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Romanticism and the Culture of Suicide in Nineteenth-Century France

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 June 2009

Lisa Lieberman
Lisa Lieberman
Affiliation:
Dickinson College
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Extract

An anonymous comment on the suicidal inclinations of great men appeared among the regular articles in an 1850 issue of the highly regarded journal of mental hygiene, the Annales médico-psychologiques. “Some curious rapprochements might be drawn,” the author suggested, “given the frequency with which this thought occurs among celebrated men; but it is clear that if insanity were the sole possible explanation, only the lot of the common people would be desirable.” On one level, this statement represents an editorial contribution to an intense debate taking place in the journal's pages concerning the relationship between suicide and insanity. Although most nineteenthcentury observers associated self-destructive behavior with mental instability, viewing the individual who sought to put an end to his existence as weak, if not perverse, a certain mystique also surrounded suicide at this time. Images of Christian martyrs who willingly courted death in preference to leading lives of pagan dishonor, of the self-sacrificing heroes of antiquity, existed alongside more contemporary renderings of unrequited lovers and world-weary young men familiar to readers of Romantic novels and the faits divers. A longing for death was a sign of sensitivity and artistic promise. “Suicide,” wrote the influential critic, Saint-Marc Girardin, “is not the malady of one who is simple of heart or in mind; it is the malady of the refined and of philosophers.” Alphonse de Lamartine, George Sand, Alfred de Musset, Benjamin Constant, and the Vicomte de Chateaubriand all confessed to having been tempted to kill themselves in their youth. No less an idol than Napoleon Bonaparte was known to have entertained morbid ideas on occasion.

Type
The Poetry of Everyday Life
Information
Comparative Studies in Society and History , Volume 33 , Issue 3 , July 1991 , pp. 611 - 629
Copyright
Copyright © Society for the Comparative Study of Society and History 1991

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References

1 “Tentatives du suicide chez les grands hommes,” Annales médico-psychologiques, 2nd ser., no. 2 (1850), 542.Google Scholar

2 The Romantics exalted in fantasies of death in general and of suicide in particular. A fascinating analysis of the cultural implications of suicide in Victorian England may be found in Gates, Barbara T., Victorian Suicide: Mad Crimes and Sad Histories (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988).CrossRefGoogle Scholar The point that suicide statistics cannot be studied in isolation from the intellectual context in which they were collected, “the underlying network of mental and perceptual habits [surrounding the act of self-destruction] …, ” is convincingly demonstrated by Anderson, Olive, “Did Suicide Increase with Industrialization in Victorian England?” Past and Present, 86 (02 1980), 151–73.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed See also her Suicide in Victorian and Edwardian England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987).Google Scholar

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30 AN: F7 9713, Hautes Alpes, letter dated 21 novembre 1816, addressed to the prefect of the Hautes Alpes, giving the results of an investigation that the Minister of the Interior undertook into the refusal of the clergy of Embrun to bury a suicide.

31 AN: F7 9713–30.

32 AN: F7 9726, Indre, report dated 3 fçvrier 1827.

33 La gazette des cultes et de l'enseignement général. Recueil religieux, philosophique et littéraire, 13 mars 1830, 28 mars 1830.

34 Ample evidence for this assertion may be found in Goldstein, Jan, Console and Classify: The French Psychiatric Profession in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 215–25.Google Scholar On the medicalization of social deviance in general, see Nye, Robert A., Crime, Madness and Politics in Modern France: The Medical Concept of National Decline (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984).CrossRefGoogle Scholar His discussion of suicide may be found on pp. 144–54.

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44 AN: F7 9726, Hautes Pyrenées, report dated 12 avril 1826.

45 AN: F7 9713, Jura, report dated 23 juillet 1817.

46 AN: F7 9719, Pas de Calais, report dated 9 octobre 1820.

47 AN: F7 9723, Drôme, report dated 12 août 1825.

48 AN: F7 9714, Nord, report dated 10 décembre 1817.

49 AN: F7 9719, Oise, report dated 14 février 1821. For the ease of readers, I have corrected errors in spelling and grammar and filled in a few missing words (in the bracketed clauses) in my translation of this document.

50 AN: F7 9712, Vaucluse, report dated 4 août 1816.

51 AN: F7 9725, Moselle, report dated 18 mars 1830.

52 Blanchard, De la mort volontaire, 45–6.

53 For a fuller discussion of the treatment of suicide by the religious right, see my “Republican Liberty and the Fall of Rome: The Conservative Appraisal of the French Revolution, 1815– 1870,” in Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Western Society for French History, no. 17 1990), 269–75.Google Scholar

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56 My concern in this article has been to explore the political and moral implications of selfdestruction in nineteenth-century France by examining the attitudes surrounding suicide as opposed to the actual causes of the act. I have therefore by necessity limited my analysis to the cultural dimension of suicide. To understand why individuals attempt to take their lives in any given society requires that the historian adopt a multifaceted approach to the suicide problem, integrating psychological and neurobiological insights into the functioning of the mind with a sociological analysis of the culture in which suicide occurs. A pioneering work in this interdisciplinary realm is Kushner's, Howard I.Self-Destruction in the Promised Land: A Psychocultural Biology of American Suicide (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1989).Google Scholar