Hysteria Complicated by Ecstasy: The Case of Nanette Leroux (review)

Entering the world of eighteen-year-old girl Nanette Leroux, Jane Goldstein offers us an astonishing example of how an historian can work upon a manuscript. When she found this polyphonic case written by two French doctors, Alexandre Bertrand (1795–1831) and Charles-Humbert-Antoine Despine (1777–1852), she didn’t know much about magnetism, Savoy or spa. Therefore, this book is about origin and reconstruction.

Like an exploration, the author guides us in her methodological approach of this source. By studying this case of Nanette Leroux, a domestic girl who lived in Savoy during the Piedmontese Restoration (1815–1860), she clearly intends to put her work in a microhistorical perspective that allows her to illuminate a larger history (p. 5). Rather than Giovanni Levi’s work, she prefers the methodological approach of Carlo Ginzburg who used to choose an ordinary man to understand thoroughly the society in which he lived. But Jane Goldstein goes further than the Italian historian, also convoking Michel Foucault and Sigmund Freud to enlighten her analysis.

Following the steps of the historian’s approach, she introduces in her first chapter the plot of the manuscript. The story of Nanette Leroux began in 1822. After being likely raped by a garde-champêtre, she experienced the first symptom of hysteria during the summer. Then, a local doctor, Despine, “took charge of her care in March 1823 and ended his treatment in September 1824.” (p. 12) All along, the young woman was treated in a spa in Aix-les-Bains and during all this time, the doctor took several notes about this case which involved multiple symptoms of hysteria and ecstasy like the transport des sens, the loss of speech or suicidal thoughts. During the treatment, Despine transferred his notes to a Parisian colleague named Alexandre Bertrand in order to get some help from a more prestigious doctor.

The second chapter of the study is also the second step of an historian’s work. After the manuscript reading, came the time of the acknowledgement of the context in which it was produced. The environment in which Nanette Leroux lived is entirely recreated by Jane Goldstein in a very accurate and detailed disciplinary effort. Like a painter, the historian draws the portrait of several figures surrounding Nanette – the garde-champêtre, the local doctor, the domestic – and restores the culture of this time, filling the gaps kept silents by the manuscript. From the Old Regime to the Piedmontese Restoration, the historical context is widely broached. The spa at Aix-les-Bains and the beginning phenomenon of consumer culture are also studied. Traditionally linked with the “bourgeois” culture, these two leisure outlets started to open themselves to the lower classes during the first half of the nineteenth century. The fact that Nanette Leroux asked her doctor for a rare and expensive watch named montre à savonnette shows the diffusion of the consumer culture.

The third chapter is certainly the most original part of this essay. Indeed, Jane Golstein tries to interpret the case of Nanette Leroux in a dual exercise consisting in the first part of giving us the nineteenth-century interpretation of Nanette’s illness and, in the second part, of a twentieth-century analysis of the case. Thus, the first exercise is historical while the second is mostly psychoanalytical. This second part uses in fact both Michel Foucault and Sigmund Freud in order to detect the real unconsciousness of the eighteenth-year-old girl. According to Goldstein, Nanette’s illness was the result of two major turns. At first, the end of the French occupation and the construction of a spa in Aix-Les-Bains induced a frustrating feeling in this young girl who only wanted emancipation. In a way, Nanette Leroux’s illness was a form of resistance against a society which denied her liberty. Then, the rape by the garde-champêtre contributed to traumatize the young girl who choose then, not to face the reality and...