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Madness in Paris, Paris in Madness: The City, Emotions and the Insane at the Dawn of Mass Society

9 November 2018

A History of Psychological Disciplines Seminar with Professor

arts.auckland.ac.nz/people/jcou308" target="_blank">Jean-Jacques Courtine (University of Auckland, NZ / QMUL.

Time: Mon 19 November 2018, 18:00 - 19:30.
Place: SELCS Common Room, G24 Foster Court, Malet Place.
Registration via Eventbrite:
https://parismadness.eventbrite.co.uk

Paris in the last quarter of the 19th century… With the accelerated urbanisation of the capital city and the massive growth in its population, new anxieties emerge. Alcoholism is rampant, degeneracy lies in wait. "Are there not more madmen today than at any other time?" worries among many others Dr Paul Garnier in his Madness in Paris (1890). He is well-placed to answer his own question: Garnier is Chief Medical Officer of the Special Infirmary at the police headquarters' holding cells, to which the bad, the mad and the sad scooped up from the pavements of the capital are transported. And the response is in the affirmative: the crowding of the city by dense and floating masses of anonymous individuals has unleashed previously unknown forms of urban madness. The city therefore produces madness, observed, transcribed, identified, and classified by psychiatry. We could stop here, seeing nothing more in it than a classic episode in the long history of the control of the insane. But there is another way of reading this picture of urban misery, whose language is scrupulously documented in the psychiatric reports; that is, from the perspective of a history of emotions "from below", hearing in it the voices of these lost souls. Then a different city reveals itself. For if cities engender madness, madness produces cities: a coherent image of the capital emerges from these delusions. It possesses its own geography, its own monumentality, its own landmarks; but also its own itineraries, its own lines of flight, its own meanderings. It will be one of the goals of this presentation to reconstruct madscapes, the mapping of the Paris of the mad. And to wonder: all things considered, is this Paris of the deluded really any stranger than the delusional Paris invented by mass urban society?