving a ‘phantasy of a memory’ in the words of Didi-Huberman.17

Robert-Fleury indeed lowers the political content of the final painting in eliminating the

cockade adorning the hat covering of Pinel and one of his assistants, which appears in

the oil sketch in possession of the Wellcome [Fig.7]. The expunction blurs all direct

references which would have made the mobilisation of the revolutionary past obvious

to the public. Robert-Fleury therefore favours an ambiguity of association which opens

to an array of different readings.

The removal of the cockade also reinforces the medical identity of the characters. Mary

Hunter stresses that in late nineteenth-century France doctors and scientists provided

new models of Republican masculinity.18 Their professions became associated with

positive characteristics such as reason, objectivity, rationality or even fortitude.

The physical assurance of Pinel’s body must also be interpreted in the context of the

aftermath of the French defeat against the Prussians which arouses fears about the

emasculation of the French population as Tamar Garb pointed out.19 The secureness

emanating from the formal and dark dressing of Pinel, only enlightened by the

whiteness of his shirt, expresses both the confidence of the man of power and

knowledge and the value of egalitarianism embodied in this representative of the

Thermidorian revolution. It marks a departure from the distinction of aristocratic

dressing in affirming the values of austerity, merit, and more broadly the new bourgeois

culture.

17

2003, p.45 18 2007 19 pp. 34-39


Everything in Pinel’s portraying promotes therefore a vision of the Republic as a

confident and appeased regime rather than the threatening power of the Revolution’s

Terror.

An equivalent re-reading of the feminine body as innocuous is one of the

interpretations, if reductive, which can be developed. The episode of the Paris

Commune had revived the fears of the unruly women of the French Revolution. To

represent them tamed by the authoritarian man of science was indeed a reassuring

scene to present to a still traumatised Parisian public.20 The viciousness and wildness of

the pétroleuses during the Paris Commune fuelled the panic of the bourgeoisie. 21 The

need of erasing the horrid memories of the viragoes of 1790 and 1871 under the mask

of tranquillity can be conceptualised as the equating process of the one of linking the

Third Republic to the Thermidorian reaction in negating the Terror. If the woman

breaking free from her chains was one of the earliest and most well-known images of

the French revolution [Fig.8], Robert-Fleury re-interprets it in suppressing all aspect of

self-involvement and consciousness. Instead of being in control of her own destiny, here

the woman through her body is portrayed as passive object submitted to an external

and manly power. Scholars like Lynn Hunt and Joan Landes have suggested that the

masculine unease caused by women’s participation in Revolutionary life led to a quasi-

elimination of the theme of the woman warrior in official or unofficial Revolutionary

imagery.22 Choosing to portray the unshackling of the mad in the asylum for women

therefore allows Robert-Fleury to put back the women in the site of remote fantasy.

20

See especially Kromm, 1994 21 On the women in the caricature of the Paris Commune see Gullickson and Clayton. 22 See Nochlin, 1999.


A logic of Incorporation

In this negotiation of the past, Robert-Fleury presents a narrative constituted of

fragmented ‘iconic’ images in a logic I will call of incorporation.

The painting’s composition emphasizes the dialogue between Pinel and the madwoman,

an association saturated with visual meaning. At least two powerful images would have

been immediately recognisable for the Parisian public of 1876 in this juxtaposition. The

most anciently established component would have been the one of the roi thaumaturge

[Fig.9], an image of the healing power of the king who in majesty would have been

represented alongside kneeling supplicants, as the thankful woman on Pinel’s left side, a

character which will be analysed in detail later in this thesis.

Furthermore the juxtaposition of Pinel, whose head is covered by a bicorn, and the

loose body of the madwoman points out to the 1804’s massive canvas of Baron Gros’

Napoleon visitant les victimes de la peste à Jaffa [Fig.10]. Robert-Fleury obviously takes

from Gros’ composition the emphasis on the duo of the body undergoing

transformation and the assertive figure of authority. As in Gros’ painting, Pinel, weak

substitute for Napoleon, is followed by slightly backing off assistants therefore strikingly

highlighting the courage displayed by either Napoleon or Pinel. In Pinel freeing the

Insane Robert-Fleury also transforms the space of representation into a visual display of

suffering corpses helplessly facing their fate. Nonetheless, except for the obvious

difference in talent and brio of execution, another major difference separates the two

paintings. In avoiding to represent the act of touching between Pinel and the unchained

madwoman –absence which will be investigated as such later in this thesis– Robert-

Fleury displaces the meaning of his referents. Both the roi thaumaturge and Napoleon

at Jaffa are images which assert the proximity of the leader, his fearlessness, empathy


and even miraculous quality. From the spacing painted by Robert-Fleury, the

juxtaposition of Pinel and the unchained madwoman conversely posits their

irreconcilable remoteness. The space conscientiously maintained around Pinel,

sheltering him from any material contact with the mentally ill, preserves sanity from all

intermixing with madness, from all risk of contagion. In the careful avoidance of any

contact, this diptych profoundly echoes the ambiguity of the image of the emancipation

of the black slaves during the French Revolution, proposing simultaneously the image of

freedom and of estrangement as explained by Darcy Grimaldo-Grisby. Therefore if

highly resonant and semantically charged, my point is that the juxtaposition of Pinel and

the madwoman remains as such unclear and could almost be interpreted as an image

antagonistic to the ones it took inspiration from.

An equivalent displacement is to be found in the image of the unchained madwoman

herself. In his endeavour to paint a glorious revolutionary’s founding act, Robert-Fleury

adapts the imagery of madness by combining it with the revolutionary tradition of

female allegory.

To engage with the painting as an écriture allégorique (Antoine de Baecque) is to erect

as cardinal the asymmetry and colour scheme of the dress worn by the central figure of

the unchained madwoman. Both directly relate to Delacroix’s Liberté guidant le peuple

[Fig.11]. This relationship is a later addition by Robert-Fleury as the dress appears

radically different in the Wellcome collection’s sketch. The kind of shawl knot over her

shoulders in the sketch favours more an identification to peasantry than to allegory.

Beyond the suppression of the shawl, the inversion of the décolleté’s slope invites the

beholder to blur the boundaries between the madwoman and the allegorical figure of

France. This opening of meaning is sustained by the equivalent modification in the

dressing of the crouching madwoman in crisis on the right of the painting. Here again,


Robert-Fleury favours the incorporation of a well-established republican schemata. In

dressing the insane in the colour of the French flag, capping her with a red covering, the

painter obviously takes again from Delacroix in replicating the association of the Liberty

and the dying tricoloured dressed figure at her feet. He also summons to the viewer’s

eyes the powerful image of the 1848’s revolution as proposed by Meissonier in his

Souvenir de guerre civile also known as La Barricade, Juin 1848 [Fig.12]. This

intermingling of references is further muddled by the emphasis on the vulnerability of

the allegorical feminine body already noticed. Its identification with the overpowered

Marianne handed over to the Germans by the provisional government during the Paris

Commune commonly caricatured at that time [Fig.13] would certainly have been quite

straightforward for the Parisian public less than five years after the events.23

Robert-Fleury also seems to draw from those caricatures of the Paris Commune in his

hesitation between unveiling and covering. Only four of the feminine characters present

a profound décolleté – one of them displaying a bare breast – which could induce a

sexualised reading of the painting. Except for the figure of the hysteric –analysed in

detail later– the most ambiguous character is the melancholic leaning back against the

wooden portico on the right foreground of the painting. The exposure of her bare legs

almost treated as fragments emerging from her skirt points indeed to degradation and

self-abasement, as Linda Nochlin remarked in a different context.24 Nonetheless, any

sexually charged reading of the painting would be seriously questioned by the

comparison of the oil painting with the Wellcome collection’s sketch. The lowering of

the sexual content of the composition is indeed manifest after further examination. The

character of the woman rushing towards Pinel underwent in particular a radical revision,

as from young and partially undressed, with her left breast popping out of her sliding

dress she is reworked as middle-aged and fully covered. Similarly the posture of the

23 See Gullickson and Clayton. 24 Nochlin, 1999, p.126


tricoloured dressed woman is more clearly revised as a one linked to moral illness. In

the oil sketch her defensive stance epitomised by her hands repelling a putative

assailant could easily have suggested the image of sexual assault.

Overall the feminine body does not appear treated as a signifier of social unity and

coherence but as a series of images juxtaposed, illustrating different periods of the

recent French history. In giving to the ‘in-recovery feminine body’ the role of allegory, in

transferring to it some of the power of the images preceding it, Robert-Fleury wrests

apart the unity of the real allegory in display and its powerful referents. In its looseness,

this de-substantialized body becomes a mere vehicle, a cluster of meanings which

readability vanishes.

In this logic of incorporation one must finally investigate the specific gesture of the

outstretched left arm of the freed madwoman. As a trope of the religious imagery of

miracle, notably the scene depicting Christ resurrecting Lazarus, to the famously known

Creation of Adam by Michelangelo, this extended arm is yet again an incorporation of

inherited iconographical elements already contextualised in the asylum’s setting. The

still royalist state commissioned the painter Charles-Louis Müller to represent the

freeing of the insane by Pinel at the men’s asylum of Bicêtre for the Académie de

Médecine in Paris. Executed around 1849-1850 after the establishment of the Second

Republic, the painting presents a younger Pinel whose extended right arm is the

quintessence of a commanding gesture [Fig.14]. A few years later, at the 1857’s Salon,

the painter Amand Gautier exhibited a highly praised canvas depicting the Salpêtrière’s

courtyard of the agitated madwomen in which the same gesture is reinterpreted as part

of the theatrical apparatus of madness [Fig.15]. In including this gesture into his own

account of the freeing of the insane, Robert-Fleury certainly acknowledges those two

antecedents but more significantly for our analysis, he displaces the gesture from the


authoritarian and empowered man of reason to the defenceless madwoman. In doing

so he nominally reasserts by this simple juxtaposition the inclusion in his representation

of the body politic of a category previously excluded.

Relics of Madness

In his use of an already well-established iconography, Tony Robert-Fleury displays a

particular ambiguity towards Christian imagery. If the painting is fuelled with religious

references, the religious debate beginning to agitate France at the same time would

have prevented him from associating too obviously a heroic revolutionary character

with Catholicism.

As Jan Goldstein established the issue of religion in the asylum was not only one of

therapeutic strategy but was also one of establishing definitively the locus of authority

within that institution. In the mid-1870s roughly two-thirds of the Paris public hospitals

and hospices were still employing religious sisters as nurses.25 Yet, in his endeavour to

present an appeased image of French contemporary society, Robert-Fleury carefully

avoids representing any nursing sisters. This omission is particularly telling as for fin-de

siècle French psychiatrists, notably Jean-Martin Charcot, the Catholic religion and its

treatment of the insane was seen as harmful if not cruel. The myth of Pinel’s freeing of

the insane was therefore read by many as the tale of a rescue of the mad from religious

caretakers’ superstitious practices.26

25 p.364 26 Harris, p.233


Moreover, the nature of the moral treatment itself endows the alienist with something

of the persona of a secular priest. In the anti-religious context of the French Revolution,

Pinel had to simultaneously disavow and adapt religious practice. One of the focal

elements of Pinel’s moral treatment was for example the notion of ‘consolation’ which

derived directly from Catholic pastoral care. 27 This complicatedness resonates with

creating a secular imagery that did not refer back to a religious prototype. This

secularisation of ancient religious imagery was precisely at stake in Charcot’s

contemporary redefinition of the supernatural as the natural, including his constitution

of a giant iconographic archive of nervous disease partially published in his 1887’s book,

in collaboration with Paul Richer, Les Démoniaques dans l’Art.

In Robert-Fleury’s painting the enterprise is less clear, since the boundaries between

religious and secular imagery are so intimately intermingled that everything is blurred.

Robert-Fleury’s avoidance to represent obvious sacred signs is indeed only matched by

the saturation of his painting’s composition by religious iconography.

In a cautiously calibrated symmetry, to the repoussoir figure of the ecstatic madwoman

on the right of the painting responds on the left a knocked over stool. They are the

boundaries defining on both sides the limits of the painting and guiding the beholder to

the central vision of the intermingled triumph of science and freedom. In my view, those

two figures act as remaining and mediated relics of madness. They are giving to the

viewer to conceive the fury of madness, the crisis, in a suitable way consistent with the

decorum. The knocked over stool only echoes the violence of the inmates’ demeanour.

In its innocuousness, the stool must be read as the material counterpart of the

unconscious body of the melancholic madwoman. They are both the traces, the relics of

a past time, one of violence and mistreatment, acting as visual evidence of this historical

27 Jan Goldstein, p.5


time. In the Wellcome’s oil sketch, the bench was acting as a separation between the

sane world of the Salon’s public and the insanity of the asylum. Its substitution in the

painting by the stool replaces separation by mediated inclusion and creates a new

bridge in the understanding of madness.

Furthermore, this stool lying on the ground is part of a series of remnants of madness.

On the foreground of the painting, occupying the focal point of visibility, lay the chains

themselves, as well as the tools used for the unshackling which protrude from a leathery

bag. Here the tools and the bag resonate forcefully with an analogy link with the

catholic relics and reliquary, re-enacting the instruments of Christ’s Passion. The

visibility granted to the pincers in particular, exposed on the toolkit, triggers the

identification with the pincers used to remove Christ’s nails in the representation of the

Deposition. Significantly, the pincers point to the body of the hysterical woman lying on

the floor of the courtyard and her exposed barren breast. The juxtaposition of pincers

and nude breasts should have been powerful enough in the still highly catholic fin-de-

siècle France to suggest the image of martyrdom and especially Saint Agatha’s, largely

popularized by the Imagerie d’Epinal.28

Alongside the leathery bag, the manacles just removed from the unchained madwoman

have a paradoxical status. In their isolation, in their darkness which starkly contrasts

with the ground, they appear unmissable, as a focal element of the vestiges of madness

and mistreatment punctuating the lineation constituted on the foreground by the stool,

the chain, the leathery bag and, on the extreme right of the painting, some poor

leftover of a loaf of bread. They are the very synthetical symbol of the painting, the

clarity of the colour’s contrast acting as a way of heightening the beholder’s awareness

of an anchoring polarity. Nonetheless their smallness and their deliberate cropping, just

28 At the same 1876’s Salon, Pierre Puvis de Chavannes exhibited his Sainte Geneviève commissioned

by the state for the Panthéon.


one handcuff being displayed while both arms of the madwoman are already freed,

unsettle their significance erecting them as a site of contradiction, simultaneously

relinquished and retained as relic.

They are therefore the very symbol of the equivocality displayed by Robert-Fleury in his

incorporation of religious iconography. In the oil sketch in possession of the Wellcome

collection, the trio constituted by Pinel, the unchained madwoman and the worker is

unmistakably akin to the Christian iconography of appearances or resurrection. Kneeling

on the ground, with the removed chains alongside his left foreleg, the worker appears

struck in action as if touched by an immaterial force. His hidden face witnesses the

accomplishment of Pinel’s healing process and the metamorphosis of the insane into

sanity.

Once completed, the painting retained this perception of the healing process as a kind

of secularised miracle but in a more subtle way which will be investigated more closely

in my last chapter. At this point, let us just notice that in discarding the figure of the

kneeling keeper, Robert-Fleury conceals the obvious reference to religious imagery.

In this first chapter I tried to demonstrate that in favouring a logic of incorporation

Robert-Fleury elaborated a new iconography of the body politic, an iconography of

displaced images, torn between unification and disconnectedness, between synthesis

and heterogeneity.

In the next chapter, in drawing upon Michel Foucault’s definition of madness, I would

like to propose that Robert-Fleury’s depiction resounds of the very shift in the

understanding and treatment of madness which occurred at the end of the eighteenth-

century.


Chapter Two: The Speaking Eye

In the treatment of his mania, it was in my power to use a great number of

remedies; but I lacked the most powerful of them all, which one

can simply find in a well ordered hospice, the one which consists in the art

of subjugating and taming the alienated, to put in this way,

by placing him in a strict dependency upon a man, who,

by his physical and moral qualities, is apt to exercise on him an irresistible

empire to change the vicious chains of his ideas.

Philippe Pinel, Traité médico-philosophique pp. 57-5829

Spectacle of Madness

Through the hugeness of the canvas, Robert-Fleury chooses to open the narrative to the

observer which finds himself/herself confronted to real size figures. In a way, the

painting performs on its own massiveness to overcome the break between the space of

representation and the one of the beholder. Nonetheless the size itself produces an

uneasiness noted by the critics. In his review of the Salon, Marc de Montifaud wrote for

L’Art Moderne: ‘The execution is blank because of the size of the canvas which prevents

the effect from tightening; moving away from the painting, the characters become

flat’.30

In his apparent dispassion, Pinel is virtually represented on the same level as the public

of the Salon, a visitor entering not the annual exhibition but a medical museum in which

extreme cases of madness would be in display.

As painted by Robert-Fleury, the Salpêtrière courtyard acts indeed as a stage in which

each inmate is given a dramatic gesture which is supposed to facilitate our

29 Cited in Vandermeersch, p.222 30 p.82


comprehension of the disorder: harangue-like gesticulation, neighbouring fists clenched,

distressed or exalted arms.

On the right of the painting Robert-Fleury chooses to highlight the violence of the crisis

through the figure of the madwoman wrapped in a tricolour dressing laying neck and

breast bare, her locks escaping from a red headdress, as an echo of the Phrygian hat.

This embodiment of the unruly woman conveys all the signals of a violent crisis shaking

body and mind. Her face epitomises the world of unreason Robert-Fleury depicts, her

wild staring eyes affixed towards us seem to challenge the public, enhancing the

provocative aspect of her stance even heightened by her profound décolleté. Her yelling

mouth, resounding of a mute cry disfiguring her face, and her flared nostrils retain much

of the convulsive violence of François Rude’s winged victory adorning the Arc de

Triomphe.

In this display of types of madness, Robert-Fleury, who trained at the Beaux-Arts,

chooses to use Charles Le Brun’s classical language of expression. For Le Brun, the outer

envelope of the face had to convey the mental state of the portrayed because the

significance and truthfulness of the enterprise rested on this precise projection of signs

to the viewer.31

This endeavour found a striking resonance with the end of the anatomical explanation

of madness. After Pinel’s breakthrough in the understanding of mental disease, insanity

became an illness of signs and their very existence, their medical acknowledgement laid

in the exhibition of symptoms, in the staging of the disease, in the very spectacle of the

crisis. To be easily identified, each illness had to be condensed and summarised into one

image, one definite and unequivocal facies, synthesis of the universal (the

31 On this subject, which complexity extends way beyond the scope of this thesis, see in particular J. Montagu.


representation of the disease) and the singular (its exemplification by the face of a

specific patient).32

On the tricoloured dressed woman’s visage, Charles Le Brun’s lines of composition and

analysis could indeed be imprinted. Only the clenched left fist breaks the faultless

symmetry of the face which could easily be divided following Le Brun’s classification.

The frowning eyebrows seem borrowed from Le Brun’s study of Rage. Similarly the

contracted mouth is found in the drawing of Rage or Despair.

To state madness unequivocally to the Parisian public, Robert-Fleury even endows some

of his characters with the more obvious and conventional signifiers of mental disease.

On the left of the painting in particular, in the dimness of the margins, the madwomen

embody their disorder in reproducing images already known. The woman cradling a doll

especially was found in Wilhelm von Kaulbach’s 1835 drawing of an asylum [Fig.16]

widely distributed through its engraving.

The overpowering intermingling of a lexicon of passions with a body consumed by

involuntary and uncontrollable impulses characterising the tricoloured dressed woman

reflects in a way the chaos and the disjunction of body and mind the madwomen

undergoes in crisis. Here symptoms do not refer to permanent or even temporary

states. They are, as Didi-Huberman states it, ‘issue from nothing’.33 Overcoming the

articulation between the emotions of man as a moral being and the expression of man

as a physical being, the causal connection between passions and facial movements,

Robert-Fleury’s collage undoubtedly epitomises the absurdity of using a restrained

classical language to paint the frenzy of madness but it also gives a new embodiment to

the unconsciousness of the mad in crisis.

32 See especially Dora B. Weimer. 33 2003, p.75


Hysteria in particular summarises this paradoxical status of madness as spectacle. In a

conflagration of symptoms, pauses, sequences and violent discourses, the hysterical

body gives to see an array of all illnesses at once without any defined causes nor

anatomical lesions.34 Moreover, with hysteria, symptoms are the only evidence,

spectacular evidence of the disease, which possesses no other form than the one of

spectacle.

It is therefore highly significant that Robert-Fleury chooses to include in his staging of

madness at least two characters which could be linked to Jean-Martin Charcot’s

definition of the four stages of hysteria. The second period of grands mouvements

included violent and hideous contortions, notably the uncontrollable tearing at the

clothes to expose bare chests which characterised the woman lying on the dirty floor of

the hospital courtyard, image displaying great similarities to some early photographs

shot for the Iconographie photographique de la Salpêtrière [Fig.17]. The last period

includes ecstatic attitudes, in which the patient is able to remain motionless for hours or

days, absorbed in silent contemplation, near the figure of the mystic embodied by the

woman leaning against the portico’s wood pillar. Her inclined head, her imprecise gaze

affixed towards an imperceptible point replicates the classical iconography of ecstasy

and supplication. Nonetheless, her appearance retains also much of one of the first

photographs by Regnard and Bourneville shot in 1875 at the time of the painting’s

execution [Fig.18], and which therefore could have been known by Robert-Fleury.

Moreover, the inclusion of the hysterical figure allows Robert-Fleury to stage the

awareness by the mentally ill of her own illness, one of the key concepts of French

psychiatry in the nineteenth-century as explained by Gilman and conceptualised by

34 Didi-Huberman, 2003


Foucault as the ‘recognition as mirror’ in which madness is ‘called upon to examine

itself’.35

In staring at this hysterical body properly put on display, the old woman sitting at the

limit of the portico seems to realise the altered perception of reality that madness

brings. Her outstretched arms pointing to the hysterical body act, in a formula favoured

by Robert-Fleury, as a demonstrating gesture inviting us to witness the desperation of

the scene and the recognition of insanity. In Michel Foucault’s own words ‘the asylum,

in this community of madmen, ensured that mirrors were positioned in such fashion

that eventually the mad could not fail to see themselves for what they were’.36 Here the

patient herself becomes observer, seeing the symptoms being the first step for an

understanding of her own madness and her cure.

Nonetheless in painting in the same space the clinical body of the hysterical woman

lying on the ground and the image d’Epinal of the woman cuddling her doll, in

juxtaposing such diverse images Robert-Fleury walked a tightrope between a quest for

scientific realism and a perpetuation of normative physiognomic formulas.

Finally, in my view, the painting also resounds of the crude theatricality of Charcot’s

weekly shows, his ‘Friday lessons’ in which patients in crisis were exhibited before an

avid audience of ‘le tout Paris’. As highlighted in Mary Hunter’s unpublished thesis,

André Brouillet applies a similar dramaturgy in his 1887’s painting of those weekly

lessons [Fig.19].37 He especially replicates the female nurse’s anxious attention, echoing

the personage of Marguerite Pussin attending the unshackled madwoman behind Pinel,

her gaze fixed on the patient, as well as the duo of the hysterical Blanche Wittman

alongside the patrician’s figure of Charcot. He also takes upon Robert-Fleury on

35 Gilman, p.355; Foucault, 2006, pp.497-498 36 p.499 37 pp.194-197


Blanche’s unconsciousness of Charcot’s assistant touch. Shifting the major group on the

right side of the painting, Brouillet carefully replicates its equilibrium. Here too there are

four protagonists, the slightly detached man of power, the assistant embodying the

touch, the anxiously attentive female nurse and of course the patient herself unaware

of her environment. Pinel also believed in the power of sensory impressions and of

visual images in particular to cure the insane in taking advantage of his/her naiveté to

shake up his mind.38

Nonetheless from Robert-Fleury to Brouillet’s painting, one can observe an inversion of

the ratio of specialists towards patients, exemplifying the increasing significance of the

medical personage and his almighty gaze.

The Alternative Model of Surveillance

As Didi-Huberman argues in the Invention of Hysteria observation indeed culminates in

surveillance, in a gaze following the patient everywhere to fulfil the psychiatric ideal of

exhaustive description, of Foucault’s ‘speaking eye’.39

Robert-Fleury’s painting exemplifies undeniably that if madwomen are no more

restrained by chains, they are still subdued by the gaze of the asylum staff, and most of

all by Pinel’s own authoritative eye. Indeed Pinel thought that moral treatment should

primarily seek to impose on patients the rational authority of the alienist, terrifying

them if necessary to better dominate, in Jan Goldstein’s own worlds the ‘salutary

coercive authority’.40 In his first memorandum, written at Bicêtre during the year of

1794, he argued for example: ‘Break with a propos their will and subdue them (...) by an

38

On this subject see especially Jan Goldstein, pp.81-83 39 1973, p.114 40 p.86


imposing terror apparatus that can convince them that they are not the masters to

follow their ardent desire and that they have nothing better to do but to submit'.41

In Pinel’s moral treatment, it is from the precise moment the insane submits herself to

the will of the physician that the curing process starts.

Therefore, if the aim of the painting is to make the chains transparent as a missing

element, they nonetheless find permanence in the dependence bonds linking the newly

released lunatic and his/her liberator and depriving her from a full autonomy.

Relying on Michel Foucault’s conceptualisation developed in his History of Madness, my

hypothesis is that the looseness of the central woman, being not only an echo of Gros’s

Napoleon at Jaffa, highlights the corporeal integrity of the physician presenting a

securely tight paternalistic body exemplifying the ‘apotheosis’ (Michel Foucault) of the

medical personage. If both Pinel and the madwoman seem stopped in motion, frozen

into stillness, it is a thoroughly different kind of immobility which is painted here. The

passive woman highlights the reflexive and analytical stillness of Pinel.

To emphasise the secureness emanating from the authoritative male figure, Robert-

Fleury chooses to portray a feminine unshackled body deprived of its full autonomy and

strength. The madwoman’s body is thus characterised by a loss of consistency, on the

verge of reaching a new corporeal state, far from having regained her full

consciousness. Her material presence seems restrained by the kind of suspension of

integrity that madness brings. It is consequently a mitigated accession to subjecthood of

the mad that Robert-Fleury portrays. The unshackled madwoman remains thus

significantly unaware of her environment as if she was estranged to the world of tactile

perception, on the margin of the world still outside the recognition of a possible

extension of her body, in a kind of anaesthetised state.

41 Cited in Postel p.259


Above all Robert-Fleury stages the submissive link unrelenting after curing in the

posture of the kneeling woman pictured humbly absorbed by her gesture of

thankfulness, on the threshold of kissing the chief physician’s hand. The relationship of

gratitude is overshadowed by the submission characterising the scene. The picture

becomes thus the very embodiment that, with or without chains, the destiny of the

cured madwomen is still one of subordination.

To exert his healing power, promise of inclusion and therefore of freedom, the alienist

needs a total visibility exemplified, in Robert-Fleury’s painting, by the open-air setting of

the scene as well as Pinel's dominant vantage point, as an illustration of the crucial

importance given to the almighty gaze of the physician, following the structure of the

panopticon.42

It is indeed by observation, by distinction and by classification that Pinel affirmed its

own power but also the end of the blind political regime. If the insane is no longer an

isolated person, when joining a kind of asylum community he/she does it however

under the constant supervision of the medical community. Pinel sought first to insulate

the hospital from all outside influences, and then to organize the community of inmates

as a collective body. Its members would no longer inhabit isolated cells intended to

encourage reflection, but would join in a mode of life where everything would be done

on a collective basis. As highlighted by Foucault, before the mythical Pinelian’s

revolution the world of madness was indeed empty of madness itself, the insane being

confined behind closed doors reducing them to abstract concepts. Conversely, after the

shift observed in the understanding of madness at the very end of the eighteenth-

century, the curing process had its correlative in the exposure of the mad and its re-

appropriation of the asylum’s common space. As Foucault stresses, the realisation of

42 Postel, pp. 136-137


humanity in individuals depends on their becoming subject to ‘an agent of control,

exterior to them and yet somehow suffused through the whole social space, and

claiming to animate them with the principles of their own nature’.43

This fundamental visibility of the mad as object of observation and classification is thus

re-defined as the privileged path to domination. It represents the alternative model to

the one of the chains prevailing beforehand. In the absolute desire to see and identify

the border between states, between the normal and the abnormal, disease itself

became seen as a means of ‘seeing’ the normal as stated by Sandler L. Gilman.44

Robert-Fleury proposes to give figurability to this process by portraying the potentiality

for the inmate to leave their cells to access the portico, exposed to the embodied power

of the gaze of helpers and physicians, to finally stand freely in the middle of the

courtyard, acting as on a stage on which the liberating tragedy can occur.

The middle-aged woman rising and hurrying towards Pinel and the unchained

madwoman properly embody the journey towards the healing which Pinel makes

conceivable. Throughout the painting, from the raving fury in crisis in the margins of the

canvas to the obedient kneeling woman in the centre we are witnessing the premise of

inclusion through resemblance. At the peripheries of visibility, in the darkened areas of

the painting, lays the extent of the most uncivilised madness. There, the pallid

madwomen faces, one can hardly see, just emerge from obscurity to encounter Pinel’s

gaze and the revelation of their curability. In this passage from the limits to the core, in

this departure from the veil of darkness to the lightness of the centre, madness is

represented as observable, analysable and therefore treatable. Acting as a repoussoir

the two madwomen of the right foreground of the painting repel madness into the

margin of the painting. Not unsurprisingly, Robert-Fleury uses here a strategy already

43 Jerrold Seigel 44 1993, p.355


deployed by Gros in Jaffa in which decorum dictated that the horror of the plague was

veiled by darkness in the periphery of the picture.45 Most importantly for our analysis,

those madwomen direct our gaze towards the climactic moment of perceptibility,

figurability and cure.

However, this triumphant path is simultaneously challenged by the dialectic tension

between openness and closeness which signatures the painting. If this conflict seems to

find a successful resolution in the full-light exposure of the unchaining, it is immediately

reiterated in the opposition between this very visibility given to the unshackling and the

enclosed setting of the yard. In Foucault’s own words: ‘The madman was henceforth

completely free, and completely excluded from freedom. Previously he was free in that

tenuous instant in which he began to abandon his liberty; now he was free in the open

space where his liberty had already been lost. What the late eighteenth-century

witnessed was not a liberation of the mad but an objectification of the concept of their

liberty.’46

The action is indeed supposed to take place in one of the courtyards of the hospital, an

open air setting marked by the presence of trees and yet any access to the outside is

denied. Robert-Fleury takes care to enclose the scene on every side by backgrounds

acting as fortifications. On the right side of the painting, in an anachronistic re-creation

of an historical setting, Robert-Fleury paints the so called ‘loges Pinel’, buildings erected

to improve the confinement of the mad [Fig.20]. In closing the canvas on the right they

propose as only perspective the face of an imprisoned woman craving for her release.

On the left, the painter cuts more audaciously the depth of the canvas in avoiding

definitively to shut the space but this transgression of the closed bourgeois space is

immediately contradicted by the definition of the hospital itself as the exclusive

45 See Grimaldo-Grisbi, p.87 46 2006, p. 515


background which seems boundless –one cannot see anything through the scarce open

windows of the building– and securely contains the space of madness.

This prevalence of the hospital echoes Foucault’s analysis of the primordial role of the

institution in itself and the disciplinary order of the asylum (l’ordre disciplinaire de la

machine asilaire). In his lectures at the Collège de France, Foucault indeed defined the

space of the asylum as a one of confrontation (affrontement).47

This very confrontation is here conveyed through the struggle between openness

(freedom) and closeness (chain) and is notably embodied by the tricolour dressed

madwoman. Her contorted body seems indeed not only to signal the violence of the

crisis but also her uneasiness to assume a position within the painting. It is as if Robert-

Fleury had voluntarily contained her body in a restrained space that figures the carceral

nature of the madhouse setting. In its tension and torsion the feminine body displays

her struggle for freedom.

Most of all, the failure of the panopticon, as model of control, is exemplified by the void

opening the painting in two and seemingly separating the sane word from the wild

madness. Indeed, far from being the instrument bringing the world of insanity under the

powerful alienist’s gaze, Pinel’s panoptical eye in Robert-Fleury’s representation only

peers into a void signposting the false freedom conferred to the mad. To better

understand this system of fractures which characterises Robert-Fleury’s painting, the

last chapter of this thesis will be devoted to the exploration of the painter’s extensive

use of voids and blanks.

47 Quoted in Gros, p.84


Chapter Three: The Fragmented Narration of Blanks

The extensive and effective utilisation of blanks by nineteenth-century

realism can reach a point where these acquire an autonomy and can thus

lead over modernist art, which interrupts or misdirects communication both

within and with the work (…)

Wolfgang Kemp p. 116

White-spaces and Isolation

As we argued in this thesis’ second chapter, with the Pinelian’s revolution, the patient

acquired the status of object from the diagnostic up to the treatment, sheltering the

physician from any emotional involvement and sacralising him, as social order’s warden,

in this very process of isolation from the sick. In Pinel freeing the Insane Tony Robert-

Fleury depicts indeed ‘un représentant du dehors’ (a representative of the outside) to

quote Gladys Swain.48

Following Michel Foucault’s interpretation this process is conceptualised as an attempt

to prevent the violence of madness to penetrate the realm of society. In this endeavour,

Pinel’s willingness to remain on the outskirt of the world of madness is properly given

form in his walking stick, which he grasps as a commanding staff or a sceptre, that

delineates the gap maintained between him and the madwoman and which gains

therefore a forceful concreteness. The break of representation symbolised in the cane

embodies the very concept of ‘limit-experiences’ defines by Foucault by which the

48 1977, p.137


‘white space’ acts as visual contradiction to the logic of inclusion promoted by the

republican discourse49.

Those breaks in representation also underline the scientific separation needed to

identify those women’s medical condition. Indeed, rather than the miraculous healing

touch of the king which inspired Robert-Fleury in his re-interpretation of the roi

thaumaturge, the distance between Pinel and the madwoman superimposes in my view

a scientific model of observation and rationality. Unlike the monarchs who touched in

order to heal as a form of divine intercession, Pinel, a scientific man, restrains his touch

to impose in a neutral distance the power of his gaze, new symbolism of the man-who-

knows, ostensible depiction of the triumph of rational knowledge against superstition.

Therefore, what is actually depicted in the painting is the very act of separating the

mentally ill from the rest of the population. It is the birth certificate of psychiatry as a

discipline per se, the founding act of its perception as a nosological object.

Furthermore, the void staged between Pinel and the unshackled mad woman

conversely enhances the intimate interaction between her and the caretaker painted in

the very process of her unchaining. Such an emphasis on the transfer of the touch from

the figure of authority –the healing king or the Emperor– to the one of a subordinate

assistant evidently representative of a lower social class is unquestionably justified by

the equivalent shift observed from a material to a psychological approach of madness.

In keeping in mind the transformation which the madwoman is on the threshold of

undergoing, the duo made of the keeper touching the woman’s body could almost call

to mind the classical mythical story of Galatea and Pygmalion.

49 ‘We could write a history of limits – of those obscure gestures, necessarily forgotten as soon as they are accomplished, through which a culture rejects something which for it will be the Exterior; and throughout its history, this hollowed-out void, this white space by means of which it isolates itself, identifies it as clearly as its values’, Foucault, 2006, p.XXIX


Nonetheless, contrary to the self-recognition induced through Pygmalion’s touch, here

the acknowledgment of the self and the re-inhabitation of the body by the mind cannot

be envisioned in the materiality of touching.50 The new status of the physician as well as

the emphasis laid on observation compelled Robert-Fleury to represent separately life,

sight and touch and to even recognise the caretaker as part of this major re-evaluation.

Thus even the potentially highly sexually charged tactility inherent to the action of

touching is negated by the strictly professional appearance of the keeper’s calm,

controlled and soft contact and the subsequent absence of responsive symptoms on the

madwoman’s flesh. ‘Phantom of tactile presence’, as expressed by Jean Baudrillard, this

gesture which has nothing in common with a real sense of touch, becomes therefore a

metaphor.51 What is precisely at stake in this aborted attempt to represent a connection

between those two characters is in my view to conceal their irreducible estrangement

under a veil of closeness.

Above all this unresponsive flesh epitomises the border role of the skin protecting, as

the gap between Pinel and the unshackled madwoman, the sane from any risk of

contagion by the insane. As an empty vessel, the body of the unchained insane only

retains her coherence and wholeness by the outer limits of her skin.

Nonetheless, the so important epidermis is deprived of its most characterful properties,

namely its sensivity and softness. The madwoman’s malleable appearance is

contradicted by this stoniness flesh, as a symptom of petrification, ultimate sign of her

allegorical status in this declared distancing from lifelikeness. The yellowish complexion

of her derma, scarcely nuanced, muddles the limits between skin and clothes and

reinforces the statue-like quality and the abstraction of this embodied allegory. In

50 See Lajer-Burcharth, 2001 51 p.59


painting this apparent insensitiveness Robert-Fleury exemplifies the remoteness

experienced by the self, oblivious of its own environment, in madness.

Thus in denying the skin its role as a ‘site of communication’, in the words of Mechthild

Fend, Robert-Fleury points out the flawed inclusion of the mad in the French community

the Pinelian myth tried to establish.52 In this sense the carefully staged closeness of the

mad and the sane, focal point of the canvas, displays its utter artificiality.

This hypocrisy is further exemplified by the corresponding space maintained between

the thankful kneeling woman and her benefactor. The significance of this residual

distance is such that Robert-Fleury paints a twofold gap. Nor the lips nor the hand of the

woman dare to touch Pinel’s right hand, which is startlingly enhanced by the stark

contrast with Pinel’s dark costume. In an inversion of the Christian’s Noli me tangere

Pinel doesn’t even appear aware of this possible touch, since the respect professed by

the woman is such that she prevents herself from any sacrilege’s contact.

Place of Indeterminacy 53

Voids indeed define the painting’s major lines of composition and give them sense. To

the gaps we have just explored between the thankful woman and Pinel, to the

corresponding carefully calibrated void between Pinel and the liberated madwoman,

must be added the ultimate major gap of the canvas acting as an opening into the

painting and pointing to anachronism one of the last major axes of interpretation I will

address in this thesis in drawing on Georges Didi-Huberman’s analysis as developed in

Devant l’image and Devant le temps.

52 Fend, p.318 53 Kemp, p.107


Following Didi-Huberman’s conceptualisation framework, anachronism is understood as

the representation of events, concepts, figures that properly takes time backwards and

conveys meanings in a way that avoids all contemporaneity. It is the co-presence of

intermingled heterogeneous temporality which is then understood as producing

anachronism in a way that fractures the linear representation of the subject, the

Albertian’s historia eloquently discussed by Didi-Huberman in relation to Fra Angelico.

My assumption is that regardless of the academic facture of Pinel freeing the Insane or

its apparent coherent narrative, Robert-Fleury saturates his painting with anachronism,

offering only a ‘fragmented narration’ (Geimer) to the beholder who is then tasked with

reinventing a chronological arrangement of fragmented painted scenes.54

For in choosing to surround all his major characters with calibrated blanks to figure the

remaining estrangement of reason and unreason, Robert-Fleury breaks the continuum

of the narrative in favouring a perpetual juxtaposition of figures. Thus, the blanks blur

the implicit hierarchy across the components of the picture attracting the beholder’s

gaze towards anachronistic places.

The first glimpse of the presence of an unstable narrative pointing to anachronism is

given by the examination of the aperture seemingly establishing a border between the

words of reason and unreason on the right of the freed insane. Carefully displayed and

staged, as previously noticed, the extreme cases of madness occupying the right part of

the painting would be obviously understood as unthreatening specimen if they were not

equated on the extreme left by other remnants of wild madness spread in the side

devoted to reason. The so-evident fracture in the composition cannot from then be

uniquely understood as a Foucauldian’s ‘space-limit’ and should thus mobilise another

interpretative framework. The need to elucidate this opening seems especially

54 p.470


necessary as it is a progressive conceptualisation of Robert-Fleury which has not been

noticed or analysed before.

In the Wellcome’s oil sketch, the kneeling worker struck by the vision of the unchained

madwoman was indeed closing all perspective. In the painting on show at the Salon, the

significance of the gap was significantly attenuated by the remaining human presence

sitting in the far background which existence is acknowledged by the photograph taken

for the State’s register of purchase as well as the Goupil’s lithograph of that time [Fig.20

and 21].55

Therefore, even in the absence of any formal document asserting it, it seems obvious

that at some point between 1876 and its hanging at the Salpêtrière Robert-Fleury has

reworked the painting to remove the character.56

This erasure is significant in itself as it erects the blank as a site of exchange. It facilitates

the communication between beholder and representation in materialising a pathway to

the inside of the painting. Through this separation, we are guided into the painting’s

depth to a wall deserted from all human presence by Robert-Fleury’s repainting.

The woman erased from the earlier version of the painting endows the canvas with the

haunting of another temporal moment of elaboration, acting as a trace, a residue of an

earlier state. This dimension of trace is especially attractive since in eliminating the

female figure, Robert-Fleury left in her stead an unidentified fabric we could almost

imagine as having been owned by the removed woman. Therefore the darker area

replacing the character not only displays a lack but accesses to the material and literal

painted evidence of the co-presence of different times, of diverse strata of the painter’s

intervention.

55 The lithograph was first published as part of Le salon de 1876, Reproduction des principaux ouvrages accompagnés de sonnets par Adrien Dézamy, Paris, 1876. 56 We have been unable to access the Archives Nationales in Paris, closed for relocation until September 2012.


Above all, inside this defining line of fracture our glance is drawn to one remaining

human presence. Laying on the courtyard’s earth floor, tearing her clothes in the

traditional hysterical ‘arc-de-cercle’ pose, the figure points unambiguously to

anachronism by its inclusion of contemporaneity in the representation of a

revolutionary event. The period of the painting’s execution is indeed marked by hysteria

which was investigated at this time in the same setting by another authoritarian medical

figure, Jean-Martin Charcot whose image superimposes itself to the one of Philippe

Pinel introducing another level of meaning. It is in this sense that Tony Robert-Fleury

plainly and purposefully integrates anachronism in his composition.

His way of painting the contemporaneous time inside the route separating the mentally

ill from Pinel indicates the participation of the past to present time. This recourse to

anachronism could perfectly be a way for Robert-Fleury to envision a glorious road of

progress and continuity for the French psychiatry from Pinel to Charcot, from the First

to the Third French Republic. Only through this non-linear juxtaposition of time is the

viewer indeed able to take the measure all at once of the progress made.

Nonetheless, here also an approach centred on propaganda alone, appears to be highly

reductive, as the interruption of the narrative continuum through juxtaposition is a

formula Robert-Fleury favours at least another time in his canvas. For the purpose of

the painting the painter transposes indeed the timely process of curing into a visual

immediacy acquiring a kind of miraculous quality. Moreover, this secularised miracle

which we have already noticed in the first chapter is here properly given body and flesh.

Robert-Fleury achieves this embodiment through the blatant likeness of the liberated

woman and the crouching one in crisis on the right of the painting. To reinforce this

powerful juxtaposition, Tony Robert-Fleury adds the highly suggestive element of the


pointing outstretched arm which leads me to analyse them as a sort a diptych, including

in an anachronistic montage the insane in crisis and then cured. In stressing their

intimate relationship in the form of the madwoman’s pointing arm Robert-Fleury

displays the representation of an un-perceptible moment, the process of the departure

of the madwoman from her own madness.

Everything in the canvas bespeaks the momentariness, the kiss on the brink of being

given, the unchaining of the madwoman … and yet the likeness of the two women

introduces a temporal disturbance in an experience of the distant. It is therefore not

only the dates of the events represented which differ but also their inner duration,

transmitting an unstable, shifting temporality, highlighted by Didi-Huberman on his

work on Fra Angelico.

The powerful contrast arising from this juxtaposition of the before and after, echoing

the medical illustration created at the beginning of the nineteenth-century of the insane

in crisis and then cured, endows the image with a power of proof. In this Robert-Fleury

also reproduces one of the most well-known formulas of the imagery devoted to

miraculous curing. Their co-presence establishes in itself a link of causality.

In his analysis devoted to Carré de Montgerond’s book on the Convulsionaries of Saint-

Médard published in 1737, Georges Didi-Huberman pointed to the significance given in

this process to the return to a good shape (‘bonne forme’) as opposed to the

disfigurement and distortion caused by the crisis.57 Robert-Fleury chooses equally to

depict the validity of the moral treatment by the removal of extreme symptoms, of

what can be seen. In the central figure of the unchained madwoman, healing is

embodied by the disappearance of all symptoms of disfigurement, virtually of all

expressions at all, as she is reintegrated into the world of reason still seemingly

unconscious.

57 1984, p.132


This conflagration of different times mirrors the undermining of time represented by

the tension between the ceaseless movement which characterises the crisis and its

suspension for the need of representation. The horror painted on the face of the

woman dressed in the tricolour doesn’t retain any features of a passing and transient

state but rather exhibit a duration quality, a kind of immutability even reinforced by the

fixity of her gaze punctuated by her bulging eyes. Here again, Robert-Fleury makes

different periodicities collide, depriving the crisis of the temporality of paroxysm. In

acquiring a timeless quality, those facial deformations constitutive of the crisis reveal

their un-intentionality, the inability of the mad to power them. They also refer to the

spectacle of madness in their affectation and most of all they challenge Lessing’s famous

injunction of 1893: ‘All phenomena, whose nature it is suddenly to break out and as

suddenly to disappear, which can remain as they are but for a moment; all such

phenomena, whether agreeable or otherwise, acquire through the perpetuity conferred

upon them by art such an unnatural appearance that the impression they produce

becomes weaker with every fresh observation, till the whole subject at last wearies or

disgusts us’.58

The use of juxtaposition, anachronism and fragmented narration is such that when the

painting was on show at the Salon, some critics expressed their doubts regarding the

easy reading of the painting, echoing Goethe and Meyer who wrote in their famous

essay of 1798 On the Objects of Plastic and Graphic Art ‘we have cause to be dissatisfied

with paintings or statues whose meaning is not obvious to the eye, but must first be

looked up in a book or recounted to us’.59 It is precisely the reproach made by the

58 Cited in Geimer, p.473 59 Cited in Kemp, p.102


influential critic of the Gazette des Beaux-Arts, Charles Yriarte: ‘It is in the spirit of the

painting itself that one must find the uncertainty left by the subject’s representation in

the viewer’s mind. This kind of painting, which symbolises general tendencies by a

particular event, can neither strike the eye nor profoundly impress the mind. We must

run to reach the booklet to understand and this is fatal vice’.60

Nonetheless it is in those difficulties of apprehension, in those voids and blanks that

Robert-Fleury’s Pinel detaches itself from the system of painting he inherited from his

own father or his masters, Delaroche and Coignet. For in the simultaneous assertion of

several heterogeneous temporalities Robert-Fleury creates a power of collision. In

devoting such a crucial role to the void, Robert-Fleury gives to the nothingness of

invisibility an obsessional visibility, the void reaches visibility and figurability. Beyond the

obvious academic facture of his painting and the un-inspiring use of the realist pallete,

Robert-Fleury produces a composite painting made of fragments of single events and

scenes put together by which madness acquires a disquieting phantom-like quality.

60 Tome 2, p.16


Conclusion

A constant underlying tension runs up through the canvas, resulting from the attempt at

creating a new imagery of France as a synthesis of diverse inherited visual traditions and

the oddity of the montage resulting from it. In incorporating historic expressions and

iconic images, in emptying them of their previous meaning to give them new forms

Robert-Fleury is perpetually confronted to the risk of blurring the purpose of the

painting, in a fumbling noticed by the critics of the Salon.

The reading of the painting is particularly open to the viewer as Robert-Fleury

attempted to propose a unified narration in intermingling heroic past and the new

grandeur of the then contemporary Charcot.

This tension which signatures the painting is strengthened by the attraction exerted by

Pinel on the centre and the extensive use of the void, acting as fractures in the system

of representation, highlighting the force of attraction of the margins, threatening to

disintegrate the unity of the scene staged.

Not only does his intensive use of voids jeopardise the continuum of the narrative, but it

also embodies the very irremediable exclusion of the world of reason and unreason

which the Pinelian’s myth tried to occult and the path to domination it consequently

leads to.

Therefore in Pinel freeing the Insane, the infinite possibility of interpretations opened in

the painting by the equivalent ruptures in the system of representation concomitantly

proposes and opposes a powerful counter model to the one of Pinel erected as the One-

Who-Knows. This duality opens up a myriad of meanings and ambiguities which could

be conceptualised as event independent of any formal intentions of the artist.

11 636 words


Images

Figure 1 - Pinel médecin chef à la Salpêtrière en 1795 (Pinel Physician in Chief at the Salpêtrière in 1795)

Source : RMN – Hôpital de la Salpêtrière ; Oil on canvas - High : 3.55 ; Width : 4.90


Figure 2 – Copy of the State Register of Purchase for 1876 – Letter R

Source : Courtesy of the Fonds National d’Art Contemporain (FNAC), Paris


Figure 3 – Wellcome’s Collection Oil Sketch of Pinel Freeing the Insane by Tony Robert Fleury-ca 1876

Source: Wellcome Collection; Oil on canvas; High: 35.8 cm; Width: 50.2 cm


Figure 4 – Early sketch for Pinel Freeing the Insane by Tony Robert-Fleury – ca. 1875?

Source: RMN photos ; Localisation: Bucharest Museum of Fine Art


Figure 5 – Le Réveil du Tiers-Etat (The Awakening of the Third Estate) – 1789

Source: BNF-Gallica (Hennin 10 375);

Hand coloured engraving of 20.5 cm by 24.5 cm


Figure 6 – Terrible massacre de femmes le 3 septembre 1792 (Monstruous Massacre of Women on 3rd September 1792) – 1792

Source: BNF-Gallica (De Vinck 4 959);

Anonymous engraving of 9.5 cm by 15 cm


Figure 7 – Wellcome’s Collection sketch’s close up on the Cockades

Source: Author’s own photograph

Courtesy of the Wellcome Collection


Figure 8 – Françaises devenues libres (Freed French Women)

Source: RMN Photos, Musée Carnavalet

Ca. 1791 – Coloured engraving


Figure 9 – Louis XIV guérissant les scrofuleux (Louis XIV Healing the Scrofulous)

by Jean Jouvenet

Source: RMN Photos

Photograph of an Oil painting

Original located in the Abbatial of Saint-Riquier


Figure 10 – Bonaparte visitant les victimes de la peste à Jaffa (Bonaparte visiting the

Plague victims of Jaffa)

Baron Antoine-Jean Gros 1804

Source: RMN Photos

Musée du Louvre – Oil painting of 5.32 m by 7.2 m


Figure 11 – Liberté guidant le peuple (Liberty leading the People) - Eugène

Delacroix 1830

Source: RMN Photos

Musée du Louvre – Oil painting of 2.60 m by 3.25 m


Figure 12 – Souvenir de guerre civile – Juin 1848 (Memory of Civil War June 1848)

Jean-Louis-Ernest Meissonier

Source: RMN Photos

Musée du Louvre, Oil on Canvas of 0.29 m by 0.22 m


Figure 13 – Les Capitulards, Paris livré (The Capitulators, Paris given over)

by D. probably Henry Demare

Source: Heidelbergh university, Vol.4, N.45

Publisher: en vente chez Duclaux, Lit. Lemaine et fils

Sheet high : 31.0 cm, width 23.3 cm


Figure 14 – Pinel faisant tomber les fers des aliénés à Bicêtre en 1792 (Pinel unchaining the Insane at Bicêtre in 1792)

by Charles-Louis Müller, ca.1849-50

Source: RMN Photos

Paris, Académie Nationale de Médecine – Oil painting of 5.74 m by 2.34 m


Figure 15 – Les Folles de la Sapêtrière (The Madwomen at the Salpêtrière) by Amand Gautier

1857 lithograph after a painting exhibited at the 1849 Salon

Source: Wellcome images – Lithograph by Amand Gautier after himself

Printed by Imp. Bertauts in Paris; Image of 18.6 by 27.7 cm


Figure 16 – The Asylum by Wilhelm von Kaulbach, 1835 drawing

Source: RMN Photos

Localisation: Berlin, Kupferstichkabinett

High: 0.459 m

Width: 0.608 m


Figure 17 – Untitled photograph part of the 1875 first photographs’ collection by

Regnard and Bourneville

Source: Iconographie photographique de la Salpêtrière

BNF-Gallica


Figure 18 – Untitled photograph part of the 1875 first photographs’ collection by

Regnard and Bourneville

Re-published in the 1877 first published volume untitled ‘Période terminale, L’extase’ (Final period, ecstasy) – Plate XXIII

Source: Iconographie photographique de la Salpêtrière

BNF-Gallica


Figure 19 – Jean-Martin Charcot demonstrating hysteria in a patient at the Salpêtrière – Lithograph after a 1887’s painting by PA Brouillet

Source: Wellcome Images


Figure 20 – View of the so-called ‘Loges Pinel’ built by the architect Viel at the Salpêtrière hospital

Source: Archives de l’AP-HP


Figure 21 – Photograph of Pinel freeing the Insane taken at the 1876’s Salon for the State register of purchase

Source: Archives Nationales (Base ARCHIM) ; Album des Salons du XIXe siècle ; Cote F/21/*7646


Figure 22 – Goupil lithograph of Pinel freeing the Insane taken in 1876

Source: US National Library of Medicine


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Appendix – Original French Quotations

Page 6, Notice du Salon de 1876, entrée 1753 :

‘Pinel protesta de manière éclatante contre les traitements odieux dont les aliénés étaient

victimes : il eut le courage de faire tomber leurs chaînes et, au milieu du mouvement social qui

se prononçait de toutes parts, il invoqua en leur faveur les lois de l’humanité. En substituant

aux violences, aux mauvais traitements, des moyens de répression sagement combinés, il fut

le promoteur d’une réforme matérielle et morale qui devait plus tard atteindre son entier

développement’.

Page 21, Marc de Montifaud pour la revue l’Art moderne, page 82, paragraphe complet :

‘Au centre, Pinel fait détacher les fers des membres frêles d’une jeune fille, dont les yeux,

inconscients de l'acte qu'elle subit, errent dans l'espace. A droite, sont des groupes

d'infortunées chargées de fers dans leurs cabanons; les unes accroupies, poignets enchaînés,

torses projetés en avant, hurlant comme des bêtes. A gauche, une de ces folles, debout et vue

de dos, coiffée d'un chapeau de paille à rubans jaunes, les mains retenues dans ses menottes,

éclate d'un rire insensé en regardant le groupe d~ Pinel et de la jeune fille. Une femme

agenouillée, délivrée de ses liens, et dont la physionomie n'offre aucun des traits repoussants

de ses compagnes, baise la main du docteur. On devine que celle-ci n'est point folle et qu'une

intervention tardive l'a soustraite enfin à d'odieux traitements. Avec une pareille donnée,

l'artiste pouvait accuser une intention; il y avait motif à mettre le soleil sur Pinel et la jeune

fille, de concentrer le jour sur eux; grâce à cette façade de bâtiment blanchâtre, et à ces

poutres en bois bruns des cabanons, il y avait deux tons distincts; et toute liberté de faire

passer un coup de lumière et un coup d'ombre. Au lieu de cela, l'exécution est vide à cause de

la grandeur de la toile qui empêche l'effet de se resserrer; en s'écartant du tableau, les

personnages deviennent plats; la peinture est trop lavée, trop guimauve.’

Page 27, Mémoire écrit à Bicêtre en 1794 par Ph. Pinel (in Postel, p. 259) :

‘Rompre à propos leur volonté et les dompter … par un appareil imposant de terreur qui

puisse les convaincre qu’ils ne sont point les maîtres de suivre leur volonté fougueuse et qu’ils

n’ont rien de mieux à faire que de se soumettre’.

Page 41, Critique de la Gazette des Beaux-Arts par Charles Yriarte :

‘C’est dans l’esprit même du tableau qu’il faut chercher l’indécision que la représentation du

sujet laisse dans l’esprit du spectateur. Ce genre de peinture, qui symbolise par un fait

matériel des tendances générales, ne peut ni frapper les yeux ni impressionner profondément

l’esprit. Il faut courir au livret pour comprendre, et c’est là un vice rédhibitoire.’

Mythical Consciousness and Discontinuities the Spectacle of Madness in Tony Robert-Fleury’s Pinel...

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Transcript of Mythical Consciousness and Discontinuities the Spectacle of Madness in Tony Robert-Fleury’s Pinel...