Eskişehir, Türkiye
20 April 2024
“What sort of diary should I like mine to be?
Something loose knot and yet not slovenly, so elastic that it will embrace anything, solemn, slight or beautiful that comes into my mind.
I should like it to resemble some deep old desk or capacious hold-all, in which one flings a mass of odds and ends without looking them through.
I should like to come back, after a year or two, and find that the collection had sorted itself and refined itself and coalesced, as such deposits so mysteriously do, into a mould, transparent enough to reflect the light of our life and yet steady tranquil compounds with the aloofness of a work of art.
The main requisite, I think on re-reading my old volumes, is not to play the part of censor, but to write as the mood comes or of anything whatever.
Since I was curious to find how I went for things put in haphazard and found the significance to lie where I never saw it at the time.“
(Virginia Woolf, 20 April 1919)
Above: English writer Virginia Woolf (1882 – 1941)
Sweet April-time — O cruel April-time!
Year after year returning, with a brow
Of promise, and red lips with longing paled,
And backward-hidden hands that clutch the joys
Of vanished springs, like flowers.
(Dinah Craik, “April“, Poems (1859)
Above: English writer Dinah Craik (née Dinah Mulock) (1826 – 1887)
Every calendar day produces its heroes and its villains.
April 20 is no exception.
This date in histroy has seen the birth of Rose of Lima and Napoleon III, Adolf Hitler and Maurice Duplessis, Harold Lloyd and Joan Miro, Jessica Lange, Luther Vandross and Andrew Serkis.
I choose to speak not of them, but of Philippe Pinel, Dinah Craik, Vladimir Vidric, Henry de Montherlant, Peter S. Beagle and Sebastian Faulks.
It is reading about these individuals that I find myself considering the notion of…
Madness.
She was born as Isabel Flores de Oliva (20 April 1586 – 1617) in the city of Lima, then in the Viceroyalty of Peru, on 20 April 1586.
She was one of eleven children of Gaspar Flores, a harquebusier in the Imperial Spanish Army whose family were from Baños de Montemayor, Cáceres, Spain, and later travelled to Puerto Rico.
His wife and Rose’s mother, María de Oliva y Herrera (b. 1560), was a criolla native of Lima.
Her maternal grandparents were Francisco de Oliva and Isabel de Herrera.
Rose’s siblings (in birth order) were Gaspar, Bernardina, Hernando, Francisco, Juana, Antonio, Andrés, Francisco and Jacinta, all born in Lima.
Her later nickname “Rose” comes from an incident in her infancy:
A servant claimed to have seen her face transform into a rose.
In 1597 Isabel was confirmed by the Archbishop of Lima, Toribio de Mogrovejo, who was also to be declared a saint.
She formally took the name of Rose (Rosa in Spanish) at that time.
Above: Rose of Lima, Claudio Coello,Prado Museum, Madrid, Spain
As a young girl, in emulation of the noted Dominican tertiary Catherine of Siena, she began to fast three times a week and performed severe penances in secret.
Above: Catherine of Siena (1347 – 1380), Giovanni Battista Tiepolo
When she was admired for her beauty, Rose cut off her hair and rubbed peppers on her face, upset that men were beginning to take notice of her.
She rejected all suitors against the objections of her friends and her family.
Despite the censure of her parents, she spent many hours contemplating the Blessed Sacrament, which she received daily, an extremely rare practice in that period.
She was determined to take a vow of virginity, which was opposed by her parents who wished her to marry.
Finally, out of frustration, her father gave her a room to herself in the family home.
Above: Frontispiece of the first edition of the first biography of Rose of Lima, the first Americas saint
After daily fasting, she took to permanently abstaining from eating meat.
She helped the sick and hungry around her community, bringing them to her room and taking care of them.
Rose sold her fine needlework and took flowers that she grew to market, to help her family.
She made and sold lace and embroidery to care for the poor.
She prayed and did penance in a little grotto that she had built.
Otherwise, she became a recluse, leaving her room only for her visits to church.
She attracted the attention of the friars of the Dominican Order.
She wanted to become a nun, but her father forbade it, so she instead entered the Third Order of St. Dominic while living in her parents’ home.
In her 20th year, she donned the habit of a tertiary and took a vow of perpetual virginity.
Above: Rose burning her hands in an act of penance, stained glass window, St. Michael’s Church, Ballinasloe, Ireland
She only allowed herself to sleep two hours a night at most so that she had more hours to devote to prayer.
She donned a heavy crown made of silver, with small spikes on the inside, in emulation of the Crown of Thorns worn by Christ.
For 11 years she lived this way, with intervals of ecstasy, and eventually died on 24 August 1617, at the young age of 31, after a long illness.
It is said that she prophesied the date of her death.
Her funeral was held in the Cathedral, attended by all the public authorities of Lima.
Above: Rose of Lima
As sympathetic as I am towards faith, Rosa’s acts strike me as extreme and irrational acts of madness.
I wonder how Philippe Pinel would have viewed her.
Above: French physician Philippe Pinel (1745 – 1826)
Philippe Pinel (20 April 1745 – 1826) was a French physician and precursor of psychiatry.
He was instrumental in the development of a more humane psychological approach to the custody and care of psychiatric patients, referred to today as moral therapy.
He worked for the abolition of the shackling of mental patients by chains and, more generally, for the humanization of their treatment.
He also made notable contributions to the classification of mental disorders and has been described by some as “the father of modern psychiatry“.
After the French Revolution, Dr. Pinel changed the way we look at the mentally ill (“aliénés” / “alienated“) by claiming that they can be understood and cured.
An 1809 description of a case that Pinel recorded in the 2nd edition of his textbook on insanity is regarded by some as the earliest evidence for the existence of the form of mental disorder later known as dementia praecox or schizophrenia, although Emil Kraepelin is generally accredited with its first conceptualization.
As the “father of modern psychiatry“, he was credited with the first classification of mental illnesses.
He had a great influence on psychiatry and the treatment of the alienated in Europe and the US.
Above: Bust of Philippe Pinel on the Pinel Memorial, Royal Edinburgh Hospital, Edinburgh, Scotland
When faith and hope fail, as they do sometimes, we must try charity, which is love in action.
We must speculate no more on our duty, but simply do it.
When we have done it, however blindly, perhaps Heaven will show us why.
(Dinah Craik, Christian’s Mistake, 1865)
Herein lies the crux of the problem.
It is hard to sympathize with what we don’t understand, that which to us is an unknown country.
All day starin’ at the ceilin’ makin’
Friends with shadows on my wall
All night hearing voices tellin’ me
That I should get some sleep
Because tomorrow might be good for somethin’
Hold on, feelin’ like I’m headed for a breakdown
And I don’t know why
But I’m not crazy, I’m just a little unwell
I know, right now you can’t tell
But stay a while and maybe then you’ll see
A different side of me
I’m not crazy, I’m just a little impaired
I know, right now you don’t care
But soon enough you’re gonna think of me
And how I used to be, me
I’m talkin’ to myself in public, dodging glances on the train
And I know, I know they’ve all been talkin’ about me
I can hear them whisper, and it makes me think
There must be somethin’ wrong with me
Out of all the hours thinkin’, somehow I’ve lost my mind
But I’m not crazy, I’m just a little unwell
I know, right now you can’t tell
But stay a while and maybe then you’ll see
A different side of me
I’m not crazy, I’m just a little impaired
I know, right now you don’t care
But soon enough you’re gonna think of me
And how I used to be
I’ve been talkin’ in my sleep
Pretty soon they’ll come to get me
Yeah, they’re takin’ me away
I’m not crazy, I’m just a little unwell
I know, right now you can’t tell
But stay a while and maybe then you’ll see
A different side of me
I’m not crazy, I’m just a little impaired
I know, right now you don’t care
But soon enough you’re gonna think of me
And how I used to be yeah, how I used to be
How I used to be
How I used to be
Well, I’m just a little unwell
How I used to be
How I used to be
I’m just a little unwell…
Pinel was born in Jonquières, in the south of France, in the modern department of Tarn.
He was the son and nephew of physicians.
After receiving a degree from the Faculty of Medicine in Toulouse, he studied an additional four years at the Faculty of Medicine of Montpellier.
He arrived in Paris in 1778.
Above: Philippe Pinel
He spent 15 years earning his living as a writer, translator and editor because the restrictive regulations of the old regime prevented him from practicing medicine in Paris.
The Faculty did not recognize a degree from a provincial university like Toulouse.
He failed twice in a competition which would have awarded him funds to continue his studies.
In the 2nd competition, the jury stressed his ‘painful’ mediocrity in all areas of medical knowledge, an assessment seemingly so grossly incompatible with his later intellectual accomplishments that political motives have been suggested.
Discouraged, Pinel considered emigrating to America.
In 1784 he became editor of the medical journal the Gazette de santé (1773 – 1789), a four-page weekly.
He was also known among natural scientists as a regular contributor to the Journal de physique.
He studied mathematics, translated medical works into French, and undertook botanical expeditions.
Above: Paris, France
At about this time he began to develop an intense interest in the study of mental illness.
The incentive was a personal one.
A friend had developed a ‘nervous melancholy’ that had ‘degenerated into mania’ and resulted in suicide.
Above: Le Suicidé, Édouard Manet (1877)
There never was night that had no morn.
(Dinah Craik, “The Golden Gate“, Mulock’s Poems, New and Old, 1888)
What Pinel regarded as an unnecessary tragedy due to gross mismanagement seems to have haunted him.
It led him to seek employment at one of the best-known private sanatoria for the treatment of insanity in Paris.
He remained there for five years prior to the Revolution, gathering observations on insanity and beginning to formulate his views on its nature and treatment.
Above: The Interior of Bedlam (Bethlem Royal Hospital), A Rake’s Progress, William Hogarth, 1763
Pinel was an Ideologue, a disciple of the Abbé de Condillac.
Above: French philosopher / Catholic priest Étienne Bonnot de Condillac (1714 – 1780)
He was also a clinician who believed that medical truth was derived from clinical experience.
Hippocrates was his model.
Above: Bust of Hippocrates (460 – 370 BC)
During the 1780s, Pinel was invited to join the salon of Madame Helvétius.
He was in sympathy with the French Revolution.
After the Revolution, friends he had met at Madame Helvétius’ salon came to power.
Above: Anne-Catherine de Ligniville Helvétius (1722 – 1800)
In August 1793 Pinel was appointed “physician of the infirmeries” at Bicêtre Hospital.
At the time it housed about 4,000 imprisoned men — criminals, petty offenders, syphilitics, pensioners and about 200 mental patients.
Pinel’s patrons hoped that his appointment would lead to therapeutic initiatives.
His experience at the private sanatoria made him a good candidate for the job.
Above: Main entrance of the Kremlin-Bicêtre hospital, Paris, France
But I don’t want to go among mad people,’ Alice remarked.
‘Oh, you can’t help that,’ said the Cat:
‘We’re all mad here. I’m mad. You’re mad.’
‘How do you know I’m mad?’ said Alice.
‘You must be,’ said the Cat, ‘or you wouldn’t have come here.’
(Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland)
Soon after his appointment to Bicêtre Hospital, Pinel became interested in the 7th ward where 200 mentally ill men were housed.
He asked for a report on these inmates.
A few days later, he received a table with comments from the “Governor” Jean-Baptiste Pussin (1746 – 1811).
In the 1770s Pussin had been successfully treated for scrofula (tuberculosis of the neck) at the Bicêtre.
Following a familiar pattern, he was eventually recruited, along with his wife, Marguerite Jubline, on to the staff of the hospice.
Above: Kremlin-Bicêtre Hospital, Paris, France
Appreciating Pussin’s outstanding talent, Pinel virtually apprenticed himself to that unschooled but experienced custodian of the insane.
His purpose in doing this was to “enrich the medical theory of mental illness with all the insights that the empirical approach affords“.
What he observed was a strict non-violent, non-medical management of mental patients that came to be called moral treatment or moral management, though psychological might be a more accurate term.
Above: Doctor Philippe Pinel with his wife Jeanne Vincent and his sons Scipion and Charles, Julie Forestier, 1807
I remember when
I remember, I remember when I lost my mind
There was something so pleasant about that place
Even your emotions have an echo in so much space
And when you’re out there without care
Yeah, I was out of touch
But it wasn’t because I didn’t know enough
I just knew too much
Does that make me crazy?
Does that make me crazy?
Does that make me crazy?
Possibly
And I hope that you are having the time of your life
But think twice, that’s my only advice
Come on now, who do you, who do you, who do you
Who do you think you are
Ha ha ha, bless your soul
You really think you’re in control
I think you’re crazy
I think you’re crazy
I think you’re crazy
Just like me
My heroes had the heart to lose their lives out on the limb
And all I remember is thinking I want to be like them
Ever since I was little
Ever since I was little it looked like fun
And it’s no coincidence I’ve come
And I can die when I’m done
But maybe I’m crazy
Maybe you’re crazy
Maybe we’re crazy
Probably
Happiness! Can any human being undertake to define it for another?
(Dinah Craik, A Woman’s Thoughts About Women, 1858)
Although Pinel always gave Pussin the credit he deserved, a legend grew up about Pinel single-handedly liberating the insane from their chains at Bicetre.
This legend has been commemorated in paintings and prints, and has lived on for 200 years and is repeated in textbooks.
In fact, it was Pussin who removed the iron shackles (but sometimes using straitjackets) at Bicêtre in 1797, after Pinel had left for the Salpêtrière.
Pinel did remove the chains from patients at the Salpêtrière three years later, after Pussin joined him there.
There is some suggestion that the Bicetre myth was actually deliberately fabricated by Pinel’s son, Dr Scipion Pinel, along with Pinel’s foremost pupil, Dr Esquirol.
The argument is that they were ‘solidists‘, which meant then something akin to biological psychiatry with a focus on brain disease, and were embarrassed by Pinel’s focus on psychological processes.
In addition, unlike Philippe, they were both royalists.
Above: French psychiatrist Philippe Pinel releasing lunatics from their chains at the Salpêtrière asylum in Paris in 1795
While at Bicêtre, Pinel did away with bleeding, purging, and blistering in favor of a therapy that involved close contact with and careful observation of patients.
Pinel visited each patient, often several times a day, and took careful notes over two years.
He engaged them in lengthy conversations.
His objective was to assemble a detailed case history and a natural history of the patient’s illness.
I fear, the inevitable conclusion we must all come to is, that in the world happiness is quite indefinable.
We can no more grasp it than we can grasp the sun in the sky or the moon in the water.
We can feel it interpenetrating our whole being with warmth and strength.
We can see it in a pale reflection shining elsewhere; or in its total absence, we, walking in darkness, learn to appreciate what it is by what it is not.
(Dinah Craik, A Woman’s Thoughts About Women, 1858)
In 1795, Pinel became chief physician of the Hospice de la Salpêtrière, a post that he retained for the rest of his life.
The Salpêtrière was, at the time, like a large village, with 7,000 elderly indigent and ailing women, an entrenched bureaucracy, a teeming market and huge infirmaries.
Pinel missed Pussin and in 1802 secured his transfer to the Salpêtrière.
It has also been noted that a Catholic nursing order actually undertook most of the day to day care and understanding of the patients at Salpêtrière, and there were sometimes power struggles between Pinel and the nurses.
Above: Engraving of the Hospital made around 1660 by Adam Pérelle
Pinel created an inoculation clinic in his service at the Salpêtrière in 1799.
The first vaccination in Paris was given there in April 1800.
In 1795 Pinel had also been appointed as a professor of medical pathology, a chair that he held for 20 years.
He was briefly dismissed from this position in 1822, with ten other professors, suspected of political liberalism, but reinstated as an honorary professor shortly thereafter.
A statue in honour of Pinel now stands outside the Salpêtrière.
Above: Mazarin entrance to the Pitié-Salpêtrière Hospital, Paris, France
In 1794 Pinel made public his essay ‘Memoir on Madness‘, recently called a fundamental text of modern psychiatry.
In it Pinel makes the case for the careful psychological study of individuals over time, points out that insanity isn’t always continuous, and calls for more humanitarian asylum practices.
In 1798 Pinel published an authoritative classification of diseases in his Nosographie philosophique ou méthode de l’analyse appliquée à la médecine.
Although he is properly considered one of the founders of psychiatry, this book also establishes him as the last great nosologist – (fully classifying a medical condition requires knowing its cause (and that there is only one cause), the effects it has on the body, the symptoms that are produced, and other factors) – of the 18th century.
While the Nosographie appears completely dated today, it was so popular in its time that it went through six editions between its initial publication and 1818.
Pinel based his nosology on ideas of William Cullen, employing the same biologically-inspired terminology of ‘genera‘ and ‘species‘ of disorder.
Pinel’s classification of mental disorder simplified Cullen’s ‘neuroses‘ down to four basic types of mental disorder: melancholia, mania (insanity), dementia, and idiotism.
Later editions added forms of ‘partial insanity‘ where only that of feelings which seem to be affected rather than reasoning ability.
The first mental derangement is called melancholia.
The symptoms are described as “taciturnity, a thoughtful pensive air, gloomy suspicions, and a love of solitude“.
Above: Physiognomy of the melancholic temperament (drawing by Thomas Holloway, c.1789, made for Johann Kaspar Lavater’s Essays on Physiognomy)
It is noted that Tiberius and Louis XI were subjected to this temperament.
Above: Bust of Roman Emperor Tiberius Julius Caesar Augustus (42 BC – AD 37), Musée Saint-Raymond, Toulouse, France
Louis was characterized by the imbalance between the state of bitterness and passion, gloom, love of solitude, and the embarrassment of artistic talents.
However, Louis and Tiberius were similar in that they both were deceitful and planned a delusional trip to military sites.
Eventually both were exiled, one to the Isle of Rhodes and the other to a province of Belgium.
Above: French King Louis XI (1423 – 1483)
People with melancholia are often immersed with one idea that their whole attention is fixated on.
On one hand they stay reserved for many years, withholding friendships and affection while on the other, there are some who make reasonable judgment and overcome the gloomy state.
Melancholia can also express itself in polar opposite forms.
The first is distinguished by an exalted sense of self-importance and unrealistic expectations such as attaining riches and power.
The second form is marked by deep despair and great depression.
Overall individuals with melancholia generally do not display acts of violence, though they may find it wildly fanciful.
Depression and anxiety occurs habitually as well as frequent moroseness of character.
Pinel remarks that melancholia can be explained by drunkenness, abnormalities in the structure of the skull, trauma in the skull, conditions of the skin, various psychological causes such as household disasters and religious extremism, and in women, menstruation and menopause.
The second mental derangement is called mania without delirium.
It is described as madness independent of a disorder that impairs the intellectual faculties.
The symptoms are described as perverse and disobedient.
An instance where this type of species of mental derangement occurs where a mechanic, who was confined at the Asylum de Bicetre, experienced violent outbursts of maniacal fury.
The paroxysms consisted of a burning sensation located in the abdominal area that was accompanied by constipation and thirst.
The symptom spread to the chest, neck and face area.
When it reached the temples, the pulsation of the arteries increased in those areas.
The brain was affected to some length but nonetheless, the patient was able to reason and cohere to his ideas.
One time the mechanic experienced furious paroxysm at his own house where he warned his wife to flee to avoid death.
He also experienced the same periodical fury at the asylum where he plotted against the governor.
The specific character of mania without delirium is that it can either be perpetual or sporadic.
However, there was no reasonable change in the cognitive functions of the brain.
Only perversive thoughts of fury and a blind tendency to acts of violence.
Above: Casa de locos, Francisco Goya (1812)
The third mental derangement is called mania with delirium.
It is mainly characterized by indulgence and fury, and affects cognitive functions.
Sometimes it may be distinguished by a carefree, gay humor that can venture off path in incoherent and absurd suggestions.
Other times it can be distinguished by prideful and imaginary claims to grandeur.
Prisoners of this species are highly delusional.
For example, they would proclaim having fought an important battle, or witness the prophet Mohammad conjuring wrath in the name of the Almighty.
Some declaim ceaselessly with no evidence of things seen or heard while others saw illusions of objects in various forms and colors.
Delirium sometimes persists with some degree of frenzied uproar for a period of years, but it can also be constant and the paroxysm of fury repeat at different intervals.
The specific character of mania with delirium is the same as mania without delirium in the sense that it can either be continued or cyclical with regular or irregular paroxysms.
It is marked by strong nervous excitement, accompanied by a deficit of one or more of the functions of the cognitive abilities with feelings of liveliness, depression or fury.
The fourth mental derangement is called dementia, or otherwise known as the abolition of thinking.
The characteristics include thoughtlessness, extreme incorrectness and wild abnormalities.
For instance, a man who had been educated on the ancient nobility was marching on about the beginning of the Revolution.
He moved restlessly about the house, talking endlessly and shouting passionately on insignificant reasons.
Dementia is usually accompanied by raging and rebellious movement, by a quick succession of ideas formed in the mind, and by passionate feelings that are felt and forgotten without attributing it to objects.
Those who are in captive of dementia have lost their memory, even those attributed to their loved ones.
Their only memory consists of those in the past.
They forget instantaneously things in the present – seen heard or done.
Many are irrational because the ideas do not flow coherently.
The characteristic properties of dementia are that there is no judgment value and the ideas are spontaneous with no connection.
The specific character of dementia contains a rapid progression or continual succession of isolated ideas, forgetfulness of previous condition, repetitive acts of exaggeration, decreased responsiveness to external influence, and complete lack of judgment.
Above: An old man diagnosed as suffering from senile dementia, Craiglockhart Poorhouse (Edinburgh), Colour lithograph, J. Williamson (1896)
The fifth and last mental derangement is called idiotism, or otherwise known as “obliteration of the intellectual faculties and affections“.
This disorder is derived from a variety of causes, such as extravagant and debilitating delight, alcohol abuse, deep sorrow, diligent study, aggressive blows to the head, tumors in the brain, and loss of consciousness due to blockage in vein or artery.
Idiotism embodies a variety of forms.
One such form is called Cretinism, which is a kind of idiotism that is relative to personal abnormalities.
Most people who belong in this group are either deficient in speech or limited to the inarticulate utterances of sounds.
Their expressions are emotionless, senses are dazed and motions are mechanical.
Idiots also constitute the largest number of patients at hospitals.
Individuals who have acute responsiveness can experience a violent shock to the extreme that all the activities of the brain can either be arrested in an action or eradicated completely.
Unexpected happiness and exaggerated fear may likely occur as a result of a violent shock.
As mentioned previously, idiotism is the most common among hospital patients and is incurable.
At the Bicetre asylum, these patients constitute 1/4 of the entire population.
Many die after a few days of arrival, having been reduced to states of stupor and weakness.
However, some who recover with the progressive regeneration of their strength also regain their intellectual capabilities.
Many of the young people that have remained in the state of idiotism for several months or years are attacked by a spasm of active mania between 20 and 30 days.
The specific character of idiotism includes partial or complete extermination of the intellect and affections, apathy, disconnected, inarticulate sounds or impairment of speech, and nonsensical outbursts of passion.
In his book Traité médico-philosophique sur l’aliénation mentale; ou la manie, published in 1801, Pinel discusses his psychologically oriented approach.
Pinel’s book had an enormous influence on both French and Anglo-American psychiatrists during the 19th century.
He meant by alienation that the patient feels like a stranger (alienus) to the world of the ‘sane‘.
A sympathetic therapist living in that world might be able to journey into the patient’s experience, understand the ‘alienated’, their language, and possibly lead them back into society.
In 1802 Pinel published La Médecine Clinique which was based on his experiences at the Salpêtrière and in which he extended his previous book on classification and disease.
Pinel was elected to the Académie des Sciences in 1804 and was a member of the Académie de Médecine from its founding in 1820.
He died in Paris on 25 October 1826.
The central and ubiquitous theme of Pinel’s approach to etiology (causation) and treatment was “moral“, meaning the emotional or the psychological not ethical.
He observed and documented the subtleties and nuances of human experience and behavior, conceiving of people as social animals with imagination.
Pinel noted, for example, that: “being held in esteem, having honour, dignity, wealth, fame, which though they may be factitious, always distressing and rarely fully satisfied, often give way to the overturning of reason“.
He spoke of avarice, pride, friendship, bigotry, the desire for reputation, for conquest, and vanity.
He noted that a state of love could turn to fury and desperation, and that sudden severe reversals in life, such as “from the pleasure of success to an overwhelming idea of failure, from a dignified state — or the belief that one occupies one — to a state of disgrace and being forgotten” can cause mania or ‘mental alienation‘.
He identified other predisposing psychosocial factors such as an unhappy love affair, domestic grief, devotion to a cause carried to the point of fanaticism, religious fear, the events of the Revolution, violent and unhappy passions, exalted ambitions of glory, financial reverses, religious ecstasy, and outbursts of patriotic fervor.
Above: The Sorrows of Young Werther, Johann Wolfgang Goethe, 1774 – The book reputedly also led to some of the first known examples of copycat suicide. The men were often dressed in the same clothing “as Goethe’s description of Werther and using similar pistols“. Often the book was found at the scene of the suicide.
Oh well uh, you might think I’m crazy
To hang around with you
Or maybe you think I’m lucky
To have somethin’ to do
But I think that you’re wild
Inside me is some child
You might think I’m foolish
Or maybe it’s untrue
(You might think) You might think I’m crazy
(All I want) All I want is you
You might think it’s hysterical
But I know when you’re weak
You think you’re in the movies
And everything’s so deep
But I think that you’re wild
When you flash that fragile smile
You might think it’s foolish
What you put me through
(You might think) You might think I’m crazy
(All I want) All I want is you
And it was hard, so hard to take (So hard to take)
There’s no escape (There’s no escape)
Without a scrape (Without a scrape)
But you kept it going, till the sun fell down
You kept it, going
Oh well uh, you might think I’m delirious
The way I run you down
But somewhere, sometimes
When you’re curious
I’ll be back around
Oh, I think that you’re wild
And so uniquely styled
You might think it’s foolish
This chancy rendezvous
(You might think I’m crazy) You might think I’m crazy
(All I want is you) All I want is you, ah-oo
All I want is you (All I want is you)
All I want is you
See if you can catch yourself complaining, in either speech or thought, about a situation you find yourself in, what other people do or say, your surroundings, your life situation, even the weather.
To complain is always non-acceptance of what is.
It invariably carries an unconscious negative charge.
When you complain, you make yourself into a victim.
When you speak out, you are in your power.
So change the situation by taking action or by speaking out if necessary or possible; leave the situation or accept it.
All else is madness.
(Eckhart Tolle, The Power of Now)
Pinel developed specific practical techniques, rather than general concepts and assumptions.
He engaged in therapeutic conversations to dissuade patients from delusions.
He offered benevolent support and encouragement, although patients who persistently resisted or caused trouble might be threatened with incarceration or punishment if they were not able to control themselves.
Pinel argued that psychological intervention must be tailored to each individual rather than be based solely on the diagnostic category, and that it must be grounded in an understanding of the person’s own perspective and history.
He noted that “the treatment of insanity (l’aliénation mentale) without considering the differentiating characteristics of the patients [la distinction des espèces] has been at times superfluous, rarely useful, and often harmful“, describing the partial or complete failures of some psychological approaches, as well as the harm that the usual cruel and harsh treatments caused to patients before they came to his hospital.
He saw improvement as often resulting from natural forces within the patient, an improvement that treatment could at best facilitate and at worst interfere with.
Pinel’s approach to medical treatments has been described as ambiguous, complex and ambivalent.
He insisted that psychological techniques should always be tried first, for example “even where a violent and destructive maniac could be calmed by a single dose of an antispasmodic [he referred to opium], observation teaches that in a great number of cases, one can obtain a sure and permanent cure by the sole method of expectation, leaving the insane man to his tumultuous excitement.
Furthermore seeing, again and again, the unexpected resources of nature left to itself or wisely guided, has rendered me more and more cautious with regard to the use of medications, which I no longer employ—except when the insufficiencies of psychological means have been proven.”
Above: Opium pod cut to demonstrate fluid extraction
For those cases regarded as psychologically incurable, Pinel would employ baths, showers, opium, camphor and other antispasmodics, as well as vesicants (blister agent), cauterization (burn off or burn closed), and bloodletting in certain limited cases only.
Above: Camphor cubes
Above: A Canadian soldier with mustard gas burns, 1916
Above: Hot cauters were applied to tissues or arteries to stop them from bleeding.
Above: Bloodletting, one of only three known photographs (tintype) of the procedure.
He also recommended the use of laxatives for the prevention of nervous excitement and relapse.
Above: Glycerin suppositories used as laxatives
Pinel often traced mental states to physiological states of the body, and in fact could be said to have practiced psychosomatic medicine.
Above: Oil painting depicting French physiologist Claude Bernard (1813 – 1878), the father of modern physiology, with his pupils
In general, Pinel traced organic causes to the gastrointestinal system and peripheral nervous system more often than to brain dysfunction.
Above: The gastrointestinal tract, also called the digestive tract, alimentary canal, or gut, is the system of organs within multicellular animals that takes in food, digests it to extract energy and nutrients, and expels the remaining waste.
Above: A diagram of the human nervous system
This was consistent with his rarely finding gross brain pathology (the study of disease and injury) in his post-mortem examinations of psychiatric patients, and his view that such findings that were reported could be correlational rather than causative.
Above: Pathologists looking into microscopes, National Cancer Institute, 1980
Pinel was concerned with a balance between control by authority and individual liberty.
He believed in “the art of subjugating and taming the insane” and the effectiveness of “a type of apparatus of fear, of firm and consistent opposition to their dominating and stubbornly held ideas“, but that it must be proportional and motivated only by a desire to keep order and to bring people back to themselves.
The straitjacket and a period of seclusion were the only sanctioned punishments.
Above: A straitjacket as seen from the rear
Based on his observations, he believed that those who were considered most dangerous and carried away by their ideas had often been made so by the blows and bad treatment they had received, and that it could be ameliorated by providing space, kindness, consolation, hope and humour.
Because of the dangers and frustrations that attendants experienced in their work, Pinel put great emphasis on the selection and supervision of attendants in order to establish a custodial setting dedicated to norms of constraint and liberty that would facilitate psychological work.
He recommended that recovered patients be employed, arguing that:
“They are the ones who are most likely to refrain from all inhumane treatment, who will not strike even in retaliation, who can stand up to pleading, menaces, repetitive complaining, etc. and retain their inflexible firmness.”
Pinel also emphasized the necessity for leadership that was “thoughtful, philanthropic, courageous, physically imposing, and inventive in the development of maneuvers or tactics to distract, mollify, and impress” and “devoted to the concept of order without violence“, so that patients are “led most often with kindness, but always with an inflexible firmness“.
He noted that his ex-patient and superintendent Pussin had showed him the way in this regard, and had also often been better placed to work with patients and develop techniques due to his greater experience and detailed knowledge of the patients as individuals.
Pinel generally expressed warm feelings and respect for his patients, as exemplified by:
“I cannot but give enthusiastic witness to their moral qualities.
Never, except in romances, have I seen spouses more worthy to be cherished, more tender fathers, passionate lovers, purer or more magnanimous patriots, than I have seen in hospitals for the insane, in their intervals of reasonableness and calm; a man of sensibility may go there any day and take pleasure in scenes of compassion and tenderness“.
He argued that otherwise positive character traits could cause a person to be vulnerable to the distressing vicissitudes of life, for example “those persons endowed with a warmth of imagination and a depth of sensitivity, who are capable of experiencing powerful and intense emotions, since it is they who are most predisposed to mania“.
Pinel distanced himself from religious views, and in fact considered that excessive religiosity could be harmful.
However, he sometimes took a moral stance himself as to what he considered to be mentally healthy and socially appropriate.
Moreover, he sometimes showed a condemnatory tone toward what he considered personal failings or vice, for example noting in 1809:
“On one side one sees families which thrive over a course of many years, in the bosom of order and concord, on the other one sees many others, especially in the lower social classes, who offend the eye with the repulsive picture of debauchery, arguments and shameful distress!“
He goes on to describe this as the most prolific source of alienation needing treatment, adding that while some such examples were a credit to the human race, many others are “a disgrace to humanity“.
Pinel is generally seen as the physician who more than any other transformed the concept of ‘the mad‘ into that of patients needing care and understanding, establishing a field that would eventually be called psychiatry.
His legacy included improvement of asylum conditions, broadly psychosocial (including milieu) therapeutic approaches, history-taking, nosography (the science of the description of syndromes), broadly-numerical assessments of courses of illness and treatment responses, and a record of clinical teaching.
I woke up this morning with the sundown shining in
I found my mind in a brown paper bag within
I tripped on a cloud and fell-a eight miles high
I tore my mind on a jagged sky
I just dropped in to see what condition my condition was in
Yeah, yeah, oh-yeah, what condition my condition was in
I pushed my soul in a deep dark hole and then I followed it in
I watched myself crawling out as I was a-crawling in
I got up so tight I couldn’t unwind
I saw so much I broke my mind
I just dropped in to see what condition my condition was in
Yeah, yeah, oh-yeah, what condition my condition was in
Someone painted April Fool in big black letters on a Dead End sign
I had my foot on the gas as I left the road and blew out my mind
Eight miles outta Memphis and I got no spare
Eight miles straight up downtown somewhere
I just dropped in to see what condition my condition was in
I said I just dropped in to see what condition my condition was in
Yeah
yeah
oh-yeah
Pinel’s most important contribution may have been the observation and conviction that there could be sanity and rationality even in cases that seemed on the surface impossible to understand, and that this could appear for periods in response to surrounding events (and not just because of such things as the phase of the moon, a still common assumption and the origin of the term lunatic).
The influential philosopher Hegel praised Pinel for this approach:
“The right psychical treatment therefore keeps in view the truth that insanity is not an abstract loss of reason (neither in the point of intelligence nor of will and its responsibility), but only derangement, only a contradiction in a still subsisting reason.
Just as physical disease is not an abstract, i.e. mere and total, loss of health (if it were that, it would be death), but a contradiction in it.
This humane treatment, no less benevolent than reasonable (the services of Pinel towards which deserve the highest acknowledgement), presupposes the patient’s rationality, and in that assumption has the sound basis for dealing with him on this side.
Just as in the case of bodily disease the physician bases his treatment on the vitality which as such still contains health.“
Above: German philosopher Georg Friedrich Wilhelm Hegel (1770 – 1831)
With increasing industrialization, asylums generally became overcrowded, misused, isolated and run-down.
The moral treatment principles were often neglected along with the patients.
There was recurrent debate over the use of psychological – social oppression even if some physical forces were removed.
By the mid-19th century in England, the Alleged Lunatics’ Friend Society was proclaiming the moral treatment approach was achieved “by mildness and coaxing, and by solitary confinement“, treating people like children without rights to make their own decisions.
The irrevocable Hand
That opes the year’s fair gate, doth ope and shut
The portals of our earthly destinies;
We walk through blindfold, and the noiseless doors
Close after us, for ever.
Pause, my soul,
On these strange words — for ever — whose large sound
Breaks flood-like, drowning all the petty noise
Our human moans make on the shores of Time.
O Thou that openest, and no man shuts;
That shut’st, and no man opens — Thee we wait!
(Dinah Craik, “April“, Poems)
I have witnessed instances of human behaviour I cannot comprehend.
Nevertheless, taking life as a whole, believing that it consists not in what we have, but in our power of enjoying the same.
That there are in it things nobler and dearer than ease, plenty, or freedom from care — nay, even than existence itself.
Surely it is not Quixotism, but common sense and Christianity, to protest that love is better than outside show, labour than indolence, virtue than mere respectability.
(Dinah Craik, A Woman’s Thoughts About Women, 1858)
Above: Don Quixote de la Mancha and Sancho Panza, Gustave Doré, 1863
As a boy I worked on a farm with a solitary man and his deaf mute sister.
Next to the farm, in a clearing set back from the highway, was a friendly man, an elderly man, living in an old school bus heated by a woodstove, who one evening in a drunken rage killed his visiting drunk companion.
During my time living in Montréal, I knew a woman who accidentally burnt down her room, including its feline occupants, and was relegated to an asylum, and in the same hotel a businessman by day and transvestite by night, he became she but was nonetheless heterosexual.
Above: Images of Montréal, Québec, Canada
We have not to construct human nature afresh, but to take it as we find it, and make the best of it.
(Dinah Craik, A Woman’s Thoughts About Women, 1858)
During my hitchhiking days as a young man in his 20s I found myself on the wrong side of the law, a story I have told in previous posts.
I remember seeing a man, thin, emaciated, wrestle several guards successfully until after much effort he was strapped to a gurney.
His violence filled my eyes, ears and mind with fear and astonishment.
Nearly all men are afraid, and they don’t even know what causes their fear — shadows, perplexities, dangers without names or numbers, fear of a faceless death.
But if you can bring yourself to face not shadows but real death, then you need never be afraid again, at least not in the same way you were before.
Then you will be a man set apart from other men, safe where other men may cry in terror.
This is the great reward.
(John Steinbeck, East of Eden)
I worked as a security guard at a hospital in Ottawa and would be occasionally assigned suicide watch, which meant spending nights in the room of a sleeping patient, hoping I would never have to deal with the patient if he / she awoke.
I sympathize with the desire for pain, physical or psychological, to end, but I know not how to convince someone in this extreme that Life might be worth living if only they persist.
Truth be told, I was unresolved as to whether stopping them from self-harm was more for their benefit or more for mine.
There is no sorrow under Heaven which is, or ought to be, endless.
To believe or to make it so, is an insult to Heaven itself.
(Dinah Craik, A Woman’s Thoughts About Women, 1858)
During my travels I recall how the behaviour of a woman traveller towards me and other male guests at a youth hostel caused a male friend to react in such a manner that he was taken from there to an asylum.
It is not the smallest use to try to make people good, unless you try at the same time — and they feel that you are trying — to make them happy.
And you rarely can make another happy, unless you are happy yourself.
(Dinah Craik, A Woman’s Thoughts About Women, 1858)
I know a man who fled from the treatment he desperately needed and yet years later has found peace of mind despite his difficulties with interacting with the world.
Mad, adj.
Affected with a high degree of intellectual independence; not conforming to standards of thought, speech, and action derived by the conformants from study of themselves; at odds with the majority; in short, unusual.
It is noteworthy that persons are pronounced mad by officials destitute of evidence that they themselves are sane.
(Ambrose Bierce, The Devil’s Dictionary)
I know a woman who spends her days playing video games and will interact with the world only after much pressure and discussion.
In utter loneliness a writer tries to explain the inexplicable.
(John Steinbeck)
Above: American writer John Steinbeck
I don’t understand many things that many people do.
I try not to condemn (nor condone) their behaviour, but I cannot deny the discomfort I feel when I find myself around incomprehensible people.
I know not how to help them nor do I know how to handle the emotions that overwhelm me at my helplessness.
“I am but as others:
I am but what I was born to be.“
“Do you recognize what you were born to be?
Not only a nobleman, but a gentleman; not only a gentleman, but a man — man, made in the image of God.
How can you, how dare you, give the lie to your Creator?“
“What has He given me?
What have I to thank Him for?“
“First, manhood.
The manhood His Son disdained not to wear.
Worldly gifts, such as rank, riches, influence, things which others have to spend half an existence in earning.
Life in its best prime, with much of youth yet remaining — with grief endured, wisdom learnt, experience won.
Would to Heaven, that by any poor word of mine I could make you feel all that you are — all that you might be!“
A gleam, bright as a boy’s hope, wild as a boy’s daring, flashed from those listless eyes — then faded.
“You mean, Mr. Halifax, what I might have been.
Now it is too late.“
“There is no such word as ‘too late,’ in the wide world — nay, not in the universe.
What!
Shall we, whose atom of time is but a fragment out of an ever-present eternity — Shall we, so long as we live, or even at our life’s ending, dare to cry out to the Eternal One, ‘It is too late!’?”
(Dinah Craik, John Halifax, Gentleman, 1857)
Just earlier this month, my wife and I visited a İstanbul mosque and its adjacent cemetery accessed by rounding a corner surrounded by walls.
As we round the corner, I catch a glance of a young man who suddenly strikes me across the face.
My wife tells me that it is not his fault, that he has a physiological / psychological problem.
I must not strike him back.
I follow her counsel but I find myself asking should there not be consequences to his act of striking me?
Where do we draw the line between responsibility for one’s acts and the need to be compassionate to those who are unwell in this regard?
Above: İstanbul, Türkiye
“Believe only half of what you see, and nothing that you hear,” is a cynical saying, and yet less bitter than at first appears.
It does not argue that human nature is false, but simply that it is human nature.
How can any fallible human being with two eyes, two ears, one judgment, and one brain — all more or less limited in their apprehensions of things external, and biased by a thousand internal impressions, purely individual — how can we possibly decide on even the plainest actions of another, to say nothing of the words, which may have gone through half-a-dozen different translations and modifications, or the motives, which can only be known to the Omniscient Himself?
(Dinah Craik, A Woman’s Thoughts About Women, 1858)
And what of those who lead men despite their own irrational behaviour?
I think of Napoleon III.
Napoléon III (né Charles-Louis Napoléon Bonaparte) (20 April 1808 – 1873) was the first President of France from 1848 to 1852, and the last monarch of France as Emperor of the French from 1852 until he was deposed in absentia on 4 September 1870.
Prior to his reign, Napoléon III was known as Louis Napoléon Bonaparte.
Above: Napoléon III
He was born in Paris as the son of Louis Bonaparte, King of Holland (1806–1810), and his wife, Hortense de Beauharnais.
Above: Louis Bonaparte, King of Holland (1778–1846), the younger brother of Napoléon Bonaparte and father of Napoléon III
Above: Hortense de Beauharnais (1783–1837), mother of Napoléon III
Napoléon I was Louis Napoléon’s paternal uncle.
Above: French Emperor Napoléon I (1769 – 1821)
One of his cousins was the disputed Napoléon II.
Above: Napoléon II (1811 – 1832)
Louis Napoléon was the first and only President of the French Second Republic, elected in 1848.
Above: Emblem of the French Republic
He seized power by force in 1851 when he could not constitutionally be reelected.
He later proclaimed himself Emperor of the French and founded the Second Empire, reigning until the defeat of the French Army and his capture by Prussia and its allies at the Battle of Sedan in 1870.
Above: Napoléon III at the Battle of Sedan, 1 – 2 September 1870
Napoléon III was a popular monarch who oversaw the modernization of the French economy and filled Paris with new boulevards and parks.
He expanded the French colonial empire, made the French merchant navy the 2nd largest in the world, and personally engaged in two wars.
Maintaining leadership for 22 years, he was the longest-reigning leader of France since the fall of the Ancien Régime, although his reign would ultimately end on the battlefield.
Napoléon III commissioned a grand reconstruction of Paris carried out by Prefect of the Seine, Baron Georges-Eugène Haussmann.
Above: Baron Georges Eugène Haussmann (1809 – 1891)
He expanded and consolidated the railway system throughout the nation and modernized the banking system.
Napoléon promoted the building of the Suez Canal and established modern agriculture, which ended famines in France and made the country an agricultural exporter.
Above: The Suez Canal, Egypt from space
He negotiated the 1860 Cobden–Chevalier Free Trade Agreement with Britain and similar agreements with France’s other European trading partners.
Above: British Prime Minister Lord Palmerston addressing the House of Commons during the debates on the treaty with France, 1860
Social reforms included giving French workers the right to strike, the right to organize, and the right for women to be admitted to a French university.
Above: Flag of France
In foreign policy, Napoléon III aimed to reassert French influence in Europe and around the world.
In Europe, he allied with Britain and defeated Russia in the Crimean War (1853 – 1856).
Above: The Attack on the Malakoff by William Simpson. Print shows the French assault on the Malakoff, the main Russian fortification before Sevastopol, on 7 September 1855. French soldiers advance from the left, Zouaves from the left foreground, crossing the ditch and engaging Russian soldiers in hand-to-hand combat on the right.
His regime assisted Italian unification by defeating the Austrian Empire in the Second Italian War of Independence and later annexed Savoy and Nice through the Treaty of Turin as its deferred reward.
At the same time, his forces defended the Papal States against annexation by Italy.
Above: Napoléon III at the Battle of Solferino, 24 June 1859
He was also favourable towards the 1859 union of the Danubian Principalities, which resulted in the establishment of the United Principalities of Moldavia and Wallachia.
Above: Flag of the United Principalities (1862 – 1866)
Napoleon doubled the area of the French colonial empire with expansions in Asia, the Pacific, and Africa.
Above: Map of the Second French Empire
On the other hand, the intervention in Mexico, which aimed to create a Second Mexican Empire under French protection, ended in total failure.
Above: Flag of the Second Mexican Empire (1863 – 1867)
From 1866, Napoléon had to face the mounting power of Prussia as its minister President Otto von Bismarck sought German unification under Prussian leadership.
In July 1870, Napoléon reluctantly declared war on Prussia after pressure from the general public.
The French Army was rapidly defeated.
Napoléon was captured at Sedan.
Above: German Chancellor Otto von Bismarck (1815 – 1898)
He was swiftly dethroned and the Third Republic was proclaimed in Paris.
After he was released from German custody, he went into exile in England, where he died in 1873.
Above: The last photograph of Napoléon III (1872)
Charles-Louis Napoléon Bonaparte, later known as Louis Napoléon and then Napoléon III, was born in Paris on the night of 20 April 1808.
All members of the Bonaparte dynasty were forced into exile after the defeat of Napoléon I at the Battle of Waterloo and the Bourbon Restoration of monarchy in France.
Above: The Battle of Waterloo, 18 June 1815
Hortense and Louis Napoléon moved from Aix to Bern to Baden, and finally to a lakeside house at Arenenberg in the Swiss canton of Thurgau.
Above: The lakeside house at Arenenberg, Switzerland, where Louis Napoleon spent much of his youth and exile – Castle Arenenberg with Napoléon Museum, in Salenstein (Canton Thurgau), Switzerland
During the decade I lived in Thurgau, before I came to Türkiye to teach, I visited his Arenenberg home on at least three occasions.
Above: Arenenberg, 1840
He received some of his education in Germany at the gymnasium school at Augsburg, Bavaria.
As a result, for the rest of his life, his French had a slight but noticeable German accent.
Above: Augsburg, Bayern – Marktplatz
When Louis Napoléon was 15, his mother Hortense moved to Rome, where the Bonapartes had a villa.
He passed his time learning Italian, exploring the ancient ruins and learning the arts of seduction and romantic affairs, which he used often in his later life.
Above: Roma, Italia
He was reunited with his older brother Napoléon-Louis.
Together they became involved with the Carbonari, secret revolutionary societies fighting Austria’s domination of northern Italy.
In the spring of 1831, when Louis Napoléon was 23, the Austrian and Papal governments launched an offensive against the Carbonari.
The two brothers, wanted by the police, were forced to flee.
During their flight, Napoléon-Louis contracted measles.
He died in his brother’s arms on 17 March 1831.
Above: Napoléon Louis Bonaparte (1804 – 1831)
Hortense joined Louis Napoléon and together they evaded the police and Austrian army and finally reached the French border.
Hortense and Louis Napoleon travelled incognito to Paris, where the old regime of King Charles X had just fallen and been replaced by the more liberal regime of Louis Philippe I, the sole monarch of the July Monarchy.
Above: French King Charles X (1757 – 1836)
Above: French King Louis Philippe I (1773 – 1850)
They arrived in Paris on 23 April 1831, and took up residence under the name “Hamilton” in the Hotel du Holland on Place Vendôme.
Above: Place Vendôme, Paris, France
Hortense wrote an appeal to the King, asking to stay in France.
Louis Napoléon offered to volunteer as an ordinary soldier in the French Army.
The new king agreed to meet secretly with Hortense.
Louis Napoléon had a fever and did not join them.
The King finally agreed that Hortense and Louis Napoléon could stay in Paris as long as their stay was brief and incognito.
Louis-Napoléon was told that he could join the French Army if he would simply change his name, something he indignantly refused to do.
Hortense and Louis Napoléon remained in Paris until 5 May, the 10th anniversary of the death of Napoléon I.
The presence of Hortense and Louis Napoleon in the Hotel had become known, and a public demonstration of mourning for the Emperor took place on Place Vendôme in front of their hotel.
The same day, Hortense and Louis Napoleon were ordered to leave Paris.
During their brief stay in Paris, Louis Napoléon had become convinced that Bonapartist sentiment was still strong among the French people and the army.
Above: Logo of the French Army
They went to Britain briefly, and then back into exile in Switzerland.
In exile with his mother in Switzerland, Louis Napoleon enrolled in the Swiss Army, trained to become an officer, and wrote a manual of artillery (his uncle Napoleon had become famous as an artillery officer).
Above: Logo of the Swiss Army
Louis Napoléon also began writing about his political philosophy.
“I believe“, wrote Louis Napoléon, “that from time to time, men are created whom I call volunteers of providence, in whose hands are placed the destiny of their countries.
I believe I am one of those men.
If I am wrong, I can perish uselessly.
If I am right, then Providence will put me into a position to fulfill my mission.”
He had seen the popular enthusiasm for Napoléon Bonaparte when he was in Paris.
He was convinced that, if he marched to Paris, as Napoléon Bonaparte had done in 1815 during the Hundred Days, France would rise up and join him.
He began to plan a coup against King Louis-Philippe.
He planned for his uprising to begin in Strasbourg.
The colonel of a regiment was brought over to the cause.
On 29 October 1836, Louis Napoleon arrived in Strasbourg, in the uniform of an artillery officer.
He rallied the regiment to his side.
The Prefecture was seized and the Prefect arrested.
Above: Louis Napoléon launching his failed coup in Strasbourg in 1836
Unfortunately for Louis-Napoléon, the general commanding the garrison escaped and called in a loyal regiment, which surrounded the mutineers.
The mutineers surrendered and Louis-Napoleon fled back to Switzerland.
Above: Louis Napoléon at the time of his failed coup in 1836
Louis Napoleon was widely popular in exile and his popularity in France continuously grew after his failed coup in 1836 as it established him as heir to the Bonaparte legend and increased his publicity.
King Louis Philippe had demanded that the Swiss government return Louis Napoléon to France, but the Swiss pointed out that he was a Swiss soldier and citizen and refused to hand him over.
The King responded by sending an army to the Swiss border.
Louis Napoléon thanked his Swiss hosts, and voluntarily left the country.
Above: Flag of Switzerland
The other mutineers were put on trial in Alsace and were all acquitted.
Above: Flag of Alsace
Louis Napoléon travelled first to London, then to Brazil, and then to New York City.
He met the elite of New York society.
While he was travelling to see more of the United States, he received word that his mother was very ill.
He hurried as quickly as he could back to Switzerland.
He reached Arenenberg in time to be with his mother on 5 August 1837, when she died.
Above: Hortense de Beauharnais
Louis Napoleon returned to London for a new period of exile in October 1838.
He had inherited a large fortune from his mother and took a house with 17 servants and several of his old friends and fellow conspirators.
He was received by London society and met the political and scientific leaders of the day.
Above: London, England
Living in the comfort of London, he had not given up the dream of returning to France to seize power.
In the summer of 1840 he bought weapons and uniforms and had proclamations printed, gathered a contingent of about 60 armed men, hired a ship called the Edinburgh Castle, and on 6 August 1840, sailed across the Channel to the port of Boulogne.
The attempted coup turned into an even greater fiasco than the Strasbourg mutiny.
The mutineers were stopped by the customs agents, the soldiers of the garrison refused to join, the mutineers were surrounded on the beach, one was killed and the others arrested.
Both the British and French press heaped ridicule on Louis-Napoléon and his plot.
Above: Tentative de Boulogne, 6 August 1840
The newspaper Le Journal des Débats wrote:
“This surpasses comedy.
One doesn’t kill crazy people, one just locks them up.”
Above: Boulogne sur Mer, France
He was put on trial, where, despite an eloquent defense of his cause, he was sentenced to life in prison in the fortress of Ham in the Somme department of northern France.
Above: Château de Ham, Somme, France
While in prison, Louis Napoléon wrote poems, political essays, and articles on diverse topics.
Above: The room in the fortress of Ham where Louis Napoleon studied, wrote, and conducted scientific experiments. He later often referred to what he had learned at “the University of Ham“.
He contributed articles to regional newspapers and magazines in towns all over France, becoming quite well known as a writer.
His most famous book was L’extinction du pauperisme (1844), a study of the causes of poverty in the French industrial working class, with proposals to eliminate it.
His conclusion:
“The working class has nothing, it is necessary to give them ownership.
They have no other wealth than their own labour, it is necessary to give them work that will benefit all.
They are without organization and without connections, without rights and without a future.
It is necessary to give them rights and a future and to raise them in their own eyes by association, education, and discipline.”
He proposed various practical ideas for creating a banking and savings system that would provide credit to the working class, and to establish agricultural colonies similar to the kibbutzim later founded in Israel.
This book was widely reprinted and circulated in France, and played an important part in his future electoral success.
Louis Napoléon was busy in prison, but also unhappy and impatient.
He was aware that the popularity of his uncle was steadily increasing in France.
Napoléon I was the subject of heroic poems, books and plays.
Huge crowds had gathered in Paris on 15 December 1840 when the remains of Napoléon were returned with great ceremony to Paris and handed over to King Louis Philippe, while Louis Napoléon could only read about it in prison.
Above: The tomb of Napoléon I, Les Invalides, Paris, France
On 25 May 1846, with the assistance of his doctor and other friends on the outside, he disguised himself as a labourer carrying lumber, and walked out of the prison.
His enemies later derisively called him “Badinguet“, the name of the labourer whose identity he had assumed.
Above: The escape from Château Ham, 25 May 1846
A carriage was waiting to take him to the coast and then by boat to England.
A month after his escape, his father Louis died, making Charles Napoléon the clear heir to the Bonaparte dynasty.
Above: Louis Bonaparte with his second son, Napoléon Louis Bonaparte
Louis Napoléon quickly resumed his place in British society.
In February 1848, Louis Napoléon learned that the French Revolution of 1848 had broken out.
Louis Philippe, faced with opposition within his government and army, abdicated.
Believing that his time had finally come, he set out for Paris on 27 February, departing England on the same day that Louis-Philippe left France for his own exile in England.
Above: The Revolution of 22 – 24 February 1848
When he arrived in Paris, he found that the Second Republic had been declared, led by a Provisional Government headed by a Commission led by Alphonse de Lamartine, and that different factions of republicans, from conservatives to those on the far left, were competing for power.
He wrote to Lamartine announcing his arrival, saying that he “was without any other ambition than that of serving my country“.
Lamartine wrote back politely but firmly, asking Louis-Napoléon to leave Paris “until the city is more calm, and not before the elections for the National Assembly“.
Above: French writer / statesman Alphonse de Lamartine (1790 – 1869)
His close advisors urged him to stay and try to take power, but he wanted to show his prudence and loyalty to the Republic.
While his advisors remained in Paris, he returned to London on 2 March 1848 and watched events from there.
Louis Napoléon’s absence from Paris meant that he was not connected either with the uprising or with the brutal repression that had followed.
Above: Barricades on rue Saint-Maur, Paris, 25 June 1848. These are the first barricades ever photographed.
Louis Napoléon established his campaign headquarters and residence at the Hôtel du Rhin on Place Vendôme.
He was accompanied by his companion, Harriet Howard, who gave him a large loan to help finance his campaign.
Above: English mistress and financial backer of Napoléon III, Harriet Howard (née Elizabeth Ann Haryett) (1823 – 1865)
He rarely went to the sessions of the National Assembly and rarely voted.
He was not a gifted orator.
He spoke slowly, in a monotone, with a slight German accent from his Swiss education.
His opponents sometimes ridiculed him, one comparing him to “a turkey who believes he’s an eagle“.
Above: Louis Napoléon as a member of the National Assembly in 1848. He spoke rarely in the Assembly, but, because of his name, had enormous popularity in the country.
Louis Napoleon’s campaign appealed to both the left and right.
His election manifesto proclaimed his support for “religion, family, property, the eternal basis of all social order“.
But it also announced his intent “to give work to those unoccupied; to look out for the old age of the workers; to introduce in industrial laws those improvements which do not ruin the rich, but which bring about the well-being of each and the prosperity of all“.
The elections were held on 10 – 11 December.
Results were announced on 20 December.
Louis Napoleon was widely expected to win, but the size of his victory surprised almost everyone.
Above: Louis Napoléon captured 74.2% of votes cast in the first French direct presidential elections in 1848.
According to the Constitution of 1848, Louis Napoleon had to step down at the end of his term.
He sought a constitutional amendment to allow him to succeed himself, arguing that four years were not enough to fully implement his political and economic program.
He toured the country and gained support from many of the regional governments and many within the Assembly.
The vote in July 1851 was short of the two-thirds majority needed to amend the constitution.
Louis Napoleon believed that he was supported by the people.
He decided to retain power by other means.
There is no great genius without some touch of madness.
(Seneca, On Tranquillity of the Mind)
Above: Modern statue of Roman Stoic philosopher Seneca (4 BC – AD 65) in Córdoba, Spain
His half-brother Charles, Duc de Morny, and a few close advisors quietly began to organise a coup d’état.
Above: Charles de Morny (1811 – 1865)
On the night of 1 – 2 December 1851, Minister of War Leroy de Saint Arnaud’s soldiers quietly occupied the national printing office, the Palais Bourbon, newspaper offices, and the strategic points in the city.
In the morning, Parisians found posters around the city announcing the dissolution of the National Assembly, the restoration of universal suffrage, new elections, and a state of siege in Paris and the surrounding departments.
Sixteen members of the National Assembly were arrested in their homes.
When about 220 deputies of the moderate right gathered at the city hall of the 10th Arrondissement, they were also arrested.
Above: French Marshall Jacques Leroy de Saint Arnaud (1798 – 1854)
On 3 December 1851, writer Victor Hugo and a few other republicans tried to organize an opposition to the coup.
A few barricades appeared, and about 1,000 insurgents came out in the streets, but the army moved in force with 30,000 troops and the uprisings were swiftly crushed, with the killing of an estimated 300 to 400 opponents of the coup.
There were also small uprisings in the more militant red republican towns in the south and center of France, but these were all put down by 10 December 1851.
Above: Caricature of French writer Victor Hugo (1802 – 1885). Hugo supported Louis Napoléon in the election for President, but after the coup d’état went into exile and became his most relentless and eloquent enemy.
Louis Napoléon followed the self-coup by a period of repression of his opponents, aimed mostly at the red republicans.
About 26,000 people were arrested, including 4,000 in Paris alone.
Above: Cavalry of General d’Allonville in Paris, 2 December 1851. Three to four hundred people were killed in street fighting after the coup d’état.
The 239 inmates who were judged most severely were sent to the penal colony in Cayenne.
9,530 followers were sent to French Algeria, 1,500 were expelled from France, and another 3,000 were given forced residence away from their homes.
Soon afterwards, a commission of revision freed 3,500 of those sentenced.
In 1859, the remaining 1,800 prisoners and exiles were amnestied, with the exception of the republican leader Ledru-Rollin, who was released from prison but required to leave the country.
Above: French revolutionary / lawyer Alexandre Auguste Ledru-Rollin (1807 – 1874)
Strict press censorship was enacted by a decree from 17 February 1852.
No newspaper dealing with political or social questions could be published without the permission of the government, fines were increased, and the list of press offenses was expanded.
After three warnings, a newspaper or journal could be suspended or even permanently closed.
Louis Napoléon wished to demonstrate that his new government had a broad popular mandate.
The fairness and legality of the referendum was immediately questioned by Louis Napoléon’s critics, but Louis Napoléon was convinced that he had been given a public mandate to rule.
Despite now holding all governing power in the nation, Louis Napoléon was not content with being an authoritarian president.
The ink had barely dried on the new and severely authoritarian constitution when he set about making himself Emperor.
Above: Napoléon III
In Bordeaux, on 9 October 1852, he gave his principal speech:
“Some people say the Empire is war. I say the Empire is peace.
Like the Emperor I have many conquests to make.
Like him I wish to draw into the stream of the great popular river those hostile side-currents which lose themselves without profit to anyone.
We have immense unplowed territories to cultivate, roads to open, ports to dig, rivers to be made navigable, canals to finish, a railway network to complete.
We have, in front of Marseille, a vast kingdom to assimilate into France.
We have all the great ports of the west to connect with the American continent by modern communications, which we still lack.
We have ruins to repair, false gods to tear down, truths which we need to make triumph.
This is how I see the Empire, if the Empire is re-established.
These are the conquests I am considering, and you around me, who, like me, want the good of our country, you are my soldiers.“
Above: The Prince-President in 1852, after the coup d’état
When Louis Napoléon returned to Paris the city was decorated with large arches, with banners proclaiming:
“To Napoléon III, Emperor“.
In response to officially inspired requests for the return of the empire, the Senate scheduled another referendum for 21–22 November 1852 on whether to make Napoléon Emperor.
After an implausible 97% voted in favour, on 2 December 1852 — exactly one year after the coup — the Second Republic was officially ended, replaced by the Second French Empire.
Prince-President Louis Napoléon Bonaparte became Napoléon III, Emperor of the French.
His regnal name treats Napoléon II, who never actually ruled, as a true Emperor.
(He had been briefly recognized as emperor from 22 June to 7 July 1815).
The 1852 constitution was retained.
It concentrated so much power in Napoléon’s hands that the only substantive change was to replace the word “President” with the word “Emperor“.
Above: Napoléon III
The Emperor fell in love with a 23-year-old Spaniard noblewoman, Eugénie du Derje de Montijo.
She received much of her education in Paris.
Her beauty attracted Napoléon III, who, as was his custom, tried to seduce her, but Eugénie told him to wait for marriage.
His wife, Eugénie, resisted his advances prior to marriage.
She was coached by her mother and her friend, Prosper Mérimée.
“What is the road to your heart?” Napoléon demanded to know.
“Through the chapel, Sire,” she answered.
Yet, after marriage, it took not long for him to stray as Eugénie found sex with him “disgusting“.
It is doubtful that she allowed further approaches by her husband once she had given him an heir.
The civil ceremony took place at Tuileries Palace on 22 January 1853, and a much grander ceremony was held a few days later at the Cathedral of Notre-Dame de Paris.
Above: Empress Eugénie in 1853, after her marriage to Napoleon III
In 1856, Eugénie gave birth to a son and heir-apparent, Napoléon, Prince Imperial.
With an heir to the throne secured, Napoléon resumed his “petites distractions” with other women.
Above: Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte (1856 – 1879), Prince Imperial, unique child of Napoleon III of France and his Empress consort Eugénie.
Louis Napoléon has a historical reputation as a womanizer, yet he said:
“It is usually the man who attacks.
As for me, I defend myself, and I often capitulate.“
He had many mistresses.
During his reign, it was the task of Count Felix Bacciochi, his social secretary, to arrange for trysts and to procure women for the Emperor’s favours.
Above: French politician Félix Baciocchi (1803 – 1866)
His affairs were not trivial sideshows:
They distracted him from governing, affected his relationship with the Empress, and diminished him in the views of the other European courts.
Above: Contessa di Castiglione (1837 – 1899), a spy, artist and famous beauty, sent to influence the Emperor’s politics.
Eugénie faithfully performed the duties of an Empress, entertaining guests and accompanying the Emperor to balls, opera, and theatre.
She travelled to Egypt to open the Suez Canal and officially represented him whenever he travelled outside France.
Above: Empress Eugénie de Montijo
By his late forties, Napoléon started to suffer from numerous medical ailments, including kidney disease, bladder stones, chronic bladder and prostate infections, arthritis, gout, obesity, and the chronic effects of smoking.
In 1856, Dr. Robert Ferguson, a consultant called from London, diagnosed a “nervous exhaustion” that had a “debilitating impact upon sexual performance“, which he also reported to the British government.
Above: Napoléon III in 1855
I find myself feeling sorry for Napoléon III and Eugénie.
They could have been so much happier together had he not let his libido control him and had she not viewed her reputation as more important than her relationship.
Above: Napoléon III and Eugénie
What freedom men and women could have, were they not constantly tricked and trapped and enslaved and tortured by their sexuality!
The only drawback in that freedom is that without it one would not be a human.
One would be a monster.
(John Steinbeck, East of Eden)
Oh, the comfort —
the inexpressible comfort of feeling safe with a person —
having neither to weigh thoughts nor measure words,
but pouring them all right out,
just as they are,
chaff and grain together;
certain that a faithful hand will take and sift them,
keep what is worth keeping,
and then with the breath of kindness blow the rest away.
(Dinah Craik, A Life for a Life, 1859)
As mentioned above, in July 1870, Napoléon reluctantly declared war on Prussia after pressure from the general public.
The French Army was rapidly defeated.
Napoleon was captured at Sedan.
He was swiftly dethroned and the Third Republic was proclaimed in Paris.
After he was released from German custody, he went into exile in England, where he died in 1873.
Was Napoleon III mad?
Society, in the aggregate, is no fool.
It is astonishing what an amount of “eccentricity” it will stand from anybody who takes the bull by the horns, too fearless or too indifferent to think of consequences.
(Dinah Craik, A Woman’s Thoughts About Women, 1858)
Dinah Maria Craik (née Dinah Maria Mulock) (20 April 1826 – 1887) was an English novelist and poet.
She is best remembered for her novel, John Halifax, Gentleman, which presents the mid-Victorian ideals of English middle-class life.
Her childhood and early youth were affected by his unsettled fortunes, but she gained a good education from various quarters and felt called to be a writer.
She arrived in London about 1846, at much the same time as two friends, Alexander Macmillan and Charles Edward Mudie.
She rapidly made friends in London and found great encouragement for her stories for the young.
In 1865, she married George Lillie Craik, a partner with Alexander Macmillan in the publishers Macmillan & Company, and nephew.
They adopted a foundling baby girl, Dorothy, in 1869.
While preparing for Dorothy’s wedding, Dinah died of heart failure on 12 October 1887, aged 61.
Her last words were said to have been:
“Oh, if I could live four weeks longer!
But no matter, no matter!“
Her final book, An Unknown Country, appeared in the year of her death.
Craik’s poetry was a woman’s poems, tender, domestic, and sometimes enthusiastic, always genuine song, and the product of real feeling.
Well established in public favour as an author, she joined an extensive social circle.
Her personal attractions were at the time were considerable.
People kindly ascribed to her simple cordiality, staunch friendliness and thorough goodness of heart.
In 1857 she published the work by which she is mainly remembered, John Halifax, Gentleman, a presentation of the ideals of English middle-class life.
Her next important work, A Life for a Life (1859), made more money and was perhaps more widely read than John Halifax at the time.
It was followed by Mistress and Maid (1863) and Christian’s Mistake (1865), and by didactic works such as A Woman’s Thoughts about Women and Sermons out of Church.
Another collection, The Unkind Word and Other Stories, included a scathing criticism of Benjamin Heath Malkin (1769 – 1842) for overworking his son Thomas, a child prodigy who died at the age of seven.
Craik criticizes Malkin for acceding to Thomas’s requests to be educated at an early age, believing it contributed to his death, but also admits that Malkin’s other sons did well in life.
Above: William Blake’s frontispiece to A Father’s Memoirs of his Child (1806), combining a portrait with a symbolic image of the child’s soul departing the Earth.
Later Craik returned to more fanciful tales and achieved success with The Little Lame Prince (1874).
In 1881 she published a collection of earlier poems entitled Poems of Thirty Years, New and Old.
Some, such as “Philip my King” were addressed to her godson Philip Bourke Marston.
“Douglas, Douglas, Tender and True” achieved wide popularity.
The Little Lame Prince appeals to me most:
In the story, the young Prince Dolor, whose legs are paralysed due to a childhood trauma, is exiled to a tower in a wasteland.
As he grows older, a fairy godmother provides a magical travelling cloak so he can see, but not touch, the world.
He uses this cloak to go on various adventures, and develops great wisdom and empathy in the process.
Finally he becomes a wise and compassionate ruler of his own land.
The author’s style was to stimulate positive feelings in her young readers so that they would be motivated to adopt socially correct actions in whatever circumstances they encountered.
She shows how imagination (mediated by the cloak) can lead to empathy and enlightened morality.
Perhaps it was imagination that kept the Prince from going mad?
It seemed as if she had given these treasures and left him alone — to use them or lose them, apply them or misapply them, according to his own choice.
That is all we can do with children, when they grow into big children, old enough to distinguish between right and wrong, and too old to be forced to do either.
(Dinah Craik, The Little Lame Prince, 1875)
Vladimir Vidrić (20 April 1875 – 1909) was a Croatian poet, and is considered one of the major figures of Croatian secessionist poetry.
Above: Vladimir Vidrić
Vidrić was born in Zagreb, to an affluent family of Slovenian origin.
Above: Zagreb, Croatia
He was one of the leaders of the demonstrators who burned the Hungarian flag on the occasion of Emperor Franz Joseph’s (1830 – 1916) visit to Zagreb in 1895.
He was arrested and sentenced to prison.
Above: Triumphal arch in Zagreb for King Franz Joseph I, decorated with a Hungarian flag, which was widely resented among the Croatian opposition
He studied law in Prague, Graz and Vienna.
After obtaining his Ph.D. in 1903, he became a lawyer rather than pursuing an academic career.
He began writing poems in high school, and was first recognized for his poem Boni mores, published in Vienac in 1897.
Before his premature death, he wrote only about 40 poems, most of which he self-published in his 1907 collection with the simple title Pjesme (Poems).
In addition to his affiliations with controversial progressive political circles, Vidrić was known for his adventurous life, great intelligence and prodigious eidectic memory.
He was an outstanding student, and spent entire evenings reciting memorized poetry to his amazed friends.
Above: Vladimir Vidrić
He died under obscure circumstances in the mental hospital in the Zagreb suburb of Vrapče.
A child born today in the United Kingdom stands a ten times greater chance of being admitted to a mental hospital than to a university.
This can be taken as an indication that we are driving our children mad more effectively than we are genuinely educating them.
Perhaps it is our way of educating them that is driving them mad.
(R. D. Laing, The Politics of Experience)
As a rule, Vidrić’s poetic atmospheres develop from a concrete scene.
The poet is lost or hidden in a mythological character.
His images of a barbaric, classical and mythological world are very personal.
He was an impressionist with a strong visual imagination.
His best poems, such as Jutro (Morning), Dva pejzaža (Two landscapes), Adieu, Ex Pannonia, Dva levita (Two Levites), include some of the best verses ever written in Croatian.
Some of his contemporaries accused him of technical imperfections, wrong accents in rhymes and raw style.
However, Vidrić was simply before his time, choosing to base his rhythm on main accents rather than feet.
The Croatian literary historian Ivo Frangeš wrote:
“Vidrić’s world feels like a fragment of an ancient vase, where the incomplete nature of the preserved scene is used to strengthen the effect.
It is a miniature world, painfully clear, with a miraculous third dimension that goes far beyond our everyday ideas of width and depth.”
Above: Croatian literary historian Ivo Frangeš (1920 – 2003)
Many legends have been woven around the Croatian poet Vladimir Vidrić, and his strong, independent poetic figure does not fade even today.
In his short life, ill with schizophrenia in Stenjevac, with only one collection, published in his own edition, he fascinated contemporaries, critics and devotees of the poetic word.
His poems are now an indispensable part of every serious anthology of Croatian poetry.
Above: Memorial plaque to Vladimir Vidrić at his birthplace in Zagreb
Insanity is often the logic of an accurate mind over tasked.
Good mental machinery ought to break its own wheels and levers, if anything is thrust among them suddenly which tends to stop them or reverse their motion.
A weak mind does not accumulate force enough to hurt itself.
Stupidity often saves a man from going mad.
(Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr., The Autocrat at the Breakfast Table)
Daniel Varoujan (20 April 1884 – 1915) was an Armenian poet.
At the age of 31, when he was reaching international stature, he was deported and murdered by the Young Turk government, as part of the officially planned and executed Armenian genocide.
Above: Daniel Varoujan
Varoujan was born Daniel Tchboukkiarian in the village of Prknig (now called Çayboyu) near the town of Sivas in Turkey.
Above: Eğri Köprü (Crooked Bridge),Kızılırmak, Sivas, Türkiye
After attending the local school, he was sent in 1896, the year of the Hamidian massacres, to Istanbul, where he attended the Mkhitarian school.
Young Taniel Varoujan had witnessed Hamidian massacres as a child, which profoundly affected his poetry, which were prophetic about the 1915 events.
He sees traces of the massacre organized by Sultan Hamid.
Above: Sultan Gazi Abdül Hamid II (1842 – 1918)
The poet’s wandering father was also among the persecuted of those days, whom his relatives searched for a long time and finally found in prison, in chains.
He tells his imprisoned father about their hard life. the grandmother died, the mother is sick and has a hoarse cough, the roses in the garden have dried up, the father’s hearth has been destroyed.
The father somehow gets out of prison and works in one of the hostels in Poland.
The young man spends his school holidays with his father and witnesses the suffering life of homeless people.
Above: Flag of Poland
He then continued his education at the Collegio Armeno Moorat-Raphael in Venice.
The poet is captivated by the monuments of Renaissance painting and sculpture with their healthy and juicy realism.
He voraciously reads the works of famous writers, especially the ideas of Leo Tolstoy and Jean-Jacques Rousseau.
Above: Russian writer Leo Tolstoy (1828 – 1910)
Above: French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712 – 1778)
Varuzhan studies the history of Armenia, old and new Armenian literature, with special love.
In Venice, he wrote his first poems on the themes of the life of the pilgrims and the pogroms of 1896.
Above: Palazzo Zenobio degli Armeni, Venezia, Italia
In 1905 entered Ghent University in Belgium, where he followed courses in literature, sociology and economics.
Student years play an important role.
Above: Seal of the University of Ghent
The high culture of the Flemish also contributes to the formation of his aesthetic views.
He carefully studies the realistic painting of the 17th and 18th centuries and is fascinated by the works of the Belgian poet Émile Verhaeren (1855 – 1916).
Above: Belgian poet Émile Verhaeren
In 1909, he returned to his village where he taught for three years.
After his marriage with Araksi Varoujan in 1912, he became the principal of St. Gregory the Illuminator School in Constantinople (İstanbul).
Above: Araksi and Daniel
In ten years, the poet wrote four books: Tremors (1906), Heart of the Tribe (1909), Pagan Songs (1912) and Song of the Bread (1921, posthumous).
He also wrote essays and articles, and made translations.
Above: Tremors (Սարսուռներ, 1906)
Above: The Heart of the Tribe (Ցեղին սիրտը, 1909)
Above: Pagan Songs (Հեթանոս երգեր, 1912)
Above: The Song of the Bread (Հացին երգը, 1921)
In 1914, he established the Mehean literary group and magazine with Kostan Zaryan, Hagop Oshagan, Aharon Dadourian and Kegham Parseghian.
Above: Armenian writer Kostan Zaryan (1885 – 1969)
Above: Armenian writer / teacher Hagop Oshagan (1883 – 1948)
Above: Armenian writer Kegham Parseghian (1883 – 1915)
The movement aimed to start an Armenian literary and artistic renaissance.
Participants saw as their purpose creating a “centre“, a temple of Art which, according to their manifesto, would attract a fragmented and spiritually scattered nation in order to promote its artistic creativity.
Heavily influenced by Nietzschean ideas, they struggled, however, to reconcile two opposing directions in their understanding of ends and means, that is, between Art as means to find a “centre” for the nation, or centering the nation as a means to achieving meaningful and universal artistic creation, the latter being Varoujan’s position.
Above: German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche (1844 – 1900)
The fundamental ideology of Mehean was expressed in the following excerpt of their manifesto on the importance of recreating a genuinely autochthonous creative “spirit” in Armenian literature:
“We announce the worship and the expression of the Armenian spirit, because the Armenian spirit is alive, but appears only occasionally.
We say:
Without the Armenian spirit there is no Armenian literature and no Armenian artist.
Every true artist expresses only his own race’s spirit.”
Above: Flag of Armenia
On 24 April 1915, Varuzhan was among the intellectuals and public figures arrested by the Turkish police.
He, along with many others, was exiled to Changhir (today: Çankırı), where he remained a prisoner.
Above: General view of Çankırı, 140 km (87 mi) northeast of Ankara
On 26 August 1915, as if moving from Changhir to Ayash, he was brutally murdered on the way in an organized conspiracy, along with the poet Ruben Sevak and three other exiles.
Above: Armenian doctor / writer Roupen Sevag (1886 – 1915)
According to Grigoris Balakian, who saw the victims in Chankiri on the day of their departure and later talked with their Turkish carriage drivers, Varoujan and four other detainees were being transferred from Chankiri to Ankara when their carriage was intercepted at a place called Tiuna.
At that location, beside a stream, they were murdered by four Kurds headed by a local criminal named Halo acting under the instructions of members of the Ittihadist committee in Chankiri.
The senior of the two escorting policemen was aware of the committee’s plan and allowed them to be taken off the carriage.
After the murders, the Kurds divided the clothing and possessions of the victims among themselves and the policemen.
Above: Roman soldiers gambling for Christ’s Crucifixion clothing
Eyewitnesses described the torture and death of Varoujan.
After being arrested and jailed, they were told that they were being taken to a village.
On the way, a Turkish official and his assistant, accompanied by five heavily armed “policemen“, stopped the convoy.
After robbing the five prisoners, the first two who were in charge left and ordered the other five to take them away.
After taking them to the woods, they attacked the prisoners, took off their clothes until all of them were left naked.
Then they tied them one by one to the trees and started cutting them slowly with knives.
Their screams could be heard by witnesses in hiding from a long distance.
One of Varoujan’s major works was The Song of the Bread, a 50-page collection of poems.
Confiscated during the Genocide, it was an unfinished manuscript at the time of his death.
Reportedly saved by bribing Turkish officials. The Song of the Bread was published posthumously in 1921.
The poems celebrate the simple majesty of village agricultural life led by Armenian peasant farmers.
More than anyone else of their time, Siamanto and Varoujan verbalized the hopes of the Armenians around the start of the 20th century.
Using legends, old epics, and pagan history as the springboard and allegory for their aspirations, they waited for deliverance from oppression and the rebirth in Armenian arts.
On 8 February 1958, an evening dedicated to Varuzhan took place in Ghent.
On 9 February, a commemorative plaque with a portrait of Varuzhan and inscriptions in Armenian, French and Flemish was fixed in the Great Hall of the University’s Library.
The following words of the poet were written on the statue:
“What a point of dying life,
when the dream lives,
when the dream is immortal.“
Varoujan’s last months, starting from his arrest to death, were portrayed in an award-winning short arthouse film Taniel by British director Garo Berberian, narrated by Sean Bean.
Taniel (Armenian: “Դանիէլ”) is a multi award winning arthouse short film by British writer and director Garo Berberian, telling the story of the last months of poet Taniel Varoujan until his murder during the Armenian Genocide at the age of 31, the day of his son’s birth.
The film is the first to deal with the story of a man considered to be one of Armenia’s greatest poets with international fame.
The film is loosely based on the memoirs of Aram Andonian, a journalist arrested on the same day as Varoujan, on 24 April 1915, when some 250 Armenian intellectuals and community leaders were rounded up and deported in the first major event of the Armenian Genocide.
The film takes an arthouse approach to the subject seen in film-noir with a narrative in poetry both with Varoujan’s now endangered Western Armenian language (according to UNESCO classification) read by Yegya Akgun and Ben Hodgson’s English poem “Indelible“, narrated by Sean Bean to critical acclaim.
Above: English actor Sean Bean
Philip Glass’s Glassworks played by Valentina Lisitsa, Michael Nyman’s Out of the Ruins, Jordi Savall’s Armenian Spirit and Tigran Hamasyan’s Luis I Luso form the soundtrack.
Above: American composer / pianist Philip Glass
Above: English musician / filmmaker Michael Nyman
Above: Spanish musician Jordi Savall
Above: Armenian musician Tigran Hamasyan
Taniel‘s scenes are explained in the poet’s rich, innovative Western Armenian, using poems from his various books about loss, love, exile and his yearning for peace for mankind.
(The Armenian genocide was the systematic destruction of the Armenian people and identity in the Ottoman Empire during World War I.
Spearheaded by the ruling Committee of Union and Progress (CUP), it was implemented primarily through the mass murder of around one million Armenians during death marches to the Syrian Desert and the forced Islamization of others, primarily women and children.
Before World War I, Armenians occupied a somewhat protected, but subordinate, place in Ottoman society.
Large-scale massacres of Armenians had occurred in the 1890s and 1909.
The Ottoman Empire suffered a series of military defeats and territorial losses — especially during the 1912 – 1913 Balkan Wars — leading to fear among CUP leaders that the Armenians would seek independence.
During their invasion of Russian and Persian territory in 1914, Ottoman paramilitaries massacred local Armenians.
Ottoman leaders took isolated instances of Armenian resistance as evidence of a widespread rebellion, though no such rebellion existed.
Mass deportation was intended to permanently forestall the possibility of Armenian autonomy or independence.
On 24 April 1915, the Ottoman authorities arrested and deported hundreds of Armenian intellectuals and leaders from Constantinople.
At the orders of Talaat Pasha, an estimated 800,000 to 1.2 million Armenians were sent on death marches to the Syrian Desert in 1915 and 1916.
Driven forward by paramilitary escorts, the deportees were deprived of food and water and subjected to robbery, rape, and massacres.
In the Syrian Desert, the survivors were dispersed into concentration camps.
In 1916, another wave of massacres was ordered, leaving about 200,000 deportees alive by the end of the year.
Around 100,000 to 200,000 Armenian women and children were forcibly converted to Islam and integrated into Muslim households.
Massacres and ethnic cleansing of Armenian survivors continued through the Turkish War of Independence after World War I, carried out by Turkish nationalists.
This genocide put an end to more than 2,000 years of Armenian civilization in eastern Anatolia.
Together with the mass murder and expulsion of Assyrian/Syriac and Greek Orthodox Christians, it enabled the creation of an ethno-nationalist Turkish state, the Republic of Turkey.
The Turkish government maintains that the deportation of Armenians was a legitimate action that cannot be described as genocide.
As of 2023, 34 countries have recognized the events as genocide, concurring with the academic consensus.)
Above: Massacre at Erzeroum, The Graphic, 7 December 1895. Photograph, taken by the American W. L. Sachtleben, depicting the victims of a massacre of Armenians in Erzerum on 30 October 1895, being gathered for burial at the town’s Armenian cemetery. “What I myself saw this Friday afternoon [1 November] is forever engraven on my mind as the most horrible sight a man can see. I went with one of the cavasses of the English Legation, a soldier, my interpreter, and an Armenian photographer to the Gregorian cemetery. The municipalty had sent down a number of bodies, friends had brought more, and a horrible sight met my eyes. Along the wall on the north lay 321 dead bodies of the massacred Armenians. Many were fearfully mangled and mutilated. I saw one with his face completely smashed in with a blow of some heavy weapon after he was killed. I saw some with their necks almost severed by a sword cut. One I saw whose whole chest had been skinned, his forearms were cut off, while the upper arm was skinned of flesh. I asked if the dogs had done this. ‘No, the Turks did it with their knives’. A dozen bodies were half burned. A crowd of a thousand people, mostly Armenians, watched me taking photographs of their dead. Many were weeping beside their dead fathers or husbands.” W. L. Sachtleben, “Letter to the Editor”, the London Times, 14 December 1895
Murder and massacre are not rational acts.
When nationalism and / or ethnicity are excuses for widespread slaughter, then immorality is cloaked in a blood red flag unworthy to fly proudly.
The essence of Daniel Varoujan’s work was the glorification of beauty, strength and work.
Although Varoujan’s life was interrupted at a young age, he created poetry of great social content and perfect artistic forms.
He had mental rapprochements with major figures of world poetry, preserving, however, the national style and stamp of his work.
Speaking also about the influence of the Italian and Flemish art of the Renaissance period, Varoujan emphasizes at the same time that he dipped his brush only in the “crimson red” and “sea blood” of his native land.
Five years after Varoujan’s birth was the birth of Adolf Hitler.
Adolf Hitler (20 April 1889 – 1945) was an Austrian-born German politician who was the dictator of Nazi Germany from 1933 until his suicide in 1945.
He rose to power as the leader of the Nazi Party, becoming the Chancellor in 1933 and then taking the title of Führer und Reichskanzler in 1934.
During his dictatorship, he initiated the European theatre of World War II by invading Poland on 1 September 1939.
He was closely involved in military operations throughout the War and was central to the perpetration of the Holocaust:
The genocide of about six million Jews and millions of other victims.
Above: Adolf Hitler
The historian and biographer Ian Kershaw describes Hitler as “the embodiment of modern political evil“.
Under Hitler’s leadership and racist ideology, the Nazi regime was responsible for the genocide of an estimated 6 million Jews and millions of other victims, whom he and his followers deemed Untermenschen (subhumans) or socially undesirable.
Hitler and the Nazi regime were also responsible for the deliberate killing of an estimated 19.3 million civilians and prisoners of war.
In addition, 28.7 million soldiers and civilians died as a result of military action in the European theatre.
The number of civilians killed during World War II was unprecedented in warfare, and the casualties constitute the deadliest conflict in history.
Above: Adolf Hitler
In the Puranas it was predicted that toward the end of Kali Yuga humanity would be driven to acts of madness.
It is very dangerous that people do not recognize this state, for while it is possible to cure a patient who does not resist treatment, if he struggles against it the beneficial effects of the medicine will be diminished.
But how do you explain to people that their leaders and their teachers are insane?
Such mental confusion fully corresponds with the end of Kali Yuga.
Most people hate the messenger who brings knowledge.
Let them at least remember the warning that humanity is acting insanely.
The Thinker warned:
“Do not fall into madness.”
(Helena Roerich, Supermundane)
Above: Russian philosopher Helena Roerich (1879 – 1955)
Researchers have variously suggested that Hitler suffered from irritable bowel syndrome, skin lesions, irregular heartbeat, coronary sclerosis, Parkinson’s disease, syphilis, giant-cell arteritis, tinnitus and monorchism.
In a report prepared for the OSS in 1943, Walter Charles Langer of Harvard University described Hitler as a “neurotic psychopath“.
In his 1977 book The Psychopathic God: Adolf Hitler, historian Robert G. L. Waite proposes that Hitler suffered from borderline personality disorder.
Historians Henrik Eberle and Hans-Joachim Neumann consider that while he suffered from a number of illnesses including Parkinson’s disease, Hitler did not experience pathological delusions and was always fully aware of, and therefore responsible for, his decisions.
Sometime in the 1930s, Hitler adopted a mainly vegetarian diet, avoiding all meat and fish from 1942 onwards.
At social events, he sometimes gave graphic accounts of the slaughter of animals in an effort to make his guests shun meat.
Bormann had a greenhouse constructed near the Berghof (near Berchtesgaden) to ensure a steady supply of fresh fruit and vegetables for Hitler.
Hitler stopped drinking alcohol around the time he became vegetarian and thereafter only very occasionally drank beer or wine on social occasions.
He was a non-smoker for most of his adult life, but smoked heavily in his youth (25 to 40 cigarettes a day).
He eventually quit, calling the habit “a waste of money“.
He encouraged his close associates to quit by offering a gold watch to anyone able to break the habit.
Hitler began using amphetamine occasionally after 1937 and became addicted to it in late 1942.
Speer linked this use of amphetamine to Hitler’s increasingly erratic behaviour and inflexible decision-making (for example, rarely allowing military retreats).
Prescribed 90 medications during the war years by his personal physician, Theodor Morell, Hitler took many pills each day for chronic stomach problems and other ailments. He regularly consumed amphetamine, barbiturates, opiates and cocaine, as well as potassium bromide and atropa belladonna (the latter in the form of Doktor Koster’s anti-gas pills).
Above: Adolf Hitler
He suffered ruptured eardrums as a result of the 20 July plot bomb blast in 1944.
200 wood splinters had to be removed from his legs.
Above: The destroyed map room at the Wolf’s Lair, Hitler’s eastern command post, after the 20 July 1944 plot
Newsreel footage of Hitler shows tremors in his left hand and a shuffling walk, which began before the War and worsened towards the end of his life.
Ernst-Günther Schenck and several other doctors who met Hitler in the last weeks of his life also formed a diagnosis of Parkinson’s disease.
Above: Hitler’s personal standard
The judge who sits over the murderer and looks into his face, and at one moment recognizes all the emotions and potentialities and possibilities of the murderer in his own soul and hears the murderer’s voice as his own, is at the next moment one and indivisible as the judge, and scuttles back into the shell of his cultivated self and does his duty and condemns the murderer to death.
And if ever the suspicion of their manifold being dawns upon men of unusual powers and of unusually delicate perceptions, so that, as all genius must, they break through the illusion of the unity of the personality and perceive that the self is made up of a bundle of selves, they have only to say so and at once the majority puts them under lock and key, calls science to aid, establishes schizomania and protects humanity from the necessity of hearing the cry of truth from the lips of these unfortunate persons.
(Hermann Hesse, Steppenwolf)
Psychopathography of Adolf Hitler is an umbrella term for psychiatric (pathographic, psychobiographic) literature that deals with the hypothesis that Adolf Hitler, the leader of Nazi Germany, was mentally ill, although Hitler was never diagnosed with any mental illnesses during his lifetime.
Hitler has often been associated with mental disorders such as bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, and psychopathy, both during his lifetime and after his death.
Psychiatrists and psychoanalysts who have diagnosed Hitler as having mental disturbance include well-known figures such as Walter C. Langer and Erich Fromm.
Other researchers, such as Fritz Redlich, have concluded that Hitler probably did not have these disorders.
“You are right, Mr. Bond.
That is just what I am, a maniac.
All the greatest men are maniacs.
They are possessed by a mania that drives them towards their goal.
The great scientists, the philosophers, the religious leaders — all maniacs.”
(Ian Fleming, Dr. No)
Above: Dr. Julius No (Joseph Wiseman), Dr. No
Was Hitler a madman or a monster?
I think it depends on whether one believes that a person is born insane or through its environment becomes that way.
I believe there are monsters born in the world to human parents.
They are accidents and no one’s fault, as used to be thought.
Once they were considered the visible punishments for concealed sins.
And just as there are physical monsters, can there not be mental or psychic monsters born?
The face and body may be perfect, but if a twisted gene or a malformed egg can produce physical monsters, may not the same process produce a malformed soul?
Sometimes when we are little we imagine how it would be to have wings, but there is no reason to suppose it is the same feeling birds have.
No, to a monster, the norm must seem monstrous since everyone is normal to himself.
To a man born without conscience, a soul-stricken man must seem ridiculous.
To a criminal, honesty is foolish.
(John Steinbeck, East of Eden)
Perhaps it is this very difficulty to understand the human mind, the human spirit, that makes 20 April also a fitting birthday of the Catalan artist Joan Miró.
Joan Miró i Ferrà (20 April 1893 – 1983) was a Catalan Spanish painter, sculptor and ceramist born in Barcelona.
Professionally, he was simply known as Joan Miró.
A museum dedicated to his work, the Fundació Joan Miró, was established in his native city of Barcelona in 1975, and another, the Fundació Pilar i Joan Miró, was established in his adoptive city of Palma in 1981.
Earning international acclaim, his work has been interpreted as Surrealism but with a personal style, sometimes also veering into Fauvism and Expressionism.
He was notable for his interest in the unconscious or the subconscious mind, reflected in his re-creation of the childlike.
His difficult-to-classify works also had a manifestation of Catalan pride.
In numerous interviews dating from the 1930s onwards, Miró expressed contempt for conventional painting methods as a way of supporting bourgeois society, and declared an “assassination of painting” in favour of upsetting the visual elements of established painting.
Above: Spanish painter Joan Miro
I should really like to think there’s something wrong with me —
Because, if there isn’t then there’s something wrong,
Or at least, very different from what it seemed to be,
With the world itself — and that’s much more frightening!
(T. S. Eliot, The Cocktail Party)
Born into a family of a goldsmith and a watchmaker, Miró grew up in the Barri Gòtic neighborhood of Barcelona.
His father was Miquel Miró Adzerias and his mother was Dolores Ferrà.
He began drawing classes at the age of 7 at a private school at Carrer del Regomir 13, a medieval mansion.
To the dismay of his father, he enrolled at the fine art academy at La Llotja in 1907.
He studied at the Cercle Artístic de Sant Lluc.
He had his first solo show in 1918 at the Galeries Dalmau, where his work was ridiculed and defaced.
Inspired by Fauve and Cubist exhibitions in Barcelona and abroad, Miró was drawn towards the arts community that was gathering in Montparnasse and in 1920 moved to Paris, but continued to spend his summers in Catalonia.
Above: Joan Miro, The Farm, (1922), National Gallery of Art, Washington DC
You know, all insanity is a form of artistic expression, I often think.
Only the person has nothing but himself to work with — he can’t get at outside materials to manipulate them — so he puts all his art into his behavior.
(Fritz Lieber, Our Lady of Darkness)
Miró initially went to business school as well as art school.
He began his working career as a clerk when he was a teenager, although he abandoned the business world completely for art after suffering a nervous breakdown.
His early art, like that of the similarly influenced Fauves and Cubists, was inspired by Vincent van Gogh and Paul Cézanne.
The resemblance of Miró’s work to that of the intermediate generation of the avant-garde has led scholars to dub this period his Catalan Fauvist period.
Above: Joan Miró, La casa de la palmera (The House with the Palm Tree) (1918), oil on canvas, 65 x 73 cm, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía
A few years after Miró’s 1918 Barcelona solo exhibition, he settled in Paris where he finished a number of paintings that he had begun on his parents’ summer home and farm in Mont-roig del Camp.
One such painting, The Farm, showed a transition to a more individual style of painting and certain nationalistic qualities.
Ernest Hemingway, who later purchased the piece, described it by saying:
“It has in it all that you feel about Spain when you are there and all that you feel when you are away and cannot go there.
No one else has been able to paint these two very opposing things.”
Above: American writer Ernest Hemingway (1899 – 1961)
Miró annually returned to Mont-roig and developed a symbolism and nationalism that would stick with him throughout his career.
Two of Miró’s first works classified as Surrealist, Catalan Landscape (The Hunter) and The Tilled Field, employ the symbolic language that was to dominate the art of the next decade.
Above: Joan Miró, The Tilled Field, (1923), Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum
Josep Dalmau arranged Miró’s first Parisian solo exhibition, at Galerie la Licorne in 1921.
Above: Joan Miró, Horse, Pipe and Red Flower (1920), oil on canvas, 82.6 × 74.9 cm, Philadelphia Museum of Art.
In 1924, Miró joined the Surrealist group.
The already symbolic and poetic nature of Miró’s work, as well as the dualities and contradictions inherent to it, fit well within the context of dream-like automatism espoused by the group.
Much of Miró’s work lost the cluttered chaotic lack of focus that had defined his work thus far.
He experimented with collage and the process of painting within his work so as to reject the framing that traditional painting provided.
This antagonistic attitude towards painting manifested itself when Miró referred to his work in 1924 ambiguously as “x” in a letter to poet friend Michel Leiris.
The paintings that came out of this period were eventually dubbed Miró’s dream paintings.
Above: Fundació Joan Miró, Barcelona, Spain
“I sometimes wonder if you are quite sane, Raoul.
You always take things in such an impossible way!“
(Gaston Leroux, The Phantom of the Opera)
Miró did not completely abandon subject matter, though.
Despite the Surrealist automatic techniques that he employed extensively in the 1920s, sketches show that his work was often the result of a methodical process.
Miró’s work rarely dipped into non-objectivity, maintaining a symbolic, schematic language.
This was perhaps most prominent in the repeated Head of a Catalan Peasant series of 1924 to 1925.
Above: Joan Miro, Head of a Catalan Peasant (1924), National Gallery of Art
In 1926, he collaborated with Max Ernst on designs for ballet impresario Sergei Diaghilev.
Above: German artist Max Ernst (1891 – 1976)
Miró returned to a more representational form of painting with The Dutch Interiors of 1928.
Crafted after works by Hendrik Martenszoon Sorgh and Jan Steen seen as postcard reproductions, the paintings reveal the influence of a trip to Holland taken by the artist.
These paintings share more in common with Tilled Field or Harlequin’s Carnival than with the minimalistic dream paintings produced a few years earlier.
Above: Joan Miro, Harlequin’s Carnival
The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents.
We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far.
The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little, but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.
(H. P. Lovecraft, The Call of Cthulhu)
Miró married Pilar Juncosa in Palma (Majorca) on 12 October 1929.
Their daughter, María Dolores Miró, was born on 17 July 1930.
In 1931, Pierre Matisse opened an art gallery in New York City.
The Pierre Matisse Gallery (which existed until Matisse’s death in 1989) became an influential part of the Modern art movement in America.
From the outset Matisse represented Joan Miró and introduced his work to the US market by frequently exhibiting Miró’s work in New York.
In 1932 he created a scenic design for Massine’s ballet Jeux d’enfants at Ballet Russe de Monte-Carlo.
Above: Joan Miro, Painting for the ballet Jeux d’enfants
Until the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, Miró habitually returned to Spain in the summers.
Once the war began, he was unable to return home.
Unlike many of his surrealist contemporaries, Miró had previously preferred to stay away from explicitly political commentary in his work.
Though a sense of Catalan nationalism pervaded his earliest surreal landscapes and Head of a Catalan Peasant, it was not until Spain’s Republican government commissioned him to paint the mural The Reaper, for the Spanish Republican Pavilion at the 1937 Paris Exhibition, that Miró’s work took on a politically charged meaning.
Above: Joan Miro, The Reaper
We parry and fend the approach of our fellow-man by compliments, by gossip, by amusements, by affairs.
We cover up our thought from him under a hundred folds.
I knew a man who under a certain religious frenzy cast off this drapery, and omitting all compliment and commonplace, spoke to the conscience of every person he encountered, and that with great insight and beauty.
At first he was resisted, and all men agreed he was mad.
But persisting — as indeed he could not help doing — for some time in this course, he attained to the advantage of bringing every man of his acquaintance into true relations with him.
No man would think of speaking falsely with him, or of putting him off with any chat of markets or reading-rooms.
But every man was constrained by so much sincerity to the like plain dealing, and what love of nature, what poetry, what symbol of truth he had, he did certainly show him.
But to most of us society shows not its face and eye, but its side and its back.
To stand in true relations with men in a false age is worth a fit of insanity, is it not?
(Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Friendship“, Essays)
Above: American philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803 – 1882)
In 1939, with Germany’s invasion of France looming, Miró relocated to Varengeville in Normandy.
On 20 May of the following year, as Germans invaded Paris, he narrowly fled to Spain (now controlled by Francisco Franco) for the duration of the Vichy Regime’s rule.
In Varengeville, Palma, and Mont-roig, between 1940 and 1941, Miró created the 23 gouache series Constellations.
Revolving around celestial symbolism, Constellations earned the artist praise from André Breton, who 17 years later wrote a series of poems, named after and inspired by Miró’s series.
Features of this work revealed a shifting focus to the subjects of women, birds and the moon, which would dominate his iconography for much of the rest of his career.
Above: Joan Miro, Morning Star
Shuzo Takiguchi published the first monograph on Miró in 1940.
Above: Japanese poet / art critic Shuzo Takiguchi (1903 – 1979)
In 1948 – 1949 Miró lived in Barcelona and made frequent visits to Paris to work on printing techniques at the Mourlot Studios and the Atelier Lacourière.
He developed a close relationship with Fernand Mourlot that resulted in the production of over 1,000 different lithographic editions.
Above: French lithographer Fernand Mourlot (1895 – 1988)
In 1959, André Breton asked Miró to represent Spain in The Homage to Surrealism exhibition alongside Enrique Tábara, Salvador Dalí and Eugenio Granell.
Above: French writer André Breton (1896 – 1966)
Miró created a series of sculptures and ceramics for the garden of the Maeght Foundation in Saint-Paul-de-Vence, France, which was completed in 1964.
Above: Fondation Maeght, Saint-Paul de Vence, France
In 1974, Miró created a tapestry for the World Trade Center in New York City together with the Catalan artist Josep Royo.
He had initially refused to do a tapestry, then he learned the craft from Royo and the two artists produced several works together.
His World Trade Center Tapestry was displayed at the building and was one of the most expensive works of art lost during the September 11 attacks.
Above: Joan Miro, World Trade Center Tapestry
In 1977, Miró and Royo finished a tapestry to be exhibited in the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC.
In 1981, Miró’s The Sun, the Moon and One Star — later renamed Miró’s Chicago — was unveiled.
This large, mixed media sculpture is situated outdoors in the downtown Loop area of Chicago, across the street from another large public sculpture, the Chicago Picasso.
Miró had created a bronze model of The Sun, the Moon and One Star in 1967.
The maquette now resides in the Milwaukee Art Museum.
Above: Joan Miro, The Sun, the Moon and One Star
In 1979 Miró received a doctorate honoris causa from the University of Barcelona.
Above: Coat of arms of the University of Barcelona
The artist, who suffered from heart failure, died in his home in Palma (Majorca) on 25 December 1983 at age 90.
He was later interred in the Montjuïc Cemetery in Barcelona.
Above: Montijuic Cemetery, Barcelona
It has been established through the analysis of personal texts written by Joan Miró that he has experienced multiple episodes of depression throughout his life.
He experienced his first depression when he was 18 in 1911.
Much of the literature refers to this as if it was a small setback in his life, while it appeared to be much more than that.
Miró himself stated:
I was demoralized and suffered from a serious depression.
I fell really ill and stayed three months in bed.
There is arguably a connection between his mental health and his paintings, since he used painting as a way of dealing with his episodes of depression.
It supposedly even made him more calm and his thoughts less dark.
Joan Miró said that without painting he became very depressed, gloomy and I get ‘black ideas’, and I do not know what to do with myself.
The influence of his mental state is very well visible in his painting Carnival of the Harlequin.
He tried to paint the chaos he experienced in his mind, the desperation of wanting to leave that chaos behind and the pain created because of that.
Miró painted the symbol of the ladder here which is also visible in multiple other paintings after this painting.
It is supposed to symbolize escaping.
The relation between creativity and mental illness is very well studied.
It has been argued that creative people have a higher chance of suffering from a manic depressive illness or schizophrenia, as well as higher chance of transmitting this genetically.
Even though we know Miró suffered from episodic depression, it is uncertain whether he also experienced manic episodes, which is often referred to as bipolar disorder.
I became insane, with long intervals of horrible sanity.
(Edgar Allan Poe, Letter to George W. Eveleth, 4 January 1848)
Above: American writer Edgar Allan Poe (1809 – 1849)
I think of Henry de Montlerlant.
Henry Marie Joseph Frédéric Expedite Millon de Montherlant (20 April 1895 – 1972) was a French essayist, novelist and dramatist.
He was elected to the Académie française in 1960.
Born in Paris, a descendant of an aristocratic (yet obscure) Picard family, he was educated at the Lycée Janson de Sailly and the Sainte-Croix boarding school at Neuilly-sur-Seine.
Henry’s father was a hard-line reactionary (to the extent of despising the post-Dreyfus Affair army as too subservient to the Republic, and refusing to have electricity or the telephone installed in his house).
His mother, a formerly lively socialite, became chronically ill due to the difficult childbirth, being bedridden most of the time, and dying at the young age of 43.
From the age of seven, Henry was enthusiastic about literature and began writing.
Above: de Montherlant in 1910
In 1905 reading Quo Vadis by Henryk Sienkiewicz caused him a lifelong fascination with Ancient Rome and a proficient interest in Latin.
He also was enthusiastic about school comradeship, sports and bullfighting.
When he was 15 his parents sent him alone to Spain where he became initiated in the corrida, killing two young bulls.
He was also a talented draughtsman and after 1913 resorted to hiring young people in the street for nude modelling.
On 5 April 1912, aged almost 17, Henry was expelled from the Catholic Sainte-Croix de Neuilly school for being a “corruptor of souls“.
Together with other five youngsters he had founded a group called ‘La Famille‘ (the Family), a kind of order of chivalry whose members were bonded by an oath of fidelity and mutual assistance.
A member of that group was Philippe Jean Giquel (1897 – 1977), Montherlant’s two-year-junior “special friend“, with whom he was madly in love although it never became physical.
According to Montherlant this “special friendship” had raised the fierce and jealous opposition of Abbé de La Serre, who managed to get the older boy expelled.
This incident (and Giquel) became a lifelong obsession for Montherlant, who would depict it in the 1952 play La Ville dont le prince est un enfant and his 1969 novel Les Garçons.
Later, in his adult years, he would resume his platonic friendship with Giquel, who would invite the writer to be the godfather of his daughter Marie-Christine.
After the deaths of his father and mother in 1914 and 1915, he went to live with his doting grandmother and eccentric uncles.
Mobilized in 1916, he was wounded and decorated.
Marked by his experience of war, he wrote Songe (‘Dream‘), an autobiographic novel, as well as his Chant funèbre pour les morts de Verdun (Funeral Chant for the Dead at Verdun), both exaltations of heroism during the Great War.
The war remained for me the most tender human experience I have lived.
(Henry de Montherlant, An Assassin is My Master)
His work was part of the literature event in the art competition at the 1924 Summer Olympics.
Montherlant first achieved critical success with the 1934 novel Les Célibataires, and sold millions of copies of his tetralogy Les Jeunes Filles, written from 1936 through 1939.
In these years Montherlant, a well-to-do heir, travelled extensively, mainly to Spain (where he met and worked with bullfighter Juan Belmonte), Italy and Algeria, giving vent to his passion for sexually abusing street boys.
During the Second World War after the fall of France in 1940 he remained in Paris and continued to write plays, poems, essays, and worked as a war correspondent.
At the height of his fame when the War broke out (He had been awarded the Grand Prix by the prestigious Académie Française in 1934), he initially described the German victory as evidence of the superiority of a virile, conquering race.
Still, after Liberation he was not treated as harshly as those who openly and enthusiastically collaborated.
The Committee for the Purification of Writers sentenced him in 1945 to only to one year of abstinence from publishing.
In 1960, he was elected to a lifetime position at the Académie Française.
Above: Henry de Montherlant
Some time in 1968, according to Roger Peyrefitte, outside a movie theatre in Paris, 72-year-old Montherlant was attacked and beaten up by a group of youths because he had groped the younger brother of one of them.
Montherlant was seriously injured and blinded in one eye as a result.
Above: French diplomat / writer / activist Roger Peyrefitte (1907 – 2000)
The British writer Peter Quennell, who edited a collection of translations of his works, recalled that Montherlant attributed the eye injury to “a fall” instead; and mentions in confirmation that Montherlant suffered from vertigo.
Above: English writer Peter Courtney Quennell (left) and James Stephens
After going almost blind in his later years and becoming the target of scorners like Peyrefitte, Montherlant died in 1972 from a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head after swallowing a cyanide capsule.
His ashes were scattered by Jean-Claude Barat and Gabriel Matzneff in Rome, at the Forum, among the Temple of Portunus and into the Tiber.
His standard biography was written by Pierre Sipriot, and published in two volumes (1982 and 1990), revealing the full extent of Montherlant’s sexual habits.
Above: Henry de Montherlant
It is good for man to die when he is abandoned by the divine part of himself.
(Henry de Montherlant, Brocéliande)
His early successes were works such as Les Célibataires (The Bachelors) in 1934, and the highly anti-feminist tetralogy Les Jeunes Filles (The Young Girls) (1936 – 1939), which sold millions of copies and was translated into 13 languages.
His late novel Chaos and Night was published in 1963.
The novels were praised by diverse writers.
Montherlant was well known for his anti-feminist and misogynistic views, as exemplified particularly in The Girls.
Simone de Beauvoir considered his attitudes about women in detail in her The Second Sex.
He wrote plays such as Pasiphaé (1936), La Reine morte (1942, the first of a series of historical dramas), Malatesta (1946), Le Maître de Santiago (1947), Port-Royal (1954) and Le Cardinal d’Espagne (1960).
He is particularly remembered as a playwright.
In his plays as well as in his novels he frequently portrayed heroic characters displaying the moral standards he professed, and explored the ‘irrationality and unpredictability of human behaviour‘.
This is a sure sign of barbarism:
In any society, it is always the elements of inferior intelligence who are hungry to be up to date.
Incapable of discerning through taste, culture and critical thinking, they automatically judge, according to this principle that truth is novelty.
(Henry de Montherlant, Les Célibataires)
He worked as an essayist also.
In the collection L’Equinoxe de septembre (1938) he deplored the mediocrity of contemporary France.
In Le solstice de Juin, (1941), he expressed his admiration for Wehrmacht and claimed that France had been justly defeated and conquered in 1940.
Like many scions of the old aristocracy, he had hated the Third Republic, especially as it had become in the aftermath of the Dreyfus Affair.
He was in a “round table“ of French and German intellectuals who met at the Georges V Hotel in Paris in the 1940s, including, the writers Ernst Jünger, Paul Morand and Jean Cocteau, the publisher Gaston Gallimard and the Nazi legal scholar Carl Schmitt.
Above: Hôtel Georges V, Paris, France
Montherlant wrote articles for the Paris weekly, La Gerbe, directed by the pro-Nazi novelist and Catholic reactionary Alphonse de Châteaubriant.
After the War, he was thus viewed as a collaborationist and was punished by a one-year restriction on publishing.
Above: French writer Alphonse de Châteaubriant (1877 – 1951)
A closeted pederast, Montherlant treated pederastic themes in his work, including his play La Ville dont le prince est un enfant (1952) and novel Les Garçons (The Boys), published in 1969 but written four or five decades earlier.
He maintained a private and coded correspondence with fellow pederast Roger Peyrefitte — author of Les Amitiés particulières (Special Friendships, 1943), also about relationships between boys at a Roman Catholic boarding school.
Peyrefitte would later mercilessly mock Montherlant and disclose his pederasty in his 1970 novel Des Français (under the alias “Lionel de Beauséant“) and in his memoirs Propos secrets (1977).
Montherlant is remembered for his aphorism “Happiness writes in white ink on a white page“, often quoted in the shorter form “Happiness writes white“.
Let me choose my words carefully.
It is possible to admire a man’s product while feeling disturbed by that man’s behaviour.
I am not homophobic, but that being said I find it objectionable when an intimate act is not between two consenting adults.
I have no desire to learn about an artist’s proclivities.
I can admire the art without liking the artist.
Peter Soyle Beagle (born 20 April 1939) is an American novelist and screenwriter, especially of fantasy fiction.
His best-known work is The Last Unicorn (1968).
Beagle has said that The Wind in the Willows, a classic of children’s literature by Kenneth Grahame, originally attracted him to the genre of fantasy.
Beagle was raised in Bronx, New York, and graduated from the Bronx High School of Science in 1955.
He garnered early recognition from the Scholastic Art & Writing Awards, winning a scholarship to the University of Pittsburgh for a poem he submitted as a high school senior.
He went on to graduate from the university with a degree in creative writing.
Beagle wrote his first novel, A Fine and Private Place, when he was 19 years old, following it with a memoir, I See by My Outfit, in 1965.
I am particularly drawn to A Fine and Private Place.
The book takes its title from a verse from Andrew Marvell’s “To His Coy Mistress“:
“The grave’s a fine and private place,
But none, I think, do there embrace.”
The setting is the fictional Yorkchester Cemetery, where Jonathan Rebeck, a homeless and bankrupt pharmacist who has dropped out of society, has been living, illegally and unobtrusively, for nearly two decades.
He is maintained by a raven who supplies him with food in the form of sandwiches stolen from nearby businesses.
The protagonist exhibits the peculiar ability to converse with both the raven and the shades of the dead who haunt the cemetery.
Beagle portrays ghosts as being bound to the vicinity of their burial, with their minds and memories slowly fading away as their mortal forms return to the dust.
As the plot proceeds, Rebeck befriends two recently arrived spirits, those of teacher Michael Morgan, who died either from poisoning by his wife or suicide (he cannot remember which), and of bookshop clerk Laura Durand, who was killed by a truck.
The two ghosts fall in love, and each pledge themselves to each other “for as long as I can remember love.”
The widow, Mrs. Klapper, discovers Rebeck while visiting her husband’s mausoleum.
The quiet existence of this unlikely quintet is diverted by philosophical conversation and the poisoning trial of Morgan’s wife, word of which is regularly provided by the raven from the local newspapers.
After she is ultimately found innocent and her husband’s death ruled suicide, Morgan faces separation from Laura when his body is removed to unhallowed ground.
Rebeck, under the encouragement of Mrs. Klapper, is driven to find a way to reunite them, and finally takes leave of his unusual abode.
Finally, with a flourish, let me conclude with that fine fellow Faulks.
Sebastian Charles Faulks (born 20 April 1953) is a British novelist, journalist and broadcaster.
I am drawn to his A Fool’s Alphabet and Human Traces rather than his historical novels set in France.
Above: British writer / broadcaster Sebastian Faulks
A Fool’s Alphabet is a 1992 novel.
The book splits the life of a photographer (the son of an English soldier) into short, alphabetically arranged episodes based on location.
Human Traces is a 2005 novel which took Faulks five years to write.
It tells of two friends who set up a pioneering asylum in 19th-century Austria, in tandem with the evolution of psychiatry and the start of the First World War.
Tracing the intertwined lives of Doctors Thomas Midwinter, who is English, and Jacques Rebière, from Brittany, France, Human Traces explores the development of psychiatry and psychoanalysis in the late 19th century, by way of excursions into first alienism then metaphysics, human evolution and neuroscience, before the search for what it means to be human takes us into a brief foray into the First World War.
Central to the plot is the theory of bicameral mentality.
Whilst some have criticised Human Traces as excessively expository, detailed and didactic, it has also been considered wide-ranging, ambitious and well written.
It has enjoyed commercial success, having been a bestseller in the UK.
Faulks himself says of his novel:
“Human Traces was a Sisyphean task.
After spending five years in libraries reading up on madness, psychiatry and psychoanalysis (my office had charts and timelines and things plastered all over the walls), the act of finishing it felt like a bereavement.”
When it comes to madness, I acknowledge that I am not an authority, amateur nor professional, of human psychology or psychiatry, but I sense that a possible proposal for the improvement of a man’s mind may lie within the pages of Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels.
His voyages to Lilliput (where Gulliver is gigantic) and Brobdingnag (where Gulliver is Lilliputian by comparison), Laputa (a flying island of philosophers), Balnibarbi (a ruined land brought about by ideas without practical results), Glubdubdrib (an island of magic and ghosts) and Luggnagg (an island of immortals who age but do not die) capture the imagination of its adaptations on film and television.
But, like Gulliver himself, I am drawn to the Land of the Houyhnhnms (a race of talking horses) who rule over deformed creatures that resemble human beings called the Yahoos.
Swift describes Yahoos as filthy with unpleasant habits, “a brute in human form“, resembling human beings far too closely for the liking of protagonist Lemuel Gulliver.
He finds the calm and rational society of intelligent horses, the Houyhnhnms, greatly preferable.
The Yahoos are primitive creatures obsessed with “pretty stones” that they find by digging in mud, thus representing the distasteful materialism and ignorant elitism Swift encountered in Britain.
Hence the term “yahoo” has come to mean “a crude, brutish or obscenely coarse person“.
“My master likewise mentioned another quality which his servants had discovered in several Yahoos and to him was wholly unaccountable.
He said a fancy would sometimes take a Yahoo to retire into a corner, to lie down and howl and groan and spurn all that came near him, although he were young and fat, wanted neither food nor water, nor did the servants imagine what could possibly ail him.
The only remedy they found was to set him to hard work after which he would infallibly come to himself.
To this I was silent out of partiality to my own kind.
Yet here I could plainly discover the true seeds of spleen, which only seizes on the lazy, the luxurious and the rich, who if they were forced to undergo the same regimen I would undertake for the cure.“
(Jonathan Swift, Gulliver’s Travels)
Perhaps in working to aid others one can forget oneself?
Though it is folly to suppose that happiness is a matter of volition, and that we can make ourselves content and cheerful whenever we choose — a theory that many poor hypochondriacs are taunted with till they are nigh driven mad — yet, on the other hand, no sane mind is ever left without the power of self-discipline and self-control in a measure, which measure increases in proportion as it is exercised.
(Dinah Craik, A Woman’s Thoughts About Women)
Perhaps here is the true definition of madness?
To be left without the power of self-discipline and self-control?
What comfort there is in a cheerful spirit!
How the heart leaps up to meet a sunshiny face, a merry tongue, an even temper, and a heart which either naturally, or, what is better, from conscientious principle, has learned to take all things on their bright side, believing that the Giver of life being all-perfect Love, the best offering we can make to Him is to enjoy to the full what He sends of good, and bear what He allows of evil!
(Dinah Craik, A Woman’s Thoughts About Women)
My thoughts return to Pinel.
We need to be compassionate to those who cannot help themselves, whether their problems are physical or psychological in nature.
Faith teaches us to love another.
Perhaps only then can we truly begin to understand one another.
Sources
- Wikipedia
- Google Photos
- The Assassin’s Cloak, edited by Irene and Alan Taylor
- “Crazy“, Gnarls Barkley
- The Devil’s Dictionary, Ambroise Bierce
- Alice in Wonderland, Lewis Carroll
- “You Might Think“, The Cars
- Christian’s Mistake / John Halifax, Gentleman / A Life for a Life / The Little Lame Prince / Mulock’s Poems / Poems / A Woman’s Thoughts About Women, Dinah Craik
- Dr. No, Ian Fleming
- “Just Dropped In“, The First Edition
- The Cocktail Party, T. S. Eliot
- Essays, Ralph Waldo Emerson
- Steppenwolf, Hermann Hesse
- The Autocrat at the Breakfast Table, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
- The Politics of Experience, R. D. Laing
- The Phantom of the Opera, Gaston Leroux
- The Call of Cthulhu, H. P. Lovecraft
- “Unwell“, Matchbox Twenty
- Brocéliande / Les Célibataires, Henry de Montherlant
- L’extinction du pauperisme, Napoléon III
- Supermundane, Helena Roerich
- On Tranquillity of the Mind, Seneca
- East of Eden, John Steinbeck
- Gulliver’s Travels, Jonathan Swift
- The Power of Now, Eckhart Tolle
