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France and Culture
Mesmerism and the End of the Enlightenment in France
Early in 1788, Franz Anton Mesmer, a Viennese physician, arrived in Paris and began to promulgate a somewhat exotic theory of healing that almost immediately seized the imagination of the general populace. Robert Darnton, in his lively study of mesmerism and its relation to eighteenth-century radical political thought and popular scientific notions, provides a useful contribution to the study of popular culture and the manner in which ideas are diffused down through various social levels.
232 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1968
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Robert Darnton
66 books172 followersCarl H. Pforzheimer University Professor and Director of the Harvard University Library
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Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews
July 2, 2012
Most people are probably passingly familiar with Franz Anton Mesmer, the eighteenth-century German-born physician and originator of what we now know as “mesmerism,” but the background that Robert Darnton (formerly of Princeton University, but now heads the Harvard University Library) brings to the this book puts mesmerism into not just medical and physical, but also political perspective.
Pre-Revolutionary France was peopled with scientists trying to create new cosmologies to explain the mysterious universe around them. “Science had captivated Mesmer’s contemporaries by revealing to them that they were surrounded by wonderful, invisible forces: Newton’s gravity, made intelligible by Voltaire; Franklin’s electricity, popularized by a fad for lightning rods and by demonstrations in the fashionable lyceums and museums of Paris and other miraculous gases of the Charlieres and Montgolfieres that astonished Europe by lifting man into the air for the first time in 1783” (p. 10). It was a time of both experimentation and empiricism – and lots of quackery. Mesmer himself proposed that a superfine fluid pervaded the entire universe, but especially the body. “Individuals could control and reinforce the fluid’s action by ‘mesmerizing’ or massaging the body’s ‘poles’ and thereby overcoming the obstacle, inducing a ‘crisis,’ often in the form of convulsions, and restoring health or the ‘harmony’ of man with nature” (p. 4).
There were, however, institutionalized consensus positions on scientific issues, and the literary and medical journals and professional societies who held them would openly call out Mesmer on his unsubstantiated claims. Mesmer was unconcerned, though. As he said, “It is to the public that I appeal.” The accreditation and approval of official societies meant nothing to him, and he didn’t bother seeking it; rather, he wanted to bring his science to the people and let it speak for itself, and accept it on their own accord.
However, mesmerists didn’t think that mesmerism’s power stopped and started with the body. Instead, they suggested that the health of the body was related to many other things, including mental health, morality, and even the possibility for political change. Darnton details some of the more important people of Mesmer’s inner group, and the splitting into factions that eventually occurred. One of the factions, led by a man named Bergasse, “developed the social and political aspects of his theory – his own ideas about ‘universal morality, about the principles of legislation, about education, habits, the arts, etc.,’” (p. 78). “Carra [another one of the breakaways from Mesmer’s official doctrine] and his friends, especially Bergasse, dealt with the cosmological side of mesmerism by extracting a political theory from the obscure, strictly apolitical pontifications of Mesmer. ‘Political theory’ may be too dignified a term for their distortions of his ideas, but they themselves considered their theories consistent and reasonable, and the police viewed them as a thread to the state” (p. 107).
What was it in mesmerism that appealed to the radical mentality before the Revolution? The mesmerists began to think that the professional, academic journals and societies had formed a kind of anti-democratic coterie whose job it was to marginalize legitimate scientists with valid ideas. In other words, some mesmerists began to see science as something other than what could be described, for lack of a better term, as an “elitist” enterprise. Science had no One Right Answer, and the ridiculing poorly known scientists for their ideas was no better than what Louis XVI was doing; science and political theory – namely, democracy – had collided.
Obscure as it sounded, the ideas of Carra and Bergasse took Mesmer to his logical conclusions: unjust legislation, just like a bad moral disposition, “disrupted one’s atmosphere and hence one’s health, just as physical causes could produce moral effects, even on a broad scale” (p. 108). By construing Mesmer so liberally (and so inaccurately), Carra, Bergasse and others were able to cast a single net around both the world of science, ethics, and revolutionary politics. “By injecting a Rousseauist bias into a mesmerist analysis of the physical and psychological relations among men, Bergasse saw a way to revolutionize France. He would reverse the historical trend of physico-moral causality, reforming institutions by physically regenerating Frenchmen. Improved bodies would improve morals, and better morals would eventually produce political effects” (p. 124).
I just happened to read this soon after finishing George L. Mosse’s “Confronting the Nation: Western and Jewish Nationalism,” which has a few chapters that discuss fascism and its relation to nationalism. In one of those chapters, he pinpoints the French Revolution as the historical event that allows movements like fascism to eventually develop, especially with the mass mobilization of politics. Although Darnton never explicitly suggests this, his book seems to be solid evidence of Mosse’s thesis. Mesmer choosing to ignore scientific consensus and saying “I wish only to convince the public,” his conspiratorial view well-known scientists trying to crush and demolish him, and the collusion of science and politics (especially more race-related “science” as we get into the nineteenth century) all have strong lines of continuity with what we will later call fascism. For anyone interested in how science, ideology and politics can become so easily and terribly entangled, I found this to be a wonderful case study.
But it’s just as good for those interested in the more pedestrian history or sociology of science. Darnton’s background in eighteenth-century European (especially French) history was essential for building the picture that he does, and for building the conclusions that he convincingly reaches. For those interested in something along the same lines but a bit more popular, Darnton’s “The Great Cat Massacre,” which I have also reviewed on this site, is a wonderful and equally insightful collection of essays on early modern French cultural and literary themes.
Pre-Revolutionary France was peopled with scientists trying to create new cosmologies to explain the mysterious universe around them. “Science had captivated Mesmer’s contemporaries by revealing to them that they were surrounded by wonderful, invisible forces: Newton’s gravity, made intelligible by Voltaire; Franklin’s electricity, popularized by a fad for lightning rods and by demonstrations in the fashionable lyceums and museums of Paris and other miraculous gases of the Charlieres and Montgolfieres that astonished Europe by lifting man into the air for the first time in 1783” (p. 10). It was a time of both experimentation and empiricism – and lots of quackery. Mesmer himself proposed that a superfine fluid pervaded the entire universe, but especially the body. “Individuals could control and reinforce the fluid’s action by ‘mesmerizing’ or massaging the body’s ‘poles’ and thereby overcoming the obstacle, inducing a ‘crisis,’ often in the form of convulsions, and restoring health or the ‘harmony’ of man with nature” (p. 4).
There were, however, institutionalized consensus positions on scientific issues, and the literary and medical journals and professional societies who held them would openly call out Mesmer on his unsubstantiated claims. Mesmer was unconcerned, though. As he said, “It is to the public that I appeal.” The accreditation and approval of official societies meant nothing to him, and he didn’t bother seeking it; rather, he wanted to bring his science to the people and let it speak for itself, and accept it on their own accord.
However, mesmerists didn’t think that mesmerism’s power stopped and started with the body. Instead, they suggested that the health of the body was related to many other things, including mental health, morality, and even the possibility for political change. Darnton details some of the more important people of Mesmer’s inner group, and the splitting into factions that eventually occurred. One of the factions, led by a man named Bergasse, “developed the social and political aspects of his theory – his own ideas about ‘universal morality, about the principles of legislation, about education, habits, the arts, etc.,’” (p. 78). “Carra [another one of the breakaways from Mesmer’s official doctrine] and his friends, especially Bergasse, dealt with the cosmological side of mesmerism by extracting a political theory from the obscure, strictly apolitical pontifications of Mesmer. ‘Political theory’ may be too dignified a term for their distortions of his ideas, but they themselves considered their theories consistent and reasonable, and the police viewed them as a thread to the state” (p. 107).
What was it in mesmerism that appealed to the radical mentality before the Revolution? The mesmerists began to think that the professional, academic journals and societies had formed a kind of anti-democratic coterie whose job it was to marginalize legitimate scientists with valid ideas. In other words, some mesmerists began to see science as something other than what could be described, for lack of a better term, as an “elitist” enterprise. Science had no One Right Answer, and the ridiculing poorly known scientists for their ideas was no better than what Louis XVI was doing; science and political theory – namely, democracy – had collided.
Obscure as it sounded, the ideas of Carra and Bergasse took Mesmer to his logical conclusions: unjust legislation, just like a bad moral disposition, “disrupted one’s atmosphere and hence one’s health, just as physical causes could produce moral effects, even on a broad scale” (p. 108). By construing Mesmer so liberally (and so inaccurately), Carra, Bergasse and others were able to cast a single net around both the world of science, ethics, and revolutionary politics. “By injecting a Rousseauist bias into a mesmerist analysis of the physical and psychological relations among men, Bergasse saw a way to revolutionize France. He would reverse the historical trend of physico-moral causality, reforming institutions by physically regenerating Frenchmen. Improved bodies would improve morals, and better morals would eventually produce political effects” (p. 124).
I just happened to read this soon after finishing George L. Mosse’s “Confronting the Nation: Western and Jewish Nationalism,” which has a few chapters that discuss fascism and its relation to nationalism. In one of those chapters, he pinpoints the French Revolution as the historical event that allows movements like fascism to eventually develop, especially with the mass mobilization of politics. Although Darnton never explicitly suggests this, his book seems to be solid evidence of Mosse’s thesis. Mesmer choosing to ignore scientific consensus and saying “I wish only to convince the public,” his conspiratorial view well-known scientists trying to crush and demolish him, and the collusion of science and politics (especially more race-related “science” as we get into the nineteenth century) all have strong lines of continuity with what we will later call fascism. For anyone interested in how science, ideology and politics can become so easily and terribly entangled, I found this to be a wonderful case study.
But it’s just as good for those interested in the more pedestrian history or sociology of science. Darnton’s background in eighteenth-century European (especially French) history was essential for building the picture that he does, and for building the conclusions that he convincingly reaches. For those interested in something along the same lines but a bit more popular, Darnton’s “The Great Cat Massacre,” which I have also reviewed on this site, is a wonderful and equally insightful collection of essays on early modern French cultural and literary themes.
December 23, 2025
The book I had been searching for: a detailed overview Mesmer, describing his practice, the concept of animal magnetism, the cult surrounding him, the context in which mesmerism arose in France the 1780s, how he was viewed in both science and popular culture, and his lasting impact. Darnton’s argument is that Mesmer was a transition between the Enlightenment and the Romantic age, as well as a figure who laid the groundwork for a radical political philosophy that paralleled many found in the lead-up to the revolution: resistance to authority, rejection of the establishment, a merging of spirit and medicine under the guise of science (what we would term pseudoscience), and a radical philosophy that broke down barriers between classes or political ideologies.
Darnton contextualizes Mesmer in an era that saw stunning scientific advances that seemed almost like magic: invisible forces acting on all things (gravity, magnetism, electricity), the miracle of balloon flight through the discovery of helium, advancement in microbiology and vaccines, etc. Not to mention the vogue for somnambulism/hypnosis, which Mesmer used to his advantage. I learned so much here, from how the process worked to the scientific and political push-back (incredibly, Lafayette was an ardent supporter, whereas Franklin and Jefferson, in France at the time, worked overtime to debunk the movement, hoping that the quackery wouldn’t make its way across the Atlantic) to the influence on later Romantic writers such as Balzac and Hugo. I didn’t think a book on Mesmer and pre-revolutionary France would be a page-turner, but I couldn’t put it down.
Darnton contextualizes Mesmer in an era that saw stunning scientific advances that seemed almost like magic: invisible forces acting on all things (gravity, magnetism, electricity), the miracle of balloon flight through the discovery of helium, advancement in microbiology and vaccines, etc. Not to mention the vogue for somnambulism/hypnosis, which Mesmer used to his advantage. I learned so much here, from how the process worked to the scientific and political push-back (incredibly, Lafayette was an ardent supporter, whereas Franklin and Jefferson, in France at the time, worked overtime to debunk the movement, hoping that the quackery wouldn’t make its way across the Atlantic) to the influence on later Romantic writers such as Balzac and Hugo. I didn’t think a book on Mesmer and pre-revolutionary France would be a page-turner, but I couldn’t put it down.
December 29, 2025
an unexpected find at the thrift store! a quick and often amusing read. but was hard to fully appreciate the argument — that mesmerism channelled and shaped political ideology pre and post french revolution — bc mesmerism’s principles are confusing and the author assumes so much prior historical knowledge. i feel like mesmerism was more so an effective vehicle and one of many; im not so convinced of its imptce. do love that the author clearly had fun writing, though.
August 30, 2015
Darnton packs quite an argument into about 150 pages: that the pseudoscientific medical-philosophical theory of mesmerism provided the rhetorical basis for later radical politics in pre-Revolutionary France. Not that the Revolution would have failed to reach the masses without mesmerism, but that few people actually read Rousseau's work, and so they needed some more popular medium to be transmitted through. Thanks to the fervor for science (well, "science") in the Ancien Regime, pseudo-scientific language was the perfect medium.
Overall the book is excellent, and Darnton injects just the right amount of irony in his observations---mesmerism is somewhat quaint in its original form, but was taken to ludicrous heights in later years in the search for a "universal system"---but unfortunately this is a book for scholars of French history, so lots of French text is presented without translation! I felt rather left out. Thankfully it doesn't much impede the thrust of the argument, but I would have liked more translation, even brute-force literal translations.
Overall the book is excellent, and Darnton injects just the right amount of irony in his observations---mesmerism is somewhat quaint in its original form, but was taken to ludicrous heights in later years in the search for a "universal system"---but unfortunately this is a book for scholars of French history, so lots of French text is presented without translation! I felt rather left out. Thankfully it doesn't much impede the thrust of the argument, but I would have liked more translation, even brute-force literal translations.
May 12, 2016
Very interesting and well explained.
Had to say that while researching Mesmerism for a paper for college, this has been my go-to book to get a global picture.
It mentions almost all of the important literature on this topic from before the making of this book, including plenty of primary sources.
It covers a lot of theories and connects the mesmeric movement to other aspects of society that hadn't been connected to it before and a lot of later scientists and writers praise Darnton for this incredible book.
It's quite short, reads as easily as to be expected for this kind of literature and is very informative without making it feel like he crammed as much research as possible on one page
Had to say that while researching Mesmerism for a paper for college, this has been my go-to book to get a global picture.
It mentions almost all of the important literature on this topic from before the making of this book, including plenty of primary sources.
It covers a lot of theories and connects the mesmeric movement to other aspects of society that hadn't been connected to it before and a lot of later scientists and writers praise Darnton for this incredible book.
It's quite short, reads as easily as to be expected for this kind of literature and is very informative without making it feel like he crammed as much research as possible on one page
June 16, 2022
3.5 以催眠術作為切入點考察啟蒙運動乃至大革命，梳理出對理性的絕對尊崇和信任>科學和進步主義>實踐之後理性的幻滅與重建的思潮路徑，其中夾雜時代和自我的考量，包括懷才不遇的宣洩碰上了革命的時機——於是催眠術，以各種方式被各種人解讀詮釋和利用，有的走向政治化，有的走向唯靈化，融入生活而最終融入歷史中。寫得頗為流暢精簡，而且難得地毫不枯燥，但需要一點背景知識的基礎。擅長於以小見大但其實並沒有什麼驚天動地的statement或洞見。
Looking at the Enlightenment and French revolution through the mesmerism telescope, highlights a trace of belief in reason>progressivism and scientism>recovery from disillusion of reason. Mesmerism has been interpreted and used by different people and purposes, some go the political way, others go the spiritual one, and eventually integrate into life and history. The writing is very smooth and neat, and surprisingly interesting as an academic essay. But you will need a bit knowledge of that historical period as a stepping stone to understand the whole thing.
Looking at the Enlightenment and French revolution through the mesmerism telescope, highlights a trace of belief in reason>progressivism and scientism>recovery from disillusion of reason. Mesmerism has been interpreted and used by different people and purposes, some go the political way, others go the spiritual one, and eventually integrate into life and history. The writing is very smooth and neat, and surprisingly interesting as an academic essay. But you will need a bit knowledge of that historical period as a stepping stone to understand the whole thing.
May 2, 2018
A fascinating theme, but better luck next time with a different author.
January 4, 2021
This period of time is INSANE and the people involved are so dramatic and I’m living for it.
July 22, 2012
An interesting look at the phenomenon of Mesmerism. Darnton seems to have two goals--one, to show why Mesmerism and its related "philosophies" were not seen as strange by contemporaries and two, to show how it became an anti-Enlightenment movement. He is right in wanting to show how it looked from the point of view of someone living during that time rather than to us. I thought his argument about the latter occurrence plausible. The men and women attacked by the "establishment" (medical, scientific) for their Mesmeric (?) beliefs came to see Mesmerism as "anti-elite" and a force against the powers-that-be that were trying to squash them and their ideas.
March 4, 2017
This is an exciting & exhaustively footnoted account of popular thought in France on the eve of their revolution against monarchy.
January 1, 2015
Mesmerism and the End of the Enlightenment in France
by Robert Darnton
by Robert Darnton
Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews