Laboratories of Faith: Mesmerism, Spiritism, and Occultism in Modern France

4. Spiritism on Trial, 1870–1880

chapter four Spiritism on Trial, 1870–1880 150 On the first anniversary of Allan Kardec’s death—March 31, 1870—a small group of Spiritists gathered at a construction site in the Père Lachaise cemetery. The monument they had come to inaugurate was a dolmen made of rough-hewn granite slabs, sheltering a bronze portrait bust of the deceased chef du spiritisme and paying tribute to his past life as a Druidic sage (fig. 9). Kardec’s widow, Amélie, and Pierre-Gaëtan Leymarie , the new editor of the Revue spirite, had conceived this project in ambitious terms. The total weight of the slabs exceeded 30,000 kilograms (33 tons), which meant that the underground chamber holding Kardec’s remains had to be specially engineered. Construction encountered a number of delays, and it was not until the morning of the anniversary that a team of masons succeeded in hoisting the 6,000–kilogram slab that formed the dolmen’s roof. When the Spiritists arrived, scaffolding still surrounded the monument, which had not yet received the deeply carved inscription it would eventually bear: “Birth, death, rebirth and unceasing progress: that is the law.”1 Scaffolding dismantled, Kardec’s tomb became one of the most celebrated in the cemetery, where it still stands, a stalwart of the guidebooks, commandingly positioned at the crest of a hill. Spiritists made it a place of pilgrimage, gathering there every year on March 31. Initially, these meetings were small. The first, in 1870, attracted only a few devotees; the second , held during the opening weeks of the Paris Commune of 1871, was 1 “Discours prononcés pour l’anniversaire de la mort d’Allan Kardec, inauguration du monument” (Paris: Librairie Spirite, 1870), 5–12. 151 Fig. 9. The commemorative dolmen erected for Kardec in Père Lachaise cemetery, as it appeared in 1870. (Collection of the author.) similarly modest. By the middle of the decade, however, the annual commemoration of Kardec’s disincarnation had become the defining ritual of the Spiritist year, attracting adherents from all over France. In 1875, a crowd of eight hundred believers assembled at the monument, adorned it with twenty-two extravagant wreaths, and listened to six formal addresses. To the Spiritists, this crowd was yet another indication of their movement’s growing strength: A new era was beginning in France, and they believed Spiritism would play a crucial role in it. The years following Kardec’s death had been tumultuous. In 1870, Napoleon III’s authoritarian government collapsed after an ignominious defeat at the hands of the Prussians, who went on to besiege Paris. Then, during the spring of 1871, the city erupted in the last of the century’s great popular insurrections, brutally crushed in its turn by the leaders of the newly elected National Assembly at Versailles. The Second Empire had given way to a new republic, albeit one of a decidedly conservative bent. After an overwhelming right-wing victory in the election of 1873, the new prime minister, Marshall Patrice Mac-Mahon, took this conservatism a step further, creating what supporters termed a “Government of Moral Order,” closely allied with the Catholic Church and devoted to repressing the various forms of urban radicalism that had emerged so violently in 1871. Though the architects of this conservative regime initially intended to pave the way for a return to monarchy, the intransigence of the fanatical heir to the throne made a restoration impossible. By 1875, the political winds had begun to shift toward secular democracy. Spiritists responded to this turmoil by reshaping the intellectual and political character of their movement. Kardec had considered his task above all a philosophical one: the creation of a rational, coherent system from the spirit communications mediums received. After his death, the focus of Spiritists shifted. Their goal was no longer to elaborate points of doctrine but instead to provide further empirical evidence for the conception of otherworldly intervention that gave Kardec’s philosophy its authority. A growing number of studies by well-known British scientists, which inaugurated the new field of psychical research, lent credence to the hope that rigorous laboratory experiments might one day definitively prove the “spirit hypothesis.” While these studies tended to deny the reality of spirits, accounting for mediumistic phenomena in psychological terms, Leymarie and his followers remained confident that an array of novel manifestations—especially spirit photography—would eventually reorient the field...