The Erotic Imagination French Histories of Perversity

^ FRENCH HISTORIES OF PERVERSITY*^
VERNON A. ROSARIO
“ f y/Regenerates are not always criminals,
<-2,^/prostitutes, anarchists, or outright
lunatics,” the physician and journalist Max
Nordau cautioned in 1893, “they are often
writers and artists.” Indeed, without writers
and artists, medical experts in the eighteenth
and nineteenth centuries would not have had
much of the material on which they based
their theories of sexual perversions. Thus it
was that Rene Descartes could be diagnosed
as a fetishist, because of his inordinate
attraction to cross-eyed women, Gustave
Flaubert as a hysteric, because of his hyper¬
sensitive imagination, and Emile Zola (“the
novelist of the quivering nostrils”) as an
epileptoid degenerate, olfactory fetishist, and
sexual psychopath, because of the suspicious
richness of odors emanating from the pages
of his books.
Drawing upon the writings of literary
figures such as Diderot, Rousseau, Zola,
Flaubert, and Huysmans, and physicians and
psychologists such as Tardieu, Binet, and
Charcot, Vernon Rosario argues that the
modern idea of the perverse first emerged in
late 18th-century France and was shaped
largely by the strange confluence of medical
writings, patient confessions, and literary
narratives. Beginning with the shocking
revelations of masturbation and masochism
in Rousseau’s Confessions, and the widespread
public alarm over the “fatal convenience” of
the “solitary vice,” The Erotic Imagination illu¬
minates precisely how various forms of
eroticism came to be classified as perversions.
Rosario takes the reader through a dizzying
proliferation of “pathologies”—from the
bizarre theories which enabled doctors to
identify homosexuals, or “inverts,” according
to bodily stigmata, to the “uterine fury” of
nymphomania, to an astonishing range of
hysterias, fetishes, and erotomanias until
finally only marital, reproductive sex survived
as normal. Such “perversification” of sexual
desire attempted to close off and regulate
USA s 27.JO
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THE
EROTIC
IMAGINATION
[This] is a book to be read only by the sexu¬

ally mature and psychically balanced. In its
psychopathic effects it might prove danger¬
ous in its influence over the neuropathically
unstable. To the prurient curiosity of that
morbid sexual element, which too exten¬
sively abounds in modern social life, its ex¬
amples and personal histories would prove
psychopathic poison.
From a review of
Psychopathia Sexualis
in Alienist and Neurologist, 1893
IDEOLOGIES OF DESIRE
David M. Halperin
Series Editor
The Female Thermometer

Eighteenth-Century Culture and the Invention of the Uncanny
TERRY CASTLE
Gide’s Bent
Sexuality, Politics, Writing
MICHAEL LUCEY
The Erotic Imagination

French Histories of Perversity
VERNON A. ROSARIO
THE
EROTIC
IMAGINATION
French Histories
of Perversity
Vernon A. Rosario
New York * Oxford

Oxford University Press
1997
Oxford University Press
Oxford New York

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Copyright © 1997 by Vernon A. Rosario II
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Oxford is a registered trademark of Oxford University Ptess
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced,

stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means,
electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise,
without the prior permission of Oxford University Press.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Rosario, Vernon A.
The erotic imagination : French histories
of perversity / by Vernon A. Rosario
p. cm. — (Ideologies of desire)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-19-510483-8 (cloth)
1. Erotica—Fiance—History—18th century.
2. Erotic literature, French.
3. Sex customs—France—History—18th century.
4. Hygiene, Sexual—France—History—18th century.
1. Title. II. Series.
HQ463.R545 1997 306.7'0944—DC21 96-29552
Earlier versions of some material have been published:

“Phantastical Pollutions: The Public Threat of Private Vice in Fiance” and “Introduction: The Politics of Solitary
Pleasures,” (co-authored with Paula Bennett) in Solitary Pleasures: The Historical, Literary, and Artistic Discourses of
Autoeroticism, ed. Paula Bennett and Vernon Rosario (New York: Roudedge, 1995). Reprinted by permission of the
publisher.
“Pointy Penises, Fashion Crimes, and Hysterical Mollies: The Pederasts’ Inversions,” in Homosextadity in Modern
France, ed. Jeffrey Merrick and Bryant T. Ragan, Jr. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996). Reprinted by
permission of Oxford University Press.
“Inversion’s Histories/History’s Inversions: Novelizing Fin-de-Sircle Homosexuality,” in Science and Homosexualities,
ed. Vernon Rosario (New York: Routledge, 1997). Reprinted by permission of the publisher.
135798642
Printed in the United Stales of America

on acid-free paper
To A-,
who fires my imagination
V
CONTENTS
Acknowledgments ix
Introduction: In Quest of Erotism 3
1 Onanists: The Public Threat of
Phantastical Pollutions 13
2 Erotomaniacs: Self-Representation
in Courts and Asylums 45
3 Inverts: Pointy Penises,
Hysterical Mollies, and
Literary Homosexuals 69
4 Fetishists: Cults, Consumption, and
Erotic Dramas 113
Conclusion: From the Talking Sex
to Sex Talk 157
A Psychoanalytic Supplement:
From French Auto-Erotography to
Freudian Auto-Ergography 165
Timeline of Sexual Perversions 177
Notes 181
Bibliography 211
Index 239
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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
In the process of writing this book, I have sometimes felt

like a mere organic computer accessory inputting a text composed by dozens of
teachers, colleagues, students, and friends who have inspired me over the years.
This book exists thanks to all of them. I am grateful to Paula Bennett, Allan
Brandt, David Halperin, Anne Harrington, Dorothy Porter, and, especially,
Robert Nye who all guided me through my research and writing. Many other
colleagues provided invaluable comments and insights along the way, including
Henry Abelove, Emily Apter, Joel Braslow, Kent Brintnall, Robert Grimm,
Sandra Harding, Andrew London, Henry Majewski, Jeffrey Merrick, Peter
Redfield, Henry Rubin, Margaret Schabas, Lawrence Schehr, Eve Kosofsky
Sedgwick, Thomas Spear, James Steakley, and Sharon Traweek.
I am grateful for many informal, informative conversations and the unflag¬
ging support of my friends Garland Allen, Kaila Compton, Irv Cummings,
Daniel Delgado, Sandi Dubowski, Harlan Lane, Elizabeth Moodey, Lergus
O’Reilly, Prank Philip, Richard Pillard, Micheline and Edward Rice-Maximin,
Susan Rosenfeld, Ed Scarcelle, William Summers, Denis Sweet, and Chris
Thorman.
I can only collectively thank the numerous scholars in feminist and queer
studies whose pioneering work has opened up controversial and socially trans¬
forming fields of research. Their brief mention in the endnotes hardly does
them justice when every thought I have is inflected by their wisdom and courage.
Kind and knowledgeable librarians at Holmes Hall in the Countway Med¬
ical Library, the Bibliothûe Nationale, the Bibliotheque Henri Ey, the Faculte
de Medecine de Paris, and the Louise M. Darling Biomedical Library have
placed all sorts of precious documents at my fingertips. I am grateful to the ad¬
ministrative staff in the Department of the History of Science at Harvard, the
Harvard Medical School—M.LT Division of Health Sciences and Technology,
X ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
and the Department of History at U.C.L.A. who helped me navigate bureau¬

cratic mazes. T. Susan Chang, my editor at Oxford University Press, has been
enormously supportive and patient in coaxing me through revisions.
My research and writing were sustained by the following sources: a Na¬
tional Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship, a Henri Lurcy
Foundation Traveling Fellowship, a Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst
Fellowship, a SmithKline Beckman Medical Perspectives Fellowship, the Clen-
dening Traveling Fellowship in the History and Philosophy of Medicine, the
U.C.L.A. Center for Cultural Studies of Science, Technology, and Medicine,
the U.C.L.A. Center for the Study of Women, and the Mellon Fellowship in the
Humanities at the University of Pennsylvania. I greatly appreciate their support.
Note on Translations and Citation System
Unless other-wise noted, all translations are mine. I have rendered foreign-
language titles into English. Medical documents are cited by the original year
of publication, and well-known literary works are cited by their title.
THE
EROTIC
IMAGINATION
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INTRODUCTION
In Quest
of Erotism
Often eroticism is just a manifestation of illness, exliibited as a

more or less marked symptom in a syndrome of manic exaltation.
Dr. Joseph Guislain (1852)
What is the origin of the “erotic”? The question seems

unanswerable in the contemporary Euro-American context, where the erotic
leaks out of the confines of the imagination and the bedroom to saturate all as¬
pects of everyday life. Titillating images are almost numbingly omnipresent.
Could anyone imagine selling alcohol, cigarettes, motorcycles, or perfume
without at least a soupgon of eroticism? This ubiquity masks the haziness of the
subject matter: What is the erotic? A dictionary definition—“of, devoted to, or
tending to arouse sexual desire”—fails to capture the erotic or its mechanisms
of action, which are as diverse and ambiguous as they are controversial.
From the municipal level to the United States Supreme Court to interna¬
tional courts, some of today’s most heated legal battles concern the definition
and regulation of the erotic: pornography, censorship of sexually explicit art,
sexual harassment, red light district zoning, AIDS education, sex surveys,
same-sex marriage, and “indecent” material on the Internet, to mention only a
few. Fascination with eroticism shifts quickly from prurient curiosity to politico-
moral inquisition as the public scrutinizes transsexuals on the “Oprah!” show,
J. Edgar Hoover’s alleged homosexuality, Manuel Noriega’s pornographic
3
4 THE EROTIC IMAGINATION
predilections, Saddam Hussein’s supposed penchant for transvestitism, or

politicians’ sexual peccadilloes^
Individuals’ erotic desires and the societal erotic imagination are conflu¬
ent, but their sources are multiple and murky. It would be short-sighted to trace
our current obsession with the erotic only as far back as the 1960s “sexual rev¬
olution,” the Beat Generation, or even Sigmund Freud’s sexual analyses of the
psyche and of culture.
A hundred years ago, sexuality was already being declared a powerful per¬
sonal and social drive. Ernest-Armand Dubarry, a journalist and scientific pop-
ularizer,^ penned The Insane Lovers, a series of melodramatic novellas. To jus¬
tify these potboilers, he declared:
Sexual life occupies such a high position in social life, even national life; it
plays such a major part in our thoughts, our acts, and has such great influence
on us all, that to neglect this power that leads us, under the pretext of not
shocking the ears of rigid prudes, is the height of absurdity and foolishness.
(1896b, 8)
While Dubarry insisted on the social importance of discussing sex,

he also recognized this as a perilous enterprise. To legitimize his representations
of the erotic, he deployed medical protagonists who deliver lengthy, well-
documented lectures on “perversions of the sexual instinct.” In one introduc¬
tion, Dubarry borrowed the oft-cited apologia from Ambroise Tardieu’s trea¬
tise on rape and sodomy: “No physical or moral misery, no wound, however
corrupted it be, should frighten those devoted to the science of man; the sacred
ministry of the doctor, in obliging him to see all, also permits him to say all.”^
Dubarry warned that to silence his “psychopathological passional novel series”
would be tantamount to covering up a political scandal. Science was a “com¬
mon patrimony,” he exclaimed: it should not be “confiscated” by any one
group but had to be employed by all for the sake of social education and salva¬
tion (7-9).
Dubarry’s posturing betrays his awareness of the fact that contemporary
medical literature was the only legitimate place for representations of the erotic.
But was this medical concern with individual and national sexuality an ancient
professional prerogative? Or, to rephrase my opening query: Is there a genetic
history of the erotic?
In this book LiBY£?iigat^êxual pleasures: their genesis, history, mechan¬
ics, and effects. I argue that all eroticism in the modern Euro-American context
is perverse because of the way sexual behavior and fantasy were theorized by
Introduction 5
physicians since the eighteenth century.^ My focus is on France not simply be¬
cause of the enduring allure of steamy French eroticism (for example, heady
perfumes, the films Belle de Jour and Last Tango in Paris, or Ravel’s Bolero.)
The mystique of Vamour fou is the product of a French “perversification” of
sexuality that arose through the circulation of sensual stories, medical ideas,
and literary styles among French physicians, novelists, and sexual “perverts”
who populate the pages of post-Revolutionary medical and literary texts.
Victorian doctors and laymen in Britain and America believed France
was a pernicious source of erotic literature.^ Initially, they thought perversity
was almost exclusively a French disorder. For example, in praising the transla¬
tion of Leopolde Deslande’s French treatise on masturbation (1835), Dr.
Samuel Woodward, superintendent of the Worcester Insane Hospital, never¬
theless noted: “The opportunities for discovering [masturbation’s] extent with
females is much greater in France, than in this or perhaps any other country”
(1839, 348). In a review of Continental works on “perverted sexual instinct,”
Drs. Shaw and Ferris of New York observed that “no cases that we are aware
of have been published in America” (1883, 185). For these distressed physi¬
cians, “sexual perversity” was a culturally and temporally variable phenome¬
non: it had spawned on the Continent and might spread to America. Thus,
while physicians deployed biological theories to explain erotic pleasures, these
scientific ways of understanding sensuality are also historically and socially
contingent.
Erotic Appetites
The first French use of erotique—in the contemporary connotation of sexual

rather than amorous—is surprisingly recent.® It only emerged in 1825, not in a
licentious novel or sexual treatise, but in the seminal text on g-astronomy: The
Physiology of Taste, or Meditation on Transcendental Gastronomy by the jurist,
politician, and gourmand AnthHme Brillat-Savarin. This eclectic amalgam of
anecdotes, recipes, and philosophical musings is an amiable parody of earlier
sensualist scientific texts and marks the epitome of a literary fad for “physiolo¬
gies” of various professions and even marriage.^
By Brillat-Savarin’s own admission, medicine was his mania and he con¬
sidered himself an “amateur doctor” (27-34). He cultivated close links with the
medical profession and it was his friend Dr. Richerand who convinced Brillat-
Savarin to publish his treatise on food. His happiest day, Brillat-Savarin con¬
fides to us, was when he was mistaken for a great physician while attending
Dr. Hippolyte Cloquet’s medical lectures (34).^ Like Cloquet, Brillat-Savarin

was intrigued by the relationship between taste, odors, and emotions. His re¬
searches led him to invent an “irrorator”: a little, mechanized room deodorizer
to boost people’s mood (34).
The “erotic” emerges, curiously enough, in his discussion of truffles: the
black, dense, spherical fungus with a pungent perfume. “Who says truffle," de¬
clared Brillat-Savarin, “pronounces a great word that awakens erotic and gour¬
mand memories amongst the sex m skirts, and gourmand and erotic memories
amongst the sex with beards” (100). The mysterious and succulent truffle can
serve as a metaphor for the erotic imagination itself: “The origin of the truffle
is unknown,” explained Brillat-Savarin, “one finds it, but we know neither how
it is born nor how it grows” (100).
However enigmatic its origins, the truffle—like the erotic imagination—
nevertheless has a cultural history. The ancient Romans appreciated the Greek,
African, and Libyan truffles, claimed Brillat-Savarin, but the fungus disap¬
peared from all records of human gastronomy after the Latin Decadence. Brillat-
Savarin’s contemporaries had witnessed its resurrection, and in the 1820s “the
glory of the truffle [was] at its apogee” (101). Every fashionable dinner had to
have at least one truffled dish. In part this was due to food merchants who, ob¬
serving the growing popularity of the costly delicacy, had combed the country¬
side for them and expedited them to the cities. But why had truffles captivated
the palate?
Brillat-Savarin believed it was due to the general conviction that truffles
“predispose one to genesic pleasures” (102). This vôvd genesique, also of his
coinage, first appears as the “genesic sense” in his meditation on the senses. He
accused philosophers of seriously neglecting or misunderstanding this all-
important sixth sense of “physical love, that draws the sexes one to the other,
and whose goal is the reproduction of the species” (39). Nevertheless, in the
evolution and perfection of the human senses, it was the genesic sense that had
“invaded the organs of all the other senses” (40). Since the Renaissance, par¬
ticularly in France, this “capricious and tyrannical sense” had stimulated ro¬
mantic love, coquetry, and fashion—the “three great motors of contemporary
society” (41).
He even attributed the genealogy of the sciences” to the human drive to
gratify the genesic sense: “In looking more closely, one will see that all the most
delicate and ingenious that [the sciences] have to offer is due to desire, hope,
and gratitude, which are related to the union of the sexes” (41). As we will see
m the Supplement, he was not the last analyst of sexual desire to propose that
the erotic drive had spurred science and all of Western civilization.
Introduction 7
Fancying himself a man of science, Brillat-Savarin wanted to test the pop¬

ular belief in the “erotic virtue” of truffles, “to know if the effect is real and the
opinion founded in reality” (102). However scabrous and comical such re¬
search might be, he was certain that “all truth is worth discovering.” But how
to research the subject? He turned to women. Only one, however, was thor¬
oughly candid. “I will let her speak,” he writes.
His informant recounts a domestic supper in the company of her hus¬
band and his friend, Verseuil, a frequent guest and a handsome young man of
some wit. The otherwise light meal nevertheless stars a superb truffled fowl.
Called away on business, her husband thinks nothing of leaving his wife and
Verseuil alone. “At first the conversation revolved around the most inconse¬
quential subjects,” she reports, “but soon it took a turn for the more intimate
and exciting. Verseuil was successively flattering, expansive, affectionate, caress¬
ing, and, seeing that I did nothing except laugh at these amusing proceedings,
he became so insistent that I could no longer misinterpret his intentions.” Sud¬
denly she comes to her senses and narrowly escapes with her virtue unsoiled by
insinuating that his desires will be satisfied another day. Escaping from his
clutches, she collapses in her bedroom, exhausted.
Only the following day does she judge her conduct reprehensible. Her
pride should have been alerted earlier; she should have silenced Verseuil’s first
phrases and not lent herself to a “conversation that presaged nothing good....
What can I tell you. Monsieur? All of this must have been on account of the
truffles; I am truly convinced that they gave me a dangerous persuasion; and
although I have not renounced them (which would be far too severe), at least
I never eat them without their pleasure being tempered with a bit of distrust”
(103). The truffle sparks a double incitement to discourse and to erotism.^ It
stimulates both Verseuil’s lascivious conversation and the lady’s picaresque
confession, which, despite the sober conclusion, has all the flavor of popular
licentious literature (and may well be a fiction spun by Brillat-Savarin him¬
self).
Distrusting a woman’s confession, however, Brillat-Savarin consulted
several men to arrive at the conclusion that the truffle was not a “positive
aphrodisiac” (104). Its erotic virtue did not arise from any biochemical action
on the genesic sense, but from the situational license afforded “the great word”
truffle by the cultural associations between the savory fungus and erotic mem¬
ories. Even while he claimed his own research concerned naturalphysiolog)/, he
also recognized that objects and practices, like words and beliefs, all have cul¬
tural histories: “In any case, how could words not change when customs and
ideas undergo constant modification? If we do the same things as the Ancients,
we do not do them in the same manner, and there are entire pages in some
French books that could not be translated into Latin or Greek” (37). He would
probably be the first to affirm that the sexual “erotic” was not so much a radi¬
cally new phenomenon as a new expression of altered customs and ideas.
In addition to this nominalist and discursive approach to a cultural his¬
tory of the erotic imagination, I have taken another cue from Brillat-Savarin: to
turn to the erotic confessions of individuals and to “let them speak.” As he
noted, his contemporaries were quite reticent on the subject of the genesic
sense, but one medium insisted that Truth knew no shame: scientific litera¬
ture. Of course, we must be skeptical of this claim, and of patients’ freedom to
voice their truth under the glare of the medical examination lamp. Nineteenth-
century medicine did, unquestionably, offer an unprecedented platform for
the exploration of sexual pleasure. Historian Michel Foucault only fleetingly
acknowledged that the confessional sexualis might produce a pleasur¬
able ars erotica (1976, 96). Here I will be showing how physicians, patients,
and novelists coaxed (and even coached) each other to reveal and consolidate
the pleasures of the erotic imagination.
Medical License
Doctors enjoy the professional privilege of inquiring into private matters under
the cloak of confidentiality and clinical relevance. To arrive at a diagnosis, a
physician extracts a patient’s history and tries to match it vdth a recognized
“natural history” of a disease. Health care professionals translate the patient’s
story into technical language and distill it into a concise “clinical case history,”
which circulates orally and is recorded in the patient’s chart. An unusual case
might be transformed into a published study.'O In telling their story, patients
are also struggling to make sense of their illness and suffering.In my clinical
experience, the psychiatric interview particularly encourages the most intimate
confessions since, given the insights of psychoanalysis, patient and doctor alike
intuit that the most hidden or forgotten aspects of experience are also the most
significant to psychic pain and healing. While practices may be quite rel¬
evant to a general medical interview, sexual fantasies and other elements of the
inner life become explicit only in the psychotherapeutic encounter where, per¬
haps for the first time, patients are encouraged to verbalize, examine, and ex¬
plore their erotic imagination.
The first psychiatric patient I interviewed as a medical student ^vas a forty-
seven-year-old man with a long history of clinical depression and suicidality.
Introduction 9
As I was quietly listening to his story, I was struck by its uncanny correspon¬
dence to psychoanalytic models: Oedipal conflicts, narcissistic erotic attach¬
ments, the implantation of fetishistic interests m childhood, the mourning over
lost ego-introjects, etc. Had Freud simply gotten it right, and was I cleverly in¬
terpreting the deeper psychosexual truths to which the patient was oblivious?
Fortunately, I was more skeptical. I realized that this man had gone
through decades of psychoanalysis and had generously volunteered to be inter¬
viewed by students. Whether consciously or not, he had rehearsed his story
many times. It had been transformed into a classic psychiatric history, but he
genuinely sensed it as uniquely his own. And it was.
We all fall in love, have sex, choose friends, and fight with them. The af¬
fective and erotic activities of our life seem to be directed by personal reasons
and emotions, calculation and fancy, yet they are also constrained by the ties of
family, class, gender, culture, and nationality, as well as the invisible pulses of
our body.^^ I will be focusing on how those extrapersonal forces shape a variety
of histories of erotism: individuals’ sensual autobiographies, doctors’ scientific
histories, and fiction writers’ histoires passionelles. I purposefully set out to blur
the boundaries between these narrative genres, or, more accurately, to show
how political, rhetorical, and professional conventions establish these bound¬
aries. This is not to deny the personal or the biological. We will see that these
two are tightly interwoven into people’s stories of their erotic lives.
Nineteenth-century French medical literature is exceptionally rich in
erotic memoirs and confessions for reasons that have to do as much with gen¬
eral professional developments as with specific concerns about sexuality. Franee
was preeminent in neurology and psychiatry throughout much of the nine¬
teenth century. Therefore, French doctors also dominated the semiology of
the erotic—the interpretation of signs of sexual pathology.
It was an era of medical professionalization and specialization along with
the multiplication of new human sciences (such as anthropology, sociology,
public hygiene, criminology, and sociology).Thanks to these ancillary med¬
ical sciences, the profession claimed expertise in medicolegal issues and social
policy, where nosological matters were critical. However, the nosologies (classi¬
fication systems) of sexual “pathologies” were imprecise until the late nine¬
teenth century.Lacking specific diagnostic labels, earlier doctors instead pro¬
vided lengthy clinical descriptions, often transcribing their patients’ first-person
confessions. Doctors could indulge in long case descriptions thanks to the ex¬
plosion of industrial printing and the proliferation of specialty and regional
professional journals that provided new outlets for biomedical publishing.
Medical texts therefore could include a variety of documentary materials:
doctors’ descriptions of patient histories and physical examinations, police and

legal documents, newspaper articles, and patients’ testimonial letters, legal
confessions, and personal writingsd®
Out of this complex literary amalgam I will be drawing attention to the so-
called patients’ own writings about their sexual lives and to the ways in which
they used these medical confessions to explore their erotic imaginations. Sur¬
rounding these patient histories are the doctors’ interpretations. These tell their
own professional and sociological stories of the origins, nature, and functions of
the erotic. This medical framing gave erotisnie a strong pathological flavor that
diffused beyond the medical journals into the general public.
Medical and lay cultures exchanged information in both directions
through numerous means. The erotic medical confessions were liminal narra¬
tives, situated in the shady boundary between scientific documents and licen¬
tious popular literature. Bold warnings that “sales of this book are strictly lim¬
ited to doctors and psychologists with a professional interest in sex” probably
only boosted “illegitimate” sales. One book reviewer for the American Journal
of Insanity (1893, 91), for example, questioned the popularity of Richard von
Krafft Ebing’s encyclopedia of perversities, Psychopathia Sexualis:
How much of its sale has been due to professional interest, how much to the
interest of sufferers in what concerns their own cases, and how much to a
morbid and prurient curiosity, it would not be easy to determine. Surely, it
would be an extraordinary appetite for nastiness that would not be satiated by
the records which it contains of the inconceivable depths of degradation into
which human beings, often in some respects highly endowed, may be
plunged by the vagaries and perversions of the sexual passion.
While “perverts” relied on medical literature for information and titilla-

tion, doctors added color to their medical tales by relying on popular novels.
Novelists, in turn (especially Realists, Naturalists, and Decadents), utilized
medical literature to inform their portrayals of a variety of “degenerate” and
“psychopathic” characters. Armand Dubarry, for example, earned quite a rep¬
utation and a fortune with his eleven “genesic deviation” novels which came
hard on the heels of the popular French translation of Psychopathia Sexualis
(1895). Dr. Rolet (1907) and other physicians might have condemned “scien¬
tific novelists” such as Emile Zola and Dubarry as “scientific dilettantes” feed¬
ing the prurient interests of the public, but Dubarry’s defense differed little
from that of the physicians themselves. Dubarry declared.
Introduction 11
The philosopher, the psychologist, the poet, the novelist, the historian, the
legislator equally insist upon that which the physician claims as his right; and
the duty of these agitators of ideas, these anatomists of the soul, is to initiate
the world, for whose benefit they fight, to all that touches or interests it.
(1896b, 9)
Can I as a historian claim much more as I search for the medical and cul¬
tural roots of the erotic imagination? I will be alternating between the place of
the erotic in the soul and in the world. Novelists, doctors, and the individuals
they treated will be the primary speakers. In elaborating their personal stories,
patients were not only struggling to make sense of their erotic experience, but
were providing the material for doctors’ “scientific” narratives of erotism in
society.
My historical narrative proceeds chronologically with individual chapters
on the eighteenth-century concern with masturbation, the early-nineteenth-
century construction of erotomania, and the late-nineteenth-century discover¬
ies of homosexuality and fetishism. These four chapters focus on broader issues
concerning the emergence of modern eroticism: individualist subjectivity,
medicolegal matters, nationalist rivalries, and consumer culture. Each new
erotic entity grew out of earlier medical knowledge and social concerns, but
also incorporated the professional and social issues of the moment. Therefore,
while these erotic phenomena have a pre-nineteenth-century ancestry, it was
during the “long nineteenth century” (from the late eighteenth century till
World War I) that they emerged as sexually perverse and the objects of focused
biomedical attention.
These four “disease” entities are different aspects of a single morbid phe¬
nomenon constructed in the nineteenth century: the erotic imagination. The
medical “discovery” and manipulation of the erotic imagination was, as
Dubarry suggested, of enormous social and political import. He and the physi¬
cians of the erotic, however, believed the “genesic drive” to be a biological, nat¬
ural appetite that had an effect on the health of the nation, but we will see that
the vicissitudes of the nation also molded the erotic imagination of individuals
and society. Thanks to the legitimacy of medicine, the erotic could fly from the
coniines of the individual imagination, and “prurience” could become the ob¬
ject of cultural politics.
As we consume a heavy diet of erotic narratives, we—like the lady led
astray by truffles—must be vigilant of their pleasures and perils just as the doc¬
tors, patients, and novelists were. The imagination, erotic and otherwise, plays
a subtle role in the narrative production of all three speakers, as it must

inevitably in my own. We would do well to self-reflectively heed Dubarry’s
disclaimer:
In the passional oeuvre in which we are engaged, we will utilize not only our
personal observations, we will make use of, among other things, the work of
alienists, of indubitable facts collected by ourselves, of criminal trials dealing
with the task we have set before us, we will try to insure that the imagination
serve only as an embroidery to the truth. (1896a, 7-8)
Dubarry pretended that the relationship between imagination, truth, and his¬
tory was unproblematic. However, in knitting my own passional historical oeu¬
vre, I will be regularly asking: Is there any truth to either the erotic or the his¬
torical imaginations, since both involve delicately embroidered narratives of
fact, experience, and fantasy? Just as erotic fantasy can become a source of real
sexual arousal and pleasure, so too a historical narrative can be made real for
individual as well as national pleasure, politics, and pride. I will not be as coy
as Dubarry and discount the prurient pleasures of history. On the contrary, I
hope my narrative will indeed satisfy an “extraordinary appetite for nastiness”
even while examining the historical and political physiology of that appetite.
For I presume all my readers are historical paraphiliacs. Although “paraphilia”
is the current psychiatric term for the sexual perversions, psychoanalyst Wil¬
helm Stekel originally defined it simply as the “interest in perversion” (1924,
1:341)—implicating us all in the history of perversity.
CHAPTER 1
Onanists: The
Public Threat
of Phantastical
Pollutions
I had returned from Italy, not quite as I had left for it, but perhaps as no one
of my age had returned. I had brought back my innocence, but not my vir¬
ginity. 1 had felt the progress of the years; my restless temperament had finally
declared itself, and its first quite involuntary eruption had triggered alarms
concerning my health that attest to the innocence with which I had lived till
then. Soon reassured, I learned that dangerous supplement that deceives na¬
ture, and preserves youth of my humor from many disorders at the expense of
their health, their vigor, and sometimes their life. That vice which shame and
timidity find so convenient, has an even greater attraction for lively imagina¬
tions: it allows them to dispose, so to speak, of the entire female sex at their
wall, and to make a tempting beauty serve their pleasure wathout needing to
obtain her consent. Seduced by this fatal advantage, I worked at destroying the
good constitution that nature had established in me, and which I had allowed
sufficient time to mature. Add to this disposition my situation at the time,
rooming with a beautiful woman whose image I caressed in the depths of my
heart, seeing her constantly throughout the day, in the evenings, surrounded
13
by objects that reminded me of her, sleeping in a bed where I knew she had
slept. What stimuli! The reader who pictures all this must already imagine me
half-dead.'
That dangerous supplement that deceives nature? Titillated readers of

Rousseau’s Confessions in 1782 would have immediately deciphered his pecu¬
liar euphemism for masturbation, or the “solitary vice” of “self-pollution.”
Rather than simply identify this eighteenth-century concept with our current
notion of masturbation, let me begin by examining pollution historically.
Today the term evokes images of smog and toxic waste, but the French word
pollution only acquired this meaning in the twentieth-century.^ Diderot and
d’Alembert’s Encyclopedic (1751-1772) provides three definitions oi pollu¬
tion: (1) Moral: “the effusion of seed outside the function of marriage”; (2)
Medical: a disease of involuntary ejaculation of seed; (3) Jurisprudential: de-
hlement of sacred places (26(2):568-71). The reader is referred to a separate
article on manustupration for a discussion of the medical ailments of “those
abandoning themselves without restraint to that infamous passion and sacri¬
ficing themselves to that false Venus” (570), that is, voluntary, manually stim¬
ulated ejaculation.
The Encyclopedic's article on pollution reflects traditional distinctions be¬
tween the theologicomoral condemnation of the “spilling of seed” versus med¬
ical concerns with seminal discharge or “gonorrhoea” (from the Greek gonos,
seed, and rhoia, flux). The EncyclopMie's entry for manustupration, on the
other hand, reveals a new medical preoccupation with masturbation which had
only arisen in the early eighteenth century. In this chapter I examine the med¬
ical and cultural evolution of “onano-phobia” in Francophone Europe. I con¬
nect this anxiety to evolving constructions of subjectivity using Rousseau as my
principal informant and paradigmatic subject. We can begin by asking: Why
did Rousseau believe the “convenient vice” was a threat to health, vigor, and
life? We must also wonder, as did Rousseau’s contemporaries, why he publi¬
cized his lifetime addiction to the “dangerous supplement.” Jacques Derrida
(1967) examines how Rousseau criticized several overlapping dangerous sup¬
plements (things that add as well as make complete): masturbation as a sup¬
plement to reproductive coitus, writing as a supplement to speaking, the imag¬
ination as a supplement to reality.^ I further argue that, for Rousseau, eroticism
itself is a socially stimulated supplement to “natural” living, and for later
nineteenth-century critics, erotisme was a supplement that threatened to un¬
dermine the very civilization that sex was “naturally” intended to perpetuate.
Onanists 15
The confrontation between the “natural” individual and “artificial” soci¬

ety preoccupied Rousseau and many of his contemporaries. I will be teasing
out several themes of this Enlightenment conflict. After a brief review of the
pre-Enlightenment ecclesiastical teachings on pollutions and the medical treat¬
ment of gonorrhoea, I turn to Rousseau and Samuel-Auguste Tissot. A promi¬
nent Svdss physician who legitimized the medical treatment of onanism, Tissot
shared Rousseau’s anxieties about the polluting effects of “civilization.” I then
focus on critiques of civilization and masturbation as corruptors of the “soft,”
impressionable nerves of children. Intimately tied to these discussions of the
nervous system was an emerging concern for the impressionable imagination
and the impact of “literature of the imagination.” Perhaps one of the most
feared perversions of the imagination was the confusion of pain for pleasure,
and I return to Rousseau for his analysis of his own masochism. Finally, I ex¬
amine the new role of published confessions or autobiographies such as
Rousseau’s in mediating the tense relationship between the personal and the
public. We will see how the revelation of private vice gained its confessor a
modicum of public absolution while making “perverse” sexual identities com¬
mon knowledge. By the nineteenth century, “social hygienists” no longer por¬
trayed these new sexual beings (like the “onaniac”) as unfortunate, innocent
victims of a corrupt civilization, but as dangerous, even criminal, social pollu¬
tants of a country threatened by industrialization, urbanization, foreign con¬
flicts, and stagnating fertility.^
Sins of the Flesh Versus Diseases of Semen
In the Middle Ages, Roman Catholic theologians elaborated doctrine on the

mortal sin of pollution or mollicies} They considered self-pollution a “sin
against nature,” and they pointed to God’s condemnation of Onan. He had
spilt his seed on the ground to avoid conceiving an heir by his widowed sister-
in-law Tamar as levirate law demanded (Genesis 38:7—10). Biblical scholars
debated whether Onan’s crime was masturbation or coitus interruptus, since
Genesis is unclear on this point. Nevertheless, they consistently condemned
such voluntary emissions along with fornication, adultery, niollicies (softness/
effeminacy), sodomy, and bestiality—all classified as forms of unlawful sex.®
But as far as we can tell, these strictures were only addressed to adults. Fur¬
thermore, according to church writings the ills of manustupration (pollution
by the hand) were confined to defilement of the soul and mind; they did not
suggest that organic ills were the wages of self-defilement, nor did they envision
lasting psychological damage.
Medieval physicians were generally careful to acknowledge church in¬
junctions against “illicit” sexual acts, but, on the whole, their concern was more
with the retention of semen than with its waste—^whether voluntary or involun¬
tary. Medical writers since antiquity have proposed theories of seed physiology.^
Galen, the most influential classical physician, proposed that male and female
health was the result of the proper balance between the production and excre¬
tion of the precious seminal humor. Although Galen described gonorrhoea
(useless, involuntary excretion of seed) as a pathological condition (IV:41vF),
he was far more concerned with accumulated seed. This could putrefy in wid¬
ows, nuns, virgins and other chaste women, producing diseases such as hyste¬
ria.^ Galen’s call for humoral, seminal balance was widely echoed by medieval
medical authorities. As in the theological texts, medieval medical literature
made no mention of childhood masturbation nor did medieval physicians, as
far as we know, attach morbid physical or psychological consequences to the act
of masturbation.
Renaissance medical texts betray an increasing concern with gonorrhoea,
particularly in conjunction with venereal disease and various forms of illicit sex¬
ual activity. For example, the highly respected and widely translated Swiss
physician Felix Platter described a case of “Gonorrhoea or Running of the
Reyns”: “[a] young man with pain and heat in the hypochondria [abdomen]
and Loyns, and a Gonorrhoea, his seed came forth and he felt it not, like water
seven years, it consumed him” (1664, 471). But Platter did not mention
manustupration as a cause of gonorrhea in his chapter on “Observations on ex¬
cretion of seed.” Furthermore, he was unperturbed by a patient’s admission of
voluntary “voiding of seed” (517).
The eccentric, self-styled “Doctor of Physicke” Andrew Boorde did
evince a more moralistic attitude toward seminal loss, identifying three kinds of
“gomorrea”: pollutions against nature, pollutions due to infirmity, pollutions
due to imbecility. He was apparently the first to suggest that “gomorrhea”
comes from “Sodome and Gomer” which “dyd synke to hell sodenly” for prac¬
ticing the “gomorrea passio” voluntarily, that is, “to meddle with any brute
beast or to pollute hymself wijlfully” (1552, f. 59v.). To the modern reader,
Boorde seems to blur a variety of “sinful” sexual acts which today we categorize
as distinct behaviors. However, his varieties of “gomorrhea” and even their sig¬
nification cannot be matched with current sexual practices or terminology.^
Boorde condemned “voluntary pollution,” but as it was traditionally under¬
stood: one among many varieties of “unnatural” and illicit “venery” and in it-
Onanists 17
self composed of a number of different kinds of polluting acts. Similarly, Her¬

mann Boerhaave, an influential Dutch physician and philosopher, was far more
concerned with seminal discharge (of any variety) than he was with masturba¬
tion per se. His descri{)tion of the symptomatology of excessive seminal loss
bears a striking resemblance to the portrait of the terminal onanist sketched in
Enlightenment antimasturbation tracts:
The Semen discharged too lavishly, occasions a Weariness, Weakness, Indis¬

position to Motion, Convulsions, Leanness, Driness, Heats and Pains in the
Membranes of the Brain, with a Dulness of the Senses; more especially of the
Sight, a Tabes Dorsalis, Foolishness, and Disorders of the like kind. (1708,
5:456)
However, we should be wary of clumping Boerhaave with the later anti¬

onanism campaigners. For Boerhaave, the causes for such cachexia or wasting
include not only voluntary and nocturnal emissions, but also, in the case of
tabes dorsalis, the lavish discharge of seed which “most frequently happens to
those who are too furious and earlier {sic\ in their Combats in the Camps of
Venus” (i.e., sexual intercourse) (5:456n). Moreover, Boerhaave sets the whole
section on excessive discharge of seed in the context of the morbid effects of
excessive humoral loss, be it blood, lymphatic juice, bile, urine, or perspira¬
tion. To Boerhaave, the lavish discharge of semen was no different from the loss
of any other vital fluid in causing a nonspecific “atrophy or wasting of the
whole habit for want of nutrition.” In summary then, pre-Enlightenment med¬
ical texts were concerned with generic “seminal loss” as a source of humoral
imbalance. With only two known minor exceptions, humoral theory was not
used to defend the theologicomoral condemnation of “self-pollution.”'*^ West¬
ern medical opinion had not singled out onanism as a uniquely pernicious
personal and social disease.
This changed radically with the anonymous publication of Onania; or, the
Heinous Sin of Self Pollution, and All Its Frightful Consequences, in both Sexes,
Considered, with Spiritual and Physical Advice to those, who have already injur’d
themselves by this abominable Practice (1710?). Onania dramatically reordered
Euro-American cultural perceptions of masturbation, transforming it from one
of many forms of seminal and excretory loss into a sexual practice potentially
fatal to individuals and society alike." Like other broadsides by mountebanks
and quacbalvers, Onania started as a brief pamphlet and advertisement for
nostrums: “Strengthening Tincture” (10 shillings) and “Prolifick Powder” (12
shillings). The author promoted these and total abstinence as the only salvation
from the ills of onanism, which included stunted growth, priapism, gonorrhea,
cachexia, blindness, phthisis, insanity, countless other disorders, and, ulti¬
mately, death. By 1750 Onania had appeared in nineteen editions and had sold
thirty-eight thousand copies. With each edition, it swelled with new “testimo¬
nial” letters from customers rescued from the deadly clutches of onanism.
The medicomoral condemnation of solitary vice quickly made its way to Ger¬
many via a 1736 translation of Onania and to France by mid-century thanks to
the translation of another British work, Robert James’s Medicinal Dictionary
and its entry on mastupratio: “A vice not decent to name, but provocative of the
most deplorable and generally incurable disorders. One of the three transla¬
tors of James’s dictionary was the future encyclopediste Diderot.
By the mid-eighteenth century then, medical and quack literature con¬
demning the disease of self-pollution had reached the French-speaking public,
but the notion had probably already penetrated the popular imagination—as
evinced by Rousseau’s guilty confession of his adolescent discovery of solitary
vice in 1728. Physicians, however, lent professional credibility to Onania's
moralistic views and the subsequent folk beliefs. Although some historians have
dismissed the medical campaign against masturbation as a delusion, a conspir¬
acy, or a form of torture, it is clear from abundant medical literature, as well as
clinical records of patients diagnosed as “onanists,” that masturbation was
considered a serious, even epidemic, disease by eighteenth- and nineteenth-
century doctors and public alike. Rather than dismissing the anti-onanism
crusade as a historical aberration, we need to examine how the persecution of
solitary pleasure was consonant with major social and cultural trends of
modernity.^®
Tissot and Rousseau Battling Pollution
Onanophobia did not gain full medical legitimacy until the Svdss physician
Samuel-Auguste-Andre-David Tissot published Onanism, or A Treatise upon
the Disorders Produced by Masturbation (1760). Tissot assured readers that, ex¬
cept for the topic, his work had “nothing in common with the British Onania,"
which he dismissed as “a true chaos” full of “theological and moral trivialities”
(18, 41). He instead proposed to describe “the diseases produced by mastur¬
bation, and not the crime of masturbation” (17). To this effect, he cited noted
medical authorities on the subject of seminal loss, and explained the pathology
of onanism by relying on the soundest humoral physiology. For Tissot the ills of
masturbation included, nevertheless, most of the disorders listed in Onan ia. To
Onanists 19
dramatize the chronic decline of the onanist, Tissot described the case of L. D.,
clockmaker, who abandoned himself to masturbation at the age of seventeen,
repeating the act up to three times a day. Within a year the youngster grew weak
and feared for his health, but too late:
The slightest irritation immediately provoked an imperfect erection, this was

immediately followed by an evacuation of that liqueur, which every day aug¬
mented his weakness. [Orgasml had become habitual and often seized him
with no apparent cause, and in a manner so violent that throughout the dura¬
tion of the attack, which sometimes lasted fifteen hours and never less than
eight, he experienced in the entire posterior neck such violent pains that he
did not just cry, but howled. . .. IHle languished without succor for months.
... Having learned of his state, I rushed to his side; I found there less a living
being than a cadaver lying on straw, thin, pale, filthy, exuding a vile stench,
practically incapable of any movement. He frequently lost through his nose a
pale, watery blood; spittle ran continuously from his mouth; stricken with di¬
arrhea, he voided his excrements in his bed without noticing it; the flow of
semen was continual. . . . The disorders of the mind were no less severe. . . .
[A1 spectacle whose horror is inconceivable, it was hard to recognize he had
once belonged to the human species. ... He died at the end of a few weeks,
in June 1757, edematous throughout his body. (45-46)
As wdth Oiiania, new editions of Tissot’s Onanism included plaintive con¬

fessions from addicted masturbators. One wrote, “I cannot take . . . two hun¬
dred steps without resting; my weakness is extreme; I suffer continual pains
throughout my body. . . . The private part [penis] is more flaccid than a cotton
thread, incapable of any erection; while it allows the semen to flow when manually
stimulated it never truly ejaculates, and besides this it is shrunken and retracted
such that one is scarcely able to visually determine my sex" (51).^® These and
Onanism's other portraits of masturbatory decline were, if anything, more sen-
sationalistic that the ones in Onania thanks to their medical realism. Although
he set aside the heavy-handed moralizing of his British counterpart, Tissot was
equally convinced of the sinfulness of onanism but reasoned that it “is easier to
turn people away from vice through the fear of an immediate ill” than through
abstract reasoning (17). Both Onanism and Onania, therefore, were part of a
common trend in the Enlightenment: the secularization and medicalization of
morality. Improper acts were analyzed as violations of familial and social rules,
and physiological and natural “laws” rather than ecclesiastical doctrines.
While Onania listed the diseases of masturbation and hinted at humoral
pathology to condemn the “sin” of onanism, Tissot deployed the full arsenal of
medical rhetoric to the same moral aims: making reproductive sex normative
and promoting the regulation of sexuality. In other words, the spiritual and the
material aspects of pollution were telescoped: not only was onanism the defile¬
ment of the temple of the soul, but also of the temple of Nature—the body Tis-
sot feared that “civilization,” in particular, threatened the salubrity of Nature
and the natural body, for he was dedicated to the idea that social forces caused
health and illness.
Although Tissot served and was rewarded by the Bern aristocracy, he also
had close connections with i\vtphilosophes}^ Their radical, democratic politics
are evident throughout Tissot’s popular self-help books: Advice to Common Peo¬
ple on their Health (1761), On the Health of Men of Letters [11QC), Essay on the
Diseases of the Valetudinary (1770). Tissot complained that the fundamentally
sturdier health of peasants was deteriorating due to contact with “civilized” city
life when employed as soldiers or domestic servants (1761, 7). He also worried
that European populations were declining, in part due to military conscription
and emigration to the colonies, but mainly because of bourgeois, urban
lifestyles (1761, 1-4). This critique was even sharper in On the Health of Men
of Letters and Essay on the Diseases of the Valetudinary where he suggested a
close correlation between class and health. The healthiest were the peasants,
followed by artisans, the bourgeois, and finally the sickly du monde—peo¬
ple from different classes who had no vocation but shared a lifestyle of leisure
and indolence. To fight boredom they searched for pleasures, not in the natural
satisfaction of labor, but in those “factitious pleasures” that were “opposed to
the usage of nature and whose bizarreness is their only merit” (1770, 11). Tis¬
sot particularly warned of the ills brought on by the valetudinary and luxurious
lifestyles of men of letters who had no occupation but that of their minds
(1766, 20-21; 1770, 11).
Relying on current physiological principles, Tissot explained that seden¬
tary life slowed down humoral circulation and produced nervous enfeeblement
and visceral congestion (1766, 70-77). He also claimed that the seminal
fluid—^which some compared to “nervous sap”—^was weakened, thus explain¬
ing why the sons of geniuses were less gifted than their fathers (1766, 85-86).
Since Tissot had relied on identical physiological principles in Onanism, it is
not surprising that he claimed the nervous exhaustion of the valetudinary was
the same as that produced by diseases of “excessive humoral expenditure,”
most notably, masturbation (1766, 45-66). This association between the ex¬
haustion of men of letters and that of onanists would be strengthened by nine¬
teenth-century physicians who warned that overexertion of the literary or the
erotic imaginations caused “softening” {mollesse) and effeminacy.
Onanists 21
To support his contention that mental work was debilitating, Tissot

turned to Rousseau. In his comedy, Narcisse, or the Lover of Himself Rousseau
staged the amorous intrigues of an effeminate, conceited, young aristocrat who
falls madly in love with a portrait of himself dressed as a woman. Tissot cited
the preface, where Rousseau made explicit the play’s critique of the effeminiz-
ing effects of contemporary, elite culture:
Study \le travail de cabinet] makes men delicate, weakens their temperament;
and it is difficult for the soul to maintain its vigor when the body has lost its
strength. Study wears out the machine, exhausts the spirits, destroys force,
enervates courage; it is thus that one becomes cowardly and pusillanimous,
incapable of resisting either sorrows or passions. [Narcisse, 966; quoted in
Tissot 1766, 41-42)
Appropriately enough, the preface was Rousseau’s vehicle for defending his
Discourse on the Sciences and Arts (1750), the prize-winning response to the
question proposed by the Academy of Sciences and Belles Lettres of Dijon:
“Has the re-establishment of the sciences and arts contributed to the refine¬
ment of manners?” Rousseau’s resounding “No!”—suggested and approved
by his friend Diderot in 1749—brought him fame and censure. One could say,
in turn, that both of Tissot’s essays on the health of valetudinary men of letters
were Tissot’s reply to the hypothetical question: Has the progress of civilization
contributed to the refinement of the body? Echoing Rousseau’s negative re¬
sponse on the cultural state of civilized men, Tissot replied in the negative on
ihdxphysical state.
Given their common skepticism concerning civilization, it is not surpris¬
ing that great philosophical, political, and personal sympathy existed between
the two men. Tissot was quite familiar with his countryman’s writings and he
exclaimed in reference to Rousseau: “That Genevois is my hero.”^® They first
met in June 1762 at Rousseau’s home in Yverdun, Bern, and corresponded
frequently thereafter.^*^ Despite the enormous controversy that erupted over
Rousseau’s pedagogical text, Emile, Tissot remained Rousseau’s staunch de-
fender.2* Rousseau, in turn, admired Tissot, sought his medical advice, and
recommended the doctor’s services to many notable friends.^^ This is remark¬
able since Rousseau despised doctors and once described medicine as “an art
more pernicious to men than all the ills it pretends to cure” {Emile, 269).
Rousseau, however, had no knowledge of Tissot’s Onanism when he
warned educators: “If [your student] once knows that dangerous supplement,
he is lost. Thenceforth his body and heart will be enervated, he will carry to the
grave the sad effects of that habit, the most mortal one to which a young man
can be subjected” [Emile, 663). This passage so delighted Tissot that he sent
Rousseau copies of Onanism, Advice to Common People, and Inoculation Justi¬
fied. In a letter accompanying this gift, Tissot praised Rousseau effusively, and
exclaimed:
You will see. Sir, in the Advice to Common People p. 520, that we are almost of
one mind regarding this Science [medicine].... [He discusses several points
in Emile on which they are in agreement.] Onanism will prove to you that fi¬
nally there is a physician who has recognized all the danger of that odious
practice you so vigorously attack, and has had the courage to make that dan¬
ger public knowledge. This book has been banned in Paris. Could there be
governments for whom it was important for the ministries to prohibit all as¬
sistance that can stop the enfeeblement of the soul or the body?^^
Rousseau did indeed share many of Tissot’s concerns about the insalubrity of
cities and the decline of healthy, rural life.^^ Tissot therefore had good reason
to feel that his social mission was comparable to that of the literatist-philoso-
pher Rousseau. Not only did they share the same scientific task of observing
humanity and diagnosing its ills, they were in similar political trouble for their
candor in this task. Tissot portrayed Rousseau and himself as solitary, coura¬
geous figures sounding the alarm on the deterioration of health and morality in
their time. After all, had not Emile and Onanism both been condemned as im¬
moral, dangerous tracts when in fact they were important pedagogical texts?
The aging Rousseau thanked Tissot for the books, and wrote that, al¬
though he no longer read—especially not medical works—he had immediately
read Onanism and he regretted not knowing of it earlier. He commiserated with
Tissot on the banning of their books.^® Radical critiques of the institutions of
civilization and democratic proposals for public hygiene were indeed contro¬
versial at the time particularly when they touched on childhood pedagogy
and erotism. So the struggle over the bodies and imaginations of children nat¬
urally drew together Rousseau and many doctors concerned wfith civilization’s
ill effects on developing brains and the social interventions necessary for miti¬
gating those effects.
Civilized Corruptions of Soft Nerves
In drawing attention to children, the anti-onamsm literature participated in a

broader trend in the construction of childhood.27 Since the flow of semen
Onanists 23
(male or female) coincided with the changes of puberty, semen was praised as
the precious fluid essential to maturation. Doctors believed that the body
needed to invest all its energy into its self-construction during childhood and
adolescence. This “somatic economy” was vulnerable to the effects of both the
“physical” and the “moral” (understood as environmental, behavioral, or psy¬
chological factors).Masturbation threatened both of these; therefore, the mal¬
leable nerves and imaginations of adolescents required careful management.
The dangers of puberty were vividly portrayed in Rousseau’s Emile, or On
Education (1762)—one of the most influential pedagogical works of the eigh¬
teenth century.^^ In this peculiar hybrid of pedagogy, philosophy, moralism,
and fantasy, Rousseau recommended that instructors constantly watch over
their charge: “Do not leave him alone during the day or the night; at least sleep
in his room. Beware of the [sexual] instinct as soon as you are not watching; it
is good as long as it acts alone, it is suspect as soon as it mixes with the institu¬
tions of mankind” {Emile, 663). He emphatically claimed that one of the “most
frequent abuses of philosophy in our time” was the belief that the onset of pu¬
berty was due to physical and not “moral” causes. His evidence for this was the
variation in the age of onset of puberty with the degree of civilization: “Puberty
and sexual potency are always earlier in instructed and policed peoples than
amongst ignorant and barbaric peoples” (495).
As we have seen, both Rousseau and Tissot blamed “civilization” for pol¬
luting the state of “nature” and stimulating the rise of masturbation. Later
medical sources echoed Rousseau’s pronouncements on the etiological role of
civilization in precociously stimulating puberty and inciting children to self¬
pollution. The masturbation entry in the Dictionary of Medical Sciences (1819)
noted: “The diseases that are the product of the excesses of onanism become
more frequent in proportion to the higher degree of civilization achieved by
modern societies. This opinion, which is generally adopted by medical ob¬
servers, seems to rest on numerous and well established facts” (Fournier &;
Beguin 1819, 101).
In Rousseau’s case, it was after leaving his rural Swiss town and during his
stay in Italy—the cradle of the Renaissance—that Rousseau lost his “virginity.”
While a catechumen in a monastery there, he was sexually molested before the
altar, and when the molester masturbated, Rousseau reported that for the first
time “I saw shooting towards the chimney and falling upon the ground I don’t
know what sticky, white stuff that turned my stomach” {Confessions, 67). Later,
back in Switzerland, it was the constant company of a beautiful woman that in¬
flamed his desires. Rousseau’s conclusion was that sexuality in general was a
supplement of civilization and that in the ideal state of nature chastity would
remain undefiled: “For myself, the more I reflect on this important crisis [of
puberty] and its proximate or distant causes, the more I am persuaded that a
solitary [man] raised in the desert, without books, without instruction, and
without women, would die virginal at whatever age he reached” {Emile, 663).
Rousseau thus evoked the three most frequently mentioned culprits of civiliza¬
tion’s epidemic of onanism: women, education, and literature.
Throughout his work, Rousseau vehemently blamed women for the ills of
modernity and the “unnatural” state of civilization.^^ It was the combined strat¬
egy of female coquetry and sexual reserve that maintained civilized men in a
state of desire and dependency {Emile, 456).^^ It was only this feminine sexual
modesty that prevented the naturally more voracious female from sexually ex¬
hausting the male (447). Rousseau especially criticized th.e_“artificious and
wicked women” of society (that is, the elite) for enslaving men and denaturing
the natural, maternal instincts (713). Rousseau recommended that at the criti¬
cal time of puberty tutors should “distance [the young men] from big cities,
where women’s ornamentation and immodesty rushes and frustrates the
lessons of Nature. . . . [R]eturn them to their first quarters where country sim¬
plicity lets their passions develop less quickly” (517). In Rousseau’s eyes,
women were fundamentally responsible for bringing on civilization and its dis¬
contents. More commonly, medical sources warned of “abominable women”
and nannies who use masturbation to pacify infants, or “more infamous yet, en¬
gage in simulacra of coitus with little boys” (Fournier 8c Beguin 1819, 105).
Schools were perhaps even more nefarious than women. Rousseau re¬
peatedly complained of the corrupting effects of education at the time: “It is
from the very first years that a senseless education decorates our mind and cor¬
rupts our judgment. All around me I see immense institutions where, at great
cost, youth are raised to learn all things, except their duty” {Discours, 24). Even
more to the point, Tissot reported that “a whole school, by this maneuver
[onanism], sometimes tried to avoid falling asleep and diverted the tedium of
scholastic metaphysical lessons delivered by a drowsy old professor” (1760,
97-98). The problem only became more acute with the advent of public
schools. Doctors bemoaned the ironic fact that “it is principally in public es¬
tablishments, where large numbers of young people of one and the other sex
are united, that the habit of masturbation develops with ease. Public education
is without a doubt one of the best results of perfected civilization. . . . But by
how many grave side effects are those advances compromised?” (Fournier &
Beguin 1819, 105). If public schools were the hazardous environment where
children learned self-pollution, it was through the imagination that the addic-
Onanists 25
tion took hold and through the nervous system that onanopathology crippled
its victims.^^
Rousseau’s oft-repeated message was that the genital instinct or sense was
excited by a precociously aroused imagination: “As I have said a thousand
times, it is by the imagination alone that the senses are awakened” {Emile, 662).
This observation was given a solid physiological explanation by Dr. Menuret de
Chambaud in the manstupration entry of the Encyclopedie: “The mind contin¬
ually absorbed in voluptuous thoughts, constantly directs the animal spirits to
the generative organs, which by repeated handling, become more mobile, more
obedient to the unruliness of the imagination: the result is almost continual
erections, frequent pollutions, & the excessive evacuation of seed” (20(2):991).
The nervous system was viewed in the eighteenth century as an exchange
network, linking all other systems in sympathy. As such, it was the principal
player in the somatic economy and was considered the most refined product of
the progress of civilization. The genital system, usually portrayed as the most
primitive or animalistic, was nevertheless supremely important for maturation
and reproduction. Together these two systems dominated the developing body:
“We can consider, in youth, these two important parts of the organism, the
brain and the sexual organs, as two centers that mutually convey the impres¬
sions they receive, and that excite one another in the most direct and energetic
manner” (Fournier &: Beguin 1819, 109). This cerebrogenital axis embodied
and materialized two axes of conflict that preoccupied the antimasturbatory lit¬
erature: civilized versus primitive and intellectual versus sensual.
As in the case of education, the nervous system was caught in the dilemma
of civilization. The more refined and civilized nerves became, the more vulner¬
able they left children to onanism. Therefore, it was a fine line between the pro¬
duction of high genius and of base decadence:
The excessive development of nervous sensibility, which is the source of so

many laudable actions and so many vices; this cause, which, depending on
the direction it is given, bears the most admirable productions of genius, or those
shapeless works that attest to the force and deviations of the imagination, may be
the result of a natural disposition of the organs, or the product of early edu¬
cation. [Infancy is remarkable for the dominance of the fully organized ner¬
vous system over the rest of the body, which is still relatively underdeveloped.]
It is immediately after early childhood, during that period when the faculties
of the new being are energetically beginning to develop, that he runs the
greatest risk. If then an unhappy accident, or, too frequently, strange han¬
dling, reveals to him a new sense, so to speak, the genital organs become a site
for concentrating more or less energetically the forces of life, and the subject,
swept away by a deceitful pleasure, abandons himself with furor to a vice that
will soon be his perdition, or draws upon him ills even more terrible than
death. (Fournier & Beguin 1819, 103; emphasis added)
Childhood was a perilous time of extreme nervous and imaginative impres¬

sionability when all forms of stimuli could prematurely excite the genital cen¬
ters and trigger onanistic addiction. Lascivious talk, romantic novels, and sen¬
sual images were especially blamed for igniting the imagination and, by
sympathy, inciting the genitals. “One can affirm that this reading of novels,
which so easily becomes the object of a veritable passion for young ladies, is
today one of the most active causes of their depravation” (106). The Ency-
clopedie, for example, warned that
the truly morbid nocturnal pollution is always the effect of immoderate de¬
baucheries of the body and the mind when, not content to indulge without
excess in venereal pleasures, one continually feasts the imagination with las¬
civious, voluptuous images, filthy conversations, libertine and indecent read¬
ings; then, dreams, which are often just a representation of the objects that
most occupied the mind during the day, replay the same matters; the genera¬
tive organs (which frequent exercise and an overheated imagination hold in a
continual tension) are much more susceptible to lascivious impressions; they
obey the slightest misdirection, and the movements destined to the ejacula¬
tion of semen, having become almost habitual, are executed without effort
(26(2):570)
We have seen that antimasturbationist doctors were preoccupied with

moral and pedagogical issues, particularly the pathological effects of civiliza¬
tion. cities, urbanization, schools, artificious women,” and “unrespectable
readings.” This last problem, the nervous impact of licentious texts and the so¬
matic effect of their mental representation, haunts the antimasturbatory litera¬
ture, which arose in conjunction with two other important historical develop¬
ments of the Enlightenment, the proliferation of “pornographic” literature and
the birth of the novel.
Les Liaisons Dangereuses
Both the middle class and literacy rates rose m France during the eighteenth
century. The Enlightenment also witnessed an associated explosion in the pub-
Onanists 27
lication of “licentious literature” often colored with political and anticlerical

overtones.^^ The rise of novels in general and pornographic novels in particu¬
lar was criticized by eighteenth-century cultural observers as a major pollutant
of the imagination. Medical critics also worried that novels and pornography
encouraged readers, particularly those with “impressionable brains” (specih-
cally, children and women), to mistake the imaginary for the truth, resulting in
unhealthy, unsatisfiable hyperexcitation or “false” pleasure.^^ Rousseau per¬
fectly described this pubescent, literary escape into a solitary, imaginary world:
I nourished myself on situations that had interested me in my readings, I re¬

called them, varied, combined, and appropriated them to such a point that I
became one of the characters I imagined and I always saw myself in the most
agreeable positions according to my taste. . . . This love of imaginary objects
and this facility for entertaining myself with them ultimately made me dis¬
gusted with all my surroundings and determined that taste for solitude which
has persisted since that time. {Confessions, 41)
Rousseau’s friend, the sensudAistphilosophe Etienne Bonnot de Condillac,

authored one of the most influential Enlightenment critiques of the “vices and
advantages of the imagination,” the Essay on the Origin of Human Understand¬
ing (1746). Relying on John Locke’s associationist psychology, Condillac sug¬
gested that the imagination allowed the free linkage {liaison) of perceptions,
thus producing new ideas that were not derived from nature. These liaisons
could either be made voluntarily or accidentally through foreign impressions.
The latter were especially tenacious and dangerous because, unlike consciously
made liaisons, they were erroneously considered to be natural (1746, 111).
This was how permanent prejudices were formed, for example, associating
particular character traits with certain facial physiognomies. As an example,
Condillac mentioned Descartes’s reputed amorous predilection for cross-eyed
women. He attributed this unusual passion to the fact that Descartes’s first love
was cross-eyed. As we will see in chapter 4, Alfred Binet a century later would
“diagnose” Descartes for the first time as a “fetishist.” Condillac only labeled
this erotic preference a dangerous liaison. In the same vein, Condillac criticized
novels which, normally harmless, could become substitutes for reality in the
hands of sad people or women (who, he believed, had more tender brains
than men) (120-21).
Condillac’s theories of the imagination were enormously important to
the alienist (or “mad-doctor”) Philippe Pinel in his conception of the pathol¬
ogy and treatment of the denii-follies: intermediate mental conditions between
sanity and raving lunacy.^® Condillac had wârned that the imagination could
easily lead one to dangerous liaisons and tenacious errors. Pinel realized that
this very property of the imagination could be exploited to therapeutic benefit
if deployed by professionals schooled in the techniques of “moral therapy.”
Thus, by the second half of the eighteenth century, physicians represented the
imagination as a perilous site where irrational, “unnatural” associations might
take hold. But it was also a malleable organ for implanting therapeutic ideas.
The erotic imagination, in particular, was theorized in this period as an
especially important locus both for dangerous associations and for regulatory
control. As we have already seen, licentious and imaginative literature had been
specifically blamed for stimulating solitary vice. Rousseau coyly referred to
“those dangerous books . . . whose inconvenience is that one can only read
them with one hand” {Confessions, 40). Conversely, genital excitement was be¬
lieved to make perverse demands on the imagination:
Thus the adult man, led by the stimulation of the generative apparatus, per¬
forms acts that his conscious will disapproves, and whose extravagance he will
deplore once his calm is reestablished. This demonstrates how great is the in¬
fluence of [these actsl on the deliberations of the ego [fnoij. We are familiar
with the effects of this excessive irritation of the genitals which gives rise to
satyriasis dead nymphomania. (Fournier & Beguin 1819, 109)
Fournier and Beguin warned that imaginary excess provoked hypersexualism in

both men (satyriasis) and women (nymphomania); however, doctors felt that
women were at greater risk because of their greater impressionability. Tissot, for
example, had claimed that, although the female seed was less precious and re¬
fined than the male, women were more vulnerable to onanistic pathology since,
the nervous system being weaker m them and naturally more predisposed to
spasms, the fits are violent (1760, 91). Tissot therefore devoted a separate
chapter to the specific effects of onanism m females. These included hysteria,
vapors, incurable jaundice, clitoral scabbing, and a uterine fury that, “depriving
them of their modesty and their reason, reduces them to the level of the most las¬
civious brutes” (62). By this late stage of masturbational addiction and uterine
fury, a patient’s mind was totally subjugated to her genitals: “The habit of being-
occupied by a sole idea, makes it impossible to have others: it becomes imperi¬
ous and reigns despotically” (99). The naturally weaker nerves and receptive
imaginations of women would become a recurrent theme in the antimasturba¬
tion literature and other texts on erotic disorders. (See Figures 1 and 2.)
Onanists 29
Figure 1. A young female onanist. Frontispiece to Dr. Rozier’s Of Secret Habits, or the Ills
Produced by Onanism in ^Nomen (1830). (Courtesy of The Boston Medical Library in the
Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine, Boston.)
These connections between masturbation, nymphomania or furor uten-

nus, and the imagination were carefully elucidated for the first time in a mono¬
graph by the Dutch physician J. D. T. de Bienville in his Nymphomania, or
Treatise on Uterine Fury (published m Amsterdam m 1771 by the printer of
Rousseau's works) Bienville was a medical populanzer and, like Xissot,
wrote on the inoculation controversy as well as popular health misconceptions.
In Nymphomania, Bienville dramatized the female onanist’s shameful decline
into passional insanity:
The sensation of pleasure, together with those diverse images the imagina¬
tion repeats endlessly, soon renders the patient raging and unbridled, finally
Ai-y. sS
Figure 2. An insane onanist. Dr. Rozier describes her sad case history; “A young girl of eight
became disquietingly thin; the lower members, such as the thighs, the legs and the feet were
agitated by extraordinary movements that were promptly communicated to the upper limbs;
it was impossible to use them; the agitation was excessive in the muscles of the face and the
eyes. The child could not rest in her bed; it was necessary to strap her into a large armchair.”
Finally, a savvy doctor suspected that these were the “effects of a bad habit, and he was soon
convinced of this. Some advice to the parents, their constant surveillance, the use of cold
baths, musk, and camphor procured a radical cure” (1830, 26-27). Unfortunately, she
returned to the evil habit at age eleven with even greater intensity than previously. Conse¬
quently, she perished within two years from chronic pericarditis. (Courtesy of The Boston
Medical Library in the Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine, Boston.)
transgressing all the limits of modesty without remorse, they betray the
frightful secret of their villainous soul through utterances that shock even the
most chaste ears with astonishment and horror, and soon their excessive las¬
civiousness having exhausted all their strength, they cast off the important
and glorious yoke of their modesty, and with openly disgraceful impudence
they solicit (with a voice as vile as it is criminal) the first comers to recipro¬
cate their insatiable desires. (1771, 39-40)
He flatly blamed the imagination for being the “artisan” of the “fatal rage of
Masturbation” (174). More generally, Bienville accused the imagination of
being “almost always the principle or mother of most of the passions and their
Onanists 31
excesses” (157). “Lascivious novels” further fueled the infernal flame of the
nymphomaniac’s lubricity (34). Bienville argued that the imagination should
also be the dominant medium for therapy: “There are cases [of nymphomania]
that will admit of a cure by limiting oneself simply to the treatment of the imag¬
ination; but there are no cases (or at least, scarcely any) in which physical reme¬
dies alone can effect a radical cure” (159).^^
Bienville reiterated the physiological belief that self-defilers and nympho¬
maniacs could become trapped within the closed loop of their genitals and
imagination, thus becoming sexually deviant and erotically autonomous. Tissot
had issued a similar warning: “A symptom common to both sexes and which I
place in this section [on women] because it is more frequent in women, is the
indifference that this infamous practice leaves for the legitimate pleasures of
hymen, even as these desires and forces are not extinguished” (1760, 63). Or
worse yet, the shameless, sensually voracious onaniste would be driven to ever¬
more “unnatural” stimulation in order to excite her overtaxed genital system.
Tissot specifically condemned “clitoridian” pollution by lesbians—“women
who love girls with as much ardor as the most passionate men,” or those unnat¬
urally clitorally endowed women who “feel they have to erase the arbitrary dif¬
ferences of nature” (65-66).^® These associations between masturbation and
lesbianism were used to great effect in political pornography aimed at discredit¬
ing Marie Antoinette as both dissolute and power-hungry: for example. The
Uterine Furies of Marie-Antoinette, Wife of Louis XVI (1791) and The Private,
Libertine, and Scandalous Life of Marie-Antoinette (1791), the latter including
an engraving of the Queen being masturbated by one of her ladies-in-waiting.^®
This indifference to the “legitimate pleasures of hymen” (marriage) was
not limited to women however. One of the most frequently cited cases of mas-
turbatory indifference to the opposite sex was that of a shepherd, Gabriel
Galien, who demonstrated the terrifying extremes of onanistic associations: link¬
ing erotic pleasure with physical mutilation. Surgeon Frangois Ghopart de¬
scribed how Galien had obsessively begun masturbating at age fifteen. Ejacula¬
tion becoming ever more difficult, Gallien began tickling the urethral canal with
a stick. His occupation as shepherd gave him the solitude and free time to titil¬
late himself thus, and “this shepherd frequently allowed his sheep to wander.”
Eventually, the urethral canal became callous and insensitive; in a fit of despair,
he pulled a dull knife from his pocket and incised his penis lengthvrise. “This
incision,” Ghopart noted, “which in any other man would have produced the
sharpest pain, instead procured for him an agreeable sensation and complete
ejaculation_Finally, given all the effort of his passion, he managed, perhaps
after a thousand instances, to divide his penis in two equal parts (1792,
322-23). A later medical writer would echo Chopart’s comment that Galien had
“an insurmountable aversion of women, which is not rare in masturbators”
{Bulletin generale de therapeutique medicale et chiurgicale 1837, 322).
Galien’s autosadomasochism was a particularly literal form of “self¬
abuse,” but it was just one of a variety of onanistically inspired “unnatural”
stimulations and liaisons that increasingly preoccupied nineteenth-century
physicians.Once again, however, Rousseau provided the most publicized ex¬
ample of how the “convenient vice” and a “bizarre taste” could induce a
youngster to avoid “normal” sexual contacts and imaginatively associate sen¬
sual pleasure with “unnatural” acts. The critical passage is the famous spank¬
ing scene of the Confessions. Rousseau recounts how as a child he had feared
being punished by Mile. Lambercier, his surrogate mother while he was a
boarder in her brother’s house. To Rousseau’s great surprise, he found the first
spanking pleasurable and it further endeared him to Mile. Lambercier: “be¬
cause I had found in pain, in shame even, a mix of sensuality which left me with
more desire than fear of receiving this treatment by that same hand.” Alas, the
second time the spanking was cut short after Mile. Lambercier “noticed a cer¬
tain sign that the punishment was not achieving its aim.” Thereafter, they were
made to sleep in separate rooms and the young Rousseau was treated as a “big
boy.” Reminiscing over this outwardly innocuous event, the adult Rousseau
concluded:
Who would have believed that this childhood punishment, received at age
eight by the hand of a girl of thirty, would determine my tastes, my desires, my
passions, my very self for the rest of my life, and furthermore quite contrary to
the sense that naturally should have ensued? At the same moment that my
senses were set afire, my desires took a turn that, confined to what I had ex¬
perienced, they never decided to seek anything else. . . . Long tormented
knowing not why, I visually devoured beautiful women; my imagination con¬
tinually recalling them, only to put them to use in my own fashion as so many
demoiselles Lamberciers.. ..
To be at the knees of an imperious mistress, obey her orders, beg her for¬
giveness, were the sweetest pleasures, and the more my lively imagination in¬
flamed my blood, the more I seemed a transfixed lover. One can imagine that
this fashion of making love does not get one very far. . . . Therefore, I have
possessed few, but nonetheless I have enjoyed great pleasure in my own fash¬
ion; that is, by the imagination. {Confessions, 15-17)
In this much analyzed passage, Rousseau attributes his lifelong sexual attraction
to “punishment” (what we now would call “masochism”) to a commonplace ex-
Onanists 33
perience of childhood—spankingd^ The importance of associationist mecha¬

nisms stands out in this “psycho-sexual genetic narrative”: affection for a mater¬
nal figure was transferred to the associated act of spankingd^ Rousseau himself
was amazed at the power and persistence of a mental liaison that he viewed as
quite contrary to the nature of punishment as well as “contrary to nature,” that
is, depraved and insane. He hints that these spanking fantasies inflamed his
imagination during his solitary vice and in all his future erotic experiences.
In a most candid and dramatic fashion, Rousseau illustrated doctors’
worst fears—“bizarre” and painful practices could become associated with
genital pleasure and onanism. These unnatural passions could then become
the sole focus of one’s thoughts. Later, in the nineteenth century, pleasure in
corporal punishment would be only one of an increasing number of erotic
“monomanias,” and the mastupratiomaniac could be baptized under the name
of his or her particular type of “unnatural” stimulation.^-^ As in Rousseau’s
case, this pleasure was usually viewed by physicians as the product of chance
association and imaginary obsession. Early-nineteenth-century medical writers
portrayed masturbation as dangerously hyperpleasurable even if for “bizarre”
reasons. Largely echoing Rousseau, Dr. Leopolde Deslandes wrote in the Dic¬
tionary oj Practical Medicine and Surgery that the masturbator had an imagi¬
nary object of pleasure with which he could endlessly play and thus delay the
sexual denouement: “His upheavals find here an imagination on fire, and
senses prepared to feel them in all their energy. For this reason, masturbation
produces on the organism a more profound impression than coitus'" (1834,369;
emphasis added).
We can now begin to weave together the many conceptual strands of the
“dangerous supplement” in Rousseau’s erotic confessions and in the medical
anti-onanism literature. Most evidently, masturbation represented a “danger¬
ous supplement” to reproductive coitus. Although the morbid physical effects
of onanism were worrisome, Rousseau and contemporary doctors especially
feared that the “solitary vice” opened the Pandora’s box of the imagination—
the dangerous supplement to reality. Furthermore, these critics depicted sexual
desire, particularly in puberty, as a supplement to “natural” living. But why
were these supplements dangerous? Because they threatened to supplant that
which they onfxxxdWyywsi complemented. Imaginary associations seemed fright¬
eningly protean and tenacious. For example, the Engclopedie warned that the
only two healthy and “natural” ways of voiding superfluous seed were m “com¬
merce and union with women” and “that [natural excretion] provoked during
the sleep of celibates by voluptuous dreams which supplement equally, and
sometimes even surpass reality" (20(2):990; emphasis added). Given the fatal
advantage” of its “convenience,” the supplement—masturbation, imaginary

representation, or sensual writing—threatened to surpass Nature and over¬
whelm Reason.
Critics who depicted Rousseau’s Confessions and philosophy as danger¬
ous also remarked on the ill effects of novel reading and imaginativeness on
Rousseau’s own life and philosophies. Ehe Freron in the Annee litteraire high¬
lighted Rousseau’s confession of having spent whole nights reading novels;
from this Freron concluded; “One now understands the source of that chimeri¬
cal mind, of that taste for falsity and lies which he conveyed to his philosophy;
one is no longer astonished that, being nourished on novels in his childhood,
he maintained in adulthood so many paradoxes and romanesque systems”
(1782, 153). Freron failed to see anything in Rousseau’s project that had not
been done in Saint Augustine’s Confessions. The only distinction Freron could
identify was the utter shamefulness of Rousseau’s avowals (147). But the
shamefulness of these confessions was precisely the novelty of Rousseau’s auto¬
biography and its exploration of the erotic imagination.
Speaking the Unmentionable
Writing about oneself is an ancient tradition; however, the word autobiography

and critical interest in autobiography only date to the late eighteenth century
with the rise of bourgeois culture and the modern conception of the subject
and individuality. Fiterary scholars have specifically credited Rousseau with de¬
veloping the modern autobiographical genre.^^ Although Rousseau labeled his
autobiography a “confession,” his literary product differs notably from its
Roman Catholic predecessors. Traditional confessions, such as Saint Augus¬
tine’s (1:1(1)), were constructed as pious and penitent monologues with God.
The autobiographer, on the other hand, addressed his fellow men (the viriter
was usually a man addressing presumed male readers). So although autobiog¬
raphy furthered the cult of the self or the “myth of the ego” (Fejeune 1975,
340), It was not a solipsistic discourse: it fundamentally examined the relation
between the modern subject and its civic setting.
Rousseau’s first preamble to the Confessions makes explicit the social func¬
tion of autobiography. Our understanding of other humans is generally just a
reflection of our understanding of ourselves, he explained, but this self-
understanding is usually quite limited since, as a social creature, an individual
must compare himself with another being {Confessions, 1148). In order to fur-
Onanists 35
ther the “knowledge of mankind,” Rousseau volunteered himself as the first-

ever, brutally candid metric for all comparisons: “I will be truthful; I will be
truthful without reserve; I will tell all; the good, the bad, in sum, everything”
(1153). He dismissed all previous histories, confessions, and memoirs as merely
accounts of external actions designed to glorify the author rather than reveal the
truth. To know the truth of an individual, he emphatically claimed, is to under¬
stand the history and processes of the person’s inner workings (1149).
Such a project, Rousseau declared, required that he invent a new lan¬
guage and a new style to untangle the chaos of his often vile but occasionally
sublime sentiments:
Wliat trivialities, what miseries am I not obliged to expose, into what revolt¬
ing, indecent, puerile, and often ridiculous details must I not enter to follow
the thread of my secret dispositions, to show how every impression that left a
trace on my soul entered it for the first time? While I blush at the mere
thought of the things I must recount, I know that stern men will yet again treat
the humiliation of these shameful avowals as impudence; but either I make
these avowals or I disguise myself; because if I silence something I will not be
understood on anything, it is all thus bound together, it is all one in my char¬
acter, and that bizarre and singular assemblage requires all the circumstance
of my life to be thoroughly unveiled. (1153)
Given this model of psychic development—in which every sensory impression

shapes the soul—an understanding of the subject demands uninhibited reve¬
lation. We can therefore better understand Rousseau’s need to confess his mas-
turbatory habits, his erotic attachment to punishment, and his sexual entangle¬
ments. His confession of the “solitary vice” is special, however. Unlike the
revelations of his coital intrigues, this is the sole erotic act that could have gone
unmentioned without fear of ulterior revelation by anyone else. Its confession is
thus the highest proof of his unreserved candor. The same can be said for
Rousseau’s confessions of his autoerotic punishment fantasies, to which no one
would otherwise have had access. In Rousseau’s construction of the “true
knowledge” of humans, there is no better demonstration of naked truth than
the revelation of one’s erotic imagination.
Rousseau correctly predicted the reaction of his contemporaries to such
disclosures. To those accustomed to hagiographic memoirs, Rousseau’s erotic
confessions seemed utterly gratuitous and revoltiiig.^^ Elie Freron sarcastically
predicted that those who had thought Rousseau an ambitious slave of fame,
“ready to sacrifice truth for glory,” would now be convinced of his utter
humility, for “how indeed could one not regard as the most modest and hum¬
ble of men, someone who would unnecessarily make the most humiliating ad¬
missions, who reveals to his contemporaries and to their nephews the shame¬
ful frailties, the misery attached to humanity which we would prefer to hide
from ourselves, in a word, who exposes himself, gleefully, to eternal ridicule in
the eyes of his century and of posterity” (1782, 145-46). How paradoxical
that one hostile reviewer in the Journal des gens du monde (1782, 112) com¬
plained that no one was a lesser seeker of the truth than Jean-Jacques! The
critics were unable to accept Rousseau’s premise that a truthful exploration of
subjectivity demanded that propriety be sacrificed.
I reemphasize that, according to Rousseau, this candor is not simply for
the sake of personal exhibitionism but for the purpose of social judgment. But
behind Rousseau’s philosophical and literary justifications lay a more pressing
motivation for his confession. A libelous, anonymous pamphlet, “The Citizens’
Sentiment,” was distributed in Geneva on December 27, 1764. It accused
Rousseau of a litany of sexual crimes: incest, abandonment of his bastard chil¬
dren, and bearing the traces of venereal diseases caught from his debauchery.
The author was Voltaire, who lambasted Rousseau for “abjuring all the senti¬
ments of nature just as he strips those of honor and of religion” (1764, 312).
Rousseau’s first reaction was to deny all accusations. Upon receiving the
defamatory broadside, Rousseau had his editor in Paris print copies of
Voltaire’s text along with a point-by-point defense in the footnotes. Neverthe¬
less, it was true that Rousseau had abandoned his three illegitimate children at
orphanages. So, by early January 1765, he decisively resolved to write his Con¬
fessions to admit this and other “shameful frailties” so that he be known in “all
the truth of nature.” He must strip himself naked in order to expose himself to
the judgment of his peers and of history. “Because my name must endure
amongst men,” Rousseau wrote in a prophetic voice, “I do not want it to carry
a false reputation; I do not want to have attributed to myself virtues or \ices that
I did not possess” {Confessions, 1153).
So it was a sex scandal that fueled this “first ever” truthful autobiography.
All the more reason, then, that Rousseau dedicated himself to displaying the se¬
cret vices of his erotic life—to the horror of his detractors.
Rousseau’s gambit worked. Posthumously, the notion of virtue was tightly
bound to his person and works; these were regularly invoked by Revolutionary
orators justifying their political positions in the name of that exceptional
Rousseauvian virtue.^® However, the Rousseauvian confession of the secret
depths was not always seen as salutary to the Republic—particularly when
those depths lay in the erotic imagination.
Onanists 37
Imaginary Hygiene
While Rousseau hoped his erotic sell-exploration and self-revelation would

serve to clear his name and to contribute to social psychology, his contemporary
critics argiied otherwise. To them, Rousseau’s personal and literary activities
were matters of dangerous self-indulgence. Just as the “dangerous supplement”
had helped the solitary Rousseau turn pain into his core erotic passion and “ab¬
jure the sentiments of nature,” critics feared that “solitary pleasure” would turn
other cfiildren into erotically self-absorbed, alienated, and antisocial beings.^^
Dr. Desruelles, lor example, [)ortrayed a ty]')ical life history of masturbation:
A vague unease, an aimless desire, an uncertain discomfort, without real

cause, at least for him, everything agitates, torments, pushes him involuntar¬
ily perhaps, towards a pleasure he has yet to know, for which he searches in-
stinctually but which escapes him because of his innocence. Satisfied, that
deceiving pleasure soon vanishes, inspiring a desire to see it reborn. An un¬
easy curiosity has begian, and the fleeting but attractive delirium of the senses
terminates the shameful act that will devour his life, unless he renounce im¬
mediately. Somber, melancholic, hiding from himself, the masturbator seeks
out isolation and obscurity; he has neither rest nor real enjoyment; without
fondness for those around him, he is entirely possessed by his disgusting pas¬
sion. (1822,32-33)
This characterization of the habit of onanism as a “monomania” was

commonplace in the early nineteenth century after jean Esquirol developed the
concept of the monomanias in 1810. The total obsession with a “bizarre taste”
did not literally drive Rousseau to “the point of depravation and insanity,” as he
claimed in his Confessions (16), but physicians diagnosed many young people
in which it supposedly did. Take, for example, a case reported by the preemi¬
nent hygienist A. J. B. Parent-Duchatelet: an eight-year-old girl with “vicious
and criminal penchants” whose addiction to masturbation from the age of four
was so strong that she threatened to kill her parents when they tried to curtail
her solitary vice. The Paris Commissioner of Police concluded that “only this
mortal habit [of onanism] could have disturbed this child’s intellectual organs,
and caused the horrible monomania from which she suffers” (Parent-
Duchatelet 1832, 189).
In order to prevent the initial corruption of the innocent, doctors recom¬
mended a whole variety of physical restraints and forms of surveillance. But as
the disease of masturbation was increasingly understood in the nineteenth cen¬
tury as a mental disorder involving a perverted imagination, they feared that
conventional physical therapies were, at best, palliative. Dr. Claude Francois

Lallemand in his widely reviewed volumes on “involuntary seminal losses” fret¬
ted: “The eyes may watch the book, the ears listen to the word of the school¬
teacher, but who can stop the imagination from working? At night it will be
more difficult yet; no surveillance could stop it, nor even observe it” (1836-42,
1:432).
If the imagination was the culprit, then it made sense to target it for treat¬
ment. The director of the lunatic ward of the Salpetriere, Dr. Etienne-Jean
Georget, therefore recommended that when signs of onanism are noted in chil¬
dren, the doctor “strike their imagination with lectures and prescribe rigorous
surveillance in a severe tone” (1840, 79). Dr. Demeaux (an anatomist in the
Paris Faculty of Medicine, the vice president of the Anatomical Society, and a
fervent admirer of Lallemand) advocated exploiting the natural shame and
timidity of the onanist by subjecting young people between the ages of ten and
twenty to surprise inspections twice a year by a specially trained national corps
of masturbation inspectors (1856, 1857, 1861). Those children who were not
deterred from the “abominable maneuver” by the mere fear of detection, De¬
meaux reasoned, would at least be caught early in their addiction when inter¬
vention was still possible (1857).
Lallemand had proposed an even more radical intervention—fundamen¬
tal ideological reform through a return to the “principles of the Revolution and
the Convention”: “It would be necessary to ground the base of a national edu¬
cation on the duties of the country towards its citizens, in order to extract from
all the physical, intellectual, and moral dispositions the greatest possible bene¬
fit for the prosperity of society, for the happiness of each individual” (1:435).
Lallemand makes it clear that, by the nineteenth century, the anti-onanism
campaign was not simply aimed at preserving the health of individual children
but, more important, the health of the state.
The Revolution first made “social medicine” an institutional reality, and
during the Napoleonic period French “public hygiene” (or public health) rose
to world prominence. The new public hygienists argued that the health of the
individual body and that of the social body were closely linked.^^ As Dr. Julien
Joseph Virey stated in his Philosophical Hygiene, or Health in the Physical,
Moral, and Political Regimen of Modern Civilization (1828): ^*We inherit vigor
or weakness from the social state; its constitution forms our own, inspires our
customs, or deploys our passions.”^^
It was inevitable that hygienists would also view “solitary passion” not just
as a matter of individual morbidity but, more ominously, as a symptom of so-
Onanists 39
cial pathology. Alternating their critique between the individual and the social
impacts of masturbation, Drs. Fournier and Beguin inveighed against juvenile
onanism:
Alxjve all it is in young people of one and the other sex that masturbation
causes the greatest ravages; it is all the more fatal since it strikes society in its el¬
ement, so to speak, and tends to destroy it by enervating, from their first steps,
the subjects who would efficaciously contribute to its preservation and splen¬
dor. How often we see these weakened, pallid beings, equally feeble of body
and mind, owing only to masturbation, principal object of their thoughts, the
state of languor and exhaustion to which they have sunk! Thenceforth, inca¬
pable of defending the nation or of serving it by honorabfe or useful work, they
lead, in a society that despises them, a life that they have rendered void for oth¬
ers and often onerous to themselves. (1819, 101-2; emphasis added)
No longer was masturbation a devastating disease simply because children

were malleable and vulnerable, but, more important, because children were
the future wealth of the nation. Fournier and Beguin newly emphasized that
self-pollution was not merely a matter of self-destruction but one of social de¬
spoliation.
In the nineteenth century, the economy between the individual and the
social body was understood to run on the currency of “heredity”—a biological
wealth that was increasingly perceived as a collective endowment.^° France’s
vigor seemed particularly threatened given the nation’s declining birth rate,
which hygienists had noted since 1815.^^ Those who squandered and weak¬
ened their seed were therefore viewed as especially noxious to society. Public
hygienist Joseph Henri Reveille-Parise decried the catastrophic effects of “lib-
ertinage of the hand” on social strength:
Masturbation ... is one of those scourges that attack and soundly destroy hu¬
manity. ... In my opinion, neither the plague, nor war, nor smallpox, nor in¬
numerable other such evils produce as disastrous results for humanity as this
fatal habit. It is the destroyer of civilized societies, and all the more active
since it operates continually and saps the generations. (1828, 93)
He further warned that pale, nervous women exhausted by manustupration

“could not exercise the functions of maternity,” and likewise, weak, effeminate,
corset-wearing men would transmit their masturbatory deterioration to future
generations. “Thus the tree is mutilated right down to its roots,” lamented
Reveille-Parise (93-94). Twenty-four years later, he would still be echoed by Dr.
Figure 3. Aba, an “idiot” at Bicetre Hospital. In his treatise, Des maladies mentales (1838),
J. E. D. Esquirol writes, “Aba is an onanist and robber” (93; Plate 22). “Idiots are
extremely prone to masturbation, and they indulge in this deplorable practice to excess,
without modesty, without shame and in the presence of everyone” (102). (Courtesy of the
Department of Special Collections of the Van Pelt-Dietrich Library, University of
Pennsylvania.)
Debourge, who condemned the “deplorable solitary maneuver” as a “potent

cause of depopulation, whose effects are all the more fatally disastrous since, al¬
though it may not kill, it tends to bastardize, bestialize, degrade, and degenerate
the species” (1852, 314). (See Figures 3 and 4.)
What emerges from the antimasturbatory literature of the nineteenth cen¬
tury is the perception of “deviant” individuals as viruses of the social corps—
polluting its national strength and purity. Clearly, a profound change had oc¬
curred since Rousseau’s and Tissot’s warnings regarding the corrupting effects
of civilization on the innocent, natural bodies of children. By the time of the
Restoration (1814-1830), the vector of contagion had been reversed: Reveille-
Parise and other hygienists were denouncing “mastupratiomaniacs” as the “de¬
stroyers of civilized societies.”
Onanists 41
Figure 4. An insane masturbator (the iconography suggests he is Jewish). J. E. D. Esquirol

notes that “Monsieur G. . . is an onanist. He abstains during the day because he is
observed, but as soon as he is in his bed, if left alone, he abandons himself to his morbid
practices, and ceases only when warned or if he notices he is under surveillance.. .. This
plate represents this idiot in his habitual pose, the regularity of his traits is remarkable”
(1838, 92 Plate 22). Note his fixed hand gestures. (Courtesy of the Department of Special
Collections of the Van Pelt-Dietrich Library, University of Pennsylvania.)
While the condemnation of masturbation had not abated, during the inter¬
vening years the dramatic political, social, and ideological conflicts of the Revo¬
lution and First Empire had altered the French worldview. Neither the “state of
nature” nor the “noble savage” were tenable Arcadian fictions any longer. Lalle-
mand, for example, rejected Rousseauvian pastoralism and declared that peas¬
ants commonly engaged in onanism as well as sodomy and bestiality (1836,
1:440). The colonized “primitives” had also proven far from docile after the
Revolution, particularly those of Haiti, where ex-slaves Toussaint-Louverture
and Jean-Jacques Dessaline led a revolt that eventually ousted the French in
1803. The Rousseauvian ideal of the Noble Savage, free of civilized, societal
constraints, paled further as early-nineteenth-century ethnographers returned
from the “wild” with tales of barbaric “primitives” who were slaves to violent,
natural drives.^^ Closer to home, the once idealized healthy, happy “productive
classes” became the disgruntled industrial workers, and these urban poor,
grouped into large crowds, were represented as volatile, rebellious, and primi¬
tive masses.^^ Even children, who Rousseau had represented as naturally inno¬
cent and good, were increasingly viewed with skepticism and distrust in the
nineteenth century. Physicians compared the developing infantile nervous sys¬
tem and moral sense to those of “primitives.” These, in turn, were represented
as adults in a state of arrested cultural development. The author of a work on
Insanity in Children observed:
We well know how fears, hatred, jealousy, we could even say sentiments of
vengeance, are frequent at an early age-[The least incitement or praise un¬
equally divided] suffices to ignite an explosion of truly morbid passions, of
that egoistic jealousy, shall we say, that one finds among uncivilized peoples,
primitives, veritable infants, having naught but sensual and nutritional needs,
and going even further, that jealousy one likewise finds among animals.
(E Moreau 1888, 20-21; emphasis added)
Childhood onanism, he continued, produced an inevitable arrest in cerebral

and mental development at a state of “moral imbecility,” fixing the child’s moral
sense at a primitive, quasi-bestial level.^^ After the Revolution and with the po¬
litical reaction that accompanied the First Empire under Bonaparte, even the
fantasy of innocence vras defunct.Rather than waxing nostalgic over a child¬
like utopia, antimasturbatiomst writers worried about social decrepitude, or
worse, atavism. And given the new public hygiene perspective, the onanist was
less to be pitied than cursed as a canker on the vulnerable social body.
Polluting Knowledges
Dorinda Outram (1989) has suggested that in the violent contests for political
order that followed the French Revolution, the individual, private body was
transformed into a necessary object for ensuring the order and productivity of
the social corpus. I have argued that this reconfiguration of the body began be¬
fore the Revolution, as philosophes and social theorists started condemning
Onanists 43
masturbation and the erotic imagination as dangerous supplements to Reason

and Nature. Hygienists of the imagination reconceptualized seminal loss not
merely as personally debilitating but also as socially enfeebling because “self
pollution” infected society’s phantasmic institutions: hereditary purity, moral
fiber, and national strength. To heal the social body, this venom had to be
squeezed to the surface. So even as it was being vilified, expression of the erotic
was becoming essential to thorough expositions of the self.
Rousseau’s words would, therefore, resonate with ironic truth throughout
the nineteenth century:
I recount very odious things about myself, which I would be loath to excuse;
but it is also the most secret history of my soul, these are my confessions at all
cost. It is just that my reputation expiate the ill resulting from my desire to
preserve it. I fully expect public denunciations, the severity ofjudgments pro¬
nounced out loud, and I submit myself to them. But may each reader imitate
me, may he enter within himself as I have done, and in the depths of his con¬
science dare he say to himself: lam better than that man. {Confessions, 1155)
Rousseau defies us to explore the most “revolting” and “indecent” chapters of

the secret history of our souls. It is only these pages that offer society a true his¬
tory of the self and thereby “further the knowledge of mankind” in general. His
challenge was clear: “May mankind hear my confessions, may they moan at my
indignities, may they blush at my miseries. May each in turn bare their heart
with the same sincerity” [Confessions, 5). Throughout the nineteenth-century,
growing numbers of people took up the Rousseauvian challenge. By their own
volition or through medicolegal coercion, they would plumb the depths of their
secret sexual beings at the behest of medical professionals devoted to healing
onanism and other “bizarre” sexual tastes. As medical theories and social pol¬
itics changed with time, so too did erotic confessions. Solitary, sensual reverie
lingered, nevertheless, as a leitmotif in these emerging narratives stimulating, in
turn, novel forms of sexuality and the public visibility of erotism.
CHAPTER 2
Erotomaniacs:
Self-Representation
in Courts and
Asylums
The patient spends her day lying on her back, her legs spread and bent at the
knees. People have complained to her in vain about this posture; she says it is
the only position she can tolerate because as soon as her thighs are touching,
she feels a fiery heat in the genitals, followed immediately by extremely in¬
tense sensations and the venereal spasm. She adds that her imagination
greatly contributes to augmenting these accidents, and she claims to have
continuously present in her mind seductive places and voluptuous images
which she struggles in vain to dispel. In a series of letters she has sent me, she
describes at length the origin and gradual development of her illness. (Bail-
larger 1845, 147)
Mademoiselle G-was twenty-four years old when she came to the at¬
tention of Dr. Baillarger, a member of the prestigious Medico-Psychological So¬
ciety and co-founder of its journal, the Medico-Psychological Annals (where the
case history was published). Born of an insane mother, Mile. G-suffered
45
from the pallor, weakness, amenorrhea, gastric pains, and circulatory anomalies
characteristic of the vague diagnosis of “chlorosis” (the “green” disease of young
women) 4 The unusual and publishable aspect of her case was her “remarkable
mental disorder”: “The patient’s imagination is constantly occupied with erotic
thoughts. Mademoiselle G-takes pleasure in reporting in the finest details
the sensations she claims to experience quite often, despite herself, in her geni¬
tal organs” (147). These descriptions were so explicit that her female neighbors
had to discontinue their visits “because of the obscenity of her speech and the
disgust it inspired” (147).
Only Dr. Baillarger (and his medical brethren) had the moral fortitude
and scientific defenses to receive Mile. G-’s written confession, which de¬
tailed the evolution of her voluptuous sensations. It all began around age four,
she reported, with pains in her genitals. This was also when she began mastur¬
bating; however, her diagnosis was not simply “onanism” as in the many cases
we encountered in the previous chapter. Her mental deviation seemed signifi¬
cantly different. With the onset of menstruation, her pains were accompanied
by the vivid sensation that her “genitals opened wade.” Her “imagination was
assailed by voluptuous ideas and images, and at the same time intense desires.”
“All these things which happened with such a lively and continuous force in my
imagination,” she complained, “always procured me a great sensation of plea¬
sure” (147-8). Her bedsheets even aggravated her genital heat. She slept less,
worked continuously, recited religious poems, and even tried skipping rope to
alleviate the genital fires and the images of seductive places and things that
troubled her mind. But nothing succeeded in distracting her, she moaned:
“Solitude, silence, the purity of the sky, bird songs, the beauty of the country¬
side were, or have been since then and still, pernicious” (148). Even when she
tried entertaining herself with a doll, she wanted to dress it as a boy: “That
doll,’ she says, ‘would have become a pernicious object... the mere sight of it
would have given me ideas’” (149). She had erotic dreams that woke her sud¬
denly at night with acute sensations and violent spasms. She applied ice packs
to the head and genitals and tried leeches and cupping “in her continual battle
against her malady,” but to no avail. “The mental desires totally mastered the
imagination,” reported Baillarger. “Then developed what Mile. G-calls
the latest symptoms, those which she does not dare describe in her letters”
(148). She confessed to Dr. Baillarger in person that “despite herself, she not
only experienced spontaneous voluptuous sensations, but sometimes she had
the distinct impression that those sensations were caused by a body introduced
in her organs, in other words, there was a complete reproduction of the venereal
Erotomaniacs 47
(149; emphasis added). Baillarger diagnosed Mile. G-as an erotoma¬

niac and had her placed in a hospice for the insane. After a few months of un¬
specified treatments, she was discharged as “perfectly cured of her chlorosis
and erotic hallucinations” (149). Her long-term remission was assured by a
prompt marriage.
Although Mile. G-represents the pornographic ideal of the freely
available woman in perpetual heat, she also embodies the logical and terrifying
product of masturbatory addiction: the imaginary pleasure of solitary vice ulti¬
mately produces a delusional addict, sensing venereal pleasure independent of
actual coitus. Baillarger, however, quickly passed over the matter of onanism—
by then considered a symptom rather than an independent diagnosis. More
than a mechanical addiction. Mile. G-’s disorder was understood as an il¬
lusion or hallucination produced in her body; she was driven insane by a “de¬
sire in the genital parts.”^
The symptom that compromised her virginity and was most disturbing,
particularly to G-herself, was the imaginary “reproduction of the venereal
act.” Her insistence on describing in exquisite detail these voluptuous sensa¬
tions—^what we might call her “erotolalia”—was the most unbecoming and an¬
tisocial aspect of her disorder. It literally drove away all her female friends. Mile.
G-’s disorder totally set aside love or actual coitus. Instead, it centered on
a pure sensual illusion and, most remarkably, the voicing of that erotic imagi¬
nary. Baillarger, therefore, turned to the diagnosis of erotomania, which as we
will see had been used for centuries. In the early nineteenth century, however,
alienists synthesized the prior associations of “love melancholia” and “mono¬
mania” with the emerging notion of erotisme—sexual obsessions and compul¬
sions that were bizarre, antisocial, pornographic, or criminal. As medical inter¬
est shifted from love to sex, doctors were one of the few auditors who permitted,
even compelled. Mile. G-to indulge in her erotolalia. To speak of her sen¬
sual experience and imagination was not just a matter of erotic self-expression,
but also of her self-defense and medical therapy.^ After a brief review of the ero¬
tomania diagnosis, I examine how the medicolegal framing of the erotic was a
vehicle for sexual self-representation (“erawiography”). As we saw with the
campaign against onanism, doctors portrayed the erotic imagination as a dan¬
gerous, morbid force requiring increasing analysis and regulation. Further¬
more, forensic medicine and “social hygiene” in the early nineteenth century,
for professional reasons, encouraged and even obliged erotic confessions. This
self-representation took many forms: personal examinations of sexuality, med¬
ical confessions of the erotic imaginary, and legal self-defense. Through this
rich outpouring of patient/defendant confessions, the protean diagnosis of

“erotomania” broke down into increasingly fine varieties oierotisme. Finally, we
will see how the erotic became embroiled in political strategies of perverse rep¬
resentation which insinuated the erotic into the social imagination of the time.
From Heroic Love to Erotic Delirium
The diagnosis of erotomania was in desuetude in the twentieth century until it

was officially recognized in 1987 by the American Psychiatric Association,
which defined it as the delusion of being loved by another, usually of higher sta¬
tus."^ Several psychiatrists have tried to legitimize the diagnosis by tracing its
supposedly continuous history from Hippocratic cases to medieval amor in-
sanus to Esquirol’s nineteenth-century monomaniacs to Clerambault’s Syn¬
drome in the twentieth century.^ In so doing, they often fail to note the dra¬
matic changes in the characteristics of erotomania.® Most significantly,
medieval love melancholy was a form of excessive, unrequited love for another,
whereas contemporary erotomania is a delusion of being loved. Furthermore,
nineteenth-century erotomania described manic patients, like Mile. G-,
with “perverse” sexual sensations, obsessions, and compulsions but who con¬
fessed no particular amorous interests at all. In other words, a connotation of
deviant sexuality {erotisme) was introduced into the diagnosis of erotomania in
the nineteenth century and later withdrawn from it in the twentieth. The nine¬
teenth-century incarnation of erotomania is therefore central to the contempo¬
rary notion of the erotic: something “which is associated vdth physical love,
which IS of a sensual nature, sexual,” or artistic works “which can incite the
search for physical pleasure.”^
As I mentioned in my earlier discussion of truffles, the association o{ero¬
tisme with sensuality or the sexual drive only emerged in the nineteenth century.
What would it have meant to speak of the erotique before then?^ Since the Mid¬
dle Ages, the noun erotique referred to an artistic form: chivalrous love poetry
or songs. As a medical term, it referred to heroic, usually unrequited, chivalrous
love leading to mehncholia, that is, a humoral preponderance of “black bile.”
This variety of romantic melancholia entered the medical canon in the eleventh
century with Constantine the African’s Viaticum, which in its numerous re¬
copyings used amor heroicus and amor eroticus interchangeably.^ The diagnosis
oiamor hereos was predominantly applied to aristocratic men during the Mid¬
dle Ages, but was increasingly employed during the Renaissance in reference to
Erotomaniacs 49
women.Physicians of the time also began associating erotomania with disor¬

ders of the genitals.
Jacques Ferrand, in his French treatise On Love-Sickness, or Erotic Melan¬
choly (1610), followed in the medieval humoral tradition by identifying the
“erotic” with melancholic love: ’’Eove, or this Eroticall Passion is a kind of
Dotage, proceeding from an Irregular desire of enjoying a lovely object, and is at¬
tended on by Eeare, and sadnessd" (1640,31). Unlike his medieval predecessors,
he argued that “love-melancholia” affected women as well as men. The word
erotomania appeared for the first time when his book was translated into En¬
glish as Erotomania, or a treatise discoursing of the essence, causes, symptoms,
prognostics, and cure of Love, or erotique melancholy (1640). Among the symp¬
toms of erotomania in women, Ferrand included the “green sickness” or
chlorosis (as in Mile. G-’s case) as well as furor uterinus. Ferrand claimed
[hat furor uterinus (as well as satyriasis) were types of love melancholy (1640,
93). By the late eighteenth century the connections between “erotic melancho¬
lia” and frank sexual desire (nymphomania or satyriasis) were still uncertain. In
Nymphomania, for example, Bienville clearly associated masturbation with
“uterine fury,” but he did not describe either of these phenomena as “erotic”
or as forms of erotomania. Although the Encyclopedic linked the erotique to an
“excess of corporeal appetite,” it clearly distinguished “incensed love [eroto¬
mania] from uterine fury and satyriasis, which are also an excess of this passion,
but in which all modesty has been lost, whereas those in love retain their mod¬
esty, often even accompanied by extremely respectful feelings, sometimes even
to excess” (12(2):913). Love, not carnal desire, is the distinct feature of erotic
melancholy. As far as the Encyclopedic was concerned, “erotomania”—whether
totally chaste or tinged by sexual desire—was the result of inordinate love,
whereas uncontrollable lust was characteristic of nymphomania and satyriasis.
This distinction was in force in two early-nineteenth-century cases of
nymphomania and satyriasis. A Lyonnaise noblewoman in her forties suffered
from periodic fits of delirium characterized by obscene outbursts, sexual at¬
tacks on her chambermaids, and the insertion of various items in her vagina
and between her breasts. Dr. Rodamel (1806) diagnosed her as suffering from
nymphomania or hysteria (he used the terms interchangeably to denote a pri¬
mary disease of the uterus).
Dr. Rony-Duprest (1801), of the Paris medical faculty, described a
twenty-year-old man who had engaged in three years of excessive onanism in
adolescence (up to fifteen times a day), weakening his strength and intelli¬
gence. The patient began having delusions that his employer’s wife loved him.
and he regularly had an erection and ejaculated each time she looked at him.
Nocturnal pollutions became frequent. As in other onanism cases we have seen
so far, the reading of fiction (in this case, Racine’s Phedre) was blamed for the
patient’s ultimate mental undoing. Imagining himself to be Hippolytus, he
reenacted the climax of Phedre by throwing himself at the feet of his employer
(imagined to be Theseus) and declaring his illicit love. In spite of enforced
separation from the fantasized Phaedra, the patient continued to suffer from in¬
voluntary emissions until treated with antispasmodics and tonics. This poor
shopkeeper-Hippolytus was firmly diagnosed with satyriasis, not erotomania or
erotic melancholy. Like the aristocratic nymphomaniac, this was not a case of
chaste, exalted love or melancholic disappointment. In the opinion of the ex¬
amining physicians, both were cases of primary genital derangement with sec¬
ondary lubricious, delusional thoughts.
Alienists had abandoned humoral theories of erotomania by the time
Jean-Etienne Dominique Esquirol reclassified it in the 1810s as a form of
“monomania.” Esquirol applied the new diagnosis to those with a focal mental
pathology or idee fixe in an otherwise sane mind: for example, an obsession
with ambition, with murder (homicidal monomania), with fire (pyromania),
with theft (kleptomania), and so on.^^ Although he eliminated the medieval
image of heroic melancholy from his erotomania diagnosis, Esquirol retained
its association with love. It was purely the mental fixation on love that was the
defining feature of the disease (1815, 186). Unlike nymphomania and satyria¬
sis—in which the genitals were the seat of morbidity—“in erotomania, love is
m the head. The nymphomaniac and the satyriac are victims of a physical dis¬
order; erotomaniacs are the toys of their imagination" (186; emphasis added).
Esquirol’s examples of classic erotomania are the love of Abelard and Heloise,
and Don Quixote s chivalrous love “which was practically epidemic in his
time (191). With Esquirol, erotomania shifted from being a somatic/humoral
disease to a being a mental/nervous disorder predominantly due to “moral”
causes (m the Enlightenment sense of psychological and environmental causa¬
tion).^^ Esquirol s theory of the moral etiology of erotomania integrated earlier
critiques of the imagination, novels, and onanism:
Even though it may erupt at an advanced age, young people are nonetheless
most vulnerable to this disease, especially young people [or young women,
jeunes personnes] with a nervous temperament, a lively, ardent imagination,
dominated by self-love, the allure of pleasures, idleness, the reading of novels,
a vice-ridden education. Masturbation (in communicating to the nervous sys¬
tem a greater though factitious sensitivity) [and) continence (in impressing
Erotomaniacs 51
upon it a very energetic activity) equally predispose to erotic delirium. (Es-

quirol 1815, 192)
Esquirol continued to distinguish nymphomania from erotomania even in his

final treatise on mental diseases (1838).'®
The dividing wall between the neuropsychological basis of erotomania ver¬
sus the genital etiology of nymphomania, however, was starting to crumble at this
time because physiologists perceived an intimate association between the body
and the brain. Esquirol himself, in keeping with earlier critics of onanism, had
warned that masturbation could make the nervous system hypersensitive,and
vulnerable to erotomania. Dr. Eouyer-Villermay, in his entry on nymphomania
in the Dictionary of Medical Sciences, initially distinguished this supposedly uter¬
ine disorder from erotomania (“insanity produced by the pains of love”) (1819a,
576). Nymphomaniacs were sexually voracious madwomen driven by an unap¬
peasable genital itch to obsessive masturbation or sex as well as lascivious ges¬
tures, obscene language, and lubricious conversation (563). The nymphoma¬
niac’s only salvation was a speedy marriage to a vigorous young man who could
“cure her through the repeated delights of marriage” (588). Yet he also argued
that nymphomania constituted “a particular species of alienation, a true mono¬
mania” (564). Therefore, Esquirol’s “moral” (that is, psychological) therapy for
erotomania could also be adapted to the treatment of nymphomania:
The physician must take care to diminish this sympathy [between the uterus
and the nervous system] by an active and busy life, by placid and varied dis¬
tractions, in order to act in a favorable way on the imagination, to calm and
rectify it. Additionally, he will strive to distance from the patient’s sight and
hearing all objects that usually excite their senses, such as statues, prints,
erotic reading and conversations, and even music, especially that which is
melodious. (Louyer-Villermay 1819a, 595; emphasis added)
In blurring the boundaries between nymphomania and erotomania, Villermay

elided the erotiqne with the overtly sexual or obscene. The erotic arts were no
longer those poems and songs evoking sublime love, but those charged with
sensuality and thus likely to induce “disgusting obscenity” in the nervously sus¬
ceptible. The behavior, language, and writings of the erotomaniac reflexively
became characterized as “erotic,” betraying the “sexual delirium” of his or her
mental disorder. I have focused thus far on the transformations of erotomania
as a medical term. But, as with onanism, erotomania also emerged as a matter
of social disorder because manifestations of the erotic imagination sometimes
came into conflict with the law and public morals.
Committing Erotomaniographers
In 1816, a young scion of a distinguished family was confined to a Parisian hos¬

pital on grounds of insanity. The suspected patient, Mr. D-, immediately
appealed to a lawyer complaining of false detention and calumny. His ultraroy-
ahsm, he claimed, had made him the victim of political persecution by the more
constitutionally oriented Minister of Police. The lawyer asked Dr. Gandois-Hery
to examine the supposed patient. After two interviews with Mr. D_,
Dr. Gandois reported back to the lawyer that the “patient” seemed quite sane
and that his plaint was reasonable. Deciding to represent the young man, the
lawyer met the Police Commissioner only to discover a startling aspect of the
case. Mr. D-had been arrested for harassing a princess with loveletters “of
the most disgusting obscenity and revolting drawings of the supposed pleasures
he had enjoyed in her arms.”^^
D-was eventually set free but again arrested in 1826. This time
he had the distinction of being examined, defended, and then indicted by the
leading alienists of the day: Esquirol, F. Leuret (Esquirol’s leading disciple),
^•■G.-H. Marc, and G. Ferrus.^^ Leuret published Mr. D-'s medicolegal
dossier in 1830 in Annals of Public Hygiene and Forensic Medicine. The case
exemplifies the diverse professional concerns that made erotism the focus for
social regulation of the imagination in the second third of the century.
Esquirol and C.-C.-H. Marc had founded the Annals of Public Hygiene
just the previous year. It was an important forum for advancing the scientific
status and broad social utility of medicine as advocated by Esquirol’s circle of
physicians.^^ The journal’s prospectus was a manifesto for social medicine:
Medicine does not have as its sole object the study and cure of disease, it also
has intimate links with social org-anization; sometimes it assists the legislator
in the creation of laws, often it enlightens the magistrate in their application,
and it always keeps watch alongside the administration over the maintenance
of public health. Thus applied to the needs of society, this part of our knowl¬
edge constitutes public hygiene and legal medicine. (Marc 1829, v)
Advances in the human sciences could only produce widespread good if legis¬
lators and judges allowed themselves to be enlightened by physicians. As we
saw in the previous chapter, the advocates of public hygiene claimed the new
sciences would aid m the perfection of institutions” such as hospitals, schools,
prisons, workplaces, cemeteries, and barracks, as well as society in general. In¬
creasingly, physicians intervened in court matters under the justification that
Erotomaniacs 53
“faults and crimes are diseases of society which we must labor to cure” through
the sciences of physiology and psychology which “lend their enlightenment to
the science of government” (Marc 1829, vii). The monomania diagnosis was a
particularly important vehicle for legitimizing the medical profession’s incur¬
sion into legal alfairs.
The title of Leuret’s article on Mr. D-betrays the professional inter¬
ests behind this odd case: “EROTIC MONOMANIA Misjudged by People Ignorant
in the Observation of the Insane.” Leuret bluntly claimed that the differentia¬
tion of insane from rational people often was difficult and required special
medical expertise. “The affair I am going to recount,” Leuret continued, “is
striking proof of what I advance; already known to the public in some of its de¬
tails, it is interesting above all for the details ignored till now and which most
strongly demonstrate the necessity of physicians’ intervention to enlighten ju¬
rists and members of the jury when an accused person is suspected of insanity”
(198). The case thus became an occasion to defend the monomania diagnosis
and the exclusive ability of seasoned alienists in its determination. The moral
of the case was that Dr. Gandois (who was ashamed to have been duped by
Mr. D-) later became secretary-in-chief of the Royal Asylum of Charenton,
and after daily contact with five to six hundred insane people “soon learned to
recognize how numerous the varieties of mental derangement could be” (209).
When, ten years later, Gandois heard that two lawyers, Messrs. Dupin and
Tardif, had been duped into defending Mr. D-, Gandois immediately in¬
tervened to prevent another embarrassing professional snafu.
Mr. D-in fact had a thirty year history as a writer and drawer of
“erotic” materials. He had been repeatedly arrested for addressing porno¬
graphic epistles to Empress Josephine Bonaparte, Queen Hortense, Mile, de
Beauharnais, Mile. Salysbury, and other noblewomen “of great power, merit,
or beauty” (200, 218). He had also been arrested for surreptitiously entering
the homes and carriages of noblewomen. Mr. D-had been committed to
Charenton five times and diagnosed as suffering from “erotic delirium.” Each
time he had been released because he disrupted the institutions: “he disturbed
the imagination of the patients, or planned escape plots with them” (211).
Charenton, under the Old Regime, had been run by the Brothers of
Charity not only as a hospital for lunatics but also as a prison for those detained
under lettres de cachet. It was closed in 1795 but was reopened two years latter
as the national asylum for the insane and a model institution for “moral ther¬
apy.’’’^ One of its most famous inmates, the Marquis de Sade, had also pro¬
voked the ire of Charenton’s physician-in-chief because the “abominable man”
and his asylum theater productions had a morbid influence on the imagination
of the other patients. The doctor begged the Minister of Police to remove Sade
to a prison because man is not a lunatic. His only delirium is that of
vice.”2i Although Sade had been arrested in 1801 for his “immoral” no\d Jus¬
tine (which had sold 'without legal problems since 1791), it is more likely that
Bonaparte objected to Zoloe and Her Two Acolytes, a recently published porno¬
graphic roman-a-clef. Although anonymous, it was widely attributed to Sade.
The novel’s heroine, Zoloe, was a thinly veiled representation of Josephine
Bonaparte herself (Lever 1991, 588). The police commissioner noted that
Sade would have remained in prison had he not “employed all the means his
depraved imagination suggested in order to seduce and corrupt the young
men who unfortunately were detained on the same corridor as he. The com¬
missioner concluded that “this incorrigible man was in a perpetual state of lib¬
ertine dementia.” He had Sade transferred in March 1803 to the Bicetre hos¬
pice and the next month to Charenton as a “patient of the police.”22 “His
family,” -wrote the director of Charenton, “in order to attenuate, if possible, the
shame of his writings, sought to have the Marquis’s perversity pass for insanity,”
and therefore made every effort to transfer him to an asylum.23 So, indeed,
Sade was not insane, but politically pornographic.
Similarly, the leading alienists of Paris could not detect a thread of mental
instability in Mr. D-despite numerous interviews. Nevertheless, Esquirol,
Marc, and Ferrus declared that Mr. D-suffered for twenty-eight years from
intermittent ‘erotic delirium” and lacked the discernment forjudging the grav¬
ity of his actions (Leuret 1830,220).
The debates on the legitimacy of the monomania diagnosis/defense are
especially fascinating in this case because of the patient’s own intervention.
After an evaluation by Esquirol, Marc, and Ferrus while detained in the hospi¬
tal in 1826, Mr. D-wrote to Dupin complaining that it was clear that
the three doctors would like to establish the system according to which a man,
although perfectly reasonable, can be accused of insanity based on a single fact
that they would like to impute to him. They give that absurd system the name
of monomania. Thus, in my case, they would have one assume: 1st. that the
fact is real to prove my monomania; and 2nd. assume monomania to prove the
alleged fact. What an absurd, extravagant, and vicious circle! (203-4)
Mr. D-’s critique is indeed impeccable. Not surprisingly, Dupin and Tardif
originally accepted it and wrote in Mr. D-’s defense to the instructional
judge. The two doctors got to the heart of the monomania controversy: “Mono¬
mania is a modern resource; it conveniently allows one either to wrench the
Erotomaniacs 55
guilty from the just severity of the laws, or to deprive a citizen of his rights arbi¬
trarily. When one could not say, he is guilty, one would say, he is crazy; and one
would then see Charenton replace the Bastille” (206). Dupin and Tardifwere
alluding to the fact that Charenton had compromised its status as a model men¬
tal asylum by taking in “police patients” (like Sade). However reasonable Mr.
D-’s analysis of the monomania diagnosis as a vehicle for the arbitrary in¬
stitutionalization of undesirables, his arguments only served, in Leuret’s eyes, to
further justify the diagnosis, since the most dangerous monomaniac is precisely
the one who most convincingly seems sane. This truly was a vicious circle!
What was to be done with Mr. D-, who had been volleyed back and
forth between prison and hospitals. Dr. Gandois asked. Imprisonment or de¬
privation of civil rights was unjust and could be a “terrible means of oppression
and eternal captivity” (213). He used the case to argue for the establishment of
special institutions for treating such monomaniacal patients who were believed
curable. Unless such people were speedily expedited to Charenton, they would
probably become incurable waiting for provincial justice to be served (213).
Gandois pleaded for special insanity laws, echoing Esquirol’s plea in 1819 for
a national asylum system. (This system would eventually be instituted through
the law of June 30, 1838.) Gandois recognized that it was necessary to balance
“the interests of public safety and prompt treatment against the safeguarding of
individual liberty” (214).
It was precisely in “the interest of public safety” that medicolegal profes¬
sionals increasingly examined, classified, and institutionalized the behaviorally
and sexually deviant.^^ Erotomaniacs were thus pawns in a number of profes¬
sional debates over the monomania diagnosis, the forensic authority of the
medical profession, and the demands for a public asylum system. But at the
same time, the label itself was undergoing a major transformation. Although
Leuret unproblematically labeled Mr. D-as an erotic monomaniac, the
case is clearly different from eighteenth-century descriptions of erotomania, or
even Esquirol’s 1815 definition. Mr. D-was never described as melan¬
cholic (nor even manic); he denied any love for the women in question, and his
form of expression was far from gallant. These “more or less erotic letters” dis¬
played “disgusting obscenity” (207, 200). In Mr. D-’s case, “erotism” lost
any connotation of love and was transmogrified instead into pure lascivious vul¬
garity. Mr. D- was an “erotomaniographer” of a new erotic world, a
pornographer in the present sense: a producer and circulator of sexual texts.
WTiile the distribution of these texts and images brought him into conflict with
the law, it was the mere production of them that physicians took as a symptom
of insanity. Like the chronic onanists discussed earlier, Mr. D- was
described as being driven by the irresistil)le impulse of his “erotic and solitar'y
delirium” (211). The “deviation of his vagabond and solitary imagination” was
to picture himself in voluptuous scenes with noblewomen (210). He had “fits
of delirium which made Mr. D-take pen in hand to inflame his erotic
verve” (208). For the examining doctors, it was quite simply his erotic sell-rep¬
resentation—the writing and drawing of’his sexual fantasies—that constituted
Mr. D-’s filthy folly {folie ordurihe) (200).
Although the medicolegal experts claimed to represent Mr. D-in
court, they primarily used the case as grounds for professional authority battles.
Ultimately, Mr. D-had to engage injudicial self-representation. However,
even his two letters of self-defense were employed by Leuret as counterevidence
of Mr. D-s sly monomania and of the need for e.xpert alienist examiners.
This is, of course, a recurrent danger of erotic self-expression in the medical
setting: doctors could turn a “patient’s” confessions into evidence of pathology
and simultaneously recast those “obscene” stories into therapeutic “meta-
pornography,” or medical tales about curing the erotic. Thus, through the pro¬
liferation of scientific discourses on sex, the medical profession was an accom¬
plice to the “outrages to public decency” it denounced.^^
Distinguishing Morbidity from Morality
Eiotomama and the monomanias were essential for the medical profession’s
campaign to gain a foothold in the courtroom and the legislature, but they were
slippery platforms since they obliged doctors to uphold conflicting positions.
As in Mr. D-’s case, doctors used the erotomania diagnosis to “defend”
him from what they portrayed as an unsympathetic society and a harsh legal
system which was ignorant of the pathological basis of his misdemeanor. Yet
physicians simultaneously portrayed themselves as defenders of “public
morals.” The resolution of these opposing interests lay in the subtle discrimi¬
nation between willful vice and true “morbid” eroticism deserving of legal and
social clemency and condescension. The diagnostic criteria of erotomania
made it possible to integrate moral and social values into the developing con¬
ception of the “erotic.”
How was erotic monomania different from old-fashioned libertinage
(epitomized by Sade)? This was a critical question that concerned Henri-
Louis Bayard, a future expert and author on medicolegal matters (1843). Ba-
yaid had wiitten his medical thesis on utero-mania” and presented its
medicolegal considerations in an article in thedmw/.v of Public Hygiene (1837).
Erotomaniacs 57
He thoroughly agreed with Villermay’s position (discussed above) that

nymphomania was a variety of monomania. Furthermore, he made it clear that
the confinement of nymphomaniacs was important not only for the protection
of the public, but also for the protection of individual families and the institu¬
tion of the family. Quoting E.-J. Georget, Bayard pointed out that libertinage in
itself was not a mental disorder, but in cases of well-born, well-bred people
“above need, who forget their dignity, their affections, the interest and honor of
the family, to the point of descending without remorse, or even with pleasure to
the rank of the most vile creatures, in those cases could not one, as a last resort,
justify their interdiction and sequestration because oia profound moral perver¬
sion, as much as for the depravation of the inclination toward sexual union?”
(Bayard 18.37, 418). Given the importance he lent to class status in distin¬
guishing immorality from insanity, Bayard most likely would have declared
Sade mentally ill. So, although French law was rather permissive in matters of
private adult sexuality, doctors could argue that “erotism” demanded regula¬
tion because it promoted social disorder and class embarrassment.
The socially disruptive effects of sensualite sexuelle were also an impor¬
tant focus of C.-G.-H. Marc’s Of Madness Considered in Its Relation to Medico-
Judicial Questions (1840). Marc was one of the founders of \}(\t Annals of Pub¬
lic Hygiene and a long-standing member of the Health Council.^® By 1840,
Marc had risen to professional prominence as First Physician to King Louis-
Philippe. In .Marc’s medicolegal treatise he tried to distinguish between the
passions and the “lesions of will” as causes of crime. Those suffering from le¬
sions of will (for example, imbeciles, children, lunatics) had traditionally been
judged as not responsible for their actions. The forensic doctor’s task was to
“determine as far as possible those circumstances in which passions, taken to
their highest degree, could be assimilated before tribunals to lesions of reason
which exclude or at least attenuate guilt” (1:130). Only the “innate or natural”
passions could be excused in court, not the “factitious or acquired” passions—
those that “result from appetites, penchants or repugnances, and ills resulting
from the state of society in which we live” (1:130). “Among the innate pas¬
sions,” Marc noted, “those born of love deserve the first place, because, taken
to extreme, this emotion often brings before the tribunal defendants whose ex¬
travagance or atrocity of actions afflicts society. Afjove all, we can agree that sex¬
ual union is the main motive” (1:131). He warned that this dangerous sexual
appetite often lay hidden under a vague, moral attraction, especially in women.
Marc had diagnosed Mr. D-as an erotic monomaniac in 1823 but
later refined his position on the case by distinguishing Esquirolian erotomania
from nymphomania and satyriasis. He designated nymphomania and satyriasis
jointly under the neologism aidoiomama, from the Greek aidoia, meaning pu¬
denda or shameful parts. (This unisex term does not seem to have been
adopted by anyone else.) Marc understood both male and female aidoiomania
to be “instinctive monomanias” and therefore lesions of the will. He warned
that authentic, organic aidoiomania and erotomania had to be carefully distin¬
guished from the simulated variety or commonplace vice and libertinism,
which deserved no leniency (2:218-21). However, this distinction between the
“natural” and the “acquired” passions proved rather difficult given his list of
causes of organic aidoiomania: a soft, sedentary life; puberty or menstruation;
continence as well as onanism and libertinism; warm climates (one reason sex¬
ual insanity was supposedly less common in France than in the Orient or Italy);
professions executed in positions that encourage blood circulation to the geni¬
tals (2:194-95). In other words, acquired vice (such as libertinism) could
eventually result in organic disease.
In addition to echoing the etiological theories of Tissot on the ill effects
of masturbation and idleness, Marc incorporated into his construction of ero¬
tomania a heavy dose of anticlericalism. He emphasized the morbid influence
of ecclesiastical celibacy or religious devotion, and went so far as to suggest
that the temptation of Saint Anthony was really a symptom of satyriasis
(2:191-215). Since the Middle Ages, the continence of priests, seminarians,
and nuns had been blamed for causing spermatic blockage, hysteria, nympho¬
mania and satyriasis. With the development of the erotomania diagnosis, anti¬
clerical analysts would also diagnose fervent love for Christ or the Virgin Mary
as forms of “religious erotomania.” This anticlerical conflation of religiosity,
hysteria, and eroticism would be most thoroughly and graphically achieved in
the 1880s with Charcot’s comparative study of saintly and hysterical postures
(Charcot Sc Richer 1887).^^ Charcot’s erotic pathologization of religiosity re¬
lies on the earlier construction of female erotomania, when alienists stripped
the erotique of its associations with love and painted it instead as sexual, par¬
ticularly in a fashion perceived to be dangerous to public manners and values.
The sensational case of the “Vampire of Montparnasse” drew public attention
to this novel medical sense of the erotique and to its broad social threat.
Necrophilic Appetites and Corrupt Politics
In the winter of 1848, a pair of grave desecrations in Montparnasse Cemetery

alerted Parisian authorities to a cluster of similar violations throughout the city.
Erotomaniacs 59
The Parisian press soon began reporting on the gruesome exploits of the “Vam¬
pire ol Montparnasse.” Vigilance having failed, cemetery guards set explosive
tra[)s. These severely wounded an intruder in the early hours of March 15,
1849. Later that day, an injured man limped to the gates of the Val-de-Grace
Hospital and was kept under surveillance as the suspected Vampire. The pa¬
tient, twenty-five-year-old sergeant major Francois Bertrand, slowly recovered.
During his convalescence, his j)hysician, surgeon-in-chief Marchal de Calvi,
encouraged Bertrand to chronicle his life and thoroughly confess his crimes.
Finally on July 10 Bertrand appeared before the military court of the Seine,
journalists described him as a slim, handsome man with “lively yet melan¬
cholic eyes.” During his interrogation, he freely admitted to having exhumed
and mutilated corpses from common graves for over two years.^^
During the trial, Bertrand shocked the packed courtroom not only by his
descriptions of unearthing, disarticulating, and eviscerating putrid corpses, but
also by his utter equanimity throughout these grisly revelations.^^ Called to the
witness stand on Bertrand’s behalf, Marchal de Calvi read selections of
Bertrand’s hospital confessions. These painted a picture of a melancholy, soli¬
tary youth, who had always been fascinated by lugubrious places like cemeteries.
He had been brought up in a staunchly Catholic family in Voisey, Haute-
Marne. After attending a theological seminary, he entered the army in 1844 and
had been an exemplary soldier. Although Bertrand denied preferentially ex¬
huming female corpses, these were the only ones he mutilated. His doctor/con-
lessor, Marcfial de Calvi, discreetly suggested that Bertrand’s destructive mono¬
mania was complicated by an even more horrible excess: erotic monomania.
Bertrand’s descriptions of his mutilatory sexual practices and sensations
were so gruesomely explicit that Marchal de Calvi chose not to make them pub¬
lic during the trial. Instead, they appeared later in various medical publica¬
tions, and are an excellent example of erawôgraphy: erotic self-representa¬
tion.'^^^ From an early age, Bertrand delighted in mutilation—working his way
up from oljects to dead animals to live dogs and finally corpses. As had become
standard in medical reports of sexual perversity, Bertrand related his mastur¬
bation history, paying special attention to his imaginary pleasures. Early in pu¬
berty, his onanistic fantasies had begun to incorporate the torture and mutila¬
tion of women:
At thirteen or fourteen I knew no limits; I masturbated up to seven or eight

times a day, the mere sight of women’s clothing excited me. While mastur¬
bating, I transported myself in my imagination to a room where women were
at my disposition; there, after having quelled my passion on them and having

amused myself at torturing them in every manner, I imagined them dead and
exerted upon their cadavers all sorts of profanations. (Epaulard 1901, 43)
His fantasies of “annihilating” female bodies were always accompanied by

masturbation. In his memoirs, Bertrand declares that he was madly in love
with women, and objected to any vulgarity in their presence. This declared re¬
spectfulness is oddly linked to his violent erotism, as in his description of one
encounter:
I embraced every part of that woman’s body, I held her to me with enough
strength to break her in two; in a word, I proffered upon her all the caresses
that a passionate lover would make to the object of his love. After having
played with that inanimate body for fifteen minutes, I applied myself to mu¬
tilating it, to pulling out its entrails like all the other victims of my furor. (47)
This merging of “love” and the mutilation of women seemed imperative and
“natural” to Bertrand, and would even appear in subsequent fiction.^^ Medical
analysts did not remark on his distressing association between sex and violence
toward women since aggressiveness was the hallmark of the “normal” mascu¬
line sex drive. Instead, medicolegal experts debated the relative diagnostic sig¬
nificance of Bertrand’s mutilatory versus erotic drives in their evaluation of his
criminal responsibility.
In the courtroom and in the medical press, the Bertrand case was the oc¬
casion for two battles: a heated professional dispute between physicians and
lawyers, and a debate within the medical profession about the classification of
mental diseases. Like other cases at the time, the Bertrand trial was used by the
medical profession to assert the authority of science and the legitimacy of the
monomania diagnosis and defense. As Dr. Frangois Leuret wrote, concern¬
ing Mr. D-’s case of rnonomanie erotique, the profession had to “demon¬
strate the necessity of medical intervention in order to enlighten jurists and
members of the jury whenever a defendant is suspected insane” (1830, 199).
Ever since Esquirol introduced the monomania diagnosis, the legal profession
resisted its increasing use as a mitigating circumstance in cases of homicide,
arson, theft, and other crimes.^^ Lawyers accurately perceived that physicians
were using the monomania diagnosis as a means of claiming judicial authority
based on the presumption that medical knowledge had higher scientific and
humanitarian worth than arbitrary legal doctrines.
Willie the medicolegal witnesses at Bertand’s trial were confident of the
superiority of scientific knowledge, their expertise did not lead to a consistent
Erotomaniacs 61
diagnosis in the case. They all agreed that Bertrand was monomaniacal, but
they disputed the exact variety of his monomania. Some argued that he was a
“destructive monomaniac” driven to sudden and uncontrollable acts of muti¬
lation. Another camp believed the violence was secondary to, perhaps just a
cover for, his erotomania and his perverse appetite for “unnatural” coitus.
There was even debate whether Bertrand had cannibalistic tendencies, since it
appeared that one female cadaver’s genitals had been chewed on. In spite of the
sexual explicitness of the confession, Bertrand himself, in a daring rebuttal to
Dr. Claude-Frangois Michea (Secretary of the Medico-Psychological Society),
asserted that destructive monomania preceded his erotic monomania. At this
time the label necrophilia did not exist; however, after the term was coined by
the Belgian alienist Guislain, doctors regularly mentioned Bertrand as the
“classic” necrophile.^^ In 1849, however, only the term erotomaniac could have
been applied. As we have seen, the diagnosis had long since dropped its mean¬
ing of “melancholic, heroical love.” Furthermore, as Dr. Felix Jacquot noted in
a letter to the Medical Gazette of Paris, there could have been no love present
when Bertrand “disinterred the cadavers of women, hideous debris, already
green with putrefaction, which he kissed erotically with even greater excitement
than living flesh palpitating with life” (1849, 575). Therein lay the real basis of
“perversion of genesic instinct,” argued Jacquot, for do not grieving mothers
throw themselves on the bodies of their daughters? Do not passionate lovers
lend beauty, wit, and virtue to an ugly, brutish, and sullied woman? “Isn’t love
all an illusion?” Jacquot exclaimed (576). In claiming that all eros is error,
Jacquot began to trace a dangerous line of continuity between the “normal”
and the “pathological.”^^ He continued listing a variety of “perverse genesic
appetites” for corpses, animals, pain; and anal stimulation that had been re¬
ported in sane military men and priests (targets which are historically mean¬
ingful).^^ He also noted that pederasty was common among the Muslims and
the ancient Greeks, and suggested that venereal aberrations are common in all
settings in which men are sequestered together and expected to be celibate.
Dr. Jules Guerin, the editor of the Medical Gazette of Paris, recognized the
danger in blurring the line between immoral acts and deranged minds. Guerin
warned in a concluding footnote to Jacquot’s comments:
In this letter, interesting on many counts, our learned colleague has not per¬
haps established a sharp enough difference between depravation of manners
and depravation of instincts. This confusion is problematic for many reasons:
physicians especially, who hold the key to progress, must not open the door to
abuses. (Jacquot 1849, 578n.)
The “key to progress” was biomedical science. More to the point, in the
Bertrand case the key to social progress and “true” knowledges of man was the
key of sexuality. It could open the door of progress by joining the dark space of
the present with the knowledge-lit space of the future. Yet it was perceived as a
dangerous key because it could open opposed doors: that of progress and that
of abuses, of discrimination and of permissiveness. In the darkness of non-
scientific knowledge, it was unclear to nineteenth-century physicians whether
these doors could be distinguished. Herein lay one of the great dilemmas of the
period: the uneasy confidence that the single key of sex-knowledge would es¬
tablish a sharp distinction between progress and regression.
The medicolegal experts’ failure to arrive at a definitive diagnosis for
Bertrand may have led the judge to reject the monomania defense. This worked
in Bertrand’s favor since the court instead found him guilty of criminal viola¬
tion of the sanctity of mortal remains. He was condemned to the maximum
sentence of one year in prison, after which time he was set free. For Bertrand,
as in other cases of sexual misdeeds, a criminal conviction led to a shorter in¬
ternment than a judgment of insanity. As Dr. Michea noted (1849, 339), had
Bertrand been judged monomaniacal he probably would have spent the rest of
his life in an insane asylum. So at that time, claiming insanity mitigated one’s
guilt but most likely lengthened one’s sentence.
Guerin made it clear that the stakes in the medical involvement in
Bertrand’s trial were far more important than just one “perverse” sergeant’s fu¬
ture. His and other cases of erotomania at the time posed major medicolegal
challenges to the discrimination between the criminal versus the pathological,
and normal versus perverse appetites. The politics of perverse appetites had a
much broader social impact and quickly spread beyond the trial of the Vampire
of Montparnasse. In an article that began with a discussion of Bertrand, Dr.
Jean Raimond (1849) turned to “an aberration or perversion yet more un¬
usual, and which alienists have yet to attend to”: the Club des Grands Estomacs
(the great stomachs club). The young aristocratic members of this club gath¬
ered every Saturday for eighteen-hour, Pantagruelesque banquets in Paris,
“that vast receptacle of all disorders, all debaucheries, and all vices.” Raimond
represented Paris itself as an infectious place—a corrupt body seething with
disease. He reproduced one of the club’s sumptuous menus, which included
twenty-three courses, twelve bottles of wine, and a bottle of eau-de-vie per per¬
son! Naturally, such gross appetites and consumption would eventually lead to
generalized paralysis and delirium, Raimond concluded. However, he claimed
that their primary problem was not merely overeating but a fundamentally per¬
verse instinct due to their aristocratic breeding and Parisian milieu. Thus the
Erotomaniacs 63
body of the aristocracy itself was as corrupt as the city of Paris. As in Bertrand’s
case, doctors were carving a new niche into the medicomoral regulation of so¬
ciety by broadly reconceptualizing “aberrations of appetite” as “perversions of
instinct.” Matters of unorthodox choice were biologized as pathologies of body
and mind.
At the same time in the Assemblee Nationale, a battle was raging over
philosophical and political ideologies in medical education and, ultimately, in
science itself^*’ At issue was the reintroduction of parochial schools in France
and the admission ol clerical and spiritualist teaching in the Faculty of Medi¬
cine of Paris, which was otherwise dominated by philosophical materialists.
The combatants enlisted metaphors of perverse eroticism, particularly
necrophilia, to attack each other. Referring to the resurgence of reactionary pol¬
itics in science, a left-leaning doctor complained.
We are witnessing a sad spectacle. The human mind seems to be regressing.

... IReligious reasoning is invading philosophy, politics and science, turning
back the progress of millennia and especially that of 1789.1 There is a general
travesty of thinking. That which yesterday was the object of violent opposi¬
tion, of derision and sarcasm, is respected today and the object of homage
and veneration. Some declare a return to ideas, to principles, to beliefs we
thought were dead forever; and history, when she will wish to characterize the
current situation, will call the present period the age of exhumations.
What is the reason for these strange transformations?
One sole cause, fear. ...
Search only there for the motive for these strange conversions, these in¬
credible regressions, these monstrous alliances. (Latour 1849c, 389; empha¬
sis added)
Latour slanders his ideological enemies wdth metaphors of necrophilic perver¬

sion (which was in the news thanks to Bertrand’s trial). Not surprisingly, a great
deal had been made of Bertrand’s upbringing in a seminary. Dr. Lunier had
observed, “That type of education perhaps also developed in him a bizarre ex¬
citability of the genital organs, as is quite common [in religious institutions]”
(1849, 369). Lunier added that priests or ex-seminarians were responsible for
the majority of known cases of “cohabitation with the dead” (369).
On the opposing proclerical side, critics of the materialist Parisian med¬
ical monopoly did not fail to employ the same strategy of “perversification.”
Noting the danger of opening the door to abuses along with the door to
progress. Dr. Edouard Carriere debated Amedee Latour in an ongoing series of
articles entitled “On Authority in Medicine.” Carriere warned.
These philosophers are like certain novelists, working in the name of moral¬
ity, stripping vice naked, while they believe they are following the road of
morality, they arrive at absolutely the opposite result. Realize also that every¬
thing in science is linked, that the tree of the scientific encyclopedia has such
close connections, that a disturbance at one point can produce great perver¬
sions in the whole. (Carriere 1849, 443; emphasis added)
It was not just the perversion of science that doctors on the right complained
of, but the perversion of medical students’ minds in Paris: “The young people
who arrive in Paris imbued with the religious education of the domestic hearth,
necessarily must lose it at the [Paris Medical] School. It is impossible for them
to defend themselves against those doctrines of egoism and revolt which are the
moral consequence of those scientific principles that they are taught [i.e., ma¬
terialism].”^^ As in the case of Bertrand and the aristrocrats with grands estom-
acs, Paris was depicted as a site of contagion. In much the same way in which
the seminary was blamed by the Left for Bertrand’s erotomania, Paris was rep¬
resented as the locus not just of perversions of moral appetite but also of a vir¬
ulent philosophical and political perversion. Supporters of parochial education
warned that these young doctors posed an even greater threat to the nation after
completion of their medical indoctrination in Paris:
Those vices of organization are all the more grave because medical education
is important to the state not only for the physical well-being of individuals,
but it is also important politically. Physicians disperse, in the cities and coun¬
tryside, the science and ideas that they acquired during their student life. . ..
It is only too true that, among men of knowledge and intelligence who have
mixed with the country people, there are too many that became apostles of
that socialism which we have seen begin its effects in Paris. We should not at¬
tack this as a vice of the heart but as a profound mental deviance determined
by a vice-ridden education. (Latour 1849a, 409)
Just like the cholera epidemic then raging in Europe, an epidemic of socialism
was spreading from Paris to the provinces. Especially after the Revolution of
1848, provincials depicted Paris as a canker of radicalism (Pick 1989, 58). The
Right proclaimed that “to end such evils one must go to the source, and attack
them in the nest where they originate; this is the reason for the reform which is
being prepared through the means of free education” (Latour 1849a, 410). In
the eyes of the proclerical Right, free medical education would be the way of
clearing out the materialists—those philosophical prostitutes who were per¬
verting pure, religious minds and initiating a syphilis-like epidemic of social-
Erotomaniacs 65
ism. This fear of socialism and Parisian radicalism contributed to Louis-

Napoleon’s successful rise to power and his conservative social policies during
the early years of the Second Empire.
In these three very different cases—Bertrand, the Club des Grands Es-
tomacs, and the education debate—the medical profession utilized the per¬
verse appetite of necrophilia as a rhetorical weapon in professional power plays
and internecine political battles. Doctors argued that “perversity” was not a
random individual event but represented a profound nervous and constitu¬
tional deviance that was a threat to professional and social order. The opposing
ideological camps sought to represent diverse forms of deviance (sexual, gas¬
tronomic, political) as embodied qualities. Bodily needs (for sex, food, associ¬
ation) had certain socially acceptable manifestations, but they were driven by
some supplement to their rational manifestation, some force that overwhelmed
reason and will—a delirious supplement of nature that challenged socially con¬
ventional order and threatened to undermine it.
Diversifying the Politics of Erotism
Bertrand’s case was regularly resurrected in the nineteenth century, each time
taking on different diagnostic and social tones. In 1864 Henri Legrand du
Saulle, a leading medicolegal expert, discussed the case in the context of ero-
tisme, not erotomanie or destructive monomania (the diagnosis was no longer
used by then). His category of erotisme included love sickness, satyriasis,
nymphomania, senile demented licentiousness, and “erotic depravations,”
under which rubric he grouped Bertrand, Gilles de Rais, and Sade. Ambroise
Tardieu, in his discussion of sexual assault, diagnosed Bertrand with “sexual
psychopathia” or “perversion of the sexual instinct” (1857, 113), emphasizing
that Bertrand’s erotisme was a socially dangerous, criminal sexuality. For Dr.
Auzouy, physician-in-chief of the Fains mental asylum, erotisme was a social
threat because it was one of the “perversions” of the “natural” affections: the
love of God, self, family, and nation (1858, 56). The Vampire of Montparnasse
case exemplifies the emergence of erotisme as a term of accusation, transgres¬
sion, criminality, and pathology.
Erotisme became a versatile embodiment of certain social anxieties in a
period of governmental, economic, populational, military, political, and reli¬
gious instabilities. The “delirious supplement” of the erotic was a useful model
for turning socially troubling phenomena into proper pathological objects of a
science of man. This science promised to restore the rational, natural law and
order that many people longed for, particularly after the Revolution of 1848.
One doctor expressed a commonplace worry: “In our time, time of transition,
of transformation, the principle of liberty has dissolved the principle of author¬
ity; the disaggregated molecules flee and search for each other, attract or repel”
(Maugras 1849). Ironically, the medical rhetoric of erotism uncovered yet more
chaos and “abuses.” Physicians found that under the aegis of their intense in¬
terrogation, erotolalia—the speaking of the erotic—took new liberties. As they
broadened their scope on sexual behaviors and as they projected the model of
dangerous erotism onto society, physicians paradoxically discovered that the
distinctions between the “natural” and the “acquired” or the “normal” and the
perverse were not clear—as Dr. Jacquot had controversially suggested in the
Bertrand case (1849, 578). As the knowledge of sex was increasingly construed
to be central to a knowledge of society, the “sharp difference” between perverse
manners and perverse instinct became blunt. The study of the pathological,
which was meant to cast light upon the normal, proved to cast an embarrassing
light upon an expanding variety of erotisms lurking in the recesses of normal¬
ity: inversion, fetishism, masochism, sadism. Aspects of perversity were in¬
creasingly revealed in culture and politics as erotism proved to be an effective
rhetorical weapon for portraying opponents as constitutionally depraved.
“Perversification” remains a common political rhetorical strategy today.
Even the rather obscure diagnosis of erotomania made a memorable comeback
m October 1991 when Alabama Senator Howell Hefflin dryly asked, in his
Southern drawl, “Are you a spurned woman. Professor Hill?” His query pro¬
voked thunderous laughter from the audience during the tense interrogation of
law professor Anita Hill at the Senate Judiciary Committee’s U.S. Supreme
Court confirmation hearings forjudge Clarence Thomas. Whether meant as a
serious hypothesis or a sly tactic to ridicule the very scenario of the delusional
enamorata, the accusation of erotomania had been flung by Hefflin—playing
lawyei and diagnostician—onto the floor of the hearing room and the living
rooms of millions of television spectators.^^ It would be up to the supporters of
Judge Thomas to make the label stick to Professor Hill as a means of discred¬
iting an otherwise credible and sane woman and her claims of sexual harass¬
ment. Thomas, in turn, was accused of indulging in pornographic films. His
opponents specifically raised the specter of Long Dong Silver, a famously well-
endowed black porn star. As in the Bertrand case, sexual violence and aggression
against women was hidden under a diagnostic label. The hearings became a po¬
litical battleground with opposing camps using erotism to slander each other.
Currently in the United States, the most politically inflammatory form of
erotism is perhaps homosexuality. Struggles over gay civil rights, same-sex mar-
Erotomaniacs 67
riage and adoption, homoerotic art, and gays in the military are being fought at
every level of the legislature and judiciary. As we will see in the following chap¬
ter, same-sex erotism inherited the politicization of erotomania. “Inversion,”
from the time of its medical discovery in the mid-nineteenth century, was em¬
broiled in complex matters of gender and nationalist politics.
CHAPTER 3
Inverts:
Pointy Penises,
Hysterical
Mollies, and
Literary
Homosexuals
To start, here is the patient’s own narrative of the bizarre phenomena that he
experiences and that he associates with his so-called sensuality: “My sensual¬
ity,” he says, “manifested itself from the age of six by a violent desire to see
boys of my age or men, naked.... At about the age of fifteen, puberty arrived;
masturbation gave me even greater satisfaction; furthermore, I provoked erec¬
tion and its consequences as much by imagination as by manipulation; more
than once I had an erection, an amorous convulsion, and seminal loss at the
mere sight of a man’s virile member. ... I love female attire; I love to see a
woman well dressed, because I tell myself I would like to be a woman to dress
similarly. From the age of seventeen, I dressed as a woman during carnival and
experienced an indescribable pleasure in dragging my skirts through rooms,
wearing wigs, and going shoulderless....”
69
The patient thus describes the characteristics of this irrepressible obses¬

sion of which he is fully aware.
This sick person, what is he? (Charcot & Magnan 1882, 54-56)
Indeed, what is this thirty-one-year-old man with "voluptuous sensa¬

tions provoked by the sight of naked men and male statues, or even by “ob¬
sessive memories of these images ? Furthermore, how is his “bizarre” sensual¬
ity related to other elements of his clinical history: “neuropathic tendencies m
the ancestors; disproportion between the age of the father and mother.... From
ages 5 to 8, a propensity for theft.—Habits of onanism until age 22.—Hysteri-
form attacks from the age of 15 ? Jean-Martm Charcot and Valentin Magnan,
two of the most prominent neurologists of the Third Republic, presented this
patient as the first case of inversion du sens genital.
This man was not, however. Patient Zero of “inversion of the genital
sense,” just the first reported French case. Charcot and Magnan included him
as fresh clinical evidence in their review of the foreign medical literature on the
subject. They acknowledged that their German colleague, Karl Westphal, had
first labeled such patients in 1869 vdth the diagnosis of contrdre Sexu-
alempfindung (contrary sexual sensation). In 1878 an Italian forensic doctor,
Arrigo Tamassia, had described the first Italian men suffering from inverswne
dell istinto sessimle the term that Charcot and Magnan simply rendered into
French. And, most recently, a Viennese physician, Julius Krueg, had published
similar cases of a male and a female whom he diagnosed with “perverted sex¬
ual instinct. After reviewing the existing European medical literature, Krueg
concluded that there were only “thirteen well-established cases of this affection
[sic\ (1882, 369). Although contrary sexual sensation or inversion of the gen¬
ital sense was a rare and new diagnosis in the late nineteenth century, its inci¬
dence was apparently oh the rise. Or, at least, it had become a hot’research
topic for elite European physicians.
Today it is commonplace to identify “inversion” as a radically new sexual
identity and the “invert” as the immediate ancestor to the modern “homosex¬
ual.”! The birth of the invert is more historically complex, however, for he did
not spring fully formed from the mind of German physicians in 1869. This
chapter will show how Charcot and Magnan molded inverts out of prior neu¬
rological and medicolegal theories concerning pederasts, hysterics, and neu¬
rodegenerates—figures who were culturally and socially well recognized in the
late nineteenth century. The emerging medical investigation of “perverted sex¬
ual instincts was not simply an isolated, objective research program but also a
manifestation of larger cultural concerns beyond the hospital. Therefore, my
Inverts 71
genealogy from the “pederast” to the “homosexual” interweaves biomedical

theories and “extrascientific” strands of influence; professional concerns, class
and gender anxieties, natalist preoccupations, national rivalries, and literary
controversies.
Here, as in the previous settings, belle-lettristes—^whether medical profes¬
sionals or scientific dilettantes—played a crucial role in shaping the medical
discourse. Some (such as Marc-Andre Raffalovich) wrote from personal expe¬
rience to defend homosexuality. Others (such as Emile Zola and J.-K. Huys-
mans) took it upon themselves to condemn the epidemic of “perversity.” But
apologists and censors alike argued for fiction’s power to shape disciplinary
knowledges, social stereotypes, and even intimate experiences of inversion.
Throughout these intertwined narratives, I will highlight the trope of inversion:
a radical contradiction between the interior being and the superficial appear¬
ance. This device recurs in the description and condemnation of these sup¬
posed physical and moral “degenerates”: sodomites, male hysterics, and in¬
verts. Due to this contradiction, effective diagnosis hinged on the detection of
subtle external signs that betrayed and defined these degenerates.
The Pathognomy of Pederasty
‘Tiers mignons, malgre I’art du poudre et du rouge,

Vous sentez tous la mort! 0 squelettes musques,
Antinoiis fletris, dandies a face glabre,
Cadavres vernisses, lovelaces chenus,
Le branle universe! de la danse macabre
Vous entrame en des lieux qui ne sont pas connus!”
Charles Baudelaire, “Danse macabre” (1857)*
Eighteen fifty-seven was an especially active year for sexual and somatic sur¬
veillance. Baudelaire’s poems Les Fleurs du mal and Gustave Flaubert’s novel
Madame Bovary were both published that year and their authors put on trial for
contravening the bi de Serre. This 1819 law criminalized books or pamphlets
“‘Proud mollies, despite the artifice of powder and rouge, you all stink of death! Oh, musky skele¬
tons, withered Antinoiises, smooth-faced dandies, enameled cadavers, doddling gigolos, may the
universal sway of the Dance of Death drag you off to unknown places! From Baudelaire s Danse
macabre,” Les Fleurs du mal. Mignons are cute boys, or the very effeminate favorites of Henri III.
Antinoiis, a beautiful Bithynian boy, was the beloved of the Emperor Hadrian. Both were com¬
monly used nineteenth-century terms for designating sodomites.
deemed by the courts to be an “outrage to public and religious morality, or to

good morals.It was also the year, as we saw in chapter 1, that Dr. J. B. D. De-
meaux published his recommendations for eradicating onanism from schools
by means of surprise inspections by a national board of specialized doctors.
Also in 1857, Dr. Benedict A. Morel published his Treatise on Degenerations, a
work that shaped French cultural anxieties for half a century. And in the same
year, Ambroise-Auguste Tardieu published his influential classic of forensic
medicine, the Medicolegal Study of Assaults on Decency.
During the first half of the Second Empire, when the government was
pursuing an extremely conservative domestic policy, it seemed imperative to
detect moral corruption and prevent its imitation, transmission, or inheritance.
As we saw in chapter 1, pathognomy, the study of the signs of passions and dis¬
eases, was a central feature of the “scientific” approach to masturbation. De-
meaux assured the Minister of Public Education that specially trained physi¬
cians could almost infallibly detect stigmata of masturbation on the bodies of
young onanists and thus curtail erotic morbidity. Even literary traces of the
erotic, however subtle, had to be nipped at the bud to prevent a social epidemic
of indecency. A good example is the scene of Emma Bovary’s adultery, which
was marked merely by a shower of shredded paper from a cab window during
her recklessly long ride with her lover Leon. The passage had been suppressed
in its original 1856 serial publication by the Revue de Pans out of fear that it
would provoke legal condemnation, as it later did.^
Tardieu was the first to bring this subtle quality of scientific scrutiny and
interpretation to bear on the positive detection of sodomy. Tardieu was a
medicolegal expert and collaborator on the Annals of Public Hygiene and Legal
Medicine. His Medicolegal Study of Assaults on Decency gained him the profes¬
sorship in forensic medicine at the Faculty of Medicine of Paris and the tome
was hugely successful; it was reedited six times over twenty years and almost
doubled in length. It covered three imbricated issues: public offenses against
decency, rape and sexual assault, and pederasty and sodomy.^ While recogniz¬
ing that pederasty was hardly a new subject, Tardieu rightly claimed that it had
never been the object of serious, scientific analysis in the way that even prosti¬
tution had been scrutinized m Alexandre Parent-Duchatelet’s Prostitution in
the City of Paris (1836).
Unlike prostitution, there was no legal regulation of sodomy per se be¬
cause the Constituent Assembly in 1791 had abrogated Old Regime laws con¬
cerning “crimes against nature.” Nevertheless, police continued to arrest men
suspected of sodomitic solicitation under the Penal Code of 1810: Article 330
(which condemned “public offenses against decency”) and Article 334 (which
Inverts 73
made it a crime to corrupt young people).^ Public concern about and private
titillation over sodomy had grown since the Enlightenment with the emergence
of sodomitic subcultures and the proliferation of pornography.® In eighteenth-
century Paris, undercover agents (known as mouches and “pederasty patrols”)
had entrapped suspected sodomites. These had been sentenced to Bicetre
Hospital if they were poor or Saint-Lazare Hospital if they could pay. During
the several days to months they were confined in the hospital, they were en¬
couraged to implicate others. Aristocrats usually went free. No wonder one
eighteenth-century police official had declared that “pederasty can only be a
vice of gentlemen.”^
Although the legal environment had changed by the time of the Second
Empire, the police and the public were increasingly concerned about sodomy
and pederasty (two terms that were, by then, used interchangeably).® Tardieu at¬
tributed this heightened interest to more active police surveillance, an extraordi¬
nary public taste for scandal, large blackmail rings, and the perceived connec¬
tion between sodomy and murder.® Tardieu echoed the opinion of an eminent
judge that “pederasty is the school in which the most able and audacious crim¬
inals are educated” (195). Although pederasts were accused of debauching mi¬
nors, Tardieu nevertheless noted that pederasts were usually the victims of mur¬
derers, blackmailers, or rings of crooks posing as agents of the vice squad.
If entrapped “legitimately” or caught in flagrante delicto by the police,
pederasts were increasingly subjected to medical examinations to determine
whether they were indeed sodomites. For this reason, sodomy had taken on
considerable importance in the practice of legal medicine. It was Tardieu’s ex¬
tensive personal experience with this sort of examination that permitted him to
“discuss with more certitude and more authority the history of the signs of ped¬
erasty” (197). He dismissed prior writers for merely circulating errors based on
few observations or copied from an outdated treatise by Paolo Zacchia (1651).
Tardieu boasted that he, in contrast, had personally performed over three hun¬
dred meticulous physical examinations of suspected pederasts. His data led
him to conclude that pederasty was a far more common phenomenon than pre¬
viously thought. It was widely distributed throughout the age groups (with the
highest prevalence among fifteen- to twenty-five-year-olds) and throughout
professional or class categories (especially domestics, merchants, military men,
and tailors) (208).^® This data confirmed that sodomy could not be considered
a privilege of the aristocracy as it had been popularly represented in the eigh¬
teenth century.
Evidently, demographic factors could not aid the forensic doctor in de¬
tecting “true” pederasts. Tardieu relied instead on his extensive familiarity
with sodomites’ bodies “to establish ... that the vice of pederasty leaves, in the
conformation of the organs, material traces far more numerous and significant
than hitherto believed, the knowledge of which will permit the forensic doctor,
in the majority of cases, to direct and confirm the lawsuits that are of such great
interest to public morals” (213). He believed that pederasts were exclusively
“active” or “passive” (that is, either penetrative or anally receptive). Based on
this assumption, he claimed that chronic, passive pederasts exhibited flaccid
buttocks, a funnel-shaped deformation of the anus, relaxation of the anal
sphincter, and other anal characteristics (see Figure 5). As if to confirm that
these physical findings were definitively associated with anal sex, he insisted
that women and prostitutes who indulged in sodomy exhibited the same anal
traits. Habitual active pederasts, on the other hand, demonstrated penile pe¬
culiarities: either thin, pointy penises like dogs, long, tapered penises with a
large muzzlelike glans, or, m the case of those also addicted to masturbation,
club shaped penises.
Tardieu repeatedly insisted that the determination of pederasty was to be
based on positive physical findings, however subtle they might be. Neverthe¬
less, for him and his predecessors, sodomy was not an organic disease but
a vice, that is, an immoral choice. The same was true of what he regarded as
the most common form of sex “against nature,” conjugal sodomy (198). In
Tardieu’s opinion, pederasty and sodomy were not matters of mental illness.
There were, however, two important exceptions: those who crossed either class
or gender boundaries were probably insane. He observed that certain ped¬
erasts, “apparently distinguished by education and fortune,” consorted with
individuals of “profound degradation and revolting filthiness.” He knew of
one pederast of high social rank who descended to the lowest level of deprav¬
ity by seeking voluptuousness in passionate submission to sordid street
urchins. It was undoubtedly the horror of class debasement, as much as the
spectacle of abjection, that moved Tardieu to describe such cases as examples
of the saddest and most shameful insanity (213). Despite these exceptional
cases, Tardieu warned against broadening the aegis of the insanity diagnosis to
protect pederasts:
I have said that the weakening of the intellectual and affective functions could
be the final term of the shameful habit of pederasts. But one must not confuse
that state, in some ways secondary, with the excesses of debauchery and the
extremes of depiavation. However incomprehensible, however contrary to na¬
ture and reason the acts of pederasty may appear, they should not escape the
responsibility of conscience or the just severity of the laws, nor, above all, the
loathing of upright people. (255)
Inverts 75
Figure 5. Funnel-shaped anus of a passive sodomite. From Ambroise Tardieu’s

Study of Assaults on Decency (1857). (Courtesy of The Boston Medical Libraiy in the
Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine, Boston.)
According to Tardieu, the revolting irrationality of pederasts’ actions could not

in itselfjustify a diagnosis of primary mental imbalance. Nevertheless, he did go
so far as to suggest that male pederasts had characteristic mental peculiarities.^^
Under the rubric of “the exterior of pederasts,” Tardieu discussed their re¬
puted effeminacy—an association already firmly established in the eighteenth
century and probably linked to the even more ancient notion of the molles:
“soft” or unmasculine men.^^
To illustrate the connection between pederasty and effeminacy, Tardieu
provided a colorful portrait of the typical tante (auntie):
Curled hair, made-up skin, open collar, waist tucked in to accentuate the fig¬
ure; fingers, ears, chest loaded with jewelry, the whole body exuding an odor
of the most penetrating perfumes, and, in one hand, a handkerchief, flowers.
or some needlework; such is the strange, revolting, and rightfully suspect

physiognomy that betrays the pederast.... Hairstyles and dress constitute one
of the most continual preoccupations of pederasts. (216-17)
Although he did not report any anatomical femininity, Tardieu suggested that
pederasts’ sartorial and behavioral effeminacy constituted a clear, fixed psycho¬
logical and ontological marker. Pederasts’ “depraved tastes” were exclusive de¬
spite attempts to dissimulate them behind sham marriages and mistresses, or
efforts to exploit the general belief that sodomitic habits were incompatible
with (normal) sexual relations (254).^^ Pederasts’ deceitfulness demanded
that, despite the distinctive characterological markers, forensic doctors had to
rely on physical, exterior traits to unmask sodomites who denied their shame¬
ful behaviors.
The sodomitic masquerade—the discordance between the public surface
and the secret depths—distressed Tardieu most viscerally: “A trait no less char¬
acteristic, and which I have observed a hundred times, is the contrast between
this false elegance, the exterior bodily cult, and the sordid filthiness that alone
would suffice to distance one from these wretches” (216). Effeminate refine¬
ment was merely a thin container for sodomitic sewage. Ever since the eigh¬
teenth century, dressing above one’s station—in the effeminate refinement of
the aristocracy—was a sure way of attracting public and police suspicions of
pederasty. Tardieu, likewise, reported that pederasts had a predilection for
grandiose sobriquets (such as “the Queen of England”) and for sartorial finery
(217). He worried generally about pederasts’ deceptions, their factitiousness
expressed as inversions of class, gender, and hygiene. What might appear to be
an elegant lady, in fact was a squalid, lowbred auntie. For example, at the pros¬
titution trial of the “Queen of England,” one reporter exclaimed: “Can it really
be a man?” (218).
Although Tardieu insisted on a clear pathognomy of pederasty, it was
commonly feared that, thanks to secret signs, pederasts of all classes could rec¬
ognize each other even more easily than they could be recognized by doctors.
Pederasts thus formed a “shameful free-masonry” (218). Dr. Fournier-Pescay
referred to the “confraternity” that recognized its vile members through “some¬
thing distinctive in their dress” (1821, 446). Sodomites were thus simultane¬
ously condemned both for their democratic and subversive commingling of
classes and for organizing into an elitist, secret order of the cloth.
Tardieu s masterwork betrays a variety of anxieties provoked by pederasts.
These deceitful debauchees could only be detected by knowledgeable doctors,
yet they possessed a mysterious means of identifying one another that eluded
Inverts 77
the analytic gaze of medicolegal experts. They disrupted public morals by their
gender and class deception, not because they were physically, anatomically ef¬
feminate but because they performed travesties of class and gender.'® The so¬
cial concern for preserving clear gender distinctions was so great that trans-
vestitism was made a punishable offense in 1853 during the early, conservative
years of the Second Empire.'^
Tardieu’s concern over the classification and detection of stigmata of hid¬
den disease were shared by other colleagues. For example, the alienist Bene¬
dict A. Morel had described the supposedly pathognomonic features of insane
men’s penises (1851, 567).'® Morel is perhaps better remembered for his Trea¬
tise on Degenerations (1857), which associated physical stigmata with mental
disorders within his general theory of hereditary decay. Relying on Lamarckian
principles of inheritance. Morel proposed that an array of somatic and nervous
disorders could be the product of an accretion of hereditary damage due to cli¬
matic conditions, diet, and the consumption of alcohol and toxins.'"
Unchecked, this gradual process of hereditary degeneration from the original
Adamic type eventually led to cretinism and infertility (see Figure 6). This gen¬
eralized and protean degenerative process. Morel believed, could be detected
through a variety of physical and psychological stigmata. The theory’s vague¬
ness made it a powerful explanatory tool in accounting for a bewildering vari¬
ety of social “diseases”; criminality, anarchy, depopulation, immorality, foreign
national characteristics, urban poverty, and so on.Degeneration theory there¬
fore played an important role in bolstering the professional and scientific cred¬
ibility of French alienists and their demands to shape social policy.^'
Morel’s theory placed a premium on the family medical history in the di¬
agnosis of degeneracy. In order to justify the diagnosis, physicians had to care¬
fully inquire after every nervous or degenerative disorder in a patient’s relatives.
Degeneration theory served as a conceptual bridge between the anatomico-
pathological mode of thinking of the Paris School in the first half of the century
and the psychiatric approach to an expanding list of mental illnesses at the turn
of the century.^^ Similarly, the quest for the pathognomy of pederasty gradually
shifted from Tardieu’s hunt for \htphysical stigmata of sodomy on the patient’s
body to a search for hereditary taints—particularly of a mental nature—in the
patient’s family medical history.
In a presentation to the prestigious Medico-Psychological Society on
March 27, 1876, Dr. Henri Legrand du Saulle addressed the hotly debated
question: “Are there physical signs in reasoning insanity?” (1876, 433).^® He
made it clear that a firm “Yes!” was essential to maintaining the respectability of
medicine before the courts, the public, and the other sciences. His professional
Figure 6. Vicious conformations of the head. In his Treatise on Degenerations (1857), Dr.
Benedict Morel described his twenty-three-year-old patient Jean Baptiste (upper right) as
having; “Obtuse intelligence. Bad tendencies. Angled forehead” (Plate 10). (Courtesy of
The Boston Medical Library in the Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine, Boston.)
concerns were not unlike Tardieu’s. For physicians to be credible, especially in

the courtroom, they had to rely on positive, physical traits and not obscure psy¬
chological theories.^'^ Legrand du Saulle argued that hereditaires (hereditary
degenerates) exhibited a variety of cerebral disorders and bodily stigmata—for
example, cranial deformities; eye, ear, and buccal cavity peculiarities; and facial
anomalies and tics. His original contribution was to suggest that during puberty
hereditaires suffered a variety of mental disorders: hysterical suffocation, mysti¬
cism, anorexia, eccentricities, mania, melancholia, masturbation, and criminal
tendencies. He further proposed that many hereditaires presented genital ab¬
normalities (such as hypospadias, phimosis, small or absent testicles) and, most
relevant for us, “genesic perversions.”
Legrand du Saulle presented several such cases; for example, a twenty-
year-old youth who had been apprehended, along with an old man, for mutu-
Inverts 79
ally exhibiting their genitals at a public urinal.^^ Unlike other degenerate pa¬
tients who displayed some “intellectual deficits,” this young man had a degree
in literature and possessed a “very ornate mind.” He was, however, morose,
solitary, contemplative, and “expressed a striking repulsion for women in gen¬
eral. ... He felt himself, on the contrary, invincibly attracted to men, to images,
paintings, and statues representing male nudes” (446). Thanks to Legrand du
Saulle’s care, this young man (whom police undoubtedly considered a ped¬
erast) escaped any legal and moral condemnation. Contrary to Tardieu’s ad¬
monition regarding the medical exculpation of sodomites, the “patient” was
never labeled a “pederast” but was instead diagnosed as suffering {xom perver¬
sion genesique (reproductive perversion) due to reasoning insanity. The telltale
stigmata were his penile deformities (which Legrand du Saulle promptly
treated surgically). The fact that this patient’s mother was a hysteric provided
even stronger evidence of his degeneration. This intelligent young gynophobe
with the hysterical mother—rescued from the ignominy of arrest for a crime
against decency and caught instead in the diagnostic net of degenerationist
neuropsychiatry—is a perfect figure for demonstrating the confluence of the
legal pursuit of the “vicious” sodomite and the neuropsychiatric treatment of
the hysterical male.
(En)gendering Hysterics: The Lunacy of Effeminacy
A hysterical man—the juxtaposition seems unremarkable given the current

usage of the word hysterical: suffering from the psychoneurosis called hysteria
or expressing excessive emotionality. Yet the term hysteria remains gendered
because of its etymology and history. As a disease ascribed by Hippocrates to
suffocation of or by the womb [hystera in Greek), hysteria had long been con¬
sidered a disease almost exclusively of women.^® The gendering of the disease
changed decisively in the nineteenth century as physicians increasingly insisted
that it was a neurological disorder and, therefore, could also afflict men
(Louyer-Villermay 1819b, 6-10; Georget 1820, 541). In the public arena and
much of the medical literature, hysteria nevertheless remained (and probably
still remains) a female-gendered disorder because its symptomatology repre¬
sents a caricature of “femininity.”^^
Hysterical males in the nineteenth century were regularly accused of ef¬
feminacy and of possessing an excessively impressionable imagination like that
of those creatures most vulnerable to erotic disturbances: children and women.
Some early case descriptions used coded language to convey the patient’s
effeminacy. Dr. Mouchet (1848), for example, opened his description of a
nmeteen-year-old hysterical male by noting his “blond hair, fine, white skin.”
But most physicians were quite forthright in their descriptions offeminisme.
Mourette (1869) reported on a boy with a “delicate complexion and feminine
appearance.” Yver presented a twenty-nine-year-old man with a feminine ap¬
pearance: thin, beardless, fine, white skin, cute face, and hyperexcitability. This
patient’s mother was, most significantly, hysterical.^® After Morel’s Treatise on
Degenerations (1857), doctors not only sought stigmata of effeminacy but also
traces of nervous debility m patients’ mothers to establish a diagnosis of male
hysteria.^^ Jacques-Joseph Moreau (de Tours), one of the early, vocal support¬
ers of hereditarian theories of mental illness, argued in Morbid Psychology
(1859) that fathers contributed most to the somatic constitution of their chil¬
dren while maternal heredity had a greater impact on the offspring’s mental
state.^® Maternal mental illness was therefore quite ominous, leading August
Klein, in his work on Hysteria in Men (1880), to conclude that “in cases in
which direct hereditary transmission is noted, it almost always comes from the
mother and the mother is almost always hysterical” (10).
In an earlier treatise on hysteria, Pierre Briquet (1859) argued forcefully
that the disease was neurological but with an environmental etiology: the social
demands placed on women (marriage, motherhood, family, work, home eco¬
nomics) constituted too great a challenge to their impressionable nervous sys¬
tems. Applying the same environmental mechanism to males, he proposed that
men with hypersensitive nervous constitutions were also likely to succumb to
hysteria. Although Briquet (1881) denied that the genitals were to blame for
hysteria, he nevertheless supported the theory that seminal loss was a predis¬
posing cause. Similarly, Dr. Michea had described the case of a man whose
childhood epileptiform crises became more frequent and violent when, at age
eighteen, “he contracted the morbid habit of masturbation and abandoned
himself to it with an incredible furor” (1865a, 42). Dr. Hirtz also had blamed
frenetic masturbation for provoking hysteria m a male.^^ As we have seen,
excessive seminal loss through onanism had long been held responsible for
impotence, so it was physiologically reasonable at the time to claim that a man,
losing his virile attributes to bear those of a woman, and thereby becoming
vulnerable to the diseases of the weaker sex, could end up with hysteria” (Bonne-
maison 1875, 675). Even those who rejected the gonadal etiology of hysteria,
nevertheless, found that deviation from the “normal” sexual organs and psy¬
chology was a common trait of the male hysteric.
The best informed reconciliation of these contradictory elements was pro¬
posed by Paul Fabre, physician at the Vaucluse Asylum and corresponding
member of the Medico-Psychological Society.33 His article on “Hysteria in
Men in 1875 (a year of numerous publications on male hysteria) drew on the
Inverts 81
work of Morel, Magnan, and especially on Briquet’s theory of nervous impres¬

sionability. Fabre reported cases of male hysterics with feminine traits, poorly
developed genitals, frequent masturbation, and diminished interest in coitus
with women. He noted that the character of one Mr. X-, a man-of-letters,
“resembles in many ways that of a woman: despite his exterior appearance,
which is totally virile, Mr. X-loves to be dominated, he cries and laughs
easily according to the circumstances; emotions have the greatest influence
upon him ... his venereal appetite is almost null” (363-64). By the same token,
Fabre rejected the old association between female hysteria and nymphomania or
“uterine fury.” Instead he claimed that hysterical women generally had a di¬
minished interest in sex and were often sterile or less fertile than healthy
women. The reason for this infertility lay not in their genitals but in the inde¬
terminate gender of their nervous systems: “The individuals stricken vdth this
neurosis offer certain psychological and physical analogies that seem to distance
them from the sex to which they belong, to direct them to a new sex, so to speak,
whose neutrality and exaggerated impressionability are the principal attributes”
(365). For Fabre, hysteria in both sexes presented a neurological gender inver¬
sion—literally a female brain in a male body, and vice versa—that could ac¬
count for the “genesic perversions” of hysterical males like Mr. X-.
Certainly, in the popular imagination, hysteria was not just for women
anymore. Mr. X-, the hysterical writer, was in good company since novelist
Gustave Flaubert also bore the diagnosis of hysteria.^^ On January 12-13,
1867, Flaubert wrote George Sand complaining about his isolation at his
country home:
The sensibility is unduly exalted in such a milieu. I suffer palpitations for no

reason, rather understandable, all told, in an old hysteric like myself For I
maintain that men are hysterical like women and that I am one. When I wrote
Salammbd, I read “the best authors” on the matter and I recognized all my
symptoms. I have the ball [globus hystericus] and the nail in the occiput.
(1980-91,3:592)
On May 1, 1874, he wrote to Mme. Roger des Genettes, “Dr. Hardy .. . calls
me a hysterical old woman. ‘Doctor,’ I told him, ‘you are quite right’” (1926-
54, 7:137). To his long-time friend Marie-Sophie Leroyer de Chantepie, he
similarly had written on March 18, 1857 that he had the nervous irritability of
a kept girl (1980-91, 2:692).
The diagnosis of hysteria stuck to Flaubert even into the twentieth century
when Rene Dumesnil (editor of the Pleiade edition of Flaubert’s worb) retro¬
spectively examined Flaubert with the intention of dispelling persistent rumors
that the novelist had been epileptic, sexually frigid, and afraid of women (that is,
homosexual) (1905, 88). Dumesnil determined, supposedly in Flaubert’s de¬
fense, that the novelist’s nervous crises were the product of “epileptoid hysteria
with a strong neuropathic tendency” (94). Flaubert’s superior literary abilities
could thus be attributed to his neurodegeneracy since “his mania for analysis is
pushed to exaggeration, and this is a trait common to all intellectual neuroses
and superior mentality” (95). The excessive imaginativeness and hypersensibil¬
ity of the hysteroepileptic placed Flaubert on the dangerous edge between in¬
sanity and literary genius. Fortunately, as the son of the physician-in-chief of the
Rouen Hotel-Dieu, Flaubert was endowed with a medical mentality and steely
surgical literary style that prevented him from falling into the abyss. Relying on
persistent hereditary degenerationist theories, Dumesnil concluded that
Flaubert united the ardent imagination and romantic character inherited from
his mother with the superior intelligence and scientific spirit of his father (317).
The image of Flaubert as hysteric was most evident in his first published
noyd, Madame Bovary (1856). Flaubert identified so closely with his heroine
that he reportedly exclaimed, “Mme. Bovary, c’est moi!” In a review of the
work, Baudelaire also declared that Emma was the female incarnation of
Flaubert, and inversely that.
despite all his zeal as an actor, [Flaubert] was unable not to infuse virile blood
into the veins of his creature, and that Madame Bovary—for all the energy
and ambition she may have in her, and also her dreaminess—Madame Bo¬
vary remains a man. Like armed Pallas [Athena], springing from the brain of
Zeus, that bizarre androgyne has kept all the seductions of a virile soul in a
charming feminine body. (Baudelaire 1857, 652)
Baudelaire found this double act of gender inversion—Emma as Elaubert in

drag, and vice versa the product of literary genius. Contemporary physicians
were far more wary of hysterical gender inverts and their novels.
Dr. Ernest Lasegue in an article on “Hysterics, Their Perversity, Their
Lies” (1881) warned colleagues against the willful malevolence and irresistible
deceitfulness of the hysteric’s imagination. Hysterics and lunatics both told un¬
true stories, Lasegue noted, but the great danger was that “the latter are unbe¬
lievable, whereas the novels of hysterics impose themselves by their verisimili¬
tude” (1881, 114; emphasis added). The same principle could be applied
more broadly, Lasegue suggested: “Do we not have something analogous in the
wide field of human inventions? This is the novelist who, commencing with a
premise furnished by the imagination, allows himself to be led by this to the
Inverts 83
point of believing that everything he creates actually happened” (112). The

novels of hysterics and hysterical novelists seem to collapse into the same cate¬
gory through their shared traits: hypersensibility, overimaginativeness, deceit¬
fulness, and self-delusion. Doctors also uncovered these characteristics in the
novels and lives of “inverts”—the literate, lin-de-siecle perverts who emerged
in the 1880s. Heeding Lasegue’s warnings concerning hysterics, physicians
were on guard against inverts’ seductive narratives.
Perversion and Nationalism
The diagnostic and nosological characteristics of sexual inversion had been

gradually accumulating in the nineteenth-century medical literature: sodomy,
pederasty, effeminacy, effeminate hysteria, somatic and psychic gender crossing,
same-sex erotic attraction, and lack of “venereal appetite” for the opposite sex.
Yet none of these elements constituted “inversion of the genital sense” as it
would emerge in the 1880s and be transformed soon thereafter into an array of
“sexual perversions.” As noted earlier, the history of inversion per se began with
the description of “contrary sexual sensation” by German forensic physicians at
mid-century.
The fact that the diagnosis arose first in Germany and not France is prob¬
ably due to the greater legal repression of sodomy in Prussia and, after 1871, all
of Germany. As noted earlier, sodomy in private between adults had been de¬
criminalized in France, but this was not the case in central Europe. Paragraph
143 of the Prussian penal code established “unnatural lewdness” as a criminal
offense. The newly unified German Empire in 1871 extended this law as Para¬
graph 175 of the penal code.^^ Given the climate of legal persecution, accused
sodomites claimed mental irregularity and sought the assistance of liberal Ger¬
man doctors. Although Hermann Kaan (1844), like Tardieu, insisted that ped¬
erasty was a perverse choice, he also suggested it might be a constitutional as¬
pect of personality. In 1852 Ludwig Casper argued that the disposition to
pederasty could be innate, and Wilhelm Griesinger (1868-1869) proposed
that it might be a psychopathic condition mitigating legal responsibility. A psy¬
chological theory of congenital, same-sex love was advanced by a Hanoverian
legal official, Karl Heinrich Ulrichs (under the pseudonym Numa Numantius),
in his autobiographical and legal brochures pleading for the decriminalization
of “unnatural acts” (1864-1879). Ulrichs coined the word Urning to identify
the “third sex” to which he and his fellows belonged.^® He proposed the classic
model of gender inversion: Urnings were female souls caught in male bodies.^^
Ulrichs argued that their nature was a physiological condition without intellec¬
tual deficits and should not be the object of legal persecution.'^^
It was through the writings of Ulrichs that Karl Westphal, editor of the
Gtxn\‘m Archives of Psychiatry and Nervous Diseases, became interested in what
he called contrdre Sexualenipfindung. Westphal described it as a symptom of a
neuropsychopathic condition in either sex, associated with hereditary taints
and occasionally mania, melancholia, and inclinations to theft. Additionally,
these patients often betrayed traits of hysteroepilepsy and moral insanity (1869,
106-7; 1876). Westphal’s article was followed by a flurry of German publica¬
tions on contrary sexual sensation.^^ Even so, in 1877 Richard von Krafft-
Ebing (who became the leading fin-de-siecle German sexologist) could only
identify eighteen cases in all the preceding medical literature.'^*^
The Germans had invented and monopolized the study of contrary sex¬
ual sensation until the 1880s, so it is hardly surprising that French writers—still
burning wdth animosity in the wake of the Franco-Prussian War—referred to
inversion as the “German vice” (Dubarry 1896b). Nationalist rivalry was as
fierce and vituperative over the study of inversion as over other scientific and
political issues. The initial French foray into research on inversion was
launched in 1882 with Charcot and Magnan’s article mentioned at the begin¬
ning of this chapter. They not only reviewed foreign publications on the new
disorder, but also presented new clinical material and laid out a theory of in¬
version pathology strongly at odds with the Germans’ hypotheses. The first part
of the article presented the patient introduced earlier, who ejaculated at the
sight or mere thought of naked males. Charcot and Magnan were clearly per¬
plexed by his constellation of perversities when they exclaimed, “This patient,
what is he?” They proceeded to create him out of the clinical materials at hand.
Jean Martin Charcot was the charismatic chief physician at the Salpetriere
Asylum during the Third Republic who restored the popularity of the hysteria
diagnosis. Valentin Magnan interned at Bicetre and the Salpetriere before his
appointment to the new Samt-Anne Asylum m 1867. He spent the rest of his
career there and promoted the degenerationist theory of neuropathology.
The two neurologists found that in spite of the patient’s exceptional intel¬
ligence, education, and achievements (he was a university professor), he had a
degenerate family history, especially on the mother’s side. The grandfather was
“agitated” and consorted with artists; the grandmother was “eccentric”; the
mother engaged in “exaggerated religiosity” and wore gaudy clothing. Since
the age of fifteen, the patient had suffered convulsive fits, which the two neu¬
rologists believed were hysterical rather than frankly epileptic. Under the label
inversion of the genital sense Charcot and Magnan fused the two diagnoses ex-
Inverts 85
amined in the previous two sections: the elite pederast and the effeminate, de¬
generate male hysteric.
In itself, this innovation in nosology was quite an accomplishment, but
the two doctors seemed unaware of their diagnostic hybridization. They in¬
tended to make a different taxonomic contribution. This became clear in the
second installment of the article, the title of which was lengthened to include
their new diagnostic term: “sexual perversions.” They reported four additional
cases that broadened the scope of the sexual perversions: a melancholic onanist
(with a hysterical mother), erotically obsessed with buttocks; a hysterical man
obsessed with boot nails; a son of eccentrics who was obsessed with night bon¬
nets; and a man who stole aprons to masturbate on them. Today we would
identify these as examples of “fetishism,” and this is precisely how Alfred Binet
reclassified them when he coined the notion of “erotic fetishism” in 1887.^^
Charcot and Magnan, however, presented these cases as fundamentally the
same class of disorder as sexual inversion. Like dipsomania (alcoholism), these
“impulsive states” were all congenital variants of degenerate heredity character¬
ized by a compulsive obsession:
Should in the place of boot nails, night-bonnets, or white aprons the obses¬
sion have man for its object, the phenomena unfold in the same manner; and
we must recognize that the histories of all these patients are closely related.
They are, so to speak, fashioned in the same mold, they do not differ except
in the more or less acute degree of intellectual degeneration. (321-32)
The doctor’s underlying objective was to collect all the sexual perversions
under the same diagnostic rubric rather than develop increasingly fine, phe¬
nomenological categories as had the Germans. Krafft-Ebing, for example, had
hypothesized that inverts suffered from a degenerate heredity, but he had dis¬
tinguished same-sex inclination from what he grouped as opposite-sex perver¬
sions: lust-murder, anthropophagy, and necrophilia.^^ He therebyjustified lob¬
bying for the repeal of antisodomy laws.'^^ Westphal had also argued for the
abrogation of antisodomy laws in hopes that this would allow more contrary
sexuals to seek medical attention and thus further the scientific study of the
condition (1869, 108).
By lumping rather than splitting the sexual perversions, Charcot and
Magnan resisted any greater legal or social acceptance of same-sex eroticism
than already afforded by the liberal French penal code. Instead, they forcefully
argued for the psychopathologization and paternal medical treatment of inver¬
sion alongside all varieties of compulsive, degenerate desires. They warned that
“these obsessions, these impulsions which, by the sole fact that the patient is
aware of them, affect certain allures of benignity, are, on the contrary, always the
manifestations of a very grave state” (322).
Dr. Jules Falret echoed these sentiments in his comments on Magnan’s lec¬
ture on sexual perversions presented at the Medico-Psychological Society. Be¬
traying concerns about national priority and purity, Falret warned that hereditary
reasoning insanity {folie raisonnante), of which inversion was just a variant, rep¬
resented the lowest state of degeneration short of imbecility or idiocy, it was not
just the first step below sanity. He sharply criticized the Germans for focusing on
inversion as a special case rather than examining it as just one aspect of the gen¬
ital perversions of the hereditarily insane (Magnan 1885a, 473).
So, m a storm of Franco-German rivalry, sexual inversion had firmly en¬
tered the French lexicon.^^ The term was nevertheless “too vague,” as Tamas-
sia himself noted when he coined inversione dell’istinto sessuale. It collapsed
two distinct issues into one label: psychological gender inversion, or the sen¬
sation that one s psychological gender is the opposite of one’s physical sex;
and the preference “to satisfy [one’s] sexual instinct with individuals of the
same sex.”'^^ physicians well into the twentieth century would overlook this
confusion between what today we distinguish under the terms transsexualism.
and homosexuality. Charcot and Magnan were not concerned with this ambi¬
guity. Charcot wrote no more on inversion. He instead turned to male hysteria
and made every effort to characterize it as a disorder of all classes of men, not
necessarily of the effeminate.^®
Magnan, in contrast, became increasingly interested in the sexual perver¬
sions (Serieux 1921). He developed a system for classifying the perversions,
including inversion, according to the presumed neuroanatomical location of
their pathology, whether spinal, posterior spinocerebral, anterior spinocere-
bral, or anterior cerebral. These hypothesized lesions from the “lower” to the
“higher” neurological centers were matched with behaviors ranging from the
most automatic, reflex genital acts of the “spinal” idiots who masturbated me¬
chanically, to the sexual insatiability of nymphomaniacs, the sexual perversions
of inverts and pedophiles, and, finally, the obsessive platonic love of “anterior
cerebrals” (see table). As had been the case with pederasty, the interest in sex¬
ual perversions arose mainly because of forensic considerations. Magnan con¬
cluded his article by stating that “despite their reasonable appearance, these
patients are at the mercy of their impulsive desires, [and] could not be consid¬
ered responsible” (1885a, 472).
Forensic interest in the sexual perversions was such that medicolegal jour¬
nals quickly dominated the scientific discourse of inversion and sexual perver¬
sion. Particularly prominent among these was iht Archives of Criminal Anthro-
Inverts 87
Classification Systems for “Perversions of the Sexuai Instinct”
MICHEA (1849)
1. Greek love or love for one’s sex
2. Bestiality
3. Attraction to inanimate objects
4. Attraction to human cadavers
LACASSAGNE (1884)*
I. Pathological quantity
1. States of augmentation: erotic temperament, onanism, satyriasis,
nymphomania
2. States of diminution: frigidity, impotence
II. Pathological quality
1. Inversion of the genital sense
2. Necrophilia
3. Bestiality
4. Love for inanimate objects (or “nihilists of the flesh”)
MAGNAN (1885B)
1. Spinals: mechanical, automatic sexual stimulation (e.g., idiot onanists)
2. Posterior spinocerebrals: reflex orgasms (e.g., nymphomaniacs)
3. Anterior spinocerebrals: perverse love objects (e.g., pedophiles,
fetishists, inverts)
4. Anterior cerebral or psychics: purely platonic love (e.g., erotomaniacs)
*Froni Lacassagne’s lecture delivered November 1884 (qtd. in Chevalier 1885, 9-11).
pology, Criminology, and Normal and Pathological Psychology, which Drs.

Alexandre Lacassagne and Gabriel Tarde founded in 1885. Lacassagne, the
professor of forensic medicine at the Faculty of Medicine of Lyon and a leader
in the discipline, had lectured on the topic in November 1884. Unlike Mag-
nan’s speculative neuroanatomical system of sexual perversions, Lacassagene
had proposed a simple phenomenological classification system that elaborated
on an earlier one by Michea.
By 1885 the French medical journals were pullulating with these queer
new creatures, and Dr. Julien Chevalier, one of Lacassagne’s students, had
ample material to write a thesis on Inversion from the Medico-Legal Point of View.
Chevalier mainly summarized previous publications, adding Lacassagne’s new
report on an effeminate invert with a hysterical mother. This case study of In
femmektte adhered to the dominant theory of the degenerate etiology of con¬
genital inversion (Chevalier 1885, 130). Chevalier’s original contribution was a
theory of the relationship between history and sexuality. He noted that, al¬
though the word inversion was of recent origin, it described an ancient phe¬
nomenon. It was therefore necessary to know its “historical filiation” m relation
to the evolution of humanity in order to understand why the phenomenon ex¬

isted. Freely adapting Auguste Comte’s classification of the evolution of human
intellect, Chevalier identified four historical stages: fetishism, polytheism,
monotheism, and the present. This historical progress was marked by the cul¬
tivation of the mind in place of “primitive” sentiments and instinctive drives.
He nevertheless agreed with Lacassagne’s appraisal that even Christianity and
(Western) civilization had not succeeded in extirpating these animal passions.
The taming of primitive drives had happened to the greatest degree among the
elite, but the masses merely exhibited a veneer of civilization. Chevalier contin¬
ued, quoting Lacassagne:
If one goes to the bottom of things and looks at what is below the apparent,
one finds that even the believer in the most refined religions has remained, as
far as ideas are concerned, the primitive man who lives in the grotto of the
quaternarian era.... Taken as a mass, humanity has remained what it was in
the beginning: purely fetishistic. (25)
Magnan s neuroanatomical system of sexual perversions represented in¬

version as a pathological descent to inferior, “primitive” cerebrospinal levels.
Chevalier’s and Lacassagne’s model of sexuality, in turn, portrayed inversion as
historical atavism: a regression to pre-Christian moralities. In their different
veays, the emerging nosologies of perversion explained sexual inversion as a
multilayered inversion of historical orders. Not only was inversion a neuropsy¬
chological counter-evolution but also a historical and cultural regression. In¬
version was theorized as a retreat from the intellect to the passions, from the real
to the imaginary, from the civilized to the primitive—typically feminine regres¬
sions consonant with the effeminacy associated with male hysteria and sexual
inversion.
The conflation of diverse sexual and gender anxieties in the diagnosis of
inversion is evident in the dizzying panoply of designations for the illness: “con¬
trary, inverse, perverted, [or] inverted genital sense; —contrary, inverse, [or]
perverted sexual attractions, impulsions, [or] sensations; —attraction of same
sexes; —crossed sensation of sexual individuality;... —perversion, [or] inter-
version of the sexual instinct, [etc.]” (Chevalier 1885, 14). Some order needed
to be brought to this field of confusions; therefore, in 1894 another of Lacas¬
sagne’s students in the laboratory of legal medicine, “Dr. Laupts,” undertook a
national survey on inversion through l\vt Archives of Criminal Anthropology. His
extensive questionnaire included items on the heredity, physical and psycho¬
logical status, and medical and leg'al history of inverts. The survey was ad-
Inverts 89
dressed not only to doctors but also to professors, lawyers, and novelists (1894,
105). Laupts argued that the study of inversion was not simply a matter of sci¬
entific curiosity but of vital interest to French society, and indeed the entire
human race:
These days, no one doubts that the number of degenerations, of cerebral de¬
railings—expressed by the tendencies towards suicide, by phobias, etc.—
results in large part from the fact that in our nation the genital functions are
often not accomplished as they should be. Therefore, it is necessary, from the
point of view of the vitality, of the future of the race, to study the morbid
causes, to discern the dangerous and evil elements, among which must be
ranked for an appreciable part the creature stricken with sexual perversion:
the pervert, the feminiform, congenital invert. (1896, 104-5)
This vitriolic indictment makes it clear that the diagnosis of inversion consoli¬
dated numerous disorders and dreads: immorality, effeminacy, degeneration,
mental illness, genital “abuse,” national decay, and genocide. The sexual per¬
versions, particularly sexual inversion, conveniently knotted together fin-de-
siecle medical, social, and moral preoccupations that stemmed from declining
French fertility, growing class tensions, and the demoralization of the nation
after its humiliating defeat in the Franco-Prussian War.^^ It was therefore ap¬
propriate that the first published reply to Laupts’s survey came from a major
cultural figure who shared these concerns—not a physician, but the novelist
Emile Zola. Zola’s contribution and the ensuing nationalist medical debates
on inversion show how the fin-de-siecle construction of homosexuality was a
broad literary and cultural affair with repercussions beyond the confines of
medical texts and knowledge.
Novelizing Inversion
Monsieur Emile Zola, Paris

It is to you. Monsieur, who are the greatest novelist of our time and who,
with the eye of the savant and the artist, capture and paint so powerfully all
the failings, all the shame, all the ills that afflict humanity that I send these
human documents so cherished by the cultivated people of our age.
This confession, which no spiritual advisor has ever learned from my lips,
will reveal to you a frightful illness of the soul, a rare case—if not, unfortunately,
unique—that has been studied by learned psychologists, but which till now no
novelist has dared to stage in a literary work. (Invert 1894, 212)“^®
So opens a truly unique “human document” of the late 1880s: a bundle of let¬
ters and postcards mailed anonymously to Emile Zola by a twenty-three-year-
old Italian aristocrat. In florid, raunchy detail alternatingly exuding hubris and
shame, Zola’s correspondent narrates the feverish evolution of his “frightful ill¬
ness,” an erotic passion for men. He recounts his early cross-dressing experi¬
ences and masturbatory addiction, his youthful infatuation with stable boys,
his secret love affair with a fellow military officer, and his seduction by an older
man. In a final postcard, he gleefully reports being sodomized by an elegant
Milanese gentleman met the previous night! Although he experienced pro¬
found moral ambivalence about his erotic inclinations, the young man ulti¬
mately hoped that he would be reborn as a hero in a great Zola novel: “I do not
know if you can do anything with the terrible passion I have confessed to you,
but in any case I am glad to have confessed it to you. If the misery which af¬
flicts me can find a place in the sublime descriptions of human misery, I beg
you. Monsieur, do not render me too odious” (135). By providing an abun¬
dance of authentic documentation, Zola’s mysterious correspondent hoped
his unusual deviation” might be represented more extensively and candidly
by the inventor of the “experimental novel”: the author who declared that “the
dream of the physiologist and the experimental doctor is also that of the novel¬
ist who applies [Claude Bernard’s] experimental method to the natural and
social study of man (Zola 1880, 1188). Zola’s self-made image as paternal
doctor clearly seduced the young Italian, for he wrote, “Please forgive my hor¬
rible scribble, but I [write] with my heart on my sleeve, as if I were confessing
to a doctor or a friend, and I have not paid attention to the form or the
spelling” (Invert 1895, 231).
Despite this false modesty, the Italian’s autobiography actually adopted
the form of the medical case history. His appropriation of the medical genre re¬
flects the cultural currency of hereditarian theories. The Italian himself boasted
of his familiarity with the works of “learned psychologists” and with Zola’s nov-
ehstic representations of hereditary degeneration. As in the case studies of male
hysterics, the Italian began with family antecedents: “My father is of a very im¬
pressionable and nervous temperament, an artist to the tips of his fingers. He
had a rather adventurous life with considerable highs and lows” (213). The
Italian invert s grandfather was also a handsome and well-respected gentleman,
but died at an early age of heart disease. The maternal line was more severely
tainted neurologically and psychologically, primarily because it was Jewish.
My mother was very pretty in her youth, although emerging from a very ugly
and vulgar family. She always had few wits and I still reproach my father for
inverts 91
having allied himself to a family that is so ugly and with such little distinction.
. . . She cannot read a little sentimental anecdote without crying; she has lit¬
tle memory and her only excuse is her great goodness.... I still think it is one
of the qualities or defects inherent to the race from which she descends and
for which I have no sympathy, rather, a certain repulsion. (214-15)
The racial “taint” of the Jews would soon preoccupy France with the eruption
of the Dreyfus Affair. The Italian, however, primarily blamed his Jewish hered¬
ity for ugly physical traits, particularly in his brothers. His own superlative looks
came from the paternal side, but his nervous, impressionable temperament was
clearly the product of both his mother and father. His beauty was, however, dis¬
tinctly feminine. Like Ulrichs before him, the Italian invert argued that his na¬
ture and physique were congenitally female:
Whenever I see my nanny, she always tells me that all the women she knows
had named me the little Madonna, I was so cute and delicate. ... I still recall
the shiver of joy and pleasure that coursed through my little person when I
went out in my little puffed-up blue pique dress with blue bows and my big
Italian straw hat [as was common among boys of his social class].
When I was four, they took away my little dresses to put me in trousers and
a little jacket. Once they had dressed me as a boy, I experienced profound
shame—I remember it as if it were today-—and I quickly ran to my nanny’s
room to hide and cry; to console me, she had to dress me again as a girl. They
still laugh whenever recalling my cries of despair in seeing them take away
those little white dresses which were my greatest joy.
It seemed as if they were taking away something that I was always destined
to wear.
That was my first great sorrow. (215)
Even his first erotic inclinations towards males were of a distinctly femi¬
nine quality: “I always imagined myself to be a woman, and all my desires since
then have been those of a woman” (371). He recollects that, even before pu¬
berty, he had a vagme idea of his sexual difference and a premonition of his
erotic destiny. At age thirteen he developed a crush on one of the servants and
regularly invited him up to his bedroom to recount sexual adventures. These
libertine tales filled him with desires: “I wished he had slept beside me, to feel
his blond, polished body; I wanted to embrace him and have him by me to take
his pleasure and to return it.” On one of these occasions,
I was suddenly driven to know him thoroughly and without shame, and as if
in jest, I begged him to show me his member in order to persuade me that it
really was as large and handsome as he claimed. At first he refused, but finally
after making me promise never to tell anyone, he opened his trousers and com¬
pletely revealed himself in the state of erection that our talk had provoked. He
approached my little bed where I was panting with desire and shame. I had
never seen the member of a big person and I was so stunned that I couldn’t say
a word. Propelled by I know not what force or what innate desire, I seized it
with my right hand and vigorously rubbed it mumbling, “My it’s beautiful, my
it’s beautiful!”
I had a furious desire to do something with that member which filled my
whole hand and I desired ardently to have a hole in my body in which to in¬
sert the object of all my desires. (372)
Reflecting a century of medical writings on the dangerous power of the

imagination, he reveals how, from the youngest age, he “took refuge in an imag¬
inary world” populated with princesses and queens whom he imitated and
Greek heroes whom he loved (368-70). He even fantasized of being Andro¬
mache in order to embrace the muscular Hector. The Italian invert recalled
that after being rebuffed by a handsome stable boy,
I sought to persuade myself through my imagination that I was his vdfe, and
at night I placed my bolster alongside me and kissed and bit it as if it were a
living person. I thought of the handsome young man so robust and so fresh,
and I sought in my movements to procure the illusion of sleeping with him.
In doing this, and almost unwillingly, I corrupted myself and I felt my ovm
semen flow for the first time. (730)
Much like the young Rousseau, the pubescent Italian was terrified by this sem¬
inal loss. Despite occasional attempts to abstain from the solitary vice, he aban¬
doned himself wholeheartedly since: “My lively imagination lent me the most
convenient images and I delighted in that terrible pleasure whilst evoking im¬
ages of men who pleased me and with whom I wanted to be.” Further echoing
Rousseau, the Italian reports that, fortunately, he was of a hardy constitution,
otherwise such indulgence “would no doubt have killed anyone else” (730).
This Rousseauvian confession of the most intimate, shameful, morbid,
yet poignant aspects of inner experience impressed Zola, who felt the subject
was extremely important:
I was struck by the great physiological and social interest [the letter] offered. It
touched me by its absolute sincerity, because one senses the flame, I would
even say the eloquence of truth-[Tjell if he does not achieve, in certain pas¬
sages, the moving style of sentiments profoundly experienced and expressed.
Inverts 93
It is a total, naive, spontaneous confession that very few men would dare make,
qualities that render it quite precious from many points of view.
Zola even hoped that its publication might “inspire some pity and a modicum
of equity for these wretches” (1896,1,3). Given all these scientific, literary, and
social virtues of the invert’s manuscript. Dr. Laupts naturally asked: “Why did
[Zola] not discuss inversion, why did [he] not dedicate one of his novels to in¬
version? The subject is worth the effort” (1907, 833).
The Italian invert wondered the same thing. He later wrote: “With each
of Zola’s new novels, I hoped to finally discover a character who was the repro¬
duction of myself, but I was always disappointed and I was finally convinced
that the ■writer had lacked the courage to stage so terrible a passion.Zola was
hardly one to shy away from controversy. Even before the Dreyfus Affair and his
famous essay “J’accuse!” (1898), Zola’s naturalist novels had been condemned
for their vulgarity, sensuality, and morbidness. Some of his harshest critics were
those people he claimed as his colleagues: physicians, who nevertheless con¬
sidered him a “scientific dilettante.” Like Flaubert before him, Zola had also
been deemed a pathological writer, and he had been “diagnosed” as an epilep-
toid degenerate, a “superior degenerate,” an olfactory fetishist, and a sexual
psychopath.^® Yet he continued to portray the great spectrum of physical and
moral degenerations: alcoholism, prostitution, monomania, adultery and
homicide. Therefore, Zola’s literary impotence on the topic of inversion is
quite revealing. He could never have edited the Italian’s manuscript, he con¬
fessed, because,
I was then in the roughest hours of my literary battle; critics treated me daily
as a criminal capable of all vices and all debaucheries. . . . First of all they
would have accused me of entirely inventing the story from personal corrup¬
tion. Then I would have been duly condemned for merely having seen in the
affair an occasion for base speculation on the most repugnant instincts. And
what a clamor if I had permitted myself to say that no other subject is more
serious or more tragic; that it is a far more common and deep wound than
pretended and that still the best thing for healing wounds is to study them, to
expose them, and to treat them! (Zola 1896, 2)
Despite Legrand du Saulle’s dictum (regularly cited in sexological works)—

“science like fire, purifies everything it touches”—the social taint of “inversion”
was clearly too much even for Zola, the scientific novelist. Privately, Zola admit¬
ted: “I have encountered [inverts] . . . and in shaking their hand, I experience
an instinctive repulsion I can barely overcome” (Laupts 1907, 833). And to
another correspondent, Zola wrote, “If I am full of pity for those whom you call
Uranists, I have no sympathy for them, no doubt because I am different.”^^
Zola had become increasingly fervent about the birthrate in France—a
concern most clearly voiced in Fecondite (1899). He was extremely anxious
about all forms of nonprocreative sex, and once moaned: “How much seed
wasted in one night in Paris—^what a shame that all of it does not produce
human beings” (Laupts 1907, 832n.). On the threat of inversion, Zola was
even more vehement: “An invert is a disorganizer of the family, of the nation, of
humanity. Man and woman were certainly not placed on earth to do other than
bear children, and they kill life the day they no longer do what is necessary for
this” (1896, 4). As we have seen, Zola’s concern with seminal waste and non¬
procreative sexuality was shared by contemporary French doctors and anthro¬
pologists. Therefore, Zola submitted the Italian’s confessions to Dr. Laupts to
be published as the first response to Laupts’s survey on sexual inversion.
Dr. Laupts introduced the “document” in a style more suited to the back
cover blurb of a racy “true crime” novella: “It is the true story of a man who
bore a great name, a very great name in Italy. As exact as a scientific observa¬
tion, as interesting as a novel, as sincere as a confession, it is perhaps the most
complete and most endearing document of this genre” (1894, 212). It is not
clear what genre Laupts is referring to, but the text borrows from numerous
forms: eighteenth-century confessional letters in Onania, epistolary novels,
Rousseauvian autobiography, licentious literature, and the hereditarian case
study of sexual perverts. Laupts clearly agreed with the Italian that the confes¬
sion was a “precious document” for it was reprinted in Laupts’s anthology of
articles and documents on homosexuality, Taints and Poisons: Sexual Perver¬
sions and Perversities (1896).
Strolling down a street one day, the Italian was startled to discover
Laupts’s volume in a bookstore window. He immediately wrote to Laupts that
he was elated to find himself “printed in living color, although I would have
much preferred to be reborn in the pages of a novel and not in a medical sci¬
ence treatise (Saint-Paul 1930, 116). Indeed, the Italian dandy repeatedly
suggested that he fashioned himself a belle-lettriste and that he envisioned his
life itself as a work of art:
I unburdened my soul somewhat [in my confessions to Zola] and I wrote with

a retrospective voluptuousness of the abominable and ardent scenes in which
I was the actor.... I therefore want to complete the study of my person, whom
I often consider favored by nature because she made me a creature that even
the most audacious poets have been unable to create (Invert 1895, 231-32).
Inverts 95
Ironically enough, his “true” confession was printed verbatim but under the
title “The of an Invert.”
Just like most of Zola’s novels, the confession was published serially, and
Laupts had a knack for breaking the action at moments of sexual climax. For
example, in the third installment, “Youth—First Acts,” we learn of the Italian’s
first sexual experience, an encounter during his military service with a hand¬
some young officer:
He was half undressed and seated on my legs right up against me. I spoke to
him as if enchanted.... fSluddenly he leaned over, embraced me in his arms
and applied a long kiss to my cheek; at the same time he plunged his hand
under the sheets and firmly grasped my flesh. I thought 1 would die and an
immense joy suddenly seized me. We remained a few seconds like that, rest¬
ing one head against the other, our fiery cheeks touching, my mouth in his in
the warmth of the pillow. I was never so happy!!
The lamp on the floor cast faint rays upon the immense dormitory where,
in the distant beds, my companions were sleeping, and left the corner where
we were thus ecstatic in the deepest darkness.
{To be continued.) (Invert 1894, 737)
Readers had to cool off for two months before the hard-core action resumed.
But is it science or is it fiction? As Zola feared, some foreign writers were con¬
vinced it was entirely his own fabrication,^^ and it did not help matters that
Laupts labeled it a novel. Perhaps Laupts felt the text deserved the designation
because of its intrinsic literary qualities: the richness of its figurative language,
the well-developed characterization of its hero, or its exceptional length for a
medical “article” (almost forty eight pages). Perhaps it was safer to label it “The
Novel of an Invert” than “The Pornography of an Invert,” for the work is in¬
deed pornographic. As had already become standard practice in the work of
Krafft-Ebing, the sexually explicit passages were “cloaked in the decency of a
dead language”—Latin. For the literate medical and lay audience who pur¬
chased these books, the Latin passages in italics were that much easier to find
and enjoy. For example, the Italian recalls the scene of seduction by an older
friend of his father’s, a cavalry captain (the italicized paragraph is in Latin in
the original):
(The captain] rose suddenly, locked the door and closed the shutters, then re¬
turned to me who was panting vdth desire, shame, and fear. He undressed me
in the vdnk of an eye, all the while running his hands over my body; he even
took off my stockings and shoes, cast away my shirt, and carried me like a little
child into his bed. In an instant he too was completely naked and lying beside
me; I felt I was in a dream and was no longer conscious of my acts and
thoughts.
He lay on top of me, panting and groaning loudly, and he clasped me so tightly
in his arms that I almost suffocated; he began stroking himself on top of my body.
He had a huge member which, when rubbed over me, gave me an extraordinar¬
ily pleasurable sensation. Meanwhile, he sucked my ears, inserted his tongue in
my mouth, and caressed my entire body with his hands. He kept saying the sweet¬
est nothings to me in a broken voice. When he emitted his semen, he inundated me
and didn’t cease thrusting, but roared like a bull. Meanwhile I had ejaculated
copiously, and for a long time we clung to one another as if unconscious and in¬
deed glued together; in fact, we struggled to unstick ourselves.
I was not in the least bit ashamed at that moment, and he too seemed to¬
tally happy. (Saint-Paul 1930, 94-95)^^
This sort of Latinized pornography was finding its way ever more frequently
into the pages of medical texts under the cover of science. Tissot and his En¬
lightenment colleagues had worried that even vague descriptions of masturba¬
tion might enflame young imaginations. A century later, the medical literature
on sexual perversions equaled eighteenth-century licentious literature in sexual
explicitness, but unlike its illicit counterpart, sexological works were sold
openly in bookstore windows.
Recall that the Italian invert had read some of this medical literature and
had even discovered his own story in a bookseller’s vitrine. Rather than being
dismayed by Zola’s breach of confidence, the Italian was delighted to see his
words in print. He wrote to Laupts, praising the doctor as a “savant. . . and a
kind and indulgent man.” The Italian even contributed dozens more pages of
self-description directly to Laupts because “like every sick person who sees in a
doctor a friend,... I am filled with friendship and gratitude for those who oc¬
cupy themselves with the odious illness that haunts me, and ... I seek to ren¬
der them service by exhibiting that which they painfully seek, and which I, on
the contrary, know so well: by innate science. ” He, nevertheless, left it up to
Laupts to draw theoretical conclusions from this data: “I have told you the
causes and the effects; now it is up to you to study them and profit from them
for the sake of science and humanity” (Saint-Paul 1930, 116, 128). He recog¬
nized that the business of creating scientific knowledge was not entirely in the
hands of physicians: researchers depended on him for data, and by being an
informant, he could engage in the “voluptuous,” exhibitionistic self-represen¬
tation and self-exploration he adored.
Inverts 97
Perhaps it was precisely because the invert had played such a strong, au¬
tonomous role in shaping his own narrative that Dr. Laupts decided to place
the “true confession” under a cloud of suspicion vdth the title “The Novel of
an Invert.” The label novel distinguished the first-person patient confession
from the “objective” medical writings surrounding it. The “novels of hysterics”
had been roundly denounced as deceitful. Laupts may have wanted to cast the
same doubt on the Italian’s confession, despite its author’s claim that “it is
pointless to reassure you that everything in my story is true” (Invert 1895,231).
However, in dealing with inverts and their masquerades, one could never be too
wary. “This autobiography resembles those of all effeminate Uranists who have
gone public,” warned the second respondent to Laupts’s investigation.
This novel of an invert will teach nothing to those with experience in psychi¬
atry. . . . Unbridled vanity and lust are especially demonstrated in the rela¬
tions between the invert of the novel and the Captain.... Repugnant or dan¬
gerous acts will generally occur between people united by debauchery, vanity,
or interest. (Raffalovich 1895b, 333)
The author, Marc-Andre Raffalovich, was a newcomer to the field of sexology.

Generalizing further, Raffalovich cautioned that “one should not dwell on such
autobiographies or attach much importance to them” (1895a, 116). We must
be careful in evaluating Raffalovich’s comments, however, for he too was an in¬
vert. But then so was Dr. Laupts, if only literally: Laupts was a fictional name,
the inversion of his real name, St.-Paul. Even better, he was a writer of literary
and fictional works: North African travelogues, war stories, farces, short stories,
poems, and a melodrama about syphilis (1907). All of this was published
under his second pseudonym G. Espe de Metz—a name adopted when bibli¬
ographers, to Georges Saint-Paul’s horror, started cataloguing Laupts’s texts
with German authors (Saint-Paul 1930, 5).
Deceptions and counterdeceptions, charges and countercharges were es¬
pecially rife in the medical literature on inversion, particularly because of the
active participation of inverts themselves in the scientific fashioning of “homo¬
sexuality.” Raffalovich especially inflamed the Franco-German national and
scientific rivalries. The writers who addressed him as “Dr. Raffalovich” ignored
the fact that he had no medical degree.^'^ In his day, however, Raffalovich was
the most provocative and prolific “medical” writer in French on homosexuality.
He enunciated positions so divergent from dominant French medical opinion
that they appeared radically prohomosexual. Yet like the Italian, Raffalovich
betrayed a deep moral ambivalence about sexual inversion, and his campaign
to normalize homosexuality was fought by sacrificing a stigmatized group of
“perverse” inverts. In many ways his scientific opinion was the forerunner of
the political strategy employed by current homosexual apologists who cam¬
paign for the rights of “good” homosexuals by perpetuating the marginalization
of“bad” ones: cross-dressers, sadomasochism enthusiasts, flamboyant effemi¬
nates, and so on.^^ Pitting virile homosexuals against effeminate, degenerate
ones had far broader fin-de-siecle repercussions: it resonated with internal ten¬
sions in scientific rhetoric as well as nationalist conflicts in social analysis.
Homoaesthetic Politics: Raffalovich,

Wilde, and Huysmans
Amat avidus amores

Miros, miros carpit flores
Saevus pulchritudine:
Quanto anima nigrescit,
Tanto facies splendiescit,
Mendax, sed quam splendide!
Hie sunt poma Sodomorum;
Hie sunt corda vitiorum;
Et peccata dulcia.
In excelcis et infernis,
Tibi sit, qui tanta cernis,
Gloriarum gloria.
Lionel Johnson, “In Honorem Doriani Creatorisque Eius”*
Just two years after his brief response to Laupts’s inversion survey, Marc-Andre
Raffalovich published an extensive monograph. Uranism and Unisexuality: A
Study of Different Manifestations of the Sexual Instinct (1896), in Lacassagne’s
Library of Criminology” series. In 1897 Raffalovich was entrusted with writ¬
ing the “Annals of Unisexuality,” a journal-within-a-journal in \ht Archives of
Excerpt of In Honorem Doriani Creatorisque Eius,” a poem written in gratitude to Wilde for a
copy of The Portrait of Dorian Gray. “He avidly loves strange loves and, fierce with beauty, he
plucks strange flowers. The more sinister his spirit, the more radiant his face, lying—but how
splendidly! Here are apples of Sodom, here are the very hearts of vices, and tender sins. In heaven
and hell be glory of glories to you who perceive so much” (trans. Ellman, 1988, 323-24).
Inverts 99
Criminal Anthropology, and his work met with professional approval among
German and British reviewers. Dr. Paul Nacke, for example, praised Raf-
falovich as one of only six non-German experts on inversion (1908,11 In.). De¬
spite his remarkable publication history, Raffalovich was treated with hostility
by French doctors. He remained a mysterious character, in part because he did
not live in France or belong to the small circle of Parisian academic physicians.
Raffalovich came from a Russian Jewish family that had made its banking
fortune in France. His mother, Marie, was a beautiful, intelligent socialite and
an intimate friend of Claude Bernard, a leader in experimental physiology. It
was Bernard who recommended that Raffalovich become a doctor. After com¬
pleting his early education in Paris, he was sent to Oxford to study medicine
but never completed his studies because of his weak health. Instead, he estab¬
lished himself in grand style in London, publishing poetry and novels and
hosting the literary stars of the time; Henry James, Aubrey Beardsley, Pierre
Louys, Stephan Mallarme, and, the most notorious of aesthetes, Oscar Wilde.
Raffalovich and Wilde were intimate friends until their vicious falling out
in the early 1890s, apparently over some indiscretion of Wilde’s. Later, Wilde
openly mocked Raffalovich’s unattractiveness and portrayed him as a preten¬
tious, nouveau riche foreigner. “Poor Andre!” Wilde once quipped, “He came
to London with the intention of founding a salon, and he has succeeded only
in opening a saloon.”^® Their mutual friend, Arthur Symons, introduced Raf¬
falovich to Wilde’s companion, a pretty-boy and budding poet named John
Henry Gray. A Portrait of Dorian Gray, with its secret dedication to John, was
published in 1891, but the next year Wilde met the younger and more angelic
Lord Alfred Douglas. Raffalovich, who had become enamored of Gray, caught
the suicidal poet on the rebound and they became lifetime companions.^^
They coauthored a play called The Blackmailers (1894) which the dramatic
critic of the Times described as “a sordid and repulsive picture of blackmailing
practices carried on in society.” In this play, an older scoundrel induces a young
man into blackmailing scams “whose game appears to be perfectly well under¬
stood by the society in which they move.”^^ Blackmail and scandal concerning
alleg'ations of sodomy were all too common in England (as they were in Paris),
and such scandal moved from the stage to the courtroom with the Wilde v.
Queensbury trial in 1895.
The Wilde Affair perturbed London’s dandies, including Raffalovich and
Gray who took off for Berlin before the trial ended. Within a few years both of
them turned to Catholicism. Raffalovich converted in 1896 and two years later
became a lay Dominican under the name Brother Sebastian. Gray decided to
enter the priesthood and began seminary training in Rome at Rafialovich’s ex¬
pense. Raffalovich later subsidized the construction of Saint Peter’s Church in
Edinburgh where Father Gray was installed as parish priest in 1907. A great
benefactor of the Dominican Order, Raffalovich also donated funds for the
construction of Saint Sebastian’s Priory in Pendleton, Manchester.^^ In 1905
Raffalovich moved into a house next to Saint Peter’s. While he and Gray did
not live together, Raffalovich’s wealth was held in a joint account with Gray.
The reportedly met every day for tea until Raffalovich died on Saint Valentine’s
Day 1934. Gray was much distressed by the loss and followed Raffalovich to
the grave just four months later.®*^
Perhaps it was through Arthur Symons, a close friend of John Addington
Symonds and Havelock Ellis, that Raffalovich was introduced to the burgeon¬
ing scientific study of inversion and to Ellis and Symonds’s groundbreaking &x-
ual Inversion (1896).®^ Raffalovich’s unpublicized “unisexuality” and his famil¬
iarity with the dandy literary set in London would be important factors in the
positions he took on inversion in the French medical press. As we have seen,
until 1894 French medical writers on inversion had stressed several points: in¬
version was a variety of degenerate insanity characterized by hysterical gender¬
crossing; it was a form of primitive nervous activity; and it was frequently crimi-
nal.®2 Given this history, Raffalovich’s reply to Laupts’s questionnaire in 1894
must have seemed extraordinary. Raffalovich brazenly claimed to know several
inverts, not as patients or as criminal suspects, but socially. He assured readers
that it was perfectly safe to be friends with a congenital invert. Inverts, he
claimed, were no longer satisfied with Ulrichs’s model of the female soul in a
male body. On the contrary, some inverts were more virile than regular men and
were attracted to men because of the invert’s fondness for masculinity. This at-
traction-of-similars was the true key to their condition, he claimed: “their pas¬
sion is comparable to that elicited by sexual dissimilarity” (1894a, 216). Raf¬
falovich was pointing out that the inversion model paradoxically maintained—at
the psychic level—the paradigm of heterosexual attraction of opposites.®^ Physi¬
cians could only imagine that a feminine man (the invert or “psychosexual her¬
maphrodite”) could fall in love with a masculine (normal) man. Love between
two inverts was inconceivable.
Raffalovich, therefore, claimed that inversion was a misnomer and pro¬
posed instead unisexuality: “As men, they love men; but they affirm that were
they women they would love women” (216). In other words, he first introduced
into France the contemporary conception of homosexuality: a “form of sexual¬
ity in which sexual attraction is directed towards a person of the same sex.”®'^
Inverts 101
Radalovich (18961)) was also the first French writer to report Havelock Ellis’s
early claims that male “homosexuality” could be present in apparently normal
men and was just a variant of human sexuality. He firmly rejected Tardieu’s
model of pederasty as well as the degeneracy model that had monopolized
French medical literature. “There are already enough thinkers and observers in
accord in recognizing that inverts are not necessarily either degenerates, or sick
people, or criminals,” Raffalovich wrote; “they even discover that inverts can¬
not be divided into passives and actives” (1897a, 87-88). He mocked those
doctors who “search, almost with desperation, for stigmata of degeneracy” in
virile inverts (1896b, 429). Inverts could not be degenerates, he added, “except
in the sense that would make all men degenerates: absolute physical and psy¬
chological harmony is not to be found” (1897a, 87n.2).
Even though he tried to strike a dispassionate, scientific tone, Raf-
falovich’s position on the social status of homosexuality was even more radical
than his psychiatric claims. “It is difficult to do justice to inverts,” he opined,
“just as difficult as it would be to do justice to heterosexuals if one occupied
oneself solely with their sexual life_Because heterosexuality is not repressed,
homosexuality should be equally favored” (1895a, 107). These suggestions
were received with profound skepticism by French physicians. Slyly hinting at
Raffalovich’s homosexuality, one reviewer of Uranism and Unisexmlity ac¬
cused Raffalovich of having “a very personal opinion on degeneration—and I
fear a very isolated one—to believe that there might exist sexual inverts who are
neither degenerates nor mentally unbalanced” (Raffalovich 1897a, 87n.2). An¬
other physician insisted that uranism was a sickness and “a deviation contrary
to social utility”; therefore, “the invert does not have the right to inversion”
(Tournier 1897, 714).
Ralfalovich’s claim for the “normality” of unisexuals came with an im¬
portant caveat: he argued that there were major distinctions between virile,
congenital unisexuality and effeminate, acquired inversion.®^ Congenital uni¬
sexuality was purely sexual and in no way tainted the moral sphere. On the
other hand, effeminate inverts were the product of vice; they tended to be dis¬
honest perverts and seducers of the young, just like heterosexual perverts
(1894a, 217). He assured his readers that unisexuals could not recognize each
other by special traits. While everyone could recognize the flamboyant, effem¬
inate invert, the self-respecting unisexual would never exhibit himself thus:
“they detest women too much to be effeminate” (216). Raffalovich thus at¬
tempted to dispel the fears surrounding the trope of inversion by insisting that
the masculine unisexual’s exterior truly matched his interior. They were the
superior, interesting, honest, and moral ones, and “one could say that (and this
could be a general rule), the greater the moral worth of a unisexual, the less he
is effeminate” (216).
In addition to his controversial assertion that there were normal, mascu¬
line, congenital homosexuals, Raffalovich also proposed that childhood sexu¬
ality was normal. As we have seen, French medical writers tended to view any
trace of autoeroticism and ewtisme in childhood as pathologic. Laupts even ar¬
gued that masturbation and inversion were fundamentally equivalent. “The
solitary vice is autophilia [autoeroticism], and autophilia is inversion. To love
oneself sexually, is to invert oneself; to love one’s own organs is to prepare to
love those of ones neighbor. In any case, all inverts, or nearly all, in one way or
another are autophiles” (1896, 337).
Adopting theories by France’s scientific rivals—the German sexologists
Albert Moll and Max Dessoir—Raffalovich instead proposed the universality of
childhood sexuality and the basic psychological equivalence of homosexuality
and heterosexuality.^ Most unisexuals were born that way, Raffalovich
claimed, and they manifested their sexuality at an early age. There was no rea¬
son to believe that they were sexually precocious, as so many physicians had
suggested. “We still know too little about children’s sexuality,” he concluded,
to know if heterosexual tendencies really develop much slower, or rather if we
do not notice them when we encounter them” (1895a, 105). Fie recognized
that a heterosexual bias influenced and even blinded scientists’ supposedly ob¬
jective observations.
Raffalovich sketched out the normal psychosexual development of the ho¬
mosexual child. Much like Rousseau’s Emile, this child could arrive at puberty
physically innocent so long as he was protected from all bad counsel. He might
be timid and ignore his body, but homosexuality would be florid in his imagi¬
nary life. Raffalovich’s evocation of this infantile, homosexual fantasy life has an
uncanny resemblance to that of the Italian invert. By age five or six, Raffalovich
explained, the homosexual child would imagine being kidnapped by brigands
and would “dream of the warmth of their chests and their nude arms” (1895a,
106). He would love paintings, statues, and pictures of beautiful men. Labor¬
ers, servants, and soldiers would attract his attention: “he already experiences
the invert’s passion for anything that resembles a uniform” (106). The homo¬
sexual boy would retreat into a special fantasy world where he was a hero loving
other heroes, or he would project himself into a sentimental novel as a heroine.
In parallel with this romanesque, “blue story” world, the invert child would
begin to experience a carnal attraction to men, which he did not quite connect
Inverts 103
with this fantasy world (107). His imagination would be enflamed when he
studied the classics and read of “Greek love.” Raffalovich suggested that the ap¬
parent sexual precocity of homosexuals was just an artifact of their delayed sex¬
ual enlightenment in a predominantly heterosexual society. He sketched what
today we would call the typical Euro-American “coming out” narrative:®^
The time arrives in the existence of every invert when he deciphers the
enigma of his homosexual tastes. It is then that he reclassifies all his memo¬
ries, and, to justify himself in his own eyes, recalls always having been what he
is now since his earliest childhood. Homosexuality has colored his entire
young life. (105-6)
While some youngsters were congenitally predestined to be homosexual

or heterosexual, Raffalovich explained, others were born sexually indifferent
and malleable: “they exhibit all the nuances between absolute homosexuality
and absolute heterosexuality” (122). Life experiences, friendships, literature,
and other incitements of the erotic imagination “determine little by little the
form of the growing child’s sexuality” (122). Education and experience not
only mold the sexuality of the undifferentiated child but also influence the
moral tone of both congenital homosexuals and heterosexuals. The greatest
danger to society, he warned, is the production of true moral perverts—^whether
homosexual or heterosexual, male or female. These “hypocrites and cynical de¬
bauchees who try to deprave or do deprave children, young boys, or very young
men, are treated by the public opinion with the justice and disdain they merit”
(118). In what seems a thinly veiled allusion to Oscar Wilde, Raffalovich
warned that “the sweet talker, the clever wit whose life is squalid does more evil
to young men that the brazen debauchee. . . . The man of the world who ad¬
dresses himself to one of these (boy prostitutes] knows the hazards and scarcely
merits the pity he receives were one to imagine the consequences of his folly”
(108; 118).
Pity is certainly not what Wilde received at the hands of the judge, jury, or
public opinion in his trial against the Marquess of Queensbury just a few
months after Raffalovich published his article on childhood sexuality. Raf¬
falovich was equally merciless in his subsequent article on “The Oscar Wilde
Affair” (1895c). Wilde was not guilty for his inversion per se, Raffalovich
wrote, but he certainly deserved punishment for his corruption of youth. He
shared this guilt with British society, which had tolerated and even lionized
him for so long while knowing of his internal corruption (445). Raffalovich’s
denigration of Wilde’s literary style is particularly revealing, for it fuses the ear¬
lier analysis of inversion with a personal vendetta against Wilde: “People
balked when [Wilde] wrote Dorian Gray, a novel that is rather unoriginal
(Oscar Wilde never was very original), artificial, superficial, effeminate. The
unisexual reigned there, but without vigor, in the penumbra, in affectation and
fear (Raffalovich 1895c, 450). He condemned Wilde, not for writing about
umsexuality but for doing so flaccidly and languidly, for restricting himself to
“artificial, superficial, effeminate” inverts. Raffalovich had earlier condemned
these “inferior” homosexuals whose lives, autobiographies, and art were just
reflections of their egoism, vice, and perversity. It was only the inferior inverts
who wrote autobiographies, Raffalovich warned. Superior, virile homosexuals
accomplished great military and artistic deeds and, therefore, had biographies
written about them. Echoing Lasegue on the novels of hysterics, Raffalovich ex¬
horted doctors and the general public alike to beware of the stories of corrupt
inverts—such as Wilde or the Italian aristocrat—not only because their confes¬
sions might be deceitful fictions but, more seriously, because these novels were
socially noxious. Raffalovich warned that literature reflected the true inner
moral state of its creator just as the portrait of Dorian Gray (and Wilde’s novel
itself) reflected the true corrupt and corrupting soul. Conversely—appropriat¬
ing Wilde’s dictum that “life imitates art”—Raffalovich claimed that literature
shaped the moral character of its readers.
As we have seen, artistic representations had long been criticized as dan¬
gerous to the malleable brains of women and children. Raffalovich, however,
argued for their salubrious use in the treatment of the imagination. With poetic
grandiloquence, he lectured novelists from the bully pulpit of medicine about
the connection between fiction and social hygiene:
I call upon our French novelists.... I would tell them: Because your readers,
your admirers permit you to say anything, why not deliver them real observa¬
tions? You have them. Describe then that passion of the strong for the strong,
of Hercules for Colossus, of robust flesh, as they say, for robust flesh; show
that it is not only the female but also the effeminate who is of no interest to
these virile [homosexuals]; draw back the veils of ignorance and of falsehood
... the cliches must be shattered. . .. We must contemplate the education of
our children, of our grandchildren. (1896b, 431n.l)
Raffalovich inaugurated a battle not just over the fictional representation

of homosexuality but over the fictionality of its scientific representation. His re¬
sponse to Laupts’s monograph on perversion and inversion cuts to the quick of
French medical analysis. “It seems to me,” Raffalovich complained.
Inverts 105
that the fundamental error of [Dr. Laupts’s] work is that he is driven to study
inversion through books rather than an impartial and penetrating observation
of life, and at more than one moment personal scruples trouble the experi¬
menter. Dr. Laupts’s imagined ideal of man interrupts his science and sci¬
ence contradicts his ideal. Also, he really is far too sensitive to study sexuality;
he writhes, he pushes himself, he retreats, he defies himself, he knots himself
up. All of a sudden that mysterious modesty that unisexuality imposes upon
so many men strips him of his courage. (1897a, 198-99)
Raffalovich wryly pointed out that the French crusaders against sexual perver¬
sity often cringed like sissies before the horrors of inversion. Their observations
did not “penetrate” the truth, and their analysis was “interrupted” by preju¬
dice. He criticized another physician who, like his French compatriots, “dis¬
cusses inverts as if they were newly imported savages that had been unknown in
Europe, and who cite the very interesting, sober, and dignified work of Moll as
one would cite an explorer” (1895a, 126). Raffalovich excused himself for
highlighting such “fatuity” but continued: “If men ol science collect such er¬
roneous details, if they ignore what every psychologist can know, what classical
antiquity already knew well, I will be forgiven my reproaches and my arro¬
gance” (126). French scientists’ cowardice was further demonstrated by the
way their “pseudoscience” caved in to prejudiced public opinion (1896a, 23,
26). Even the Italian invert had noted that Zola, the supposed scientific novel¬
ist, “lacked the courage to stage so terrible a passion.” Like the efl’eminate nov¬
els of inverts, the hypersensitive, timid writings of French scientists were not to
be trusted. Instead, Raffalovich ambitiously proposed that his own “Annals ol
Unisexuality” would discard all these “theoretical delusions,” “these dated and
retrograde assertions,” these cliches: “We will no longer invoke nature only to
pretend that she constantly contradicts herself; we will guard against defama¬
tory epithets ... we will remember that the scientific and moral point of view is
neither heterosexual nor homosexual” (1897a, 88). His “Annals of Unisexual¬
ity” would be “stamped with that healthy, male psychology that alone can help
us know and understand unisexuality” (87).
Here was the invert outdoing the French doctors in their games ol mas-
culinist science. Doubts about the vigor and veracity of French science and sci¬
entists became even more acute when German sexologists became embroiled
in the debate. Ironically, this was instigated by Raffalovich’s publication of the
observations of another nonscientist. In a 1904 article, Raffalovich contrasted
the “Sodom of Paris” with homosexual gatherings in Berlin. The first part of
the article consisted of anonymous excerpts from a private letter (by novelist
J. K. Huysmans) describing a descent into the seedy and criminal Parisian

sodomitic underworld where the classes mixed promiscuously and profitably.
“It made me think of Hell,” Huysmans wrote on April 19, 1986.
Imagine this; the man who has this vice willfully withdraws from association
with the rest of mankind. He eats in restaurants, has his hair done at a coif¬
feur, lives in a hotel where the patrons are all old sodomites. It is a life apart,
in a narrow corner, a brotherhood recognizing itself by their voice, by a fixed
gaze, and that sing-song tone they all affect.
Furthermore, that vice is the only one which suppresses the castes, the de¬
cent man and the rogue are equal—and speak to each other naturally, ani¬
matedly without distinction of education. ... It is rather strange and disqui¬
eting. (Allen 1966, 216)
Huysmans was echoing fears and accusations voiced earlier by Tardieu. The
description of the homosexual underworld is probably accurate in part; how¬
ever, there were also elite bars for homosexual men and women, and many fin-
de-siecle artists and socialites were coveted precisely because of their homosex¬
ual notoriety.®^
In the second part of Raffalovich’s expose, he contrasted this “Sodom of
Paris” with Dr. Paul Nacke’s description of the relatively open, middle-to-
upper-class, well-mannered world of homosexuals in Berlin and of the meet¬
ings of the Scientific and Philanthropic Committee established by Magnus
Hirschfeld for the defense of homosexuals.®^ Nacke was so moved by the nar¬
ratives of these homosexuals’ sufferings and their struggles with their parents
that he wondered, “Why doesn’t someone write unisexual novels?” (Raf-
falovich 1904, 931). Raffalovich again hoped to indict French society for its
general immorality, irreligion, and ignorance of the psychology of healthy, sym¬
pathy-provoking bourgeois unisexuals. “Heterosexuals, by their example and
behavior,” Raffalovich complained, “have created many inverts” (935).
Nacke replied to Raffalovich in the next volume of the Archives, chiding
him for uncritically presenting the most horrific vision of Parisian homosexu¬
als. Nacke estimated that Paris had fifty thousand homosexuals (maybe twice
that many), most of whom were upstanding and uneffeminate, and had nu¬
merous respectable venues for socializing. He rejected the implication that
most homosexuals were “pederasts” (that is, practitioners of anal sex). Yet he
slyly cast aspersion upon the French by suggesting that this “specialty” was
more common in Latin cultures than Teutonic ones (1905, 184). In a subse¬
quent article in a German journal, Nacke suggested that the French generally
suffered from more degeneration than the Germans (1908).
Inverts 107
Dr. Laupts immediately took umbrage at these affronts to French mas¬

culinity (1908a, 1908b). He shot back at both Raffalovich and Nacke that the
French were no more degenerate that the Germans. Furthermore, Laupts in¬
sisted, I know that homosexuality does not exist save as a rare exception in the
entirety ol continental.. . France.... I know that the vast majority of my (non¬
colonial) compatriots experience an undissimulated and extreme disgust for
homosexuality” (1909, 693, 696). (Laupts was evidently less certain of the sex¬
ual normality of France’s colonized subjects.) This was in dramatic contrast to
the situation in Germany, where notable doctors, such as Westphal, Krafft-
Ebing, and Nacke, had taken up the defense of homosexuals and had favored
the deletion of antisodomy laws from the penal code. Laupts feared that ho¬
mosexuality was contagious and was spreading in both France and Germany
precisely “because it is studied, and spoken, and written about” (1909, 694).
The very fact that German doctors had done so much work on the subject was
proof of (and presumably cause of) the higher incidence of homosexuality in
Germany than in France (Laupts 1908b, 741). In retort to Raffalovich’s insult
that Laupts’s work on homosexuality was in “a literary tradition,” Laupts ac¬
cused Raffalovich of being “a bit too literary, too inclined, in any case to intro¬
duce into a scientihc debate considerations of a moral nature that have no place
there and are. . . somewhat absurd” (1909, 695).
These accusations and counter-accusations that scientific research was
merely fictional “literature” continued to be flung across national f)oundaries
thanks to essays by Eugene Wilhelm, a homosexual Alsatian lawyer, who had al¬
ready published several articles on German sexology in the Mercure de France.
Under the pseudonym “Dr. Numa Prastorius,” Wilhelm accused Eau{)ts of
being utterly misguided: there might even be more homosexuals in France, in¬
cluding the countryside, than in Germany. Wilhelm indicted Eaujits and his
French colleagues for being practically ignorant of the existence of homosexual¬
ity in France because their old prejudices prevented them from broaching the
subject with their patients and, thereby, discovering how many of these, in fact,
were homosexual (1909, 201). He chastised French men of science for gener¬
ally neglecting sexual questions and hurled Eaupts’s slur of “literariness” back
in the face of French physicians: “They seem to want to leave this terrain to lit¬
erature and superficial popularizers; one could say that a certain false shame, an
ill-placed prudishness prevents them from studying these problems in detail
and methodically” (Wilhelm 1912, 301). Wilhelm was right: men of letters,
heterosexual and homosexual alike, did have an especially significant role in
shaping the French discourse of homosexuality. But one can hardly accuse the
belle-lettristes of having perverted science; rather, they informed the very fictions
science was dedicated to spinning. Raffalovich and Wilhelm thus turned the
trope of inversion on French physicians themselves, showing how the construc¬
tion of the invert was a travesty of science: What was advertised as objective in¬
formation was really prejudiced and willful disregard for knowledge.
Un-Knowing Female Inversion
On issues of homosexuality, “un-knowing” emerged as a virtue for scientists

both in their dealings with their patients and in their scientific research.^*^
While Raffalovich and his fellow unisexuals complained about the malicious
medical ignorance of their confreres, there were more serious victims of French
doctors’ un-knovwng of inversion: female inverts, aka “tribades,” or “lesbians.”
Women were occasionally mentioned in the literature on pederasty, hysteria,
degeneration, inversion, and homosexuality. Tardieu, for example, discussed
“assaults on modesty” committed by women (mainly nannies and servants)
against little children and girls; however, he mentioned these actions under the
rubric of “rape and sexual assault” rather than pederasty (1857, 65-71). Al¬
though sodomy between women (with dildos or enlarged clitorises) had been a
concern of legists and moralists since the Middle Ages, Tardieu considered
sodomy an action perpetrated exclusively by men on women or other men.^^
The German medical literature, on the other hand, always identified
“contrary sexual instinct” as a “disorder” of both sexes. German sexologists,
such as Krafft-Ebing, Moll, Nacke, and Hirschfeld, continued to study les¬
bianism into the twentieth century. Charcot and Magnan cited the German
cases of female inversion, but they explained that such observations were rare
since women could better disguise their “instinctual disorder” (1882, 303). As
with boys, the condition was deemed a degenerate psychopathic state that was
innate, imperative, accompanied by cross-gendered behavior (virility and male
dress) and onanism (304-5). Despite the declared severity of their condition,
lesbians were rarely mentioned in the French sexological texts.
The French had become inured to the pornographic spectacle of tribadic
couples in the eighteenth century and to the fantasmatic titillation of sapphic
lovers in nineteenth-century literature. Balzac, Gauthier, Baudelaire, Louys,
Monnier, Feydeau, and Zola had all depicted lesbians.^^ Havelock Ellis (1895)
specifically remarked on French novelists’ and poets’ fascination with lesbian¬
ism. Precisely for this reason, doctors such as Chevalier criticized French artists
for making “tribadism” unduly acceptable through its frequent and arousing
representation in novels. Ide attributed the novelistic prevalence of tribadism to
Inverts 109
the fact that male authors could easily tolerate the vice in vromen, whereas ped¬
erasty evoked disgust in “normally constituted” men. These male authors,
Chevalier concluded, represented lesbius amor as a neurosis of idle, decadent,
upper-class and bourgeois women (1885, 69-74). Even Raffalovich men¬
tioned female unisexuality only to dismiss it as uninteresting. For him, misog¬
yny was one of the characteristic qualities of normal, virile homosexuals
(1894a, 216). He even blamed women, particularly fashionable older women,
for creating an insalubrious vogue for effeminate male inverts (218). As we have
already seen, Raffalovich also made masculinity the essential attribute of good,
objective science. Despite their awareness of “sapphic love,” French physicians
were truly satisfied with leaving it “to literature and superficial popularizers,” in
other words, viewing lesbianism as an unthreatening or even titillating fictional
existence.^^
Male inverts, on the other hand, were quite threatening, even if their lives
were turned into fictions. The almost exclusive focus of French medicine on
male inversion is a product of the material from which it was constructed:
sodomy, hysteria, and degeneration. As we have seen, it was the confluence of
anxieties over the class and gender-crossing of the sodomite and anxieties over
the neurohereditary gender-crossing of the male hysteric that gave rise to the in¬
vert of the 1880s. The inversion model, in turn, left its impression on the un¬
derstanding of “homosexuality.” As historian Robert Nye (1989) also argues,
the French medical obsession with the effeminate male (particularly after the
Franco-Prussian War) was a manifestation of a broader anxiety over waning
masculinity and, by extension, cultural inversion and national impotence.
Science Fictions and Inversions
In his scathing critique of degenerate, fin-de-siecle culture. Dr. Max Nordau

fumed: “Does [Zola] think that his novels are serious documents from which
science can borrow facts? What childish folly! Science can have nothing to do
with fiction” (1893, 2:437). As we have seen, however, the scientific literature
on inversion was especially dedicated to fiction, both the fictions it studied and
the fictions it sponsored. To label the scientific literature on inversion a “fic¬
tion” is not to dismiss it as untruthful. “There is the possibility for fiction to
function in truth,” Foucault has argued,
for a fictional discourse to induce effects of truth, and for bringing it about
that a true discourse engenders or “manufactures” something that does not as
yet exist, that is, “fictions” it. One “fictions” history on the basis of a political
reality that makes it true, one “fictions” a politics not yet in existence on the
basis of a historical truth. (1980, 193)
The novelizing and fictioning of “homosexuality” served to advance the

ttnderlying goals of defenders and derogators of homosexuality alike: on the
one hand, to reify the notion of a normal, virile homosexual; on the other hand,
to fashion a monster of perversity embodying all the degenerations and insecu¬
rities that plagued the cultural imagination of fin-de-siecle France: intellectual,
artistic, therapeutic, military, and racial impotence.
While perfectly consonant with the latest scientific, biomedical “truths” of
the day, the medical debates on the nature of inversion were, nevertheless, also
molded by the cultural and political preoccupations of the time. The national¬
ist fires of Franco-German rivalry continued to burn on the terrain of science
well after France’s defeat in the Franco-Prussian War. The construction and
counting of inverts was just one amongst many ideological weapons (just as it
is, albeit under different scientific and political conditions, in the United States
today).The fictioning of what would later be called “homosexuality”—em¬
bellished as it was by associations with effeminacy, hysteria, and deceitful¬
ness—^was especially critical in bolstering fantasies of national potency and sci¬
entific virility.
In the case of inversion, fiction and nonfiction were blurred on a stage
bustling with novelists in medical drag and physicians passing incognito as nov¬
elists or inverts. Inverts and homosexuals found their “true” confessions turned
into scientific fictions under the fear that their narrative productions partook of
the deceitfulness and self-delusion of their sexual natures. Homosexuals also
played an active part in the “fictioning” of their experience. Not only did they
write anonymously or under pseudonyms to disguise themselves, but, like the
medical researchers of “sexual perversions,” they found it necessary to invent a
new history for themselves. Manufactured in the political cause of homosexual
emancipation and decriminalization, this histoire honwsexuelle or historical
coming-out narrative advanced seemingly contradictory claims of a long tradi¬
tion, beginning with the “Greek vice,” and of historical novelty. Likewise, the
scientific simultaneously asserted the congenital nature of homosexual¬
ity and its acquired, even contagious, nature (Laupts 1909, 695, 694).
In the promiscuous intercourse between doctors and novelists over the so¬
cietal poison of “sexual perversion,” science itself served as a potent but am¬
biguous elixir. As Jacques Derrida (1972) points out in his exegesis of Plato’s
Inverts 111
pharmakon (meaning both elixir ■milpoison), symbolic language is unmasked

as a dangerous supplement to “true learning”: superficially, writing appears to
be a technique for remembering, but ultimately it produces forgetfulness since
people will write down what they otherwise would be obliged to memorizeJ^
Like the female soul disguised in the male body, the mechanism of poisoning
is that of inversion: what superficially appears to be one thing is, at its core, the
poisonous reverse. Physicians and litterateurs played a similarly dangerous
game with \ht pharmakon of science which—like the novels conceived by Zola,
Raffalovich, and the Italian invert—had the seductiveness of a social panacea.
We have seen that Raffalovich, although critical of French sexologists, put his
trust in science. The Italian invert was also delighted to find his confessions fi¬
nally represented by science. Even while attempting to condemn and contain
perversity, the scientific fictions of inversion were embraced by the inverts
themselves, who used science to defend their “naturalness,” consolidate an
identity, and disseminate their stories of passion and “robust flesh.” Where bet¬
ter than in scientific journals could the Italian invert “cry [my joy] from the
rooftops” for finally having been sodomized (Saint-Paul 1930, 115)?
In addition to science, the pharmakon of history itself cannot be over¬
looked. Of all the human technologies, none is more inherently dependent on
fabricating and forgetting than history. History figured prominently in the fin-
de-siecle medical analysis of homosexuality. A patient’s individual case history
or anamnesis (reminiscence), often printed as a confession, was connected to
other family histories and anamneses of supposedly related disorders. Doctors
and inverts regularly alluded to the “Greek vice” of antiquity. Yet, as Raffalovich
astutely noted, these historical connections were un-remembered in the conve¬
nient science fiction that “inversion” was a new syndrome of organic degenera¬
tion and social disintegration. Inverts were thus concocted as a terrible social
and cultural poison through the conventions of amnesia and anamnesis: the in¬
versions of forgetting and reminiscence, the masquerade of intolerance as sym¬
pathy, the travesty of ignorance as knowledge.
CHAPTER 4
Fetishists: Cults,
Consumption,
and Erotic
Dramas
Marie D-, widow of A-, housewife, forty-nine years old Father al¬
coholic, reportedly committed suicide at age sixty. Mother reportedly com¬
mitted suicide. Brother very manic, was institutionalized.
Born and raised in the provinces. From the age of seven to eight, she in¬
dulged in masturbation, either solitary or reciprocal. “I played mommy and
daddy with another little girl, on chairs.” .. . Her passion for silk manifested
itself early. “I married so I could have a beautifid black silk dress that woidd be
stiff. ... Silk has a froufrou, a cricri that gives me pleasure.” To hear the word
silk pronounced or even to represent silk in her thoughts provokes in her an
erection of the genital parts. Total orgasm is produced with contact and a for¬
tiori by the rubbing of silk against that region. .. .
She indulged in masturbation daily. Normal sexual relations procured, she
insisted, no pleasure. ... She recalls having lived in Paris, around 1888, with
a sailor and then another man of whom she says: “He beat me, I love him still,
but he doesn’t want to speak to me any more. At times when he beat me, I ex¬
perienced an enormous pleasure. ”...
113
She has stolen innumerable times from the department stores. . . . Often,
when appearing before the court, she has refused to respond. ... At the end
of 1904, she entered a department store driven, she says, by a veritable im¬
pulsion. . . . “In the silk department, a light blue dress fascinated me, it was
vay stiff. Silk that isn’t stiff does nothing for me. I took thdit girb’ dress, I
slipped it under my skirt, in a big pocket, and holding the dress by one end,
I masturbated myself in the middle of the store, near the elevator, then in the el¬
evator, where 1 have the maximum pleasure. In those moments my head
swells, my face becomes flushed, my temples pound, I can no longer have
pleasure except by that means. . . .” She adds: “Masturbation alone doesn’t
give me much pleasure, but I complete it by thinking of the tickling and
sound of silk. Sometimes, at the moment I am masturbating with silk, I nev¬
ertheless think of men, although they leave me cold.” (584-85)
The case of Marie D-, reported by Dr. G. G. de Glerambault in 1910 as an

example of silk fetishism in females, crystallizes the many associations that had
been accreting around the problem of the erotic imagination: precocious mas¬
turbation, degenerate heredity, criminality, immorality, obsessive fantasies, irra¬
tional compulsions, and loss of heterosexual attraction (to list just the most
salient ones). The diagnosis fetishism, however, added new layers to the med¬
ical theorizing and popular understanding of the erotic imagination. Further¬
more, the diagnosis allowed analysts to explain the erotic motivations of strange
behaviors even when their actors refused to confess.
Psychologist Alfred Binet coined the term sexual fetishism in 1887, five
years after Charcot and Magnan first discussed sexual inversion. Describing
fetishism as the “cult of trinkets,” Binet drew his term from the anthropological
literature on the idolatrous practices of “primitives.”^ The wordfetish was traced
back to the Latin factitius: man-made, artificial, fake. Just as Marie D-
supplemented the waning pleasures of manufriction with the associated sensa¬
tions of silk, department-store eroticism, and beating, the notion of fetishism
supplemented medical understanding of the psychology of eroticism with asso¬
ciations of “primitive” religious cults, modern consumption practices, and the
myriad sensory triggers of sexual pleasure: touch, color, sound, taste, odor. Cer¬
tain of these, such as tactile, olfactory, and gustatory sensations, had long been
viewed as “primitive” senses (recall Brillat-Savarin’s analysis of the erotic power
of truffles). In drawing together the new “sexual perversities” under the head¬
ing of fetishism, Binet and subsequent sexologists further stigmatized the per¬
versions as abnormal, primitive practices. However, by theorizing fetishism so
broadly, by connecting it to the sensory perils of department stores and
crowded cities, as well as the primitive senses and drives of even the most
Fetishists 115
“civilized” people, fin-de-siecle sexologists captured everyone who experi¬

enced an erotic sensation or fantasy into the diagnostic dragnet of sexual per¬
versity.
Although fin-de-siecle sexologists represented the supposedly artificial,
fake pleasure of fetishism as a supplement to “normal” reproductive sex, they
increasingly discovered that fetishism was the catalyst of all erotism. Further¬
more, they suspected that secret or unconscious eroticism was the culprit of all
varieties of unconventional or irrational crimes and improprieties. Conversely,
fetishism in all its varieties—religious, economic, and sexual—acutely called
into question the reality or nonfictiveness of religious faith, economic value, and
erotic experience. In order to show how fetishism is a nexus of these three
major domains of human experience and culture I begin by examining the ori¬
gins of fetishism in literature on religious cults and Portuguese explorations. I
connect these ethnographic observations with nineteenth-century French dis¬
cussions of pathological religiosity or “theomania.” Turning to Marx’s analysis
of “commodity fetishism,” I trace the links between the “kleptomania” diagno¬
sis and anxieties over the new bourgeois culture of consumption. Kleptomania
would be associated wdth “fetishism” proper after Binet’s article on “amorous
fetishism” (1887a), which opened the floodgates of “sexual perversity” re¬
search. Olfactory fetishism, in particular, drew attention as a form of “primi¬
tive,” atavistic sensuality. We will see how this pathology was brought to life in
Huysmans’s neurodegenerate hero des Esseintes, who embodied not only sex¬
ual perversities but also the closely associated culture of decadence. Finally, I
turn to the other major subcategory of fetishism that arose toward the end of the
century: sadism and masochism. As we have repeatedly seen, literary figures
played an important role in shaping medical knowledge on erotisme, and in this
section, the reemergence of Rousseau—not as onanist but as masochist—is in¬
dicative of a new hermeneutics of erotic suspicion in the reading of patient his¬
tories. Sexuality, which had been presumed to be firmly grounded in the dic¬
tates of “Nature,” was proving to be a highly variable and artificial figment of
the erotic imagination.
The Cult of the Holy Parrot
And the censers on their fine chains were in full svdng. An azure vapor rose to
Felicity’s room. She advanced her nose, inhaling with a mystical sensuality,
then closed her eyelids. Her lips were smiling. The movements of her heart
slowed beat by beat, each time more distant, softer, as a fountain dries out, as
an echo fades; and when she exhaled her last breath, she thought she saw, in
the opening heavens, a giant parrot, hovering over her head. (Flaubert, “Un
Coeur simple,” 622)
In “Un Coeur simple,” one of his most subtle, poignant, and unpreten¬
tious works, Flaubert relates the life story of a simple servant. Felicity, in the ser¬
vice of a haute-bourgeoise widow and her two children living in a small Norman
town. Orphaned young, jilted by her one and only suitor, silently mourning the
death of a beloved nephew in America, she leads a quiet life of devotion to her
mistress, “who, it must be said, was not an especially agreeable person” (591).^
In her dotage. Felicity’s devotion increasingly turns to her parrot, Loulou, the
gift of departing neighbors and an animal whose American origins remind her
of the mysterious land where her nephew died of yellow fever. She teaches it to
say Hail Mary” and, as she grows old and deaf to every voice but the parrot’s,
it becomes practically a son or a lover” (615). She cries bitterly when it dies
and she walks all the way to Honfleur to deliver it safely to a taxidermist. In her
tiny room part chapel, part bazaar—the stuffed Loulou takes the place of
honor amongst an incongruous shrine of religious trinkets and peculiar mem¬
orabilia: rosaries, crosses, several statues of the Blessed Virgin, a coconut holy
water font, saints’ medals, and relics of lost loved ones (617). Beside the stuffed
Loulou she places a reproduction of a painting representing the Holy Spirit as
a brilliantly plumed bird “such that, in the same glance, she saw them together.
They became associated in her mind, the parrot thus sanctified by this relation
with the Holy Spirit, which in turn became more alive and intelligible in her
eyes” (618). Thereafter and unto her dying moment, Loulou will be the repos¬
itory of all Felicity’s hopes for salvation.
Flaubert s portrait of the idolatrous Felicity is drawn with such tenderness
that one might miss his criticism of the bourgeoisie—which had been far from
subtle in Madame Bovary. While Felicity ecstatically dies amid the apotheosis of
the Blessed Loulou, the townsfolk are celebrating the feast of Corpus Christi.
Just outside Felicity’s window, they have laid the golden monstrance on an altar
cluttered with flowers, an enameled sugar bowl, crystal pendants, two Chinese
screens, and Loulou herself, which Felicity had bequeathed to the parish priest.
Like Felicity s chapel-bazaar bedroom, this altar—^where sacred and profane,
material and spiritual commingle amidst the mystical sensuality of incense—is
a precious figure for the multifaceted character of the “fetish.”
Fifteenth-century Portuguese explorers of the west coast of Africa used
their native yvordfeitigo to describe the talismans or objects of veneration that
Fetishists 117
the “savages” wore on themselves or installed in special places for worship. As

I alluded to t2ix\\tx, feitigo is believed to be derived from the Latin factitius
(man-made, fake, unnatural, magical). Feitigeros were magicians or sorcerers,
and meu feitiginho could even be used as a term of affection meaning “my little
fetish or darling” (Muller 1878b, 64). Anthropologist William Pietz (1985,
1987, 1988), in an excellent analysis of the etymology and history of the fetish
in early ethnological accounts, points out that the word feitigo had previously
been used rather broadly by the Portuguese in reference to idolatry and witch¬
craft. It was also applied to merely vain religious practices and objects that were
deemed by the medieval Church to be worthless in comparison with legitimate
sacramental objects (such as the host, chalices, sacred relics, crucifixes, mon¬
strances, and altars). As the nineteenth-century orientalist Max Muller (1878a,
56) pointed out in his thinly veiled anti-Catholic study of the ethnographical
literature on fetishism, the reason the Portuguese could choose the word feitigo
to describe the savages’ trinkets and talismans was because the Portuguese
sailors themselves were fetishists and undoubtedly possessed rosaries, crosses,
images of saints and Madonnas, and all sorts of other good-luck charms. Even
seventeenth-century Dutch Calvinist explorers compared African fetishes to
Roman Catholic sacramental objects (Pietz 1987, 39). As Flaubert pointed out
in “Un Coeur simple,” the cult of trinkets is still practiced in “civilized” Euro¬
pean cultures.
The notion of “fetishism” as a religious system (as distinct from the sim¬
ple object called a “fetish”) was first described by a Frenchman, Charles de
Brasses, who named Australia and Polynesia (although he never actually ex¬
plored them).^ Frustrated by the confusion of ideas concerning the mytholog¬
ical and religious systems of different cultures and of different times, he wrote
On the Cult of Fetish Gods, or Parallels Between the Ancient Religion of Egypt
and the Present Religion of Nigeria (1760). De Brosses coined the notion of fe¬
tishism as a religious principle, not just of Africans but of “all nations whatso¬
ever, in which objects of reverence are animals, or inanimate beings which they
deify . . . things endowed with divine virtues, oracles, amulets, and life-saving
talismans” (10). De Brosses thus universalized fetishism as the transhistoric
and transcultural religious system of all those with a “savage mind,” which he
believed was like that of children. The savage mind is permanently stalled at a
mental age of four, de Brosses claimed; therefore, savages lack a proper sense of
causality, and they attribute life to their fetishes just as children believe then-
dolls are animated (185-86). In shifting from “the fetish” to “fetishism,” de
Brosses impressed on the notion of fetishism many of the characteristics that
would adhere to the term until Binet applied it to “sexual perverts.” Fetishism
was theorized as a universal, originary, primitive or infantile form of thought

characterized by the arbitrary or even random devotion to “worthless” items. As
distinct from idolatry fetishism was the worship of objects in their materiality
rather than in their symbolic capacity as transcendent icons or representations of
divinity"^ Although primitive, the fetishistic tendency to overvalue and animate
objects was a “natural metaphor of man” whether savage or civilized, de Brosses
concluded. “Although [the civilized], do not always really imagine, any more
than [the savage], that these physical things, good or evil to man, are in fact en¬
dowed with affection and feelings, this usage of metaphors nonetheless proves
that there is in the human imagination a natural tendency to figure things thus”
(216). The primitive’s belief in the power of fetishes is fundamentally the same
as ignorant and superstitious, civilized people’s belief in nymphs, fairies, and
ghosts (216). So however misinformed de Brosses may have been on the prac¬
tices he christened fetishism, he notably broadened the term’s applicability
across space and time.^
While de Brosses claimed the “chosen race,” Judeo-Christianity, had
skipped fetishism or polytheism and gone directly to monotheism, Auguste
Comte in his Course on Positive Philosophy (1830-1842) proposed that fetish¬
ism represented a common, primordial attitude of man towards the world:
“Man everywhere began with the most coarse fetishism, as with a well-charac¬
terized anthropophagy (5:26).® At this earliest stage of thought—common to
the savage, children, and higher beasts—one’s fears of the world were overcome
thanks to the theological mode of thinking. According to Comte’s natural his¬
tory of human progress, this theological stage was eventually abandoned for
metaphysical and then rational modes of thought and practice. The new sci¬
ences, especially his postive philosophy augured the future positive stage of hu¬
manity. Philosophical treatises on history and religion were not the only ratio¬
nalist critiques of theological modes of thought. As we have seen m previous
chapters, many members of the medical profession (also steeped in Enlighten¬
ment materialism and rationalism) presented religiosity as not only irrational
and primitive, but positively insane or, at least, monomaniacal.’^
C.-C.-H. Marc, physician to King Louis-Philippe, dedicated a whole
chapter of his medicolegal text on insanity to “religious monomania and de¬
monomania” (1840, 2:222-46).8 The former usually appeared as a variety of
melancholia with religious idees fixes and excessive religious observance. De¬
monomania was similar but usually accompanied by visual and auditory hallu¬
cinations leading patients to believe themselves persecuted or possessed by the
devil. In the materialist spirit of the Paris School, alienists “diagnosed” histor¬
ical cases of witches, demonic possession, and divine visions as cases of insan-
Fetishists 119
ity promoted by superstition and collective hysteria. “Was the Temptation of

Saint Anthony,” Marc asked, “anything other than a case of satyriasis?”
(2:200). Marc especially wârned of the nefarious effect of credulity, supersti¬
tion, and love of the marvelous on the development of religious monomania.
He also blamed the belief in magic and witchcraft for prompting crimes. Just
as de Brosses saw an infantile, superstitious imagination at the root of fetishis-
tic religiosity, the followers of Esquirol’s doctrine of monomania viewed the
credulous, simple-minded laborer as the typical victim of religious monoma¬
nia. We hear the echo of this attitude in Flaubert’s judgment of Felicity: “For
such souls the supernatural is a simple matter” (“Coeur simple,” 609).
This infantile, peasant, or primitive hyperreligiosity was closely tied to the
“cult of the erotomaniac.” Recall that Fsquirol, in his original definition of ero¬
tomania, stated that it was “a mental affliction in which amorous ideas are fixed
and dominant just like religious ideas are fixed and dominant in theomania”
(1815, 186). To illustrate the overlap of theomania and erotomania, Marc (one
of Esquirol’s disciples) offered the case of a nineteen-year-old girl who, like Fe¬
licity, was a servant in an older woman’s home. The young domestic fell madly
in love with one of her mistress’s sons. “To conquer her penchant, she resorted
to practices of devotion. Almost constantly in church, she sought to calm her
illness through sermons and religious offices,” Marc reported. These went un¬
noticed until, one day, they failed to control her passions, and she rapidly de¬
clined into a state of delirium. She shouted biblical and mystical texts, made
“the most obscene propositions,” and threw herself naked on the floor, “aban¬
doning herself to the most revolting actions.”
Her forces declined, and the patient, whose religious ideas were confused
with erotic ideas, preserved an automatic movement of the whole body which
could not be suppressed. By rubbing the thighs, or through mere oscillation
of the hips, she procured the most acute pleasures, which were reflected in
her facial expressions. (Marc 1840, 2:216-17)
The patient died two days later; the autopsy was uninformative. Marc never¬
theless concluded that “erotomania was the determining cause of the religious
delirium,” and her break from sanity was “the result of the abuse of solitary
pleasures” (2:217).
The line of demarcation between fervent devotion and insanity, particu¬
larly erotomania, Avas a fine one.^ The line would be further blurred by anticler¬
ical physicians during the Third Republic.One writer proposed what might
have seemed a scandalous question: “Is not [pathological religion] simply the
exaggeration, perhaps even ... the perfection of [normal religion], and is there
not between the two an undetectable gradation, rather than a drastic leap, as is
generally believed?” (Santenoise 1900, 144).^^ Even priests recognized the ex¬
istence of religious erotomaniacs and “priest lovers” whom they called “confes¬
sional bugs” {punaises de confessional) or “font frogs” {grenouilles du beni-
tier)d^ “They demonstrate,” doctors remarked, “the frequent association of
mystical and erotic delirium” (Leroy & Juquelier 1910, 248). Writing on the
topic of “erotic insanity,” Dr. Benjamin Ball extended the pathologization of re¬
ligion to include the clergy as well:
For those who know the filiation of ideas in the minds of the sick, there is no
doubt that the sublime cult that many priests have vowed to the Holy Virgin,
that the admiration that shines in so many of the works of the most serious
theologians, is the effect of an erotomania unknown to them; it is the love of
women that speaks beneath all the appearances of piety in those good celibate
men’s ardent cult. Their chastity would necessarily predispose them to this
aberration. (1887, 194)
Ball also described cases of epidemic erotic insanity in convents (1887, 262).
Comparing paintings of saints to photographs of hysterical patients, Charcot
drew parallels between states of religious ecstasy and stages of “grand hysteria”
(Charcot 1885; Charcot 8c Richer 1887). Although especially pronounced
during the Third Republic, an undercurrent of anticlericalism was present in
earlier writings on “theomania” from members of the Faculty of Medicine of
Paris. We encountered a similar skepticism about the sanctity of members of
religious orders in the Bertrand case, where seminaries and monasteries were
presented as cauldrons of sexual deviance. Going further back, eighteenth-
century pornographic literature abounded in lascivious and scabrous tales of
licentiousness in monasteries and nunneries. Even if formal clergy or religious
institutions were not involved, the erotomaniac’s unshakable devotion to the
object of his or her “pathological love” was described as a cult or religious de¬
votion (Legrand du Saulle 1864, 254). Whether talismans, rosaries, or stuffed
parrots, another central element of the “pathology” of fetishism—the “cult of
trinkets”—^was the worthlessness of the venerated objects (at least in the eyes of
anthropologists and physicians). Starting with the cultural clash between Re¬
naissance European explorers and African natives, and continuing until the
fin-de-siecle confrontation between doctors and “sexual perverts,” diverse an¬
alysts have represented the fetish as an economic folly: a defect or delusion in
the valuation of material objects.
Fetishists 121
Commodity Obsessions
The mystery of the commodity lies simply in the fact that the social character
of men’s own labor is reflected as an objective character of the product of labor
itself. . . . [With commodities] it is the definite social relation between men
themselves which takes on for them the phantasmagorial form of a relation be¬
tween things. In order to find an analogy to this, we must flee to the nebulous
realm of the religious world. Here, the products of men’s heads seem endowed
with a life of their own, as independent forms entering into relation with each
other and with humans. So it is in the commodity world with the product of
men’s hands. This I call the fetishism that adheres to the products of labor, as
soon as they are produced as commodities and which is accordingly insepara¬
ble from the production of commodities. (Marx 1867, 1:38-39)
Wliile Charles de Brosses constructed fetishism as a primitive and primordial

religion and Auguste Comte recharacterized fetishism as a primitive mentality,
Marx used the term to analyze modern capitalism as a form of “primitive accu¬
mulation” (Pietz 1993, 151). On the one hand, Marx accomplished this by re¬
turning to the original meaning of the word fetisso: man-made. Marx empha¬
sized that commodities are “the products of men’s hands” and therefore
human artifacts part of a social exchange. Marx’s conception of “commodity
fetishism” thus soldered together religion and economics in a seemingly novel
fashion, but as we have seen, the ethnological literature on the fetish already in¬
volved concerns about trade and economics.
Renaissance merchants exploring the west African coast felt that the na¬
tives engaged in irrational trade practices: certain trinkets were personified and
invested with religious and social powers that gave them values beyond their
(European) instrumental market value (Pietz 1987, 24). To the Europeans’
delighted consternation, the savages would trade gold articles for European
rubbish in an exchange that seemed foolish and infantile. As anthropologist
Marcel Mauss pointed out, the problem of the fetish could only arise as an “im¬
mense misunderstanding” emerging at the interface between two cultures
“with no other foundation than the blind obedience to colonial custom and the
lingua franca spoken by the Europeans” (1968—1969, 2:244—45). More pro¬
foundly, such a “misunderstanding” could only arise because of definite power
inequities, for the label of fetishism was (and would continue to be) derogatory:
a marker not just of a different value system but of an irrational, delusional one.
Whether it was Europeans identifying African fetishes as “in fact” worthless
rubbish or Calvinist explorers equating African fetishes with superfluous
Catholic '\Aoh, fetishism was deployed as a disparaging term to unmask or in¬

terpret a conceptual delusion of a society considered inferior (Pietz 1985, 14).
Marx similarly deployed the term fetishism to disparage capitalist mental¬
ity and “vulgar economics” (Geras 1971). Marx read the German translation of
de Brosses’s The Cult of the Fetish Gods and other works on the history of reli¬
gions in 1842. At that time he noted in an article that Cuban savages had in¬
terpreted gold to be the Spaniards’ fetish (lacono 1992, 79). Later, in Capital,
he developed his analysis of the capitalist commodity as fetish. In the capitalist
mode of production, according to Marx, where the laborer is alienated from the
product of his or her labor as well as from other laborers, manufactured prod¬
ucts take on a life of their own. Instead of being related to the human activity of
their production and use, the value of products is determined at moments of
exchange when value seems natural and intrinsic to the product. This transfor¬
mation of products into commodities disguises their artifice—their “real” na¬
ture as products of human labor and of social exchanges (Marx 1867,
1:38-39). Scientific (that is, Marxist) economics “destroyed this false appear¬
ance and illusion . . . this personification of things and conversion of produc¬
tion relations into entities, this religion of everyday life.”^^ Marx and Marxist
economics thus claimed hermeneutic superiority: the power to unmask the re¬
ligion of capitalism as the cult of commodity fetishes.
Marx and Marxists were not alone in unmasking the “fetishization” of
commodities in capitalist consumer culture.French political conservatives of
the time were also worried about the ill effects of rapid modernization, indus¬
trialization, and the concomitant explosion of mass consumer culture, particu¬
larly in Paris. As already suggested from the opening case of Marie D-, the
department stores were a mcyor site for focusing these anxieties. The ânds
magasins or bazars (so called because they sold a variety of merchandise)
sprung up during the Second Empire with Baron Haussmann’s reconstruction
of the heart of Paris. As historian Michael Miller points out (1981, 3), the new
department stores were monuments to the emerging bourgeois culture of con¬
sumption—they staged in spectacular, novel ways “the culture’s identification
with appearances and material possessions” and the abundance of industrial
production.!^ They emerged as a result of a constellation of factors during the
Second Empire: industrialization (particularly of textile manufacture), urban¬
ization, railroad expansion, improvements in banking, and overall economic
prosperity. These social and economic developments, like the department
stores, were also perceived as a threat to traditional familial and economic in¬
stitutions. Unlike the old, family-run stores and exclusive boutiques, the de¬
partment stores were vast, urban, democratic institutions. Despite their luxuri-
Fetishists 123
ous appearance, they were open to the public, and people of all classes mingled
promiscuously on the sales floor and in the public reading rooms. An article
on the grands bazars in the conservative newspaper Le Figaro concluded on
an ominous note: “Is it therefore written in stone that materialist and ultra¬
modern democratic society will smother forever our old [Christian] society?”
(Ignotus 1881).
Historian Rosalind Williams (1982, 13) suggests that the new depart¬
ment stores superimposed two conflicting consumer lifestyles that reflected a
fundamental tension in post-Revolutionary French society: elitist consumption
(the aristocrat’s pursuit of the unique and exclusive) versus democratic con¬
sumption (the purchase of popular, inexpensive mass-produced commodities).
Emile Zola, always with his finger on the pulse of the body politic, represented
the social problems of the grands rnagasins in his novel Au Bonheur des Danies
(alluding to the name of an actual store, the Paradis des Dames.) Zola was
partly inspired by the Figaro article, and he highlighted the following para¬
graph in his clipping of it:
These great bazaars are the fatal and immediate consequence of a material¬
ist and democratic epoch. Nothing will make me say that I like them—but
none can prevent me from seeing in them one of the most striking products
of the fin de siecle. Fins de siecle are always interesting like the ends of chap¬
ters! (Ignotus 1881)
Zola also turned to medical writers for their critiques of the stores’ commodity
temptations and flashy merchandise displays. These willfully stimulated the
imagination and prompted an “epidemic” of kleptomania.^®
Although the diagnosis oi klopenianie was first coined in 1816 and later
theorized by Marc as a monomania,*^ the disorder received enormous public¬
ity and was declared a “social problem” only with the birth of the department
stores.“In the interest of their commerce, [businessmen] have practiced the
art of seduction, of temptation, in a truly brilliant fashion,” wrote Paul Dubuis-
son, chief physician of the Sainte-Anne Asylum(1902, 41). Allowed to see and
touch the wealth of merchandise at their will (a pleasure never permitted in tra¬
ditional stores), women at the great bazars felt a powerful attraction much like
that of church, Dubuisson warned (42). Marie D-, the silk fetishist, had
blamed these merchandising techniques for her kleptomania: “All they have to
do is not expose their silks so and I wouldn’t take anything” (Clerambault
1910, 585). Dubuisson shared these concerns about the deviously imposed
compulsion to consume: “[Shopping] no longer is a fantasy, it is a need; it is
not just a distraction, it is a cult. Truly, the manner in which temptation is or¬
ganized in the great department stores is beyond all praise, Satan could not
have done better” (43). These ideas were also voiced by Zola’s character Mr.
Mouret, the owner of Le Bonheur des Dames. Mouret excitedly tells a friend
how the dazzling sales displays—lit by newly invented electric lamps—drew
out a whole variety of thieves:
First, IMouretl cited the professional female thieves who caused the least
damage since the police knew them all. Then came the thieves due to mania,
a perversion of desire, a new neurosis that alienists had classified, recognizing
the sharp temptation exerted by the department stores. Finally, there were the
pregnant women, whose thefts were specialized: thus, the police commissioner
had discovered in one of these women’s homes two-hundred-forty-eight pink
gloves stolen from all the sales counters of Paris. {Bonheur, 632; emphasis
added)
Those women whose theft was not specialized earned the label collectioneuses,
for—much like Felicity—they filled up their homes with small items of little
value. It was usually reported that the articles remained unused, vdth the price
tags still attached. Take for example Mme. G-, in whose home the police
discovered, among other items, 5 pairs of boots, 22 pieces of silk and wool ma¬
terial, 24 handkerchiefs, 56 pairs of black stockings, and 33 pairs of socks, all
with prices still affixed (Dubuisson 1902, 71). This was not a pure monoma¬
nia, Dubuisson explained, but a degenerate indulgence m a primitive animal
instinct to stockpile. Pregnancy especially increased this desire to amass, which
was the root of all varieties of useless, childish collecting for the sheer pleasure
of possession. Some could satisfy themselves with the pleasant “tipsiness” {ma-
gasinite) provided by a visit to a store (188). For others {mostly herMitaires and
neurotics, pregnant and menstruating women), their moral sense could not re¬
sist this degenerate, primitive instinct or their female physiological weakness:
theft became “an incomparable voluptuousness” (208).
While Zola relied on medical theories to inform his fiction, doctors reci¬
procated by turning to Zola’s novels for the most dramatic illustrations of the
passion of the voleuses des magasinsf^ Dr. Lacassagne, speaking at the Fourth
International Criminal Anthropology Conference, warned that, “these depart¬
ment stores are always Le Bonheur des Dames’ and constitute a serious dan¬
ger to sickly and weak people” (1896, 82). In his 1904 thesis on kleptomania.
Dr. Soubourou quoted Zola frequently. The best example of the disorder is
found at the end oiAu Bonheur des Dames with the arrest of the Countess de
Fetishists 125
Boves, caught red-handed with 14,000 francs’-worth of lace stuffed into every
nook of her ample dress. Zola’s description has all the flavor of medical acuity:
For a year now, Mme. de Boves had robbed thus, ravaged by a furious, irre¬
sistible need. The crises had worsened, growing to the point of being a volup-
tuousness necessary for her existence, sweeping away all thought of prudence,
satisfied by an even sharper pleasure since, in full view of the masses, she
risked her name, her pride, the high status of her husband.... ISlhe stole al¬
though her pockets were full of money, she stole to steal, as one loves for the
sake of loving, under the whip of desire, with the neurotic derangement that
her unquenched appetite for luxury had whetted, formerly, through the enor¬
mous and brutal temptation of the department stores. {Bonheur, 793; empha¬
sis added)
We are again reminded of Marie D-who masturbated in the middle of the

stores with purloined silk. Marie, like many other working-class shoplifters, was
usually less fortunate in her dealings with the authorities than the Countess,
who was discreetly dismissed after signing a simple confession. It was precisely
high social standing and the ability to pay that encouraged doctors and courts
to diagnose kleptomania rather than condemn wealthy shoplifters for vulg'ar,
utilitarian theft. Zola expressed another diagnostic subtlety: audacity and the
fear of disgrace further kindled her desire. Although Zola did not explicitly
claim that Mme. de Boves engaged in public masturbation and orgasm, the im¬
perative, irrational voluptuousness of her lace theft alluded to the intimate con¬
nections between kleptomania and fetishism.
Dr. Dupouy described these irrepressible pleasures quite explicitly in the
case of Helene M-, who stole silk corsages exclusively from two department
stores. “Once the act is committed,” he observed, “it is an enormous relief, a
sensation of immense well-being, a very special state of satisfaction, with, as
with fetishists, sensations of voluptuousness followed by ejaculations” (1905,
419). Dupouy noted, however, that the patient experienced a “sensation of
ejaculation without nonetheless experiencing orgasm” (423). Despite this.
Dr. Dupouy diagnosed Helene M-as a fetishist. Although in M-’s case
the fetishism was secondary to the kleptomania, Dupouy insisted that in many
other cases of kleptomania, fetishism or some other perverse sexual irritation
was the primary spur to theft.
The new cult of material objects that was so craftily staged in the Second
Empire’s temples of commodities inflamed new pleasures of consumption, of
female public visibility, and of social commingling fuelling much concern.
Some conservatives blamed these modernist developments of capitalist con¬

sumer culture for the deterioration of traditional social institutions: family,
church, home, and business. What if these provoked, false pleasures of moder¬
nity were so commonplace that they had become the norm? Alfred Binet’s
novel theory of amorous fetishism provocatively suggested that an irrational,
primitive psychology might lurk at the core of even the most normal love.
Binet’s Family of Perverts
By the time Alfred Binet first employed the notion of fetishism to designate pa¬
tients whose sexuality revolved around night bonnets, boot nails, and aprons,
he could rely on ethnologists who had already drawn connections between re¬
ligion, eroticism, and primitivism.^^ Binet thus formulated a rather complex
network of associations in one sentence: “These patients’ adoration of inert ob¬
jects such as night bonnets or boot nails resembles in all ways the adoration of
the savage or the negro for fish bones or shiny stones, with the fundamental
difference that, in our patient’s cult, religious adoration is replaced by a sex¬
ual appetite” (1887a, 144).
Binet is probably better known today for the psychological tool he devel¬
oped with his colleague Theodore Simon: the Binet-Simon I.Q. test.^^ His de¬
velopment of the notion of an “intelligence quotient” was just one product of a
long life of diverse research projects earning him the reputation as a founder of
the French school of experimental psychology. He trained in both law and
medicine, and in 1883 he was introduced to Charcot at the Salpetriere. An as¬
sociation with Charcot allowed Binet to employ hysterical patients in his stud¬
ies of hypnotism, hallucination, and animal magnetism. Relying on his experi¬
ence with the mentally alienated, Binet also wrote several realist dramas.^^
While he was familiar with the numerous articles on sexual perversion pub¬
lished in the early 1880s during his time at the Salpetriere,^^ his essay on
“amorous fetishism” singled out Charcot and Magnan’s work as his greatest in¬
spiration. Indeed, Binet fully agreed with his mentors’ hypothesis that all “sex¬
ual perversions” (inversion and erotic attraction to objects or body parts) be¬
longed to a single nosological entity: they were simply the variable symptoms of
one class of neurological degeneration. In this he followed along national lines,
opposing the Germans who isolated sexual inversion as a distinct disorder.^^
Even inversion, Binet explained, is “a perversion entirely of the same order [as
attraction to inanimate objects]... and a man who today only loves men might,
in a different milieu, have only loved night caps or boot nails” (1887a, 165).
Fetishists 127
Rather than undermine Charcot and Magnan’s theory of the neu¬

ropathology of sexual perversion, Binet proposed to explain the genesis of its
diverse psychological manifestations. “For the psychologist,” Binet explained,
“the important fact is elsewhere; it is to be found in the direct study of the
symptom, in the analysis of its formation and its mechanism, in the light that
these disease cases shine upon the psychology of love” (146). The psychology
of love followed a single set of laws; therefore, the pathological cases could be
used to illuminate the normal cases. Conversely, this implied that “everyone is
more or less fetishistic in love; there is a constant dose of fetishism in even the
most regular love” (144). Binet’s contribution to sexology was to claim perver¬
sity as a natural mechanism of the psychology of love: “The true fetishists are
those lovers of boot nails or white aprons; but if we stretch the terms, then we
are in the presence of a natural family of perversions, and there is a major in¬
terest in giving this family a unique name” (145). It was this “natural family of
perversions” that Binet baptized fetishism. By setting aside the matter of the
neuropathology of perversions, Binet could instead theorize their psychology in
three ways: classifying the normal versus the pathological and the typology of
fetishisms; hypothesizing the childhood implantation of the specific fetish; and
speculating about the psychic activity and pleasure of the fetishist.
Binet destigmatized the distinction between normal and pathological
forms of fetishism by renaming them grand fetichisme dind petit fetichisme. Petit
fetichisyne—the normal fetishism of ordinary love—^was “easily dissimulated”
because it appeared as part of the search for beauty in the loved one (260). But
we should not be fooled: “The attraction that the lover experiences for all the
parts of a person’s body are not the product of a platonic admiration or a purely
aesthetic sentiment; this attraction is sexual, and female beauty is a cause of
genital excitement in men” (272). Comparing it to Darwin’s description of
avian “artistic combat” over beautiful plumage or song, Binet forthrightly un¬
masked aesthetic competition as just another manifestation of sexual selec¬
tion—a matter of sexual instinct rather than aesthetic choice. In cases of so¬
cially inappropriate matches, Binet suggested, we should suspect a fetishistic
motive: “A rich, distinguished, intelligent man marries a woman without youth,
nor beauty, nor wit, nor anything that attracts most men; there is perhaps in
these unions a sympathy of odor or something analogous; it \?, petit fetichisme'”
(145). As with the savage trading gold for trinkets, the fetishist sometimes made
socially unwise amorous transactions.
Grand fetichisme “one simply could not fail to recognize,” Binet initially
claimed rather unrigorously (144). It betrayed itself by thefts and violent acts.
Later on he was more circumspect: “The line of demarcation [between the
normal state and its deviations] is very difficult to trace; often, in the world, one
takes as a lover’s pure extravagances what is really a sexual perversion” (261).
Ultimately, it came down to social criteria: fetishism is “the adoration of things
inappropriate to directly satisfying the ends of reproduction” (261). Following
Binet’s principles, the suspicion of fetishism hovers around all amorous liasons
marked by their sterility or contravention of social standards.
He distinguished three broad classes of fetishism: love of a body part, love
for inanimate objects, and attraction to a psychic quality. In the first category,
he discussed fetishism of the eyes, hand, hair (the infamous “braid cutters”),
and odor.^® Under the second category, he examined clothing, handkerchief,
nightcap, and boot-nail fetishists, as well as sexual inverts. The third class in¬
cluded the erotic attraction to punishment, flagellation, and “exhibitionism”
(named in 1877 by Lasegue).^^
All these varieties of fetishism were triggered by a childhood association.
Given Binet’s early attachment to associationist psychology, he turned first to
the authority of Condillac. In chapter 1 we noted Condillac’s warnings about
the impact of lascivious images and texts on the imagination and the impor¬
tance of the association of ideas in the establishment of likes and dislikes. Binet
echoed Condillac’s observations, particularly that of Descartes’s lifelong attrac¬
tion to cross-eyed women. Descartes thus became Binet’s first example of a
fetishist. Furthermore, Binet relied on Descartes’s Treatise on Passions to ex¬
plain how these peculiar attractions and aversions are acquired: some powerful,
childhood experience or trauma remains implanted in the mind, creating a
permanent affective association that persists even after the original event is for¬
gotten. Binet underscored this final element: “Here is the important point, and
Descartes did not fail to recognize it. The acquired aversion for certain objects
becomes independent of the memory of the fact that gave birth to that aversion”
(147 n.l). The choice of the term fetishism (bearing associations with “primi¬
tive” cults) aptly embellished Binet’s formulation of the condition as a primi¬
tive and infantile mechanism of the psychology of love: fetishism is established
in infancy, persists in the unconscious and easily risks becoming unreasonable,
irrational, and countersocial (traits also linked to primitives and children.)
Finally, Binet mused over the psychic mechanisms for ingraining and en¬
joying the fetish. He emphasized the role played by the “resonance box” of pre¬
cocious masturbation—it amplified and fixated the fetish in the erotic imagi¬
nation by dint of repeated association (163). His best example of this is a case
we know well, a man Binet identified as a fetishist of punishment, clothing, and
self-exhibition: Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Binet quoted extensively all the pi¬
quant scenes from the Confessions, notably the spanking by Mile, de Lam-
Fetishists 129
bercier and Rousseau’s masochistic fantasies. Rousseau’s confessions sup¬

ported Binet’s claim that erotic tastes are established in childhood by acciden¬
tal association and that the conjunction of masturbation and the repeated
“work of the imagination” firmly implanted the fetishistic desire. This imagi¬
native work or “erotic rumination of the fetishist” (253) focused on some small
part or quality of the loved one: “The part is substituted for the whole, the ac¬
cessory becomes the principal” (274). Normal love, on the other hand, is a
“harmonious” complex of fetishistic attractions to the whole body of the
beloved with whom one coupled (Binet assumed this is a woman and the
fetishist a man.) Pathological fetishism was a matter of erotic synecdoche or
metonymy: substitution of a part for the whole, or for something related or con-
tiguous.^^ Completely inverting the historical association of religious fetishism
with primitive polytheism, Binet suggested that “in normal love, fetishism is
polytheistic” while perverse fetishism is monotheistic in its cult of a single at¬
tribute (274). Indulging in some imaginative work of his own, Binet offered yet
another analogy: “The love of the pervert is a theater piece where a simple bit
player advances to center stage and takes the leading role” (274). Being an am¬
ateur playwright himself, Binet undoubtedly had an especially keen sense of the
danger of such theatrical chaos.
The monotonous drama of the grand fetichiste consisted of the “erotic
rumination of the continent”: “[They] thus managed to satisfy their genital
needs by constructing love novels in their heads” (269). Like the idolatrous
savage, “erotic ruminants” secretly engaged in a private, useless mental cult of
an erotic image. Beyond the mere images came whole fetishistic scenarios. In
addition to Rousseau’s fantasies, Binet referred to the erotic tales scripted by
the boot-nail fetishist. Mr. X-concocted all variety of stories with young
girls visiting a cobbler to have nails placed in their shoes and feet, or worse,
have their feet cut off:
One of the aforementioned fantastical stories returned involuntarily to [Mr.

X-’si mind phrase by phrase; and at the same time, erection occurred,
which soon resulted in ejaculation without even putting hand to penis; he
wished, on the contrary, that the ejaculation not occur since it prevented him
from continuing his story, and he much preferred the pleasure experienced
through the story to that procured by ejaculation. (Charcot & Magnan 1882,
309)
Although, as Rousseau also suggested, the erotic “furors of the imagination”

might be satisfying enough to produce continence or impotence, they often
wore thin (Binet 1887a, 266,269). “Ruminants, who understand very well this
inferiority of the imagination, seek with a remarkable sagacity the means to
force the mental image to render all the pleasure it can give” (269). Thus they
seek to “dynamogenize the image” by exteriorizing it through speaking and
writing.2^
Binet thereby identified the two critical elements that have occupied us in
our examination of the erotic imagination: the confession of erotic fantasies
performed by “patients,” and the writing of them as performed by doctors,
their patients, and novelists. By 1887 sexual perversions had captured the pop¬
ular imagination, and Binet recognized that “we find them mentioned, and at
times rather well analyzed, in some contemporary novels” (144).^^ In his arti¬
cle, medical and literary cases alternate with one another to such a degree that
one loses track of any distinction. With the notion of “dynamogenization,”
Binet rendered into psychological terms the connections between oral or liter¬
ary confession, the erotic imagination, and pleasure. Dynamogenization
through writing obliges the writer to analyze his or her image, to strengthen, de¬
fine, and give it contour:
This necessity must equally contribute to excite the imagination of the subject
when it is lazy. Perhaps we should search in similar psychological facts the rea¬
son for which so many mystics, Suso, Saint Theresa, Rousseau, etc., wi’ote
their own biography in which they describe, with countless details, their mys¬
tical exaltations. (270)^^
Given the recurrent association of mysticism and eroticism throughout the cen¬
tury, Binet s suggestion is hardly scandalous. He had already explained young
priests’ devotion to statues of the Virgin Mary as fetishistic (161). More inter¬
esting IS the fact that Binet explicitly connected the erotic imagination to liter¬
ary pioduction, yet he was careful not to simphstically label the many novelists
he cited as “fetishists” themselves. Take for example Adolphe Belot, whose
novel The Mouth of Madame X... Binet “dissects.” The hero, Binet concluded,
is indubitably a fetishist of the mouth, and Belot confirmed that it was based on
a real person. The book presented a clear case of mental pathology, Binet con¬
cluded, so he was perplexed by the fact that critics had decried the novel as li¬
centious rather than recognizing it as a “description of a case of mental pathol-
(272). Other medical analysts would be far less discerning in their
diagnosis of the sexual perversity of novels, authors, and society—further blur¬
ring the boundaries between fiction and medical cases, the normal and the
erotic. An especially good example of this is the medical treatment of J. K.
Fetishists 131
Huysinans and his novel A Rebours. The supposed olfactory fetishism of the
novel and of Naturalist authors in general provoked acerbic cultural criticism
and particularly florid erotic dynamogenizing among medical authors.
The Stench of Decadence
Little by little, the arcana of Ithe art of perfumery], the most neglected of all,
opened themselves before des Esseintes who deciphered its complex lan¬
guage—as subtle as literature—^with a style of unprecedented precision under
its floating and vague appearance.
To do this, he had been obliged to study its grammar, understand the syn¬
tax of odors, deeply penetrate the rules that govern them, and, once familiar
with this dialect, compare the creations of the masters [of perfumery] . . . ,
disassemble the construction of their phrases, weigh the proportion of their
words and the disposition of their periods. {iAnysm-ms, A Rebours, 153-4)
Like a medieval monk or hermetic alchemist, the Duke Jean de Floressas

des Esseintes collects, classifies, ruminates, and revels in the “langxiage” of
odors. Like a Dr. Frankenstein of perfumery, he concocts courtesans out of es¬
sential oils and excites himself into a “nervous crisis.” He exhausts himself in
sensuous debaucheries not only of perfume but also of flowers, books, engrav¬
ings, music, gems, liqueurs, etc. Joris-Karl Huysmans’s hysterical, effeminate
hero is a classic, if ever-so-refined, collectioniste-fetichiste. To borrow Binet’s
term, we could say des Esseintes is supremely skilled at dynamogenizing sensa¬
tions. Throughout 4 Rebours, des Esseintes indulges in the pleasure of an aes¬
thete, analyzing the language of the senses and admiring the refined erotism of
his sensuous “compositions.” Des Esseintes’s particular affinity for odors fur¬
ther qualifies his diagnosis: “The lover of odor” Binet explained, “is of espe¬
cially great interest to the psychologist, because this genre of fetishist is inti¬
mately associated with the existence of a sensorial type: the olfactor [Volfactif]"
(1887a, 157). The olfactor (or more conventionally, the olfactory fetishist) was
the object of intense medical and artistic scrutiny because the analysis of olfac¬
tion concentrated scientific, cultural, and literary concerns about the primitive,
the artificial, the unconscious, and the erotic.
Classical authors, such as Aiistotle and Theophrastus, long ago described
an association between the period of rut and pungent smells {osphresis) in ani-
mals.^2 However, during the Enlightenment, natural scientists, public hygien¬
ists, and the Frenchphibsophes examined odors and the sense of smell with new
interest. Generally, the study of the senses was critical to materialist, sensualist
savants such as Condillac and Cabanis. In his Treatise on Sensations (1754),

Condillac went so far as to give olfaetion primacy among the human senses. Ca¬
banis reasoned that there had to be some “sympathy” (or neurological associa¬
tion) between the nose and the other internal organs—especially those of the
digestive tract, to which taste and smell were most closely linked. Not least
amongst these sympathetic links was that between olfaction and the genital or-
g'ans (Cabanis 1802, 526-28). Thanks to the direction and funding of Caba¬
nis, Hippolyte Cloquet (whom we first encountered as a close friend of the
gourmand Brillat-Savarin) studied the many scientific and philosophical writ¬
ings and empirical/folk preconceptions of odors and olfaction. He published
his research in Osphresiology, A Treatise on Odors, of the Sense and Organ of
Olfaction in 1821, and it remained the reference text on olfaction throughout the
nineteenth century.^^
For Cloquet, “osphresiology” (the science of smell) was central to the sen¬
sualists’ “seience of man.” They were confident that an understanding of “bod¬
ily economy” or physiology would then clarify the “laws of social association,”
in other words, a code of natural morality for the ethical satisfaction of human
needs.^^ A taxonomy of olfactory sensations was just the first step in this
broader analysis of the laws of association between sensations, thoughts, and
actions—at the level of both the individual and the social bodies. Cloquet be¬
lieved that olfaction was the primary instinctual organ for self-preservation in
subhuman species because of its extensive sympathy with the digestive and re¬
productive systems (1821,20).^^ Although sight and hearing had grown to pre¬
dominate in the sensory life of humans, odors continued to produce sneezing,
lacrymation, sleep and wakefulness, nausea, strong affective reactions, and gen¬
ital excitation. The importance of olfaction in reproduction was quite apparent
in both animals and humans, Cloquet noted. Many animals exude strongly
odorous substances from their sex organs (such as females’ smegma vulvce) to
facilitate male-female recognition and coitus (126). He added that “civilized”
women continued to exploit the seductive power of smell through the use of
perfume.^® Conversely, he suggested that female “genital neuroses” (such as
hysteria) could be excited or calmed by particular odors (126). Indeed, reports
of “genital and nasal reflex neuroses” (such as “rose fever”) proliferated in
the late nineteenth century, linking parosmia (olfactory perversion) to genital
disorders.^^
The stigmatization of olfaction as a primitive, bestial sensation was given
a neurological and anthropological foundation thanks to Pierre-Paul Broca’s
contributions to comparative anatomy and evolutionary thinking. A physician.
Fetishists 133
politician, and founder in 1859 of the Society of Anthropology, Broca is espe¬

cially remembered for his work on the neuropathology of aphasia, particularly
the cerebral cortical area and the corresponding expressive aphasia that bear
his name. His research on the “great limbic lobe” of the cerebral cortex was the
last in a series of projects in comparative anatomy. Through it, he hoped to
demonstrate the transformation of species and the continuity of the so-called
phylogenetic series up from simple animals, to mammals, to “primitives,” to
(white, French) men (Broca 1869, 1870, 1871). He could thus confirm his
preconceived hierarchy of the human races through objective neuroanatomical
features.^^
The “limbic system” connected the olfactory cortex of the forebrain with
hypothalamic areas supposedly responsible for autonomic functions (including
fight, flight, and sexual behaviors). Broca noticed striking changes in the size
and location of the olfactory cortex of animals occupying successively higher
positions on the evolutionary ladder. He interpreted these anatomical findings
as proof that olfaction had played a major role in the intellectual development
of the animal series but its importance had waned in the primate series. These
evolutionary forces had led to the diminished olfactory lobes of humans.^^ His
ethological claims were supported by his discovery of the “limbic sulcus”: a
small groove in the cerebral cortex (see Figure 7). He proclaimed the limbic
sulcus a “trait of inferiority” and an “index of incomplete evolution arrested at
the simian stage” (1879b, 449). The limbic sulcus was present in all primates
and “inferior races” of humans, but absent from Europeans (except for some
“idiots and imbeciles”).Broca attributed the absence of the limbic sulcus in
normal “civilized people” to the “influence of the social state, education, and
disuse” of the sense of smell among the civilized (1879b, 451). Anthropologists
had frequently reported that “primitives” depended on their olfactory powers
to track down game, enemies, and runaway concubines (1879b, 450). Unlike
these “inferior races,” civilized people did not rely on olfaction for survival but
for refined luxury and discrimination.
Although Broca and other anthropologists of his time helped to lend sci¬
entific credence to such parallels between phyletic and social evolution, these
schemes were not novel. They follow in the tradition of French transformism,
which traced the chain of beings from “lower” animals to the primates, then to
the human “primitives,” and finally to “civilized” Europeans. As we saw in the
discussion of Morelian degeneration theory, these Lamarckian mechanisms of
evolution also served to explain the reverse process of atavism: the regression
from the civilized to the primitive bestial state (often equated with “imbecility”
Of
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Figure 7. The olfactory nervous system. Inferior surface of a human brain from a patient
who died of general paralysis of the insane. From Paul Broca’s “Research on the Olfactory
Centers” (1879, 429). The letter / indicates the “depression representing the limbic sulcus
in monkeys.”
or “idiocy”). Although all systems and surfaces of the body might exhibit stig¬
mata of degeneration, the nervous system was particularly susceptible to de¬
generative action and demonstrated its pathology as various symptoms of
nevrose (neurosis) or neurasthenia (nervous weakening), and eventually more
serious nervous degeneration.^^
In addition to being affiliated with the most “primitive” of the senses,
odor was also associated with putrescence, filth, and disease. The theory that
contagious diseases were spread by miasmas (noxious effluvia of swamps and
corrupt matter) was gradually discredited in the late nineteenth century with
the microbiological discoveries of scientists such as Louis Pasteur.^2 The con¬
cern over the noxiousness of foul odors, particularly in the great cities such as
Paris, nevertheless persisted even as Pasteurian germ theory was accepted.^^ As
Fetishists 135
historian Alain Corbin (1982) has shown, nineteenth-century doctors and

public hygienists further connected these associations between fetid odors,
primitivism, and disease to the stench of the urban lower classes. Closely re¬
lated to the preoccupation with physical odors was the metaphorical use of
odor to represent moral and cultural corruption. Louis Veuillot, editor of the
conservative Catholic daily L’Univers, in his polemical The Odors of Paris
(1867) lambasted the Second Empire and the Hausmanization of Paris, which
he claimed together served to further the circulation of journalistic, literary, and
theatrical sewage. He also reiterated the elitist critiques of that other product of
Hausmanization, the department stores. The whole book is a vicious diatribe
against the fetor of the “vile multitudes,” democracy, republicanism, and mod¬
ernization.'^'^
Given this rich network of nineteenth-century associations concerning
odor, it is not surprising that Binet singled out “the lover of odor” as a particu¬
larly interesting object of study. A psychological understanding of the olfactif
promised to explain many contemporary social mysteries. Binet echoed reports
of the savages’ reliance on odors and women’s exploitation of perfumes. For
him, pathological olfactory fetishism was just the extreme form of this natural
eroticism of odors: “For certain men, what is essential in a woman, is not beauty,
wit, goodness, or refinement of character,—it is odor; the pursuit of the cher¬
ished odor determines them to seek an old, ugly, vice-ridden, degraded woman”
(156). He predicted that countless inappropriate matches and peculiar, socially
disruptive behavior were due to olfactifs: for example, “a married man, head of
a family, who cannot smell a certain female odor without following that woman
in the street, to the theater, or anywhere” (156). Olfactory fetishism could also
be suspected as the real obsession for many object fetishists: for example, the
man with a collection of over three hundred stolen handkerchiefs, who “inhales
their aroma and retires, stumbling like a drunkard” (162).
Degeneration to this sensory predominance of the nose was to descend
woefully low on the social and evolutionary ladders. Max Nordau said it quite
plainly: to privilege those senses that human evolution had specifically quelled
was to “suppress one’s frontal lobe and substitute in its place the olfactory lobe
of a dog.”
The sniffers [flaireurs] among degenerates represent an atavism that steps

back not just to the earliest times of man, but infinitely further back to the era
before man. Their atavism marches back to the animals among which, just
like musk-bearers today, sexual activity was directly excited by odorous mate¬
rials. (Nordau 1893, 2:463)
Wliile Magnan and Lombroso applied Morelian degeneration theory to neu¬

rology and criminology respectively, Dr. Max Nordau sought to catalogue new
signs of degeneration by exposing its cultural stigmata.^^ These, he argued,
were particularly evident in French fin-de-siecle artistic styles, which infected
civilization globally.A physician, novelist, playwright, and literary critic, this
German Jeremiah of degeneration dedicated his immensely popular hook De¬
generation to Cesare Lombroso. Nordau set out to apply Lombroso’s positivist
science of society and criminality to the analysis of art and artists. “Degenerates
are not always criminals, prostitutes, anarchists or outright lunatics,” Nordau
warned, “they are often writers and artists. But these present the same intellec¬
tual—and often also somatic—traits as the members of the single anthropolog¬
ical family who satisfy their morbid instincts with the assassin’s dagger or the
dynamiter’s explosives, rather than satisfying them with the pen or brush”
(1893, l:v-vi). Like Binet, Nordau set out to uncover a vast “family” of degen¬
erates—in his case, linking the overtly insane or monomaniacal to the politi¬
cally, artistically, and sexually deviant. He was in line with leading medical fig¬
ures of his day. Valentin Magnan, the main proponent of neurodegeneration
theory, had declared at a meeting of the Medico-Psychological Society:
A hereditaire can be a savant, a distinguished magistrate, a great artist, a

mathematician, a politician, an able administrator, and exhibit profound de¬
fects from the psychological perspective: strange eccentricities, surprising be¬
havioral abnormalities,... morbid instincts, appetites and sentiments, which
thanks to weaknesses of the will, push them to the most extravagant and often
dangerous acts. (1886, 99)
Nordau freely mixed the degenerationist ideas of Magnan, Morel, and Lom¬
broso with the notion of neurasthenia. Mystical, symbolist, and decadent art,
Nordau declared, were the effect of degeneration and hysteria, or at least, early
neurasthenia (1:31). In addition to physical stigmata, there were to be found
the mental stigmata of Magnan’s “superior degenerate” class who display the
characteristics of moral insanity: unbounded egoism, impulsiveness and emo¬
tionalism, mental weakness and despondency, powerlessness, inane reverie, an
excessive “delectation in the imagination,” mysticism (or religious mania), im¬
itation, and impressionability (1:39-48). These authors—with more or less
pronounced moral insanity, imbecility, and dementia—produced “pathologi¬
cal art” and “exercise[d] a powerful suggestion on the masses,” especially the
impressionable youth hungry for novelty (l:vi). Thus the public, infected by
the cultural elite, delighted in the artificial and contrary-to-nature: “Elegant
Fetishists 137
titillation only began where normal sexuality ceased” (1:26). This Bn-de-siecle
public was impressionable, fadish, fetishistic, and “oniomanic” (that is, they
suffered from “purchasing mania”) (1:50). To this material consumerism cor¬
responded an aesthetic consumption of ever more sensational, spectacular, and
bizarre stimulations.
One ol these new and degenerate neuro-aesthetic excitements was odor.
“The pioneers [in art],” Nordau wrote sarcastically, “address themselves to the
sense ol smell, unjustly disdained till now by the fine arts, and they invite it to
take part in the aesthetic pleasure” (1:28). Fin-de-siecle books stank of incense
and manure. The cultural avant-garde pinch their nose and dive into the “mo¬
bile cesspool of unattenuated Naturalism” (1:26). Given the stigmatized history
ol olfaction, it is not surprising that a “diagnosis” of olfactory decadence was ac¬
companied by the suspicion of sexual perversion. Nordau mounted an espe¬
cially virulent attack against the Naturalist school and its father, Emile Zola. In
the previous chapter I mentioned Nordau’s disdain for Zola’s “scientific nov¬
els.” Nordau went far beyond deriding Zola’s intellect and art, however. He
read that art as a symptom of Zola’s “advanced degeneracy”: “The fact that he
is a sexual psychopath is betrayed in every page of his novels” (2:456). Nordau
refined his diagnosis further: “Accompanying M. Zola’s sexual psychopathia is
the role olfactory sensations play in his work. The predominance ol the sense ol
smell and its relationship to the sexual sphere is striking in many degenerates.
In their work as well, odor acquires a great importance” (2:458). Nordau was
already familiar with a monograph. Odors in the Novels of Zola, written by
Leopold Bernard, a philosophy teacher and Inspecteur de I’Academie from
Montpellier. Zola was a “symphonist of odors,” Bernard proclaimed;
He is the novelist with the quivering nostrils, a subtle sense of smell, always
tickled by the mysterious effluvia of the air; he is the man who has most lived
by the nose, who has most suffered and most delighted by the odor of things
...; his imagination, a rare thing, has preserved the lively impression, and he
can, when he wishes, refresh it to the point of affording himself the illusion of
the original experience; he also excels in noting odors, in describing them,
analyzing, classing, seizing their secret harmonies, their mysterious corre¬
spondences with sentiments and ideas, their deaf but nonetheless irresistible
influence on decisions and conduct. (1889, 7)
Bernard passed in review the most odorous scenes in Zola’s novels, thoroughly
documenting his claim that smell plays an unprecedented role in Zola’s novel-
istic world. This is most striking in Le Ventre de Paris [The belly of Paris]
(1873), the third installment of the Rougon-Macquart cycle, and a novel where
tlie odors of the market, the aromas of the charcuterie, the stench of filth and
poverty rise thick and fulsome from every page. The “symphony of cheeses”—
one ol the most memorable passages in French literature—sates the reader with
three pages of pungent and frankly nauseating aromas from twenty-three
cheeses. Zola leaves no doubt about the toxicity of odors:
The warm afternoon had softened the cheeses; the mold on the rinds melted,
varnishing them in rich copper red and gray-green tones, like ill fermented
wounds;... a flood of life had bored through a livarot, birthing through that
gash a crowd of worms. And behind the scales, in its narrow case, an anise fla¬
vored gaome exuded such an infection that the flies had collapsed all around
the box. {Ventre, 828)
These odors were all carefully documented in Zola’s preparatory dossier. Zola
even made notes to himself to write “a page on dung” and to describe the
“strong odor of fowl.”^^ Bernard rightly claimed that the omnipresence of
odors in Zola’s novels was carefully premeditated. The reason, Bernard ex¬
plained, was to inform the reader about the milieu and the individual charac¬
ters. Each character exudes a particular odor depending on their age, sex,
state of health or illness, their secret vices, the hereditary composition, their sta¬
tus (14). In other words, Zola attempted to exploit odor as a diagnostic at¬
tribute, as an index of hereditary composition,’’just as Broca, Lombroso, and
other anthropometrists had done with so many other physical traits.
An association between certain odors and “sexual appetite” was also an
important element in Zola’s literary use of odors (Bernard 1889, 22). One ex¬
ample of “voluptuous, aphrodisiacal, erotical odors” (22) in Zola’s novels is a
fleeting moment between Florent, the largely gynophobic hero oiLe Ventre de
Pans, and the fishmonger, Louise (“La Belle Normande”) Mehudin: “When
her camisole gaped open, [Florent] imagined he saw rising, between two white
masses, the smoke of life, a steamy breath of health that smacked his face, as if
stirred up from a malodorous focus of the Halles [market], by the sweltering
evenings ofjuly” {Ventre, 738). It was this raw brutality, this materialist primacy
of the gut over the brain, that delighted Bernard. Furthermore, it was because
Zola wanted to evoke the beast which always sleeps in the depths of human
nature” that he made odor and taste—the “animal senses”—the equals of the
intellectual and aesthetic senses (21). It waspreasety this animality that Nordau
most feared in the work of Zola and other Naturalist and Decadent authors
who idealized the cycle of excess consumption, sensory exhaustion, and un¬
orthodox, artificial stimulation (1:28). These decadent obsessions, Nordau
Fetishists 139
insisted, were to blame for the spread of neurasthenia, sexual deviance, and
degeneration.
Nowhere is this cycle of degeneration and decadence more exhaustively
portrayed than in Huysmans’s A Rebours (which in one English translation is
appropriately rendered Against Nature). Nordau described its hero, des Es-
seintes, as “an anemic and nervous weakling, the inheritor of all the vices and
degeneration of an exhausted race” (2:108). (Here, as throughout Degenera¬
tion, the nationalist subtext is quite thick.) Since 1876, Huysmans had been a
member ol Zola’s circle of Naturalist authors committed to a scientific, realist
representation ol the material rigors of life and the biological decay of French
society. In A Rebours, his last novel before breaking with Zola, Huysmans ex¬
plicitly diagnosed des Esseintes as “degenerate.” The venerable ancestors of
the Floressas des Esseintes line had been large, athletic men, we are told, but
the more recent descendants all showed the signs of degeneration: “The deca¬
dence of this ancient house had, undoubtedly, followed its regular course; the
effemination of the males had continued accentuating itself; as if to complete
the labor of ages, the des Esseintes had intermarried their children lor two cen¬
turies, wearing down the remains of their vigor in consanguineous unions” {Re¬
bours, 61). Jean des Esseintes was the last “runt” of this family and the initial
description of him echoes a century of medical portraits of hystericoneuras-
thenic onanists. He was
a skinny young man of thirty, anemic and nervous, with hollow cheeks, icy
steel-blue eyes, an up-turned yet straight nose, and skinny, spidery hands. By
a singular phenomenon of atavism, the last descendant resembled the ancient
patriarch, the mignon, whose extraordinarily blond, pointy beard and am¬
biguously languid and cunning expression des Esseintes had revived. (61-2).
To complete this medical history of atavism and effeminacy, we are told that his
mother suffered from nervous breakdowns if exposed to too much light or
noise, and that he had had a solitary, monkish education among the Jesuits. He
becomes a misanthropic recluse, and after having sated himself on all forms ol
excessive carnal repasts, his sexual drive was just as weak as his nerves. In an
act of refined cynicism, he hosts a black-themed dinner party as a wake for his
defunct virility.
Des Esseintes was also the fashion plate of the dandy: “He acquired the
reputation of an eccentric which he completed by dressing in white velour cos¬
tumes, gold-embroidered vests, planting, in the guise of a cravat, a bouquet of
Parma violets in the cleavage of a collarless shirt” (70). This was, in fact, one ol
the outlandish outfits of one of the best known dandies of Huysmans’s circle,
Robert Count of Montesquiou, widely believed at the time to be the model for
des Esseintes as well as Proust’s homosexual character in Remembrance of
Things Past, the Baron de Charlusd® As we saw in the previous chapter, des Es-
seintes’s style also had a profound influence on Oscar Wilde and his British cir¬
cle of aesthete dandies.
Throughoutd Rebours, des Esseintes is cloistered away from the world he
abhors in a bizarre house of his own design. There he systematically exhausts
one appetite after another in a compulsively encyclopedic fashion. His custom-
built “mouth organ” {orgue a bouche)—a contraption for blending liqueurs—
allows him to experiment with the gamut of gustatory stimuli and compose
pieces of music for the palate. Like the collectionomanes described by Dr. Codet
(1921), des Esseintes goes on feverish buying sprees of exotic plants and or¬
chids, rare books, manuscripts, and engravings.
His dominant, we might say obsessive, aesthetic quest for the artificial,
unnatural, and factitious is repeatedly associated with his religious aspirations:
“Thus, his tendencies towards artifice, his need for eccentricity,” he wonders,
“were they not ultimately the result of specious studies, of otherworldly refine¬
ments, of quasi-theological speculations; they were fundamentally transports,
aspirations towards an ideal, towards an unknown universe, a distant beatitude,
desirable as that which the Scriptures promised” (126). As in the construction
of religious fetishism itself, a delusional cult of material objects is the basis of
des Esseintes’s feverish religiosity. Nevertheless, he tires of each series of pur¬
chases and sensations and must turn to a new one. With each cycle, his nervous
crises become more and more severe.
Midway through the novel he is stricken with olfactory hallucinations,
“perversions of smell” or “parosmia,” to use the official medical term (Collet
1904, 83). After ascertaining that his manservant can smell nothing out of the
ordinary, des Esseintes realizes that “the neurosis was returning, once again,
vdth the appearance of a new illusion of the senses” (152). For therapy he turns
to experimenting with perfumes, a sort of “nasal homeopathy” (152). Through
this early aromatherapy he becomes thoroughly familiar with all the essences of
the perfume industry, hoping to create a “grammar of perfume” (154). In ad¬
dition to this episode, there are countless other odorous events, so numerous
that Havelock Ellis was struck by the “olfactory hyperaesthesia” of the novel
(1931, xx).'^® As another expression of his obsession with the artificial, des Es¬
seintes’s experimentations in odors allow him to develop a “precision of^c-
tion"—a “science of smell” (153).^° Huysmans portrayes his hero as a hybrid
between a philologist, a psychologist, and an alchemist: both analyzing the
Fetishists 141
“soul” of perfumes and composing odorous mixtures to imitate natural per¬

fumes. The culmination of his labors is the creation of a “human essence” that
smelled of skirts, announcing the powdered and painted woman, stephanotis,

ayapana, opoponax, chypre, champaka, sarcanthus, over which he layered a
touch of seringa in order to suggest with the factitious life of make-up which
they released, a natural flower of sweaty laughter, of joys which toss about in
the open sun. (157; emphasis added)
In this ultimate refinement of olfactory perversity, des Esseintes concocts a

wholly artificial perfume woman. Inevitably, he is overwhelmed by his aromatic
alchemy and tormented by a storm of olfactory hallucinations. These “assailed
his exhausted nose, overwhelming once again his shattered nerves, prostrating
him to such a degree, that he collapsed swooning, almost dead, at his window
sill” (161-62).
Havelock Ellis, who was fascinated by Huysmans and his hero, called this
particular form of sexual meton)^^ (replacement of “normal” sex for odorous
excitation) “olfactory fetichism,” perhaps the first use of the term (1905, 74).
Although Ellis praised the Decadent aesthetic, he also noted an association be¬
tween “neurasthenic sensitivity to odors” and the loss of sexual vigor. Even
more specifically, Ellis pointed out that “olfactory attractions are especially
marked” in inverts (75). This is confirmed in chapter 9 by a series of des Es-
seintes’s actual sexual experimentations—unlike the sensually suggestive but
asexual sensory overindulgences of the other chapters. In his stereotyped fash¬
ion, des Esseintes follows a pathway to increasingly artificial, “unnatural” sub¬
stitutions. In the case of sex, the nadir is sexual inversion and the three sexual
reminiscences are evoked by the taste and smell of candies. The progression of
love affairs in chapter 9—from the American circus performer, to the female
ventriloquist, and finally to an effeminate young man—is representative of a
chronic descent into sexual “degeneration” and loss of virility. As we saw in the
previous chapter, this was a matter of great concern in France at the time.^^
This descent and fetishization is also evident in the very first liaison with the
American acrobat. Miss Urania. The latent homosexual nature of this affair is
suggested by her name, since uranism, as discussed earlier, was a common term
for sexual inversion. Des Esseintes’s infatuation with Miss Urania grows as he
increasingly imagines that this athletic trapeze artist is a man, and that he is cor¬
respondingly being feminized. When he finally arranges for a rendezvous, he is
totally disappointed by her lack of the “stupid bestiality of a carnival wrestler,”
about which he had fantasized (146). His most satisfactory love affair is with a
pale, effeminate schoolboy he encounters by chance in the street. It seems log¬

ical to him that this most “unnatural” of loves should be the natural one for
him, predisposed to it as he is through a sodomitic ancestor and a religious
training that had “stirred up the illegitimate ideal of voluptuousness; libertine
and mystical obsessions confusedly haunted his brain twisted by a stubborn
desire to escape the vulgarities of the world, to ruin himself, far from venerable
practices” (151). Effeminacy, inversion, and pederasty become the natural out¬
come of degeneracy and a revolt against the commonplace. Huysmans later de¬
scribed his hero as too effeminate and degenerate even to be a proper sodomite.
He admitted m a letter to Marc-Andre Raffalovich: “Des Essemtes is an ex¬
ceptional being, m that vice [sodomy], as in the others; he is, in sum, an almost
unlikely sodomite given his constitution.”^^
A Rebours and its hero were thus the epitome of fin-de-siecle decadence
and all its sensual perversities.^^ Huysmans’s literary imagination as well as his
person were equally accused of participating in and fomenting the fetishistic
aesthetic of the period. In Dr. Nordau’s cultural and literary diagnosis of the so¬
cial ills oicntciTtcnte Kunst (degenerate art), he made little distinction between
fiction and reality or des Esseintes and Huysmans. The fictional character was
diagnosed as seiiously as a real patient and, likewise, Huysmans’s stories
were taken as symptoms of the authorial pathology of the olfactif. Ld-Bas (a
novel of 1891) “furnishes Mr. Huysmans the occasion to wallow and snort in
the most atrocious filth with a porcine satisfaction,” Nordau exclaimed
(2:119). Even Huysmans’s contemporary biographer perpetuates the aura of
Huysmans as an olfactory fetishist, one who “loved sniffing those female bod¬
ies [of prostitutes] . . . [and ] needed odors, gestures, novel situations to reani¬
mate him, otherwise a woman alone provoked no feeling” (Vircondelet 1990,
65). Was Huysmans the novelist as much of an impotent fetishist as his hero
des Esseintes? Was Huysmans a novelist and, eventually, a celibate Benedictine
monk precisely because he was a fetishist? This tradeoff between “normal” sex¬
ual potency and literary potency had been hypothesized by Binet when he ex¬
plained that the coital impotence of the fetishist was replaced by “imaginative
work” and “erotic rumination.”
If the essence of fetishism lay in secret, imaginative work rather than overt
acts. It demanded new hermeneutic or interpretative work on the part of doc¬
tors if they were to successfully unmask and diagnose the erotisme of a growing
number of people whose ‘ antisocial” behavior was suspected of having per¬
verse erotic roots. So, although we now find Max Nordau’s work to be literary
interpretation rather than medical diagnosis, his “pathophilology” was not so
different from the diagnostic approaches of his medical colleagues. Con-
Fetishists 143
fronting the seeming proliferation of sexual perverts, physicians debated the

best means of understanding and classifying these manifestations of erotic be¬
haviors and, more elusively, erotic pleasures. While Binet had proposed the
primitive fetishistic cult as a model for unmasking all perverse practices, other
medical writers insisted that perversions of fantasy were variations of sadism or
masochism.
S & M and the Hermeneutics of Desire
With my knees bent, dressed in the pink silk bloomers I bought much earlier,
I placed a Vaseline lubricated billiard ball in my anus. I had taken care to
place a little piece of old linen beneath so as not to soil my bloomers. Now,
while holding the ball with my left hand, I pushed on it as if to swallow it with
my anus. With my right hand I held my bloomers. At that moment I was only
half erect. Once the ball is in my anus, the preparatory work is over; the real
joy is about to begin. While masturbating with my right hand, I struggled to
pass the ball. Wlien I had managed that, I shoved it back in with the left hand,
repeating this six, eight, ten, twelve times. . ..
I have described the facts. Now these are my sensations during the act.
They were extremely complex and much less clear than during my mastur¬
bations of earlier years. I always experienced a double pleasure: 1st. In part,
the entrance and exit of the billiard ball in my anus gave me the sensation of
a virile member accomplishing the same work of entering and exiting, and, in
my imagination, I attached that virile member to the body and the face of
young men 20 to 25 years old that I had encountered recently and who had
most charmed me by their face, their dress, their male appearance and their
patent leather boots.
Their images appeared successively, four, five, six in number, but I was
careful to reserve one of the most seductive to finish my thrust, at the moment
of ejaculation. 2nd. It seemed that these young men with patent leather boots
engaged in pederasty with me and were masturbating me at the same time.
(Gamier 1895, 398-99)
These exquisitely detailed and candidly self-reflective confessions by

Louis X-, like the Italian invert’s “novel,” clearly betray the author’s
tremendous pleasure in the very act of relating them. Unlike the Italian, Louis
was not writing independently and freely but was compelled to do so in his
medicolegal defense. A twenty-six-year-old “man of letters” from a good family,
Louis was arrested on charges of “outrages to public decency” for masturbat¬
ing openly in the Vincennes Park. He underwent mental evaluation by
Drs. Legras and Paul-Emile Gamier of the Special Infirmary of the Police Pre¬
fecture of Paris. Gamier was a student and colleague ofMagnan, Lasegue, and
Legrand du Saulle, and in 1886 became physician-in-chief of the Special In¬
firmary and one of the leaders in forensic medicine.^'^ As we might predict, the
doctors discovered that the family medical history was rich in degenerate disor¬
ders, particularly on the more dangerous maternal side (including suicide, al¬
coholism, convulsions, and eccentricity). Louis was, nevertheless, highly intel¬
ligent and educated; he even had a law degree. But he really yearned to be an
author. He bore all the marks of the dandy: he was tall, thin and well-dressed,
wore a monocle, had an effeminate voice, literary pretensions, and manicured,
feminine hands. The nails, the doctors noted, “are the object of quite a par¬
ticular cult and maintained at an extraordinary length that would be incom¬
patible with any manual labor” (394). Most significant for diagnostic purposes
was that he wore brilliantly shiny, patent leather shoes.
His lengthy memoir-confession painted the classic picture of the onanist-
invert. He had been a lonely, sad, effeminate youth who had begun solitary and
mutual masturbation at age thirteen. From that time forth, he could only ac¬
complish the “voluptuous spasm” by contemplating patent leather shoes—“a
contemplation towards which he was instinctively impelled even as a child”
(395). After reading of sexual aberrations” m the Greek classics at the age of
twenty-two, he developed “vague desires for passive pederasty” (396). How¬
ever, his first ideal was to meet an educated, sensitive young man with whom to
talk of literature, exchange caresses, and masturbate. His early literary efforts
enjoyed a complete lack of success” (397). As his sodomitic desires and patent
leather shoe fetishism evolved, the doctors noted, “there began an uninter-
lupted succession of incidents m which the culture of letters and a morbid
search for the strangest ideal marched side by side” (397).
As Louis’s confessions revealed, he developed elaborate rituals for satisfy¬
ing in his body and through his imagination his desires for sodomy with par¬
ticular young men with patent leather boots. To use Rousseau’s phrase, Louis
could enlist these young men and put them to use in his own fashion in care¬
fully choreographed erotic performances. In parallel with these bedroom ritu¬
als, he began inscribing a stereotyped graffito with “absolute regularity” in the
public urinals of the Vincennes Park: “The phrase began thus: llend my ass to
handsome nun who have patent leather shoes' and ended with repugnant
promises” (400). As he wrote these words, Louis would stare at his patent
leather boots and enjoy an erection. He had finally acquired these boots after
years of resisting the temptation. He devoted himself to their care and the mere
ghnt off their brilliant surface excited him to a voluptuous spasm. Their odor
Fetishists 145
was also highly exciting: “He sniffs them; their perfume is highly agreeable”
(402). Their feel “procure[d] exquisite sensations” as well, and he would
squeeze them between his thighs, “taking care to modulate his ardor, as if he
were afraid to harm them” (402). Gamier and Legras reported that Louis X—
was involved in a “relationship with his boots” and “traces the following sketch,
whose obscenity, however revolting in itself, must not let us forget that we are in
the presence of a pathological obsession”:
I put on my pink bloomers and my boots. I climb on two chairs, my legs

spread, and I slightly open the door of my mirrored armoir to see myself from
behind thanks to the reflection in the mantle mirror. While masturbating my¬
self, I obstinately maintain my gaze on my buttocks, my thighs and above all
my boots. At that moment I would like to be able to make love to myself, to
abandon myself to caresses all over my body, whose image I see in the mirror.
The sight of my boots excites me enough that, usually, I can dispense with the
introduction of the billiard ball in my anus. My goal is to project the jet of
sperm into the opening of one of the two boots, and when I manage that, it is
the paroxysm of pleasure. Other times, at the point of ejaculation, I rub my
buttocks, my thighs, my anus with one of my boots while I tenaciously con¬
template the light reflected off the other boot. . . . This operation, in the ex¬
cessive pleasure it procures, gives me a sensation of triumph, of victory, when
the seminal liqueur strikes my boots. (402-3)
One day Louis spots a handsome young bicyclist who seems to glance at
Louis’s patent leather boots. “No further doubt, [the bicyclist] desires him as
much as he himself yearns for his caresses: in a paroxysm of excitement he ex¬
hibits his genitals” (403). What disappointment when the young man turns
away with indifference, and what a shock when Louis finds himself arrested for
public indecency.
Gamier and Legras confronted an increasingly common medicolegal
dilemma. They noted that it was incontestable that this defendant’s conduct ar¬
gued against him, but “must one consider him a vulgar sodomist unworthy of
pity”? (404). No, they were of a different opinion, for they felt it their medical
duty to “analyze what is found in reality under such appearances” (404). In
digging under Louis X-’s overt, public, criminal behavior, by exploring his
imaginative practices and their history. Gamier and Legras concluded that he
suffered from “hereditary mental degeneration with sexual inversion, obses¬
sions, and very active morbid impulsions” (405). The court followed the doc¬
tors’ recommendations by dismissing the criminal case against Louis X-
and instead placing him in a mental asylum.
Aside from the technical issues involved in this particular case, Gamier re¬
produced the entire medicolegal evaluation in the Annals of Public Hygiene in
order to demonstrate that inversion and fetishism were innate, not acquired by
accidental mental association as Bmet had proposed. Gamier emphasized that
even the patient s attraction to shiny boots was “instinctive.” Furthermore,
Bmet’s theory considered inversion itself as a variety of fetishism: the delusional
devotion to men as fetishes and substitutes for women. This fetish theory could
not account for Louis’s case oihomosexual fetishism—except as double fetish¬
ism. Bmet’s theory also suggested the continuity between “normal” and patho¬
logical fetishism, if only in their psychological mechanisms. Gamier, on the
other hand, made it clear that homosexuality was a distinct and most serious
form of degenerate sexual perversion. However irrational the erotic tastes of the
heterosexual perverts, at least they did not confuse genders Gamier explained:
“This total, teratological error is the lot of the invert (385). The diverse sex¬
ual peiveisions weie matters of teratology (that is, birth defects), not acquired
psychological deviation.
Binet had emphasized the role of masturbation in firmly implanting fet¬
ishism in rituals of hypersexual dynamogenization. Gamier instead argued that
true perverts engaged in a delusional form of fetishism and sterile fantasy. Louis
^ vulgar masturbator” who utilized material procedures and
some erotic mental representations to provoke an orgasm. Gamier explained
(404). X-’s obsession with patent leather boots degenerated to such a point
that he “engaged m sexual relations with them.” His exalted imagination so an¬
thropomorphized his patent leather boots into his “homosexual ideal” that he
feared hurting them by squeezing them too much (406). X-was rather like
Esquirol’s platonic, frigid erotomaniac obsessed with an ideal love. The fetish
was not a supplement to coitus, but fully satisfied any coital needs through a
psychic onanism, if we may call it thus, a psychic onanism which only doubles
and supports the real oi material onanism to which all these deviants abandon
themselves with passion” (351).
His hteiary pretensions and his graffiti practices were an integral part of
this psychic eroticism: “pederasty, onanism, and literature constitute a trilogy
without which X-cannot see complete happiness!” (405). Gamier con¬
cluded that, contrary to what had previously been thought, “the fetishist, far
from being hyjaersexual from the point of view of venereal pleasures, is rather
an insufficient person which nothing usually attracts to the union of the sexes.
Genitally, he sins by absence rather than excess” (351). Therefore Gamier re¬
served the designation of “imaginatives” or “psychics” for those who were the
most disinterested in coitus (whether homo- or heterosexual) and the most
genitally “insufficient.”
Fetishists 147
Another classic case of the imaginative sexual pervert was that of Auguste
C-, the white-apron fetishist first described by Charcot and Magnan
(1882, 317). Gamier presented the case to the Society of Forensic Medicine of
Paris in March 1887 after C-was arrested for stealing a white matinee
(morning negligee) which, in a state of drunkenness, he had mistaken for the
“apron of his dreams” (Gamier 1887,275). Despite several intervening arrests,
three stays at the Sainte-Anne Asylum, and an internment at the police infir¬
mary in 1885, C-had not been able to restrain his obsession with aprons.
A police search of C-’s apartment revealed a large collection of sperm-
soiled aprons. The forty-three-year-old day-laborer was a man “upon whom a
morbid heredity weighs heavily”; he had a drunken father, an insane uncle, a
“mentally feeble” brother, and a nervous, melancholic mother and sister (269).
Gamier reclassified C—-— as an “impulsive onanist”: a degenerate who expe¬
riences genital excitement simply and almost exclusively by sight or mere men¬
tal representation of a certain object (268).
At night he dreams of white aprons; during the day he thinks of them un¬
ceasingly. If he does not manage to procure the sight or the possession of the
desired object, at the right moment, he experiences a profound malaise; he is
depressed, but then he calls his imagination to the rescue. He concentrates,
closes his eyes and before him floats the white apron, just as it appeared the
first time. . . . The liveliness of this mental representation is great enough to
provoke, without the aid of masturbatory maneuvers, an erection and even
succeeds in ejaculation. (271-72)
This genital hyperesthesia and the potency of the imagination over actual sex¬
ual potency was a critical element in the pathology of “sexual perversions” as
far as Gamier was concerned.^® He focused attention on a dominant theme in
fin-de-siecle medicine and society that we have noted before: male impotence
or asexuality and its concomitant effects, infertility and depopulation.
The same core anxiety emerged in the case of V-, a young book clerk
and ex-seminanan with an “obsessive appetite” for silk who. Gamier ex¬
plained, in every way shared the timidity, melancholia, solitariness, and reli¬
giosity of C-(the apron fetishist). Arrested for rubbing against ladies in silk
dresses, V-had written in his confession, “I have to admit that a woman
only pleases me for the silk that covers her” (Gamier 1893, 463). He had just
as much pleasure with a silk dress alone. Like other impulsive onanists. Gamier
explained, V-could experience orgasm merely by imagining the beloved
material, but was otherwise impotent with women. Garnier’s initial classifica¬
tion system of sexual perversions, therefore, presented a spectrum of growing
sexual inadequacy (relative to reproduction) from the psychic onanism of the

Iieterosexual letishist to the total horror feniina of the invert. Along this spec¬
trum of perversity, aside from the inescapable degenerate inheritance, the
imagination was the major aggravator. Because of his vantage point in the po¬
lice prefecture. Gamier mainly came in contact with people detained for theft,
violent crimes, rape, or public indecency. As first suggested in his book on Ap¬
parent and Hidden Sexual Anomalies (1889), he increasingly suspected that
some perverse erotic element lay at the root of many apparently unmotivated
crimes (just as Bmet had believed that fetishism was the cause of inappropriate
marriages). In particular. Gamier theorized that sadism (or, as he coined it in
1900, “sadi-fetishism”) was the paradigmatic perversity.
Medical discussions of sadism and masochism per se had sprung up only
111 the last decade of the nineteenth century. As noted earlier, Binet had in¬
cluded an extensive analysis of Rousseau’s “voluptuousness in pain” and his at¬

traction to punitive women. But Binet had diagnosed Rousseau’s sexual per¬
version as a foim of psychic fetishism”: an attraction to a tyrannical character
trait. During the November 28, 1888 session of the Juridical Society of Mos¬
cow, Dimitry Stefanowsky, the substitute Attorney General of Cracow, named
this condition passivism and its pendant tyrannism. Utilizing Rousseau’s case,
Stefanowsky explained passivism as the “complete and absolute abdication of
one person’s will in favor of another’s, with an erotic aim”; the male passivist
and female tyrannist formed a couple, sharing the voluptuousness of the mar¬
tyr and the executioner (1892a, 294). In an attempt to theorize passivism as the
master perversity, he also suggested that fetishists and inverts who found plea¬
sure in odors, bodily secretions, oral sex, or sodomy were all really passivists
seeking humiliation (1892a, 295; 1894, 742).^*^
The terms sadism and masochism were popularized by Krafft-Ebing in a
publication of 1890 where he acknowledged that fiction writers had been the
first to examine the voluptuousness of cruelty. He therefore used terms based
on the names of two authors: the Marquis de Sack and Leopold von Sacher-
Masoch.'^^ In his hugely popular catalogue of perversities, Psychopathia Sexu-
alis, Krafft-Ebing categorically rejected Binet’s chance association theory of the
genesis of pathological fetishism. Instead, he viewed sadism, masochism, and
fetishism as congenital psychopathic conditions often exacerbated by sexual
and masturbatory “excess” in youth (1895, m)A^ He did, however, credit
Bmet for explaining the “physiological” fetishism that bonded happy, monog¬
amous couples (23). Just as fetishism had been the model perversion for Binet,
sadism and masochism were Krafft-Ebing’s paradigmatic perversions. He ex¬
plained sadism as the exaggeration of natural male aggressiveness, especially in
Fetishists 149
the conquest of females. Correspondingly, masochism was the pathological ex¬

treme of “natural” female passivity and submissiveness (179). Male sadism
might therefore be atavistic (83 n.l), while male masochism (the only type he
knew of in 1895) represented “a morbid overgrowth of the female psyche” in
men (183). There was therefore an undercurrent of sexual inversion in the
male masochist.
Gamier presented a rather skewed population in his 1900 article on sadi-
fetishishism; these were not just the petty thieves and exhibitionists who shame¬
fully admitted their erotic obsession, these were more serious, violent criminals
who refused to admit a sexual motivation for their often “bizarre” and cruel ac¬
tivities. A certain analytic flair—a suspicion of eroticism—was necessary on the
part of the medical expert to extract a confession and explain the “true” erotic
nature of the crimes.
“Voluptuousness in cruelty,” Gamier recognized, had been frequently de¬
scribed in literature (1900a, 97), particularly Sade’s novels. In the 1880s the
works of Sade, which had circulated in a limited way underground, enjoyed re¬
newed popularity and public discussion. Decadent artists especially prized
Sade’s stories for their elitist rebellion against conventional manners and, of
course, for their sensual excesses. These resonated with the spirit of the times;
one writer went so far as to exclaim, “We are all more or less sadists!” It was typ¬
ical of periods of decadence, he continued, and of “all periods whose nervous
systems are worn out and overwrought.”^^ The usage sadism in the French
press was so common that when Krafft-Ebing first used the term in medicine
he observed that it was already a “mot courant” in French literature (1895, 79
n.l). A central text of Decadent sadism was Huysmans’s (1891), a nov-
elistic (albeit rather autobiographical) account of a writer’s descent into the
world of demonism as he prepares a history of Gilles de Rais, the infamous
French military office executed in 1440 for murdering and sodomizing hun¬
dreds of children.^*^ The case had been cited in the medical discussions of
Sergeant Bertrand’s necrophilia, but by the end of the century it was regularly
classified as an example of sadism. Huysmans’s account draws a parallel be¬
tween the mystical sensuality of Gilles de Rais and that of Joan of Arc, along¬
side whom de Rais fought in 1427. An even more terriying vision of the volup¬
tuousness of cruelty was painted by Octave Mirbeau in Le Jardin des supplices
[The garden of tortures] (1899), where the heroine revels hysterically in Ori¬
ental tortures. Nordau, as we have already seen, condemned decadent artists’
fascination with sadism (2:119).
Gamier believed that such destructive and angry voluptuousness was a
natural element of the animalistic sexual instinct, but it became pathological
when the “spectacle of inflicted pain” was required for orgasm (1900a, 98). As
with all sexual perversions, the medicolegal question was the determination of
responsibility. Gamier deemed that Sade was certainly abnormal but not sick:
he was not the least bit contrite and was therefore fully responsible for his sex¬
ual crimes. The “true” sadist, like the invert, was the slave of a degenerate con¬
dition producing impulsive obsessions that the sadist loathed but could not re¬
sist. Gamier attempted to demonstrate that sadism and fetishism were closely
tied together, not because they shared the same psychological origins (as Binet
had claimed), but because the sadist usually focused his erotic cruelty on a par¬
ticular body part. Flagellators, such as the one described by Regis in 1899, usu¬
ally were simultaneously buttock fetishists (Gamier 1900a, 108). The same was
true of the piqueur defilles, who periodically terrorized neighborhoods by stab¬
bing women in the buttocks with a penknife or scissors. Further distilling the
sexual perversions. Gamier proposed that patients/criminals who primarily ap¬
peared to be fetishists of other body elements (such as hair braids or pubic
hair) were actually sadists, since their ultimate pleasure was in cutting or biting
off the fetish. Sadism was also intertwined with object fetishism. Gamier pro¬
posed, since the true erotic pleasure was in cutting, burning, or shredding
fetishized silk, handkerchiefs, or aprons (236-37).
Sadi-fetishism should also be suspected in cases of senseless, violent
crimes. Gamier suggested. For example, Frangois Maire had captured the pub¬
lic attention m 1898 for having cut off the ear lobes of a fifteen-year-old boy
Maire was a fairly well-educated man who fashioned himself as a “lecturer in
natural sciences” but actually exercised the profession of enameler. Associates
testified that he was eccentric and had a “monomania for earlobes.” He re¬
peatedly tried to convince his young coworkers to pierce their ears to prevent fa¬
cial pimples, and he regularly accosted boys in parks with the same proposition
while manipulating their earlobes. Despite much evidence of his guilt, Maire
obstinately proclaimed his innocence. In his “Discourse on the Detailed Sum¬
mary of My Life,” an autobiography written while in detention, he admitted
that he recommended ear-piercing for scientific reasons and had even invented
an instrument for doing this efficiently, but this did not mean that he was in¬
terested in cutting ear lobes (Garner 1900a, 217).
The examining doctors repeatedly urged him to confess the erotic nature
of his crime, but he insisted on his complete innocence, writing that ''’‘he will
never reveal his secret, since no one has the right to penetrate into the mystery of
his consciousness and that no one has the right to interrogate his soul” (216).
Gamier concluded that in the absence of a candid confession, Maire’s strange
act could be explained only as a result of either sadi-fetishism or delusional
Fetishists 151
“surgical dilettantism” (218). Lacking any clear evidence of an erotic obses¬

sion, the court judged Maire responsible for his acts and condemned him to
two years in prison.
When examining bizarre, violent criminals such as Maire, Jack-the-
/
Ripper, or Vacher L’Eventreur (a French “ripper” case that preoccupied the
country in 1899), Gamier suggested a sadi-fetishistic motive be carefully
sought.®^ Gamier also resurrected the case of Sergeant Bertrand as an extreme
example of sadi-fetishism. The medicolegal expert’s duty in such cases was to
determine whether the defendant suffered from degenerate pathology and de¬
served medical treatment rather than criminal punishment (246). Gamier
complained that this task was complicated by the enormous popular fascina¬
tion with such cases: “The public opinion, overexcited by the horror of the de¬
tails, revealed far too willingly by the press, creates such a current of indignant
reprobation and vengeful wrath that the emotion is even felt by those who are
entrusted with the delicate mission of judging, as impassive observers, free of
the passion of the mob, with science as sole guide” (244). The suspicion of
erotism was clearly not just the privilege of the medical expert.
With a new palette of perversities and erotic psychologies to choose from,
the public, as well as the medical profession, was urged to uncover the “true”
erotic motive of almost any peculiar, socially reprovable or criminal behavior.
The master perversity might be fetishism, passivism, or sadism (as Binet, Ste-
fanowsky, and Gamier proposed respectively), but with any of these possibilities,
the erotic substitution of the pervert was mirrored by the hermeneutic substitu¬
tion of the analysts who, claiming to “penetrate the mystery of consciousness,”
read a hidden erotic master narrative in a whole variety of texts and confessions.
It became increasingly necessary to interpret patients’ stories to get beyond the
superficial level of behaviors to the underlying erotic mechanisms. Or, as Char¬
cot reportedly advised, “II faut chercher la chose genitale” (one has to look for
the genital motives). The realm of the imagination—of erotic dreams, fantasies,
and pleasures—revealed more of a subject’s “true” sexual nature than his or her
actions, whether overtly sexual or not.
Normal Love and Other Erotic Fictions
Even as the last decade of the nineteenth century witnessed the birth of sexol¬
ogy and the invention of new “perversities,” the old categories of onanism, ero¬
tomania, and inversion remained ever present. As we have seen in this chapter,
however, their significance and even their meaning underwent important
reevaluations as they were associated with new phenomena such as fetishism,

sadism, and masochism. While doctors of the time did not fail to note the mas-
turbatory history of a patient, their interest had thoroughly shifted from the
morbidity of the mechanical act of seminal waste to the psychic effects of soli¬
tary “erotic rumination” over sexual narratives. As they further explored the
subterranean workings of the erotic imagination and vastly expanded the range
of its “perverse” manifestations, doctors edged closer to the inevitable question
posed by one psychologist: Is love a pathological state? (Danville 1893). In a
book review of Emile Laurent’s work on the pathology of love (1891), the
prominent sociologist and criminologist Gabriel Tarde declared:
Morbid love! But, perhaps one will ask, is there any love that isn’t an illness?
Is not love always a fever that alters the pulse, disturbs or accelerates respira¬
tion, troubles the mind? It blinds us to the defects of the loved object and
highlights its imaginary beauties; and by this double hallucination, negative
and positive, through this complex delirium of the senses and the brain,
pushes us to despair, to ruin, to crime, to death. However normal it might be
... it is but a voracious hunger for live human flesh, a form of anthropophagy
that develops along with civilization; and its grip halts all work, extinguishes
all curiosity, stifles all noble passion, nourishes a monstrous mutual egoism.
The lover, like the sick person, is necessarily lazy, uninquisitive, inactive, in¬
different to anything but his illness; and isn’t it the worst of diseases, the one
that fears nothing more than its own cure? (Tarde 1891, 585)
So all lovers were obsessive, irrational, bestial necrophiles like Sergeant

Bertrand? No—Tarde was being facetious. He believed that Laurent’s book on
fetishism and sexual perversity amply demonstrated the “distance that sepa¬
rates ordinary love from its extraordinary aberrations” (586). The territory be¬
tween these ideal extremes was, however, vast and troublesome, obliging Tarde
to be on the defensive. He was willing to include class-transgressive marriages
and the love of prostitutes in the realm of the pathological, but the tragic love of
Romeo and Juliet had to be salvaged as normal. Normal and pathological love
had to be distinguishable by nature and not just degree. Tarde rejected Lau¬
rent’s suggestion that normal love was characterized by harmonious physical
and moral attractions between lovers. That would force one to accept as normal
the lascivious but consensual perversities of assassins and their mistresses
(588). Tarde concluded that a distinction based on social utility was necessary.
“Truly normal love (thereby very rare, I admit, at least in the state of perfect
noTTTiality) is that through which are pursued jointly not only the vital ends of
generation and the purity of races, but also the social goals of patriotic great-
Fetishists 153
ness, family preservation, and the purity of manners” (589). Previously, “nor¬
mal” love could be presumed to be the dominant, “natural” variety. By the end
of the nineteenth century, “perfectly normal” love appeared to be a rarity in¬
stead of the norm. In Tarde’s estimation, it was an uncommon sentiment that
enriched the family and the nation.
Other psychologists described love as the satisfaction of physiological or
evolutionary imperatives, and a primeval chemotaxic drive: the attraction of
sperm for ova (Delboeuf 1891). Tarde described the object of normal love as
socially uniform, whereas “morbid love is provoked by the most diverse ob¬
jects” (1891, 590). Similarly, Danville (1893) explained that the normal love
instinct was aimed indifferently to a large class of appropriate and interchange¬
able mates, while pathological, “passional love” was specialized to an individ¬
ual and was obsessive, neurotic, and degenerate. He relied on Pierrejanet’s de¬
scription of passional love as a viral infection that only afflicted a man if he was
weak, depressed, or mentally ill (1889, 436). In order to preserve the “normal¬
ity” of love in the face of proliferating evidence of its antisocial “deviations,” it
was stripped of its passion, excitement, individuality, and imaginativeness—all
of which became symptoms of love’s pathology.
Wliat was the cure for the epidemic of “morbid love” produced by the
multiplication of modern incitements to desires that went unsatisfied? Tarde
suggested that if religious faith could no longer offer salvation, then the only
thing that could “tear away the crowd from the cult of pleasure” was the con¬
solation of maternity and paternity: “Because there is no other manner of sur¬
viving than by being reborn in one’s children, men should ceaselessly multiply
their number, out of self-interest as much as patriotism” (595).
Tarde’s expression of depopulation anxieties is typical for the French fin
de siecle,*’^ but also uncannily echoes the contemporary American rhetoric of
“family values.” Like the late-nineteenth-century defense of “normal love,” the
late twentieth-century phantasm of family values has been so loaded with so¬
cial, patriotic, racial, religious, and economic demands that few, if any, of its
champions actually exemplify it. The ideological utopian fiction of “family val¬
ues” enshrines cultural conformity and rationalist social utility as the only form
of “normality” that will protect the nation against the decay and decadence of
individualist, irrational, and immoral “cults of pleasure.”
The public had no interest in such “pathological passion,” Tarde claimed,
only the “normal type of love.... No erotic aberration has inspired a novel, nor
a painting, nor a theatrical work, nor even a comedy” (592). This was clearly a
misrepresentation of popular cultural tastes at the time. Even if writers such as
Zola, Mirbeau, and Dubarry had not been writing passionally perverse novels.
the public could (and did) turn to medical texts for tales of the erotic imagina¬
tion. In turn, these medical erotic narratives were influenced by broader social
interests and concerns: consumer culture, anticlericalism, industrialization, de¬
population, the conflict between elitism and democracy, the weakening of tradi¬
tional family structures, and even novelistic styles.
The interdependence between physicians and novelists in the exploration
of erotic narratives is particularly remarkable. Each borrowed material from the
other as they interpreted the hidden world of the erotic imagination. Doctors
had once simply reported patients’ stories and usually taken them at face value.
By the end of the nineteenth century, sexologists were scrutinizing these con¬
fessions not only to classify sexuality but to understand the psychic mechanisms
of erotic pleasure. Sexual practices that first seemed singular and insane were
now being interpreted as phenomena of more generalizable psychologies: of
masculinity, femininity, love, passion, consumerism, religiosity, artistic creativ¬
ity, collectionism, and so on. As doctors and novelists charted new erotic terri¬
tory, the boundaries between normal eros and pathological erotism became
ever more unclear.
All it took to reveal the perverse underside of the normal was a careful
reading of either patient narratives or literary narratives. In fact, a characteristic
of the medical texts we have been examining is their constant re-reading and
reinterpretation of erotic narratives. Rousseau’s Confessions is the best example
of this. Nineteenth century doctors sequentially diagnosed Rousseau with al¬
most every sexual perversion save necrophilia. Similarly, many other stories
resurfaced from one medical article to another—for example, those of Sergeant
Bertrand, the shepherd who divided his penis, the nightcap fetishist, and the
white-apron fetishist. As these stories were collected and circulated from doctor
to doctor, they took on new color and significance vdth each re-reading and
retelling.®^ The “collectionomania” and analytic “erotic rumination” of the
nineteenth-century physicians themselves was clearly quite productive of new
scientific theories of sexuality.
Doctors’ scientific, erotic rumination was intimately tied to their historical
rumination. In fabricating theories of erotism, doctors wove and rewove a net¬
work of histories: the patient’s “degenerate” family history, the history of reli¬
gion, phylogenesis and transformism, the history of the human race, the narra¬
tive of atavism. In addition to being blamed for all varieties of perverse literary
and artistic productions, the erotic imagination was also blamed for perverse
historical productions. Take, for example, the “Archives of Spanking”: a “Sa-
dian’s” extensive documentation of whipping and spanking throughout history.
Fetishists 155
collected for his personal erotic rumination (Regis 1899). Doctors’ own
“archives of erotism” swelled through their own labors as physicians urged
their subjects to reveal all. The new perverts filled thousands of pages of med¬
ical books and records with true erotic confessions, and in the process crystal¬
lized new sexual identities and histories for themselves. These autobiographi¬
cal productions informed and, increasingly, relied on medical terms,
metanarratives, and histories. Although stigmatized as deviant, pathological,
and insane, perverts often found solace in this medicalization and even found
pleasure and self-affirmation in these new nosological formations. Further¬
more, the medical reach was so broad and its cultural currency so great that
erotism in general took on the colors of perverse pleasure. Finally, we cannot
overlook the element of pleasure in doctors’ scientific production as they pored
over their archives of erotism. Nor can I deny feeling a similar element of plea¬
sure as I have ruminated over the same archives during the writing of this book,
which, like the many other scholarly works on sexuality, represents just one
bloom in the historical efflorescence of erotic literature. Twentieth-century
“perverts”—an ever growing and apparently dominant population—are find¬
ing new, nonmedical outlets for the pleasurable confession of erotic imaginings,
obeying the modernist impulsion to make sex speak in all possible contexts,
from analysts’ couches to television studios to cyberspace.
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CONCLUSION
From the
Talking Sex
to Sex Talk
day Mangogul, the Sultan of the Congo, was royally

bored with his life and his favorite consort, Mirzoza. Having exhausted her
store of scandalous tales, Mirzoza suggests that fresh stories of the court’s gal¬
lant adventures would certainly entertain His Highness. Since ladies would
never freely volunteer such revelations, Mirzoza wisely suggests that the court
genie, Cucufa, be consulted. “I want a very simple thing,” Mangogul tells Cu-
cufa, “to procure some pleasure at the expense of the women of my court.”
After some initial resistance, Cucufa accedes to his sultan’s wishes and presents
Mangogul a marvelous ring. If the monarch directs it at any woman, she will re¬
count her intrigues in a loud, clear voice. They will not speak through their
mouth, Cucufa warns, but “through the most frank organ in them, and the
most knowledgeable of the things you wish to know: their jewels.” Armed with
this powerful instrument for confession, Mangogul embarks on a thorough in¬
vestigation of the venality, hypocrisy, treachery, and virtuousness of his court
and empire. As candid, new voices emerge from under ladies’ skirts, women
and men alike are struck with terror and shame. ^
ITie Indiscreet Jewels (1748) is Diderot’s only known licentious tale. Like
similar contemporaneous works, the story is set in an exotic, oriental locale that
157
served as a cover for both libertinism and political censure.^ Some literary
scholars have argued that the work is a roman a clef satirizing the court of Louis
XV, much as the later Zoloe and Her Two Acolytes (attributed to Sade) ridiculed
Napoleon’s circle, and Joe Klein’s anonymously published Primary Colors
makes fun of the 1992 Clinton campaign.^ Sultan Mangogul is Louis himself,
who delighted in the matinal recounting of the court’s scandal chronicles gath¬
ered by police spies. As further inducement to read the novel as disguised truth,
Diderot repeatedly identifies its scribe as an African historian extremely con¬
scientious of his duty to posterity.
Whether or not elements in the novel correspond to real people and
events in Louis XV’s court, Diderot uses this fantastical conceit to satirize the
manners, ideologies, and institutions of his time. Academies of science, medi¬
cine, and barber-surgery, as well as the worlds of theater, music, and philoso¬
phy are all scrutinized in this voyeuristic narrative of sexual policing. As the true
sex lives of aristocrats, nuns, courtesans, and artists are exposed by le sexe (the
genitals), so are the intimate connections between social institutions and sexual
affairs. The political crisis instigated by these revelations stimulates the atten¬
tion of the learned societies which frantically try to silence the chatty labia.
After the first jewel speaks, one of the listeners immediately interprets the
phenomenon medically as a product of “hysterical vapors” (15). Soon the
Academy of Sciences of Banza dedicates itself to investigating the marvel. The
historian-narrator tells us that “the chatter ofjewels produced an infinity of ex¬
cellent works; and the important subject swelled the bulletins of the academies
with many memoirs that can be considered the finest efforts of the human in¬
tellect” (23). Diderot’s naughty wit pokes fun at the language and manners of
savants as well as their doctrinaire esprit de systeme. In so doing, he sides with
philosophe friends and collaborators, such as Condillac, in condemning Carte-
sianism and Newtonianism. Whichever their philosophical affiliation, the sa¬
vants agree that it must be a natural, material phenomenon.
In a claim that Tardieu echoes a century later. Doctor Orcotome boasts to
having personally vdtnessed many jewels “in the paroxysm,” and declares that
female genitalia are like vocal cords (25). They had always spoken, but in such
a low voice that even their owners had not heard them. It was not surprising
that they were now speaking more loudly, Orcotome explains, “in these days
when we have pushed freedom of conversation to the point that we can speak
of the most intimate matters without impropriety or indiscretion” (27). Even¬
tually they would all speak, he predicts: “If they remain silent, it is because they
have nothing to say, or that they are deformed, or they lack the ideas or the
terms” (27).
Conclusion 159
Oddly enough, it seems that Orcotome’s prediction has proven correct.

Throughout the previous chapters we turned the magical ring of historical
analysis on diverse cultural documents to extract a growing volume and variety
of talking sexes since the mid-eighteenth century. Like modern day equivalents
of Orcotome and the academicians of Banza, we have been the inquisitive and
perplexed auditors of a parade of talking sexes from the first confessions of
shameful onanists to the purple prose of elite inverts and the scientific sex talk
of medical experts. But are the indiscreet jewels of Diderot’s time telling us the
same kinds of stories as the patent leather boot fetishist of the late nineteenth
century? Clearly not. Un sexe qui park (a talking sex) is quite different from
talking sex.^
The genital confessions recorded by the fictional African historian focus
on acts of copulation and on the identity and genital prowess of those men,
women, or animals visiting the speaker’s jewel. Like other libertine literature of
its time. The Indiscreet Jewels seems cold and ironically aloof in tone. These
texts are more concerned with political satire and social commentary than with
sensual arousal, or at least it appears that way to today’s readers.^ Even Sade’s
works seem like conventional picaresque tales interrupted by brief sexual
tableaux and lengthy philosophical disquisitions.® Nevertheless, these clearly
were popular texts and were—to use Rousseau’s coy phrase—“dangerous
books” read with “one hand.” In them, mechanical acts and visual titillation
monopolized sexual arousal.
Similarly, early medical writers on onanism worried about the mechanics
of humoral loss and nervous exhaustion. Later physicians, however, were more
concerned with the psychology of sexual excitement. Medical preoccupation
with the erotic imagination mounted throughout the nineteenth century, incor¬
porating (rather than displacing) material issues such as somatic physiology or
hereditary degeneration. Patients’ first confessions (like those of the indiscreet
jewels) were unwillingly extracted from them in medicolegal inquisitions. But
as time went on, they increasingly explored their sensations, passions, and fan¬
tasies of their own accord. Ironically, it was in the ostensibly cold and un¬
friendly setting of the medical examination room that people began to develop
“the ideas and the terms” for the erotic.
By the end of the century, some “perverts” (like the Italian invert) were
exploiting the medical press not only to learn about their “disorder,” but also
to expose their erotic inner life. These growing refinements of erotism touched
on so many aspects of sexual arousal that the only sexuality not labeled “per¬
verse” was conjugal reproductive copulation.^ The transition from the mechan¬
ics to the erotics of sex is epitomized by the confession of the patent leather
boot fetishist. Recall that after his elaborate description of his sexual perfor¬
mance with billiard balls, silk bloomers, and the boots, he tells us, “I have just
described the facts. Now, here are my sensations during the act. They were very
complex and much less clear than during my masturbations of preceding
years” (Gamier 1895, 398).
Medical and cultural representations of sexuality had also become much
more complex, no longer merely depicting copulation and seminal loss as in
the eighteenth-century.® On the one hand, Tlie Indiscreet Jewels and other En¬
lightenment political pornography used sex (including “unnatural” sex) to sat¬
irize powerful political institutions. By contrast, the evolving medical and fic¬
tional literature of the erotic implicated all classes, ages, and sexes in a wide
network of meanings of self and society. Furthermore, the erotic imagination
was entangled in a variety of social anxieties: political instability, national en-
feeblement, colonial unrest, European racial rivalries, depopulation, degenera¬
tion, decadence, women’s enfranchisement.
Foucault suggests that the “truth of the sex” has been a major (perhaps the
major) development of modernity (1976, 92-93). But the nature of that truth,
the reasons for its extraction, and the aims for its confession have varied enor¬
mously over the past three centuries. Diderot’s talking sex had a mind of its
own: its clear, truthful voice was distinct from the civilized, rational speech of
the “superior mouth.” Contrast this with the uncertain phrasings of patients,
doctors, and novelists straining to hear the voice of the erotic imagination and
incorporate its “truths” with the workings of the “civilized” mind. It was pre¬
cisely because this passional, truthful voice seemed integral, perhaps even es¬
sential, to the rational “normal” voice that it was feared.
Another important reason the voice of the erotic seemed unprecedented
and threatening was that it had a distinctly feminine tone. Diderot’s chattering
jewels have a huge impact because they tell the absolute truth, even to the cha¬
grin of their owners. A courtesan swears: “As long as they are prudent enough
to speak only of that which they understand, I will believe them as oracles”
(20). Dr. Orcotome similarly refers to the female genitalia, women’s “inferior
mouth,” as the delphus (25)—alluding to the Delphic oracle. Diderot’s Del¬
phic genitals reveal the true activities and motivations of people. But against
what falsity is this truth of the sex contrasted? In each hilarious episode, jewels
loudly contradict the modest, prudish, or virtuous assertions of their mistresses.
Diderot presents a world in which women have far greater libidinal desires and
activities than they could ever confess, and have far more influence in society
than men would ever admit. It is only the magic ring that bypasses the artifice
and deception of women’s superior mouth and compels their inferior mouth to
Conclusion 161
speak. The truth of the sex and its otherwise discreet social role is thus re¬
vealed, at Mangogul’s command, “at the expense of the women of [his] court.”
Diderot was far more liberal on sexual matters than Rousseau, but the en-
cydopMiste's vision of women’s sensual drive in the imaginary Congo is similar
to Rousseau’s views of “natural” female sexuality.® Rousseau believed that
women had unlimited desire and that it was their sensuous artifices and cam¬
ouflaging modesty that gave them psychological and political power over men
in the state of civilization [Emile, 447). The “humor” o{ The Indiscreet Jeweb,
therefore, lies in unmasking this female desire and thus shattering women’s
erotic dominion over men. The strategy would be used most famously in the
1793 trial of Marie-Antoinette, who was accused of a variety of sexual perversi¬
ties as well as having used sex as a means of inducing Louis XVI to deceive and
betray the French people.^® Female seductions and deceptions had also been
attacked and satirized under Louis Xy whose mistresses had been feared as
powerful court intriguers.^^
This obsession with extracting confessions from women’s hyperactive yet
double-dealing sex contrasts with the preponderance of male cases in the med¬
ical literature on the erotic. While Tissot and other anti-onanism campaigners
always warned that girls could suffer the same ills as boys and even worse, and
while there were even a few monographs dedicated to female “secret habits,”
antimasturbatory tracts principally concerned male seminal emissions. The
erotomania literature presents only a few female cases. In the French medical
material on inversion, “tribadism” was unproblematically recognized and dis¬
missed as an age-old vice of little new scientific interest. From the beginning,
case reports of fetishism described women with cloth or dress fetishes, yet
Clerambault insisted as late as 1908 that true fetishism had only been de¬
scribed in men and might reflect an aspect of specifically male psychology
(452). Even Brillat-Savarin, after first relying on a female informant, marginal¬
ized her erotic anecdote and turned to men for their wisdom on the “genesic”
power of truffles. Confronted with the dismissal or erasure of women from this
medical literature, we must ask: Were women really not speaking, or were doc¬
tors not listening? Did nineteenth-century male doctors share Orcotome’s an¬
tipathy to women’s inferior mouth, as when he explained, “And besides, it is
not simply in speaking that one is heard: so how could women, who already
have difficulties being heard with one mouth, be heard speaking with two?”
[Bijoux, 27).
Although women’s voices are under-represented in this scientific litera¬
ture, that does not mean that medical and cultural views of female erotism were
lacking. Indeed, in many ways they were preponderant. Rousseau and Tissot
faulted onanism, like civilization, for softening the body and the nervous sys¬
tem. They opposed this effeminate physiology to the robust, virile body of sav¬
ages or peasants. “In becoming social and a Slave,” Rousseau explained,
“[man] becomes weak, fearful, groveling, and his soft, effeminate manner of
living ends up sapping his force and courage” (1755, 139).^^ A soft nervous
system and imaginative impressionability were intrinsically female characteris¬
tics. Therefore, the imagination itself was a problem of effeminate civilization.
Rousseau put it quite bluntly, “The imagination, which wreaks havoc among
us, does not speak to savage hearts” (1755, 158). The reason for this was the
absence, in the state of nature, of female deceptions or male sexual deferral.
Onanism was the inevitable product of this effeminate state of civilization,
where men took morbid refuge in the imagination because women did not sat¬
isfy them on demand.
Tissot and Rousseau contrasted the childlike innocence of the Arcadian
savage with the effeminate perversions of civilized man. But as we have seen, a
reversal of metaphors occurred in the early nineteenth century. The primitive,
the child, and the laborer were no longer the ideal but the problem. With the
advent of degeneracy theory, these three figures were lowered to the level of
women. They were consigned to the inferior rungs of the evolutionary ladder
and associated with caudal, primitive regions of the nervous system. Once Es-
quiroPs medieval notion of lovesickness had been cast aside, alienists perceived
the erotomaniac as a victim of imperative primitive sexual drives related to the
hypersexual cerebellar impulses lying repressed in women.
Doctors explained the pathology of male inverts as a form of hysterical ef¬
feminacy due to neuropsychic atavism. Like courtesans, the sodomitic prosti¬
tute and the poetic invert excelled in the subterfuges of makeup and language.
The sodomite, however, exploited factitiousness, whereas the invert embodied
it psychically: his very desire was artificial and self-deluded. As in the anti¬
onanism literature, the erotic imagination was the dangerous locus of these “un¬
natural” self-conceptions and liaisons. The invert’s predilection for pleasures of
the imagination—whether sensual or novelistic—was a symptom of a neuras¬
thenic exhaustion that would eventually pervert the “genesic sense” as well. The
late-nineteenth-century cultural preoccupations with elitist decadence and de¬
mocratic mediocrity (which haunted Huysmans’s des Esseintes) conflated sex¬
ual inversion with effeminacy, impotence, and imaginary delirium.
Erotic fetishism from its inception in the work of Binet was characterized
as a primitive erotic delusion. Although most of the cases described were men,
doctors linked fetishism to stereotypically female imaginative malleability and
commodity covetousness. At a time of deep political anticlericalism in the
Conclusion 163
Third Republic, physicians also construed female religiosity—exaggerated in

hysteria and religious-erotomania—as a primitive theological practice.
Thus although the literature we have reviewed mostly presented men talk¬
ing sex, doctors and novelists were hearing a female voice. Or more precisely,
they were listening to a vetriloquized female sex that spoke through doctors’
imagination with threats of irrationality, disorder, and primitivism.
This human beast was terrifying represented in Zola’s novel of that title.
La Bete hutnaine (1889). Zola’s entire Rougon-Macquart novel cycle traces its
psychopathic genealogy to a woman: Tante Dide, whose original act of adultery
with the insane, alcoholic Macquart spawned the degenerate family tree. Al¬
though she was “ardent, passionately amorous, moved to fits” for the first
eighty-three years of her life, she was reduced to a state of mute, hysterical cata¬
tonia throughout her final two decades {Docteur Pascal, 973). In the system of
Zola’s experimental novels, she was the first bad seed, the original sinner in the
Adamic Fall narrative that also preoccupied Morel in his theory of degenera¬
tion.^^ La Bete humaine “experiments” with her great-grandson, Jacques
Lantier, who suffers from a monomania driving him to seek erotic fulfillment in
slashing women’s throats. As he struggles to resist this impulse, he perceives his
degeneration as a form of hereditary pollution with prehistoric roots:
The family was not very stable, many had a chink. At certain moments he felt
it acutely, this hereditary chink.... (If t was like sudden losses of equilibrium
in his being, like cracks, holes through which his self escaped amidst a great
smoke that deformed everything. ...
Each time it was like a sudden crisis of blind rage, a continually reborn
thirst to avenge very ancient offenses, whose precise memory he had forgot¬
ten. Did it come from so far back, from the evil that women had done to his
race, from the grudge amassed from male to male since the first deception in
the depths of the caves? {Bete humaine, 1043)
This hereditary conceit (alluding to spermatorrhea) was not Zola’s invention.

He simply novelized a dominant theme of nineteenth-century medical and fic¬
tional literature evoking the erotic: la bete humaine crouching in the dark re¬
cesses of the individual and collective psyche was the primitive, pathological,
deadly erotic imagination, and its sex was female.
Gender was a major specter haunting the cultural imagination of the
erotic in France, but it was not the only one. A new territory of the erotic was
mapped out for battling a variety of social and cultural preoccupations: class,
race, nationalism, civilization, progress, and professional and philosophical
disputes. The medical and cultural imagination of the erotic, however, did not
simply squeeze subjects into rigid labels. These labels or identities mutated
constantly as individuals struggled to clarify, treat, or celebrate their sexiud
yearnings. They refined their sexual identity as they learned to narrate their cro-
tique and fallocate its history.
The erotic imagination had many closely interwoven histories. Personal
sexual histories are entangled with medical tales of’ sexualit\'. Fictional erotic
stories, in turn, relied on the new ideas and words of medicine even as medical
writers drew upon fiction to illustrate their theoretical fabrications. Enmeshed
in these narratives are traces of the changing social and political situation of
France: the revolutions (governmental and industrial), the rise of the bour¬
geoisie, urbanization, feminism, consumer culture, the \ravering fortunes of the
church, foreign wars and domestic class wars, colonization. Thus the erotic
seemed ever more intrinsic to the preservation of the species, the nation, the
bourgeoisie, and the patriarchy.
The many factors I have traced here are particularly French; however, one
could similarly examine the narratives of the erotic arising in other national
contexts. These would probably have their own peculiarities, but as we have
glimpsed in the cases of Germany and Britain, these were also interwoven into
the French story. We might well expect this to be generally the case since so
many of the “words and ideas” for speaking the erotic arose in France. Indeed,
the importance of the erotic in today’s psyches, politics, and society resonates
significantly vdth the construction of the erotic imagination in nineteenth-cen¬
tury France even as the narration of the erotic continues to be a territorv for dis¬
covery and contention.
In the United States, for example, the politics, merchandising, and pub¬
licizing of the erotic is a national obsession that takes myriad forms. These at¬
test to the growing importance of the erotic not just to private pleasures, but
also to group identities, consumption habits, public health, and all aspects of
popular culture. Conversely, new forms of erotic pleasure have emerged and
gone public thanks to these social pressures. In order to tackle these controver¬
sies thoughtfully and productively we must listen attentively to entangled indi¬
vidual, professional, and social narratives as we, in turn, spin our intimate and
our collective histoires erotiques.
A Psychoanalytic
From French
Auto-Erotography
to Freudian
Auto-Ergography
I always find it uncanny when 1 can’t understand someone in terms

of myself.
Sigmund Freud’
Readers familiar with psychoanalysis have no doubt

been struck by the uncanny similarities between the preceding eighteenth- and
nineteenth-century medical ideas and the theories that Sigmund Freud began
to develop at the turn of the century. Notions of infantile eroticism, psychosex-
ual development, childhood trauma or seduction, original bisexuality, primitive
erotic drives, and the psychogenesis of fetishism, for example, seem to belong
to the domain of psychoanalysis. Obscure issues such as the noxiousness of
masturbation or the role of olfaction in the evolution of civilization were also
preoccupations of Freud’s. I have assiduously kept Freud out of the picture in
165
order to avoid what historian Mark Micale (1995, 125) calls “Freudian histor¬
ical teleology”: the tendency to present the history of psychiatry as the gradual
anticipation of, or failure to perceive, Freud’s ultimate verities. Aside from
being ahistorical, such an approach fails to cast any critical light on Freud’s hy¬
potheses since these are taken as natural facts.^ In the case of the present study,
almost all the preceding material antedates Freud’s psychoanalytic theorizing
begun in the 1890s. French doctors first ignored psychoanalytic works and then
received them with hostility in the 1910s because of nationalist and profes¬
sional rivalries.^ Thereafter, psychoanalysis took root slowly because French
psychoanalytic institutions were riven by professional and personal infighting.
Nevertheless, psychoanalysis ultimately achieved broad cultural appeal after
1968 through its political deployment.^
Although Freud was unknown in France until the turn of the century, there
is no denying that psychoanalysis has had a tremendous impact on psychiatry,
the academy, and culture since then. In this concluding supplement I wish to
historically contextualize Freud in relation to the French literature on the erotic.
He was a genius, but also a man of his time. Part of his brilliance was in syn¬
thesizing, professionalizing, and institutionalizing disparate scientific ideas and
social concerns of his age. Ironically, he also recapitulated some of the processes
we have seen here: sexual confession and anamnesis transformed into scientific
knowledge and stimulus for fiction. In the final section, I consider how Freud
collapsed the roles of doctor, patient, and novelist into one as he transcribed his
life into a professional auto-fiction: \\\?, Autobiographical Study.
Nervous Energy and Biogenetic Histories
Throughout the nineteenth century the French were committed to organicist

and neurogenital theories of sexuality. To a certain extent they remain attached
to such biological conceptualizations of gender and sexuality.^ Historian Frank
Sulloway (1983) argues that one of the most important Freudian “myths” is
that Freud cast aside such biologism in favor of a purely psychological model
of psychosexual development. In fact, it was with much regret that Freud
abandoned an active research career in neurobiology and turned to clinical
medicine in 1882 because of his poor prospects as a Jew in Austrian academe.
Sulloway’s careful reading of Freud’s work shows that many of the common¬
place tenets of Victorian biology—degeneration theory, biophysics, psycho-
Lamarckianism, and Haeckel’s “biogenetic law” (that ontogeny recapitulates
A Psychoanalytic Supplement 167
phylogeny)—profoundly shaped Freud’s theories. They provided the hidden

foundations that allowed Freud to believe psychoanalysis was a science and not
just a metaphysical system as some French doctors claimed.®.
As we have seen in the preceding chapters, hereditary degeneration theory
dominated late-nineteenth-century pathology. Freud has been represented as
the slayer of this dogma. He did state, for example, that most inverts could not
be considered degenerates (1905a, 138). Generally, however, Freud accommo¬
dated his theory of psychoneuroses to hereditarianism.^ Freud (like Binet be¬
fore him) wished to explain the specific manifestation of a neurosis through ac¬
quired, psychological mechanisms involving the childhood experiences of
those with “hereditary predispositions” (Sulloway, 92-93).
Perhaps the most important aspect of Freud’s “crypto-biology” was his
electroeconomic theory of neurophysiology and pathology as epitomized in his
“Project for a Scientific Psychology” (written in 1895 but only published
posthumously). It would be too large a task to explain Freud’s elaborate and
fantastical theory of,nerve energies, cathexis, discharge, and repression.^ Suf¬
fice it to say that the “Project” utilized purely neurophysical mechanisms to
model psychological principles that were significant in his later work: primary
and secondary processes, the identification of dreams as wish fulfillment, hys¬
teria as a product of pathological repression, and other theories. The “Project”
also betrays Freud’s peculiar, reactionary belief in the pathology of onanism.
Hysteria, he wrote, was due to the premature loss of nervous energy through
masturbation (1950, 357).
Freud and his intimate friend and collaborator Wilhelm Fliess were cer¬
tain of the neurotoxicity of masturbation and coitus interruptus.® Throughout
their correspondence, Freud identified these as the cause of melancholia,
neurasthenia, and nasal disorders.^® Freud explained the pathology of mastur¬
bation—^what he called the “primary addiction” (1985, 287)—in mechanical
terms: “It can be further assumed that excessive masturbation—^which accord¬
ing to the theory leads to too great an unloading of E. (the end organ) [i.e., the
genitals] and thus to a low level of stimulus in E.—excessive masturbation ex¬
tends to the production of s. S. [somatic sexual excitation] and brings about a
lasting reduction in the s. S., thus a weakening of the p. S. [psychic sexual
group of neurons]” (1985, 99). As I pointed out in chapter 1, the belief m the
pathogenicity of masturbation had died out in France by the end of the nine¬
teenth century; however, doctors continued to view onanism as a symptom of
degeneracy. Freud, nevertheless, held on to views that seem to echo Tissot’s hy¬
draulic mechanism.
Freud constructed upon this mechanist biologism a vast psychology of the

unconscious, of repression, and of sexuality. The synthesis of these issues was
not a major concern of fin-de-siecle French psychologists with the significant
exceptions of Alfred Bmet and Pierre Janet. These two contemporaries had
been close colleagues, but later became academic and intellectual rivals. Janet
developed a complex, novel system of “psychological analysis” of the “subcon¬
scious”—a term he coined. He also pioneered the interpretation of dreams, the
cathartic cure of neuroses, and other psychotherapeutic techniques that Freud,
to Janet’s consternation, claimed as his own innovations. However, Janet never
especially focused on erotism. In fact, he objected to what he viewed as Freud’s
“dogma of pansexuality.”^^
Binet, as we have seen, was quite interested in sexuality and proposed an
associationist psychology of erotic attachment. In the Three Essays on the Theory
of Sexuality, Freud approvingly cited Binet as having been “the first to maintain
(what has since been confirmed by a quantity of evidence) that the choice of a
fetish is an after-effect of some sexual impression, received as a rule in early
childhood” (1905a, 154).Although Binet did not develop a general theory of
the unconscious, his theories of childhood erotic associations and of psycho¬
logical automatism (1886) were consonant with Freud’s dynamic theory of the
unconscious. Binet, quite uniquely in late-nineteenth-century France, also
proposed that infantile associations were a universal mechanism for the acqui¬
sition of erotic predilections. Furthermore, he suggested that not all erotism was
perverse, but \\rAipetit fetichisme was a normal form of erotism on a continuum
with pathological fetichisme. Nevertheless, Binet and his colleag ues saw
the “sexual perversities” as distinctly pathological and neurodegenerate.
Freud, on the other hand, universalized perversity. His theory of infantile
polymorphous perversity” suggested that perversity was not only on a contin¬
uum with normal sexuality but was the primordial erotic soup from which
“normal,” heterosexual, reproductive sex evolved.As Freud put it (after his
laudatory mention of Bmet): “The conclusion now presents itself to us that
there is indeed something innate lying behind the perversions but that it is
something innate in everyone, though as a disposition it may vary in its intensity
and may be increased by the influences of actual life” (1905a, 171).
To arrive at this conclusion, however, Freud relied on commonplace nine¬
teenth-century analogies between the evolution of the human species, the
progress of races and civilizations, the hierarchy of economic classes, and the
development of children. For Freud, the individual’s sexual evolution paral¬
leled the sexual stages in phyletic evolution from monads, to bisexual creatures,
to unisexual ones (Sulloway, 199). Haeckel had hypothesized this in 1891;
Binet {1887b) had developed the idea into a full psychology of microorgan¬
isms; and Delboeuf (1891) had proposed that civilized love vvâs just a behav¬
ioral elaboration of the spermatozoa’s primeval drive to unite with the ovumd®
We have also seen that nineteenth-century doctors drew parallels between indi¬
vidual psychosexual development and the evolution of eroticism from “primi¬
tive” to “civilized” man. Freud employed this model in explaining the genesis
of civilized, adult sexual shame, disgust, and morality (1985, 279). He also
hinted that the lower rung of civilization was analogous to that of peasants and
the lower classes (1985, 163). These ideas persisted in Freud’s thinking be¬
yond the period of his interactions with Fliess in the 1890s. In the preface to
Bourke’s Scatological Rites of all Nations, Freud wrote of defecation: “[T]he
chief finding from psycho-analytic research had been the fact that the human
infant is obliged to recapitulate during the early part of his development the
changes in attitude of the human race towards excremental matters which
probably had their start when homo sapiens first raised himself off Mother
Earth” (1913, 336). His use of “Mother Earth” is significant since he believed
a prehistoric male human’s first adoption of upright posture liberated him from
the sexual periodicity determined by female menstrual odors. Thus, bipedal-
ism not only prompted menstruation taboos, but also the development of
shame, morality, and the “organic repression” of anal and olfactory eroticism
(as suggested earlier by Broca). This was the first step, Freud argired, towards
civilization (and its discontents) (1930, lOOn.). Freud’s prehistoric narrative
had more profound implications: “With the assumption of an erect posture by
man and with the depreciation of his sense of smell, it was not only his anal
eroticism which threatened to fall victim to organic repression, but the whole of
his sexuality; so that since this, the sexual function has been accompanied by a
repugnance which cannot further be accounted for” (1930, 106n.).
Freud’s history of “normal,” civilized heterosexuality is, therefore, a tale of
prehistoric neurological repression of erotism recapitulated in contemporary
child-rearing practices. Although Freud and his French predecessors relied on
similar neurobiological principles and interwoven historical narratives of ero¬
tism, they arrived at somewhat different conclusions in their psychiatrization of
the erotic imagination. For Freud, the erotic imagination revealed a forgotten or
repressed childhood history, and it was a sphere for accomplishing therapy. For
the French, the erotic was a (perhaps widespread) taint of hereditary degener¬
acy and was largely irreparable.
Why did Freud and the French arrive at such divergent therapeutic con¬
clusions? One reason is that the two had different patient populations. As we
have seen, French doctors often wrote about individuals arrested on “public
immorality” charges who had been explicitly diagnosed with some variety of
sexual perversion. It is no wonder that these patients’ medical histories splay
out their sexual preoccupations on the surface. When Freud erected the foun¬
dations of his theory of sexuality in 1905, he had not treated any “inverts” or
indeed any adults who engaged in “perverse” sexual behavior.He admitted
that the information for his essay on “The Sexual Aberrations” was derived
second hand from the “well-known writings” of German sexologists and Have¬
lock Ellis (Freud 1905a, 135n.). (Of his French colleagues, he only mentioned
Binet, Fere, and Magnan.) Freud’s early analysis patients were apparently sex¬
ually “normal.” Perversity, if it existed, was not on the surface of their stories (as
in the French cases). Freud developed the technique of psychoanalysis to ex¬
pose the erotic imagination under the skin of patients’ narratives. Therefore,
the psychoanalyst’s interpretation took precedence over the patient’s original,
first-person history. One index of this is the relative dearth of patient voices in
Freudian texts compared to the abundance of first-person patient confessions
in nineteenth-century French medical literature on erotism.
While Freud lacked bona fide “sexual perverts” for his analysis of the
erotic imagination, he did not lack his own imagination, and he struggled to ex¬
amine its perversities. Like Rousseau, Freud used his autoanalysis as a univer¬
sal index case. He went further by turning self-analysis into a system of psy¬
chology, psychosocial analysis, and professional development (psychoanalysts
must still undergo personal analysis as part of their training). In this process,
the subject’s erotic narrative is displaced by the scientized, professional
retelling of Freud’s autobiography.
Freudian History or Self-Representation?
Freud never wrote a formal autobiography; therefore, his Autobiogiuphical

Study of 1925 is the closest we get to the form. In the introduction to this short
work, James Strachey noted the difficulty of translating the original German
title, Selbstdarstelkng. More accurate terms would be self-portrait or self-
representation. Strachey therefore coined a term to classify the essay: auto-
ergography (from the GxttVergon, work or activity).!^ He did not define this ne¬
ologism, but we might gloss it as “an account of one’s work or career.” Freud’s
Autobiographical Study is the logical text for examining the relationship of self¬
representation to the erotic imagination, medical knowledge, and historical
nairatives. The semantic ambiguity we explored m the “dangerous supple-
ment” of’ erotism recurs in this concluding section: Was the Freudian erotic
narrative an addition to or a substitution for other narratives, particularly the
history of his professional development through his self-representation?
Freud began his Autohiographical Study by noting that he had already
written a History of the Psychoanalytic Movement “which contains the essence ol
all I have to say on the present occasion” (1925, 7). The current article, there¬
fore, had to be more than a professional history. Echoing Rousseau, Freud ac¬
knowledged the difficulty of the literary task before him: “I must endeavor to
construct a narrative in which subjective and objective attitudes, biographical
and historical interests, are combined in a new production” (7). Constructing
such a biographicohistorical narrative should have come easily to Freud. He
had used literary and (pre)historic narratives as the backbone of psychoanaly¬
sis, and his personal experience, particularly his auto-analysis of 1894-1899,
had provided his fundamental psychoanalytic insights.
We have seen in the previous chapters that French physicians had freely
dipped into fiction for case material. Freud, like his French colleagues, had
praised authors and artists for their intuitive understanding of the human mind
and nature (1907a, 8). Yet Freud made use of literature in a drastically differ¬
ent way. In his postscript to Wilhelm Jensen’s novella. Gravida, Freud wrote:
“[Psychoanalysis] no longer merely seeks in [novels] for confirmations of the
findings it has made from unpoetic, neurotic human beings; it also demands to
know the material of impressions and memories from which the author has
built the work, and the methods and processes by which he has converted this
material into a work of art” (1907a, 94). Freud first published analyses of liter¬
ary works in The Interpretation of Dreams (1900), which included interpreta¬
tions of Oedipus Rex and Hamlet. The former was the basis for his notion of the
“Oedipal complex.” He had already described it in a letter of 1897 to Fliess as
a widespread experience: “I have found, in my own case too, [the phenomenon
of] being in love with my mother and jealous of my father, and I now consider
it a universal event in early childhood” (1985, 272; emphasis added).
Freud produced this and other fundamental insights of psychoanalysis in
1894-1899, a period when he engaged in intense self-analysis and suffered pe¬
culiar neuroses (neurasthenia, headaches, nasal and other disorders, anxiety
dreams, railroad phobia, etc.). He also recalled during this period that as a small
child he had slept wdth his mother, seen her naked, and become attached to an
ugly, clever, old nanny (1985,268-71). Biographers and students of Freud have
mythologized this period, describing it as an interval when he accomplished a
“heroic feat,” made all his discoveries, and was in a state of shamanistic “creative
illness.One analyst declared that the Freud-Fliess correspondence of the

1890s reveals how “Freud had no doubt that he had through an act of heroic
and unique courage undertaken to understand in himself, and others, what hu¬
mans had always sought to repress, mythologise, or rationalise in terms other
than the truth of experience itself
The theoretical conclusions of this self-analysis were publicized in The In¬
terpretation of Dreams, which relied on Freud’s interpretation of several dozens
of his own dreams. We need not speculate on the mystical nature of Freud’s
nasal and other neuroses, but we can safely say that Freud arrived at the central
tenets of psychoanalysis in the late 1890s, and that he himself believed that his
self-analysis and “little hysteria” were essential to these conceptual discoveries
(1985, 261). (One is reminded of Flaubert’s and Baudelaire’s similar com¬
ments on creative hysteria). In the introduction to The Interpretation of Dreams,
Freud confessed: “For this book has a further subjective significance for me
personally—a significance which I only grasped after I had completed it. It
was, I found, a portion of my own self-analysis, my reaction to my father’s death
[on October 23, 1896]—that is to say, to the most important event, the most
poignant loss, of a man’s life” (1900, xxvi).
The statement reflects one of the central beliefs of psychoanalysis, that
there is a latent, “true” meaning below the apparent manifestations of the psy¬
chic life. The pivotal moment in Freud’s recognition of the deceptive mecha¬
nisms of the psyche was his abandonment in 1897 of the “seduction theory”
(that patients had been actually sexually traumatized in youth) in favor of the
Oedipal drama, which reinterpreted these memories as phantasies. This radi¬
cal move was prompted by his abandonment of the conviction that his ovm fa¬
ther was a “pervert” who was responsible for the hysteria of his children, in¬
cluding Freud (1985, 230, 264, 268). In the Autobiographical Study Freud
simply explains that he made a “mistake” in believing patients’ stories were
“historical truth” (35).
From that point forward, psychoanalysis was defined by an attitude of
skepticism, even distrust, toward the patient, for “the work of analysis involves
an art of interpretation....”
The analyst, who listens composedly but without any constrained effort to the
stream of associations, and 'w\\o,from his experience, has a general notion of
what to expect, can make use of the material brought to light by the patient ac¬
cording to two possibilities. If the resistance is slight he will be able from the
patient’s allusions to infer the unconscious material itself; or if the resistance
is stronger he will be able to recognize its character from the associations, as

they seem to become more remote from the subject, and will explain it to the
patient. (1925, 41; emphasis added)
Not only is the analyst presumed to have interpretative superiority over patients,
but the psychiatrist enters the analytic struggle equipped with anticipated
stories. What were these tales behind the “manifest” content of patient stor¬
ies other than Freud’s own erotic phantasies elevated to the level of universal
master narratives. Freud himself was sensitive to this criticism that “interpreta¬
tion” might really be “suggestion,” and he felt obliged to deny it concerning
the Oedipal complex: “I do not believe even now that I forced the seduction-
phantasies upon my patients, that I ‘suggested’ them” (1925, 34).
Dream interpretation was a model of the psychoanalytic “art of interpre¬
tation”; stripping away the manifest “fagade” and “make-believe” to reveal the
true meaning, that is, the Freudian narrative (1925,43). As a powerful art of in¬
terpretation—of unmasking the artifices of the manifest—psychoanalysis
would later be applied to normal psychology and to religious beliefs.^^ Given
that Freud became such a master at stripping away the artificial, superficial sto¬
ries of life to reveal the disguised Freudian, erotic narrative beneath, it is re¬
markable that his Autobiographical Study makes no mention of his personal
erotic life or the self-analysis of the late 1890s that was so essential to the foun¬
dations of psychoanalysis. Why did Freud erase his own erotic memoirs? Four
years before his death, Freud wrote in the postscript to the Autobiographical
Study, “Two themes run through these pages: the story of my life and the his¬
tory of psychoanalysis. They are intimately interwoven. This Autobiographical
Study shows how psychoanalysis becomes the whole content of my life and
rightly assumes that no personal experiences of mine are of any interest in com¬
parison to my relations with that science.”2“^ The central phrase of this state¬
ment—“psychoanalysis becomes the whole content of my life”—can be un¬
derstood in two ways: (1) Freud dedicated his life to psychoanalysis; (2)
literally, psychoanalysis is entirely about Freud’s life. The two interpretations
are not mutually exclusive.
Perhaps more than any of Freud’s other works, {\\t Autobiographical Study
is dedicated to erecting the heroic myth of Freud as the solitary, embattled, mis¬
understood genius who single-handedly created psychoanalysis. He systemati¬
cally dovmplayed the early influence of colleagues and denigrated their work.^^
In this history of the seventeen-year gestation period of psychoanalysis, Freud
makes no mention whatsoever of his relationship with Wilhelm Fliess (which
Jones [1953, 287] awkwardly described as an “extraordinary experience” but

“a passionate friendship for someone intellectually [Freud’s] inferior”). Freud
erased his “dearest in truth” who was so critical to his self-analysis, theoretical
cogitations, and recovery from neuroses in the 1890s.^'’ The passionate friend¬
ship and the erotic recollections that spawned psychoanalysis were suppressed
in favor of an official, professional personal history—an auto-ergography—to
cloak Freud’s seminal auto-erotography.
Freud’s transformation of erotography into ergography mirrors and con¬
denses the activity I have documented throughout this book. Individuals’ strug¬
gles to elucidate and voice their erotic experiences were woven into a network
of broader scientific and cultural narratives. In being received, processed, and
diffused by biomedical and novelistic writers, these erotic imaginations
adopted new narrative forms that would shape the sexual identities of future in¬
dividuals. In Freud’s case, not only was this erotic self-examination conducted
in interaction with the commonplace biomedical ideas of the time, but it
founded a system of psychiatry that has had major responsibility for molding
the sexual subjectivities of individuals in the twentieth century. Even Freud’s
own sexual subjectivity and erotic history was not immune to the interpreta¬
tions and revisions of his science of psychoanalysis.
The erotic became a dynamic palimpsest of constant inscription and era¬
sure, blurring the boundaries between reality and fiction, truth and deception.
It IS a slate on which no one—neither doctors, patients, novelists, nor histori¬
ans—can read the “true” text. Each reader becomes as active a writer of their
own narrative as those authors whose auto-graphies are being analyzed.
I will close with one final citation from Freud’s postscript to [he Autobio¬
graphical Study to illustrate the inadequacy of any one attempt to fathom the
eiotic. First, recall Rousseau’s challenge and his proud claim of having painted
a human portrait exactly after nature and m all its truth” and “a unique and
useful work which may serve as the first point of comparison for the study of
men {Confessions, 3). In contrast, at the end of his life Freud seems disillu¬
sioned in the power of confession, or at least in his power to control the retelling
of his own confessions. Even after portraying his life story as indistinguishable
from the history of a science” uniquely dedicated to extracting and interpret¬
ing intimate erotic histories, Freud trails off into silence:
And here I may be allowed to break off these autobiographical notes. The
public has no claim to learn any more of my private affairs—of my struggles,
my disappointments and successes. I have in any case been more open and
frank in some of my writings (such as The Interpretation of Dreams and The

Psychopathology of Everyday Life) than people usually are who describe their
lives for their contemporaries or for posterity. I have had small thanks for it,
and from my experience I cannot recommend anyone to follow my example.
(1925, 73) Fortunately for psychoanalysts, millions of people have ignored
Freud’s final warning. Instead they have followed the example of Rousseau
and many nineteenth-century “sexual psychopaths,” placing the erotic at the
heart of contemporary Euro-American culture.
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Timeline
of Sexual
Perversions'"
1640 J. Ferrand’s De la maladie d’amour (1610) translated as Erotomania.

1710? Onania condemns masturbation and advertises quack cures.
1758 Masturbation authoritatively medicalized by S. A. A. D. Tissot.
1782 Posthumous publication of Rousseau’s Confessions (Part 1).
1791 Constituent Assembly eliminates French antisodomy laws.
1810 J. Esquirol develops the notion of “monomania,” including “erotic
monomania” and “theomania.”
1819 A. Matthey coins the term klopemanie, which C. Marc renders as klep-
tomanie in 1840.
1857 B. Morel publishes his Treatise on Degeneration. A. Tardieu publishes
his Medicolegal Study of Assaults on Decency.
C. Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du mal and G. Flaubert’s Madame Bovary ac¬
cused of violating good morals.
1861 E. Monneret describes necropkilie in his Treatise on Genercd Pathology.
Guy de Maupassant uses necrophile in 1884 in his short story “La
Chevelure.”
‘Several terms (such as voyeur and frotteur) have earlier, non-erotic denotations.
177
1864 K. H. Ulrichs calls himself and others with a “female psyche confined in
a male body” Urnings.
1868 First German usage o{homosexual and heterosexual, in a letter from K. M.
Kertbeny to Ulrichs.
1869 C. Westphal introduces the diagnosis of “Contrary sexual sensation.”
1877 E. Lasegue coins exhibitionnisme.
1878 A. Tamassia renders Westphal’s term into Italian as inversione dell’istinto
sessuale.
1881 J. Krueg employs the English term “perverted sexual instinct.”
1882 J. M. Charcot and V Magnan translate Westphal’s term as inversion du
sens genital and discuss o\h.trperversions sexuels.
1883 J. Richepin first uses voyeur in a prose work, Le Pave.
1884 J. Peladan mentions coprophagia in his historical novel, Le vice supreme.
1886 The first edition ofR. Y^sddii-Yktm^sPsychopathia Sexualis coins no new
terms; these appear in subsequent editions: e.g., coprolangnia, frot-
tage, zoophilia erotica (sensual excitement with animals), and zooeras¬
tia (copulation with animals).
1887 Binet theorizes “amorous fetishism.”
G. Mace describes thefrotteur in his criminological text, Unjoli monde.
1888 D. Stefanowski lectures on “tyrannism” (pathological cruelty) and “pas¬
sivism” (erotism in humiliation).
1890 R. Krafft-Ebing employs the terms Sadismus and Masochismus.
1892 J. Kiernan uses heterosexual in English to refer to those with “inclina¬
tions to both sexes.”
In Memphis, Alice Mitchell murders Freda Ward in a widely publicized
lesbian love crime.
1895 Oscar Wilde trials.
1896 M. A. Raffalovich coins the term unisexual for people with same-sex at¬
traction.
Krafft-Ebing first describes erotic paedophilia as a perverse attraction to
children.
1898 George Bedborough put on trial for selling H. Ellis’s Sexual Inversion.
1910 M. Flirschfeld describes the “transvestite” m a monograph by that title.
FI. Ellis in 1928 coins the terms sexo-aesthetic inversion and eonisrn to
refer to transvestitism.
1924 The English translation of W. Stekel’s Peculiarities of Behavior intro¬
duces the teims voyeurism paraphilia (interest m perversions).
1949 D. 0. Cauldwell first describes “psychopathic transexualism.”
Timeline of Sexual Perversions 179
1952 The first edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manned of Mentcd Dis¬
orders (DSM) groups the “sexual deviations” (including homosexual¬
ity) under the category of “sociopathic personality disorders.”
1966 J. Money develops the notion of gender identity disorder.
1968 DSM-II reclassifies the sexual deviations as a separate category of per¬
sonality disorders.
1973 The American Psychiatric Association votes to remove homosexuality
from DSM-II and replace it with “sexual orientation disturbance.”
1980 DSM-III creates a new class, the “psychosexual disorders,” including
psychosexual dysfunction, paraphilias (the fetishisms), gender iden¬
tity disorder (transsexualism), and “ego-dystomc homosexuality.”
1984 J. Money and M. Lamaez coin gynemimesis to describe men who live as
women without sex reassignment surgery. Men attracted to them are
“gynemimetophilics.”
1986 In Bowers v. Hardwick, the U. S. Supreme Court upholds the state of
Georgia’s antisodomy law.
1987 DSM-III-R deletes the diagnosis of homosexuality entirely, leaving the
paraphilias and sexual dysfunctions as the two main classes of “sexual
disorders.”
1993 R. Blanchard and P. Collins invent the term gynandroniorphophdes to de¬
scribe all men erotically attracted to cross-dressed or anatomically
feminized men.
1994 DSM-IV collects sexual dysfunction, the paraphilias, and gender identity
disorder under the heading “sexual and gender identity disorders.”
NOTES
Introduction
1. See “Secret CIA report reveals Saddam Hussein’s bizarre sex life,” The Na¬
tional Examiner, 12 March 1991. The tabloid press is an inextinguishable fountain of
these spurious or real sex scandals.
2. Ernest-Armand Dubarry served as a corresponding journalist in Italy early
in his career and was one of the most active writers on the question ol Napoleon Ill’s
Italian policy. He returned to France to cover the Franco-Prussian campaign and then
served as editor of(1871) mALeFigaro (1875), political director o{La Gazette
(1876), and collaborator on Le Ralliement (1877). He then succeeded Jules Verne as
popular science writer for the periodical Le Musee des families. He wrote m a variety ol
genres: poetry, history, geography, novels, short stories, and travelogues. He planned to
include twenty novellas in his series Les Desequilibres de I’amour. Although hugely pop¬
ular, only eleven volumes were actually published from 1896 to 1902 (Micale 1995,
192). These covered fetishism (1896a, 1898b), homosexuality (1896b), incest
(1902a), hermaphroditism (1897a), sadism (1898a, 1901), and other sexual perver¬
sions (1898c, 1899, 1902b), as well as hysteria (1897b).
3. Dubarry (1896b, 8) citing Tardieu (1857, 2).
4. It is due to these historical roots that psychoanalysts such as Robert Stoller
(1985, vii), can conclude that the “perverse” and the “nonperverse” share the same dy¬
namics of erotic excitement: hatred and the desire to humiliate. Also see psychologist
Louise Kaplan’s study o{Female Perversions (1991a) which argues that femininity itself
is a perverse gender script that functions as a defense mechanism. More broadly, she ar¬
gues that “socially normalized gender stereotypes are the crucibles of perversion”
(1991b, 128). Emulating Freud’s original approach, psychoanalyst Gerald Fogel asb,
in the introduction to his anthology Perversions and Near-Perversions in Clinical Prac¬
tice, “What can perverse sexuality teach us about the normal” (1991, 4). Can distinc¬
tions between the “normal” (or the “near-perverse”) and the “perverse” be logically
maintained when perversity is found to be at the origins ol the so-called normal? The
New York Times recently took note of this “perversification” of the normal (Goleman
1991). French psychoanalysts tend to maintain sharper distinctions between normal
and perverse sexuality. Analyst Gerard Bonnet, for example, declares that “perversity is
181
182 Notes to the Introduction
situated closer to eroticism or pornography than sexuality strictly speaking” (1993, 12).
For him, true “sexuality” is “complete union or procreation.” See Rosario (1992) for a
discussion of contemporary French sexology.
5. For example. Dr. Allan Hamilton in an article on the “civil responsibility of
sexual perverts” (1896, 503), blamed French writers for opening American eyes to sex¬
ual perversion. Duggan (1993, 795) also discusses the impact of French novels on
American sexology and popular culture. De Grazia (1992, 6) notes that the early pros¬
ecution of “obscene” novels in England was directed at French works.
6. See the Tresor de la langue frangaise. Previously, the word erotic denoted
amorous poetry or dispositions. There will be a detailed discussion of the etymology of
erotic and erotism in chapter 2.
7. One is reminded of Condillac’s Traite des sensations (1754) and Cabanis’s
Rapports du physique et du merrale de Vliomme (1802). The later “physiologies” were
small, humorous texts on students, porters, creditors, debtors, etc. Honore Daumier il¬
lustrated one: Les physiologies parisiennes (1850). One of Honore de Balzac’s earliest
works was Physiologie du mariage (1829). Bourget (1902) returned to the form to crit¬
icize “modern love.”
8. I discuss Cloquet’s “physiology of smell,” Osphresiologie (1821), in chapter 4.
9. Cf Foucault (1976, 25).
10. On the way clinical histories are shaped and used by the doctors for their own
professional purposes, see Hunter (1991). Epstein (1995) provides an excellent review
and analysis of the role of narrative in medical practice and diagnosis. Both of these
works, however, focus on doctors’ storytelling rather than the patients’.
11. Anthropologist Arthur Kleinman (1988) explores how “illness narratives”
help subjects make sense of their suffering.
12. Compare with de Lauretis (1984, 159) who favors a more social reductionist
understanding of subjectivity.
13. There was, of course, no psychoanalysis in the nineteenth century, nor any¬
thing like the various talk therapies common today. It was not until the 1890s that the
term psychiatry was even used regularly in France, and not until this century that
“physician-alienists” regularly adopted the label psychiatrist. On the use of the term
psychiatiist, see Goldstein (1987, 6—7). On the Golden Era of French psychiatry see
Castel (1976).
14. See Foucault on the “birth of the clinic” (1963) and the development of the
human sciences (1966); also see Coleman (1982) on the grovrth of the public hygiene
profession.
15. Today some of these pathologies fall under the rubric of “sexual dysfunc¬
tions, paraphilias, and gender identity disorder” according to the official nosology of
the American Psychiatric Association (1994). But these taxonomies have gone through
much contentious modification, as Bayer (1987) demonstrates in the case of homo¬
sexuality.
16. In two small books, Foucault introduced the public to the rich documenta¬
tion printed in medical journals. The two works, Herculine Barbin (1978) and Moi,
Pierre Riviere... (1973), are built around dossiers originally published in a nineteenth-
century medical journal, theAnnales d’hygiene pubhque.
Notes to the Onanists 18:3
Chapter 1 Onanists
1. hm (lonjmions (108-9; c»ri[jfia,sis added). I cite Roii,s.seai4’s work Ijy title.

2. 'I’fie Littrt; dictionary (187.3) only refers to tfie seminal and theological fle-
nolalions wfiich die Insor (k l/i Imiffw. jran(;am (1988) lists as “literary and archaic.”
'I'he ICnglish usage jxiUidimi in relerence to environmental contamination (rather
than ritual profanation) riates hack to at least H20. Ncvertheie.ss, the earliest asage de¬
notes seminal emission apart from coition (Oxford l<Ji.j!:^l,ish Diclion/iry, 2d ed.).
.3. Derrida productively exfdoits die double, almost conllicting, connotations of
“supplement” (1907, 207-9). First, it can reler to a comjilcrnent or extension of an ex¬
isting corpus, e.g., the supplement to a dictionary. Second, it can refer to an exterior ad¬
dition or surplus, e.g., a supfilcmentary lee for an exfiress train. Derrida mainly ex-
(ilores the sujifdemcntary nature of .symbols to real things (i.e., signiliers to signi(ieds),
and of writing to speech.
d. Robert Nye (1984, 199.3a) has esfiecially d(welo(>ed the theme of liri-de-
sieclc merlical and sociological anxieties over Frencfi national decay. It is a compelling
historical argument tliat I will refer to freijijently.
.3. I rely on Stengers and Van Neck (1984) for their extensive intellectual history
of masturbation from die Middle Ages to the nineteenth century. 'Fheir valualile docu¬
mentary work, lmw(rver, ventures no historical inter[iretations of the cau.ses and social
meaning of tfic “jrrmuk pmr d/' l/i m/isbirh/dion.” MoUirm was afso a common me¬
dieval term for cffcniina(y or sodomy, whicli led to an ea.sy a,ssociation between what
today afipear as clearly distinct “sins” (see liullough He Voght 1979).
('). St. I’aul’s first epistle to the Clorinthians (9:9-10) was a freijuently cited [mas¬
sage, which declares that the rmllhukoi (fireek for “soft”) would not inlierit the heav¬
enly Kingdom. Sec bo.swell (1980, lf)9-7) and llalperin (1990, 22-24).
7. f )n the history (d.semm (seed), see ffcrlacfi (19.38), Hdritier-Auger (1989),
and Si.ssa (1989).
8. 'Fhomasset and jacijuart (198.3, 2.39) discti.ss die “di.sea.se of continence” in
the works of Oalen, flonsliintine the African, anrl Avicemia.
9. MacDonald (1997, 4.31) errs, therefore, wfien he erjuates Hoorrle’s term
ff)mrrrmpassio with masturbation.
10. Stcngliers and Van Neck (1984,44) identify only two [ire-eigfiteendi-century
medical texts that contain unequivocal, if fleeting, condemnations of ma.sturbation.
'I’he fferman physician Knttmiiller exfilained in 1970 that gonorrhea rnigfit lie due to
“nefarious mn7Lslnpraimu'.rti.'‘‘ In 1709, the IJritisfi doctor hdward Hayriarrj vaunted
the u.sc of cold baths to treat im[iotence which he claimed was causerl liy “that cursed
scfiool wickedness of mastiirliation.”
I I. 'Fhcre is no extant first edition (dOnania. d'he liriti.sh Library catalog dates
a now destroyed first edition as “ 1710?” Stengers and Van Neck (207n. 1) date it 1715.
MacDonald (424n.4) dates it around 1708.
12. See Neuman (197.3,2) on the [lufdication history of Ow//wi«.
1.3. For more on early eighteenth-century anti-onanism literature, see Stengers
and Van Neck (1984) and d’arezylo (198.3, pt. 2, ch. 2).
184 Notes to the Onanists
14. For example, Spitz’s (1953) whiggish history presents the theory of onanis-
tic pathology as a transient aberration of medical science, while Szasz’s (1970,
180-206) antipsychiatric critique of the antimasturbation campaign portrays it as a
sadistic, Victorian medical witch-hunt. Focusing on a selection of particularly lurid
cases, Barker-Benfield (1976) and Masson (1986) have depicted these same doctors as
wholesale practitioners of medical atrocities against women.
15. Relying on a Freudian “repressive hypothesis,” Duffy (1963) proposes that
the anti-onanism campaign was a product of a so-called Victorian Age “synonymous
with prudery.” From the functionalist sociological perspective of Talcott Parson’s “sick
role,” Hare (1962) and Gilbert (1975) suggest that masturbation represented a silent
compact between doctors and patients: a positive diagnosis of “onanism” allowed doc¬
tors to overcome their therapeutic inefficacy, while patients’ acceptance of the onanist
sick role represented a secular, medicalized form of penance. Neuman naturalizes the
masturbatory phenomenon by suggesting that the earlier onset of puberty and the bour¬
geois delay of marriage led to an actual increase in the practice of masturbation precisely
at a time when bourgeois values prescribed economic and sexual thrift. Similarly, Hare
posits an actual increase in masturbatory behavior which he attributes to heightened
fears of venereal diseases. Rejecting both Freudo-Marxist and functionalist explana¬
tions, Tarczylo (1983) proposes instead that the anti-onanism campaign arose, para¬
doxically, as an intrinsic part of progressive Enlightenment ideology and a growing fear
of declining fertility in France. Laqueur (1989) echoes Tarczylo’s critique, adding the
suggestion that suppression of the “solitary vice” was associated with the regulation of
antisociality and a rampant imagination (1992). See Engelhardt (1985) on masturba¬
tion in Victorian America.
16. The sentence in italics originally appeared in Latin. I am grateful to David
Halperin for assisting me with this English translation.
17. As Ludmilla Jordanova has noted on the eighteenth-century popularization
of medicine: “Notions of sin, evil, crime and punishment are all incorporated into a
larger vision, which sets improper sexual activity in the context of class relations, family
dynamics, responsibility and dependency” (1987, 77).
18. Portmann (1980) portrays Tissot as a politically conservative “representative
of the Ancien Regime” and an opponent of the French Revolution who was faithful to
the sovereign of Bern and his patrician caste. Emch-Deriaz (1984), on the other hand,
argues that Tissot’s works reflect his ideological commitment to Enlightenment con¬
cepts of public health and welfare.
19. Tissot to Dr. J. G. Zimmermann, 3 February 1761 (Leigh 1970, no. 1257n.).
20. See letter from Tissot to Rousseau, 3 July 1762 (Leigh 1970, no. 1946).
21. Emile went on sale in Paris at the end of May 1762. It was condemned by the
Sorbonne on June 7, the Paris Parliament two days later, and the Archbishop of Paris
on August 28, and then burned in the streets. Tissot defended Emile and its author to
medical friends such as Albrecht von Haller and Johann Casper Hirzel (Leigh 1970,
nos. 2052 and 1994).
22. Rousseau to Tissot, 1 April 1765 (Leigh 1970, no. 4227); also letter nos.
1980, 2006, 2525, 2566 in Dufour (1930).
Notes to the Onanists 185
23. Elosu (1929) describes Rousseau’s chronic ailments and his longstanding
animosity towards doctors.
24. Tissot to Rousseau, 8 July 1762 (Leigh 1970, no. 1966).
25. The editor of Rousseau’s correspondence notes that “Rousseau could have
countersigned many of the pages of [Tissot’s Advice\, for example those where Tissot
decries rural depopulation, unhealthy city life, the overworking of common people,
etc.” (Leigh 1970, no. 1966n.a).
26. Rousseau to Tissot, 22 July 1762 (Leigh 1970, no. 2022).
27. As Aries (1960) describes it, the “discovery of childhood” as a distinctive
stage of life began only at the end of the seventeenth century and was marked by the rise
of children’s schools, the changing iconographic representation of children, and the
evolution of children’s clothes.
28. Barker-Benfield (1972) describes the anti-onanism campaign as an expres¬
sion of an American preoccupation with spermatic economy: the self-managed accu¬
mulation and wise investment of male energies. Similar concerns are expressed in
Lrench anti-onanism texts regarding both men’s and women’s reproductive economies.
See Elizabeth Williams (1994) on thephilosophes’ conception oUephysique et le morale.
The latter should not be simply understood in the current English sense of “morality.”
29. See Bloch (1974) on Rousseau’s impact on Enlightenment pedagogy.
30. Eor other critiques of Rousseau’s misogyny and antifeminism, see Kofman
(1982), Okin (1979), and Zerilli (1994).
31. For further analysis of Rousseau’s sexual and gender politics, see Schwartz
(1984).
32. Laqueur (1992) suggests that the concerns with the imagination outweighed
the inadequate and often contradictory worries about the somatic pathophysiology of
onanism. 1 argue that these went hand in hand.
33. On the rise of literacy and pornography see Dawson (1987). The word
pornography (as exemplified by Restif de la Bretonne’s Le Pornographe, 1779) originally
referred to writings about prostitution rather than sexually explicit fiction. The latter
was known as “licentious literature” in the eighteenth century (Kendricks 1988). The
history of pornography at this time—its “golden age” (Alexandrian 1989)—has been
the object of much recent scholarship. Aristocratic licentiousness inspired substantial
pornographic political satire, especially during the Revolutionary period (see Hunt
1991, 1993; de Baecque 1991). Growing secularism and anti-Catholic sentiment also
created a favorable climate for anticlerical pornography depicting libertinism in con¬
vents and seminaries (Wagner 1991). On the wide circulation of “clandestine litera¬
ture” more generally and its political functions, see Darnton (1991).
34. Also see Goulemot (1991, 10).
35. See Goldstein (1987, 90-91) on Gondillac’s influence on Pinel.
36. Bienville’s Nymphomanie was evidently quite popular in its time since it was
republished in seven French editions and translated into English, Dutch, German and
Italian. For what little is known of its obscure author, see G. Rousseau (1982). Also see
Goulemot (1980).
186 Notes to the Onanists
37. Here Bienville prefigured the later therapeutic recommendations on hysteria

by Robert Brudenell Carter (1853).
38. Rather than mention the word lesbienne himself, Tissot quotes Sappho:
“Lesbides infamem quae me fecistis, amatae” (beloved lesbians who made me infa¬
mous) (1760, 65). I am grateful to Katherine Park for this translation.
39. On political pornography featuring Marie-Antoinette, see Hunt (1991).
40. In fact, the diagnostic labels masochism mA sadism were not coined until the
late nineteenth century by Richard von Krafft-Ebing in the sixth edition of his Psy-
chopathia sexualis (1891).
41. For a psychoanalytic interpretation of the spanking scene, see Jury (1947).
Lejeune (1975, 49-85) provides a detailed narratological analysis of it.
42. I use the phrase “psycho-sexual genetic narrative” to refer, as Butler (1990)
does, to stories that attempt to explain the emergence of erotic desires. Freudian psy¬
choanalysis is of course founded on such personal genetic erotic narratives, and also
prehistoric ones, i.e., the Oedipal and totemic stories. I will return to these in the con¬
cluding supplement.
43. The terms mastupratiomanie and mastupratiomane seem to have been
coined by Dr. Debourge (1852), a member of the Conseil d’hygiene publique et de
salubrite of Montdidier, France.
44. Misch (1907, 1) claims that philological interest in autobiography was a prod¬
uct of the “European Enlightenment spirit,” and that the very word autobiography is of
late-eighteenth-century coinage. Fejeune (1975, 340) attributes the rise of the genre it¬
self to Enlightenment bourgeois values and the cult of the self On the importance given
to Rousseau as the father of the genre, see Frye (1957, 308). Huntington Williams
(1983) more specifically credits Rousseau with founding the Romantic autobiographical
form which actualizes the virtual self through new techniques of autofictionalizing.
45. The scathing review in the Journal des gens du monde (1782) found the Con¬
fessions boring, insipid, egotistical, and abusive of its readers’ indulgence. For other re¬
actions to the first part of the Confessions see Fejeune (1975, 49-50).
46. Starobinski (1957) discusses Rousseau’s fascination with his own virtue.
Blum (1986) examines Rousseau’s frequent invocation of “virtue” and the way the
image of the virtuous Rousseau was evoked for a variety of political purposes through¬
out the French Revolution.
47. Also see Faqueur’s analysis of masturbation and prostitution as antisocial
acts (1989).
48. See Weiner (1970, 1993) on the rise of socialized medicine and the con¬
struction of the “citizen-patient” in Revolutionary France. See Ackerknecht (1948) on
Napoleonic public hygiene. Coleman (1982, 21) discusses Restoration hygienists’
metaphors of the social body and its pathologies.
49. Virey(1828,79).
50. Foucault suggests that this preoccupation with heredity represented a shift
from the aristocratic cult of “blood” to the bourgeois cult of “heredity” (1976, 164).
But as we see here, the latter was also a concern with blood—a genetic blood that was
malleable to environmental and behavioral manipulations, unlike “blue blood.”
Notes to the Erotomaniacs 187
51. See Coleman (1982, 34-35) on French hygienists’ concerns over fertility.
Depopulation anxieties (probably ill-founded) had troubled the country throughout
the eighteenth century too as France saw rival nations outstrip it in industrial and mili¬
tary manpower.
52. See Fairchild (1961) on the political uses of the “noble savage” ideal. As
English politician and paleohistorian, Sir John Lubbock (1834-1913), put it in his
Prehistoric Times (1865), “The true savage is neither free nor noble; he is a slave to his
own wants, his own passions; . . . ignorant of agriculture, living by the chase, and im¬
provident in success, hunger always stares him in the face and often drives him to the
dreadful alternative of cannibalism or death” (qtd. in Stocking 1968, 41). 1 turn to
nineteenth-century anthropology in chapter 4.
53. See Nye (1975) and Pick (1989) on the mounting concerns during the late
nineteenth century over the urban poor and the working classes.
54. Also see P. Moreau (1882).
55. See Staum (1980, 292-97) on the disappointment of radical, materialist
Ideologues (such as Cabanis) with the rise of Bonaparte.
Chapter 2 Erotomaniacs
1. A peculiarly nineteenth-century diagnosis, “chlorosis” was a disease pre¬
dominantly of adolescent girls who were chronically exhausted and had a pale, green¬
ish tint. Some historians have reduced it to a form of anemia (Hudson 1977; Siddall
1982); Brumberg (1984) and Figlio (1978) provide more complex social analyses.
2. Baillarger’s observation is in a long scientific tradition: locating “femininity”
or female illnesses, particularly mental illness, in the female body (especially the sexual
organs). See Smith-Rosenberg (1986, 182-96), Smith-Rosenberg and Rosenberg
(1973), Shuttleworth (1990), Showalter (1985), Barker-Benheld (1976), Schiebinger
(1989), Laqueur (1990), and Russett (1989).
3. We can also guess that her and others’ erotolalia provided a definite titillation
for medical and lay readers of erotomania cases.
4. Erotomania was reintroduced in the American Psychiatric Association’s Di-
agnostic and Statistical Mariual-III-Revised (1987, 199-203) as a t>pe of “delusional
(paranoid) disorder” distinct from schizophrenia. According to the DSM-III-R the
defining erotic delusion is of being loved by another, usually a person of higher status,
a famous person, or a superior. “The delusion usually concerns idealized romantic love
and spiritual union rather than sexual attraction.” Often the subject makes insistent,
even threatening, attempts to contact the object of the delusion. Most clinical cases are
female, while most forensic cases are males who “come into conflict with the law in their
efforts to pursue the object of their delusion, or in a misguided effort to rescue him or
her from some imagined danger. The prevalence of erotic delusions is such as to be a
significant source of harassment to public figures” (199). Prior to the publication of the
DSM-III-R, psychiatrists debated the clinical autonomy of the diagnosis, with some ar¬
guing that “erotomania” is usually a symptom of schizophrenia or an organic psychosis
(Ellis & Mellsop 1985). Segal (1989) defends the validity of the diagnosis and the
188 Notes to the Erotomaniacs
DSM-III-Ks characterization of it, which he believes echoes that of Emil Kraepelin

(1921) and Clerambault (1942). The/4Alf-/F(1994) retains the condition largely un¬
changed as diagnosis 297.1: “Delusional disorder, erotomanic type.” For more on male
erotomania, see Taylor, Mahendra, and Gunn (1983), and Gagne and Desparois (1995).
5. See Segal (1989). G. G. de Clerambault resurrected the phenomenon of
erotomania in 1913 to describe a passing episode in a case oidelire de persecution. He
would later classify it under the general rubric of psychoses passionelles. Clerambault’s
erotomaniac syndrome (or “pure erotomania”) consists of the delusion of being in
amorous communication with a person of a higher social standing who was the first to
fall in love and make advances (1942, 346). Despite vehement assurances to the con¬
trary by the object of love, the subject remains convinced of this love; however, halluci¬
nations are absent. Clerambault noted a regular progress on the part of the subject from
optimism, persecutional feelings, to querulousness (1942, 331-32). He also believed
that although platonic love {Platonisme) predominated in many cases, it was only su¬
perficial. Nevertheless, he felt that Platonism was more common in erotomaniacs than
in the “normal man” because the erotomaniac’s passion was a matter of pride more
than love (335). For a more extensive discussion of Clerambault’s syndrome, see Signer
(1991). For more on Clerambault, see Papetti (1980). I return to him in chapter 4.
6. Taylor, Mahendra, and Gunn (1983), for example, erroneously credit Es-
quirol (1815) with the first psychiatric description and then overlook a century of writ¬
ings on “erotomania” until the work of Clerambault in the 1920s. Segal (1989, 1262)
also dismisses this nineteenth-century research. Also see Enoch, Trethovran, and
Barker (1967).
7. Tresor de la languefrangaise, s.v. “erotique” (B.l.a and B.3.b).
8. Dr. D. Jeanroi (1730-1816) in the EncyclopMie offered the two traditional
denotations of erotique.
“Chanson, poesie, espece d’ode anacreontique, dont I’amour et la galanterie four-
nissent la matiere. .. .
“Medecine, . . . c’est une epithHe qui s’applique a tout ce qui a rapport a I’amour
des sexes: on I’employe particulierement pour caracteriser le delire, qui est cause par le
dereglement, I’exces de I’appetit corporel a cet egard, qui fait regarder I’objet de cette
passion comme le souverain bien, et fait souhaiter ardemment de s’unir a lui; c’est une
espece d’affection mdancolique, une veritable maladie, c’est celle que Willis appelle
eroto-mania, et Sennert, anwr insanus" (12(2):912-13, s.v. “erotique”). It is odd that
the Encyclopedic refers not to the Frenchman Ferrand, but to Thomas Willis, who pre¬
sented the medieval, humoral view of erotomania as a form of melancholic, insane love
[amor vesanus) with heroical actions (gestis heroicus) (Willis 1670, 282).
It would take an extensive digression for me to discuss the uses of the word eros
from the Greek classics onward. Fet me note briefly that the word denoted passionate
sexual desire, in contrast to philia (affection or love). Halperin (1990) argues that
Greek eros was structured around a gender polarity: feminine/passive/receptive versus
masculine/active/penetrative. Even Plato’s attempt in the Symposium to construct an
ideal of reciprocal pederastic desire relied on conventional models of “feminine” re¬
productivity (Halperin 1990, 142-47). While eros might have been represented as a
malady, erotisme did not connote deviant or perverse sex until the nineteenth century.
Notes to the Erotomaniacs 189
9. See Jacquart (1983, 43-53). Constantine the African translated Ibn al-
Jazzar’s text Zad al-mmdjir (tenth century) under the title Viaticum peregrinantis. One
chapter of the Viaticum on '‘''amor qui et eras [or hereos\ dicitur” (love that is also called
eros/heroic) is the subject of an excellent monograph by Wack (1990). The Viaticum
was a widely recopied text and was the subject of numerous commentaries. It was a stan¬
dard medical textbook in Paris by the end of the twelfth century, and in Montpellier by
the early fourteenth century (Wack, 48). One of Constantine’s students, Johannes Affli-
cius, is believed to be the author of another translation of Ibn al-Jazzar’s text under the
title Liber de keros morbo (Book of the disease of heroes). This text gives heroicus a new
meaning: “those who suffer from the disease of heroes.” The text thus gave a clearer
model of the idealized, melancholic love-suffering of the chivalric hero (Wack, 46-47).
10. Wack (1990, 166-69) argues that the aristocratic predominance of the dis¬
order resulted from the psychic tension between men’s inordinate power over women
versus men’s ideal courtly subservience to their beloved. Wack further suggests that the
medical discourse on lovesickness allowed the medical students, faculty, and literate
male readers to master their anxieties over these conflicting cultural amorous conven¬
tions (173). Wack proposes that the subsequent feminization of heroic love in the Re¬
naissance may have been due to the availability of new Classical medical texts depicting
lovesick women (175).
Italian Renaissance medical authors continued decribing amor hereos as
amorous obsession. Carnal desire was often distinguished from true love as a bestial ap¬
petite or even as demonic possession (see Beecher 1992). In all cases, love and carnal
desire were represented as obeying heterosexual aims, even if for pleasure alone
(Pietropaolo 1992).
11. See Wack (1990, 175).
12. The English usage of “erotic” also arises from the conflation of “erotical
love” and “heroical love” in a nongendered fashion. The Oxford English Dictionary (2d
ed., s.v. “erotic”) credits Richard Burton with the first printed use of “erotical love”
during his discussion of “Love, or Heroical Melancholy” in The Anatomy of Melancholy
(1620, pt. 3, sect. 2, Memb. 2, Subs. 1). Also see Pigeaud (1992).
13. These cases appeared in the Memoires de la SociHe medicale d emulation, the
Ideologues’ medical society under the direction of Pinel (see Goldstein 1987, 49).
14. See Goldstein (1987, 153-58) for further discussion of Esquirol and mono¬
mania.
15. See E. Williams (1994, 8) on the multiple connotations of & moral at the
time.
16. Esquirol, however, subtly shifted from neuropsychological to neuroanatomi-
cal models in his later discussion of the “seat of erotomania.” The original 1815 text
with the 1838 variants given in braces reads: “II nous suffit d’avoir fait sentir que cette
maladie est une veritable alteration {de la sensibilite et} de la faculte pensante, pour
qu’on en conclue que les functions de Vorgane de la pensee {[he substitutes]
I’encephale} sont lesees. . . . L’erotomanie etant une maladie essentiellement nerveuse
{[he substitutes] cerebrale}, doit etre traite comme les autres monomanies nerveuses
{[he substitutes] affections cerebrales}” (1815, 192 {1838,354}). He was aware of the
increasingly important neuroanatomical and neurophysiological work of colleagues
190 Notes to the Erotomaniacs
such as Leuret, Foville, and Gerdy in the same decade. This research would have last¬
ing effects, which I examine in chapter 4.
17. Leuret (1830,200). Unless otherwise specified, all references to Mr. D-’s
case throughout this section are from Leuret’s article, which contains letters and
medicolegal documents by Mr. D-and numerous physicians.
18. Marc will be discussed at greater length in the following section. Guillaume
Ferrus served as a military surgeon in the Napoleonic army and became a disciple of
Philippe Pinel in 1814. He worked alongside Pinel at the Salpetriere and in 1826 be¬
came chief physician for the insane at Bicetre (Goldstein 1987, 127-28).
19. See Goldstein (1987, 175) on Esquirol, Marc, and Annales d’hygiene
publique.
20. On the history of the Charite de Gharenton, see Weiner (1993, 212-15).
21. Dr. A.-A. Royer-Gollard to the Ministre de la Police generale de I’Empire, 2
August 1808; qtd. in Cabanes (1901, 188).
22. Prefet de Police to the Ministre de la Police, 24 Fructidor, XII; qtd. in Ca¬
banes (1901, 183). Eever (1991, 600) notes that Sade was held at Gharenton under the
official designation of a “malade de police.”
23. Maurice Palluy, Directeur de la Maison Royale de Gharenton; qtd. in Ca¬
banes (1901, 196).
24. See Foucault (1976) and Nye (1989).
25. Foucault (1976) sees this starting at the end of the century with the “ento-
mologization” of perversities.
26. On C.-C.-H. Marc’s earlier career and the Conseil de salubrite de Paris, see
Weiner (1974).
27. On Charcot’s anticlericalism, see Goldstein (1987, ch. 9). On the iconogra¬
phy of hysteria, see Gilman (1993).
28. This narrative is compiled from Le Siecle (11 July 1849), the Gazette des Tri-
bunaux (11 July 1849), and Brierre de Boismont (1849).
29. It is clear from the newspaper and Gazette des Tribunaux articles that the
Bertrand trial was highly sensational and at times melodramatic. In this aspect it can be
likened to the later trials of female criminals described by Harris (1989a; 1989b, ch. 6).
30. Ambroise Tardieu reproduced a lengthy “extract” of Bertrand’s manuscript
confession which Tardieu claims to have received from Marchal de Calvi before his
death. It is not clear what may have been excised from the original. Epaulard (1901,
57-59) reproduced lengthy sections of Bertrand’s confession which may have simply
been copied from Tardieu, since Epaulard did not claim to have utilized the manu¬
script nor did he indicate its location. Shorter selections can also be found in Dansel
(1991). Dansel’s account is journalistic, sensationalist, and often highly speculative.
31. The theme of necrophilia or the fetishization of female body parts was espe¬
cially popular in fantastical literature, for example, Theophile Gautier’s Le Roman de la
momie and La Morte amoureuse (see Voisin 1981, 194-98; Todorov 1970, 57, 146;
Godfrey 1984). The association between love and violence would be given its most fa¬
mous literary yet “scientific” expression in Zola’s La Bite humaine (1889), where
Jacques Lantier’s slasher erotomania is represented as a degenerative taint tracing back
to the prehistoric enmity between the sexes {Bite, 99). I am grateful to Henry Majewski
for bringing Gautier’s stories to my attention.
Notes to the Inverts 191
32. On the legal history of mitigating circumstances in France at this time, see
Moulin (1982).
33. For more on the etymology of necrophilia, see Epaulard (1901, 9).
34. On the development of the concept of the “normal,” see Canguilhem (1966).
35. At this moment of extreme national unrest during the Second Republic, the
newspapers were filled with vitriolic anticlerical and antimilitary cries prompted by
Louis Napoleon’s Italian campaign and the state of emergency declared in France (see
Le Siecle and Courrier de France during the month of July 1849).
36. The defenders of so-called “free medical education” {enseignenient libre des
sciences medicales) wished to reintroduce clerical education at all levels including med¬
ical school (Latour 1849c). Frederic comte de Falloux—then Minister of Public Edu¬
cation and head of the clerical party along with Montalembert—named commissions
on higher education and on medicine charged with reviewing university admissions,
courses, exams, and degree granting. In principle, the commissions were charged with
putting into effect the constitutional guarantee that education be free (Guerin 1849b).
The commissions contributed to the eventual passage on March 15, 1850 of the loi
Falloux, which gave members of religious orders the right to open schools without any
professional qualifications and introduced strongly clerical councils to regulate the
universities.
In the summer of 1849, Republican physician Amedee Latour (the editor of
the Union Medicak) quickly suspected that something foul was brewing, since the com¬
mission included three clergymen and Jules Guerin (the editor of the competing jour¬
nal, the Gazette rnedicale de Paris and a member of the Academy of Medicine) (Latour
1849b). It was clear to Latour that “freedom” was a euphemism for deregulation and,
particularly, for weakening the dominance of the materialist, secular Faculty of Medi¬
cine of Paris in favor of spiritualist and clerical teaching in the French school system in
general. Glerical teaching had waxed and waned since 1789 according to each govern¬
ment’s attitude toward the church. The rise of Louis Bonaparte to the presidency dur¬
ing the reactionary wave after the February Revolution of 1848 brought about greater
state tolerance of and collaboration with the church. This spelled trouble for the Left.
In a series of articles and rebuttals that grew increasingly polemical and inflammatory,
the editors of the Union and the Gazette fought political battles that made explicit the
connections betw'een philosophical ideology and “medical authority.”
37. Latour (1849a, 409) cites this from a “political journal which supposedly
represents the opinions of M. de Falloux.”
38. Amy Taublin (1991) in the Village Voice explicitly made use of the word ero¬
tomania in her coverage of the hearings. She also noted the mention, during the hear¬
ings, of the recent movie Fatal Attraction, about a spurned woman driven to insanity
and murder.
Chapter 3 Inverts
1. Foucault (1976, 59) gives the date of birth of the modern “homosexual” as
1870, when Westphal published his contrdre Sexualempjindung article that constituted
homosexuality “less by a type of sexual relations than by a certain quality of sexual sen¬
sibility.” (Actually, as Feray [1981, 256] points out, the article was published in 1869.)
192 Notes to the Inverts
Chauncey (1982-1983, 116) and Halperin (1990, 15-16) are more circumspect in
distinguishing the multifaceted diagnosis of “sexual inversion” (which combined ele¬
ments of deviant gender behavior with physical and psychical hermaphroditism) from
the diagnosis of “homosexuality” (which focused on same-sex object choice). On the
importance of late-nineteenth-century medical science in constructing homosexuality
in diverse European and American contexts, see Greenberg (1988), Herrn (1995),
Lanteri-Laura (1979), Weeks (1976, 1977), Abelove (1993), Hansen (1989), and
Davidson (1990).
2. See Hemmings (1982, 151) on the legal persecution of Baudelaire’s work.
3. Lottman (1989, 134) and Dumesnil (1928) explain the publication history
and legal entanglements oiMadame Bovary.
4. Aron and Kempf (1984) discuss Tardieu’s career and Demeaux’s campaign
against onanism in boarding schools.
5. See Copley (1989, 24) and Sibalis (1996) on French legislation concerning
sodomy and “public indecency.” On the persecution of eighteenth-century sodomites,
see Rey (1989).
6. On sodomitical subcultures, see Trumbach (1987) and Rey (1987). On the
rise of pornographic representations of sodomy and tribadism, see Ragan (1996), Col-
will (1996), and Hunt (1993).
7. Lieutenant-General of Police Lenoir in his Memoires 1:289 (qtd. in Rey
1989, 137).
8. The semantic distinction between sodomy and pederasty had begun to erode
in the eighteenth century. Police records after 1738 increasingly used the the term
sodomite (Rey 1989, 145). Tardieu (1857, 198) was careful to dthntpederasty as “the
love of young boys” and sodomy as the general designation for all “acts against nature,”
regardless of the sex of those involved. Nevertheless, he too used the terms interchange¬
ably in his work.
9. See, for example, a case of sodomy, delusions of persecution, and murder re¬
ported by Reignier, Lag-ardelle, and Legrand du Saulle (1877).
10. Wliile Tardieu did not comment on the predominance of fifteen- to twenty-
five-year-olds in his data, I suspect that this group represents those engaged in prostitu¬
tion, and that older pederasts had more private venues for congregating that afforded
greater protection from police entrapment.
11. Several of these rectal signs had been described previously. Cullier claimed a
“great facility for immediately recognizing [pederasts], and he was rarely mistaken in
this regard.” A funnel-shaped appearance of the anus was “an almost certain sign, and
one could be almost certain that those who exhibit this are stained by the vice” (qtd. in
Reydellet 1819, 45).
12. Tardieu’s statements in 1857 about the specific mental characterisitics of ped¬
erasts undermines the oft-recited Foucauldian tenet that an epistemic break occured in
1870 between pederasty (as an act) and homosexuality (as a state of being) (see n. 1).
13. On the eighteenth-century association of effeminacy and sodomy see Trum¬
bach (1989, 134-35). On effeminacy and cross-dressing among eighteenth-century
sodomitical mock-religious “orders,” see Lever (1985, 318). On modes, see Halperin
(1990, 22).
14. Sade, through the character of Dolmance in La Philosophie dans le boudoir

(1795, 161-62), had also declared that sodomites were naturally and constitutionally
so, and that they had a distinctive, recognizable physiognomy, anatomy, and character.
15. See Rey (1987, 189) on eighteenth-century cross-dressing.
16. Newton (1972) and Garber (1992) make similar arguments concerning
cross-dressing in the modern American context.
17. Article 471, § 15 of the Penal Code of June 10, 1853 criminalized trans-
vestitism in public spaces and balls. The law was subsequently reaffirmed by police or¬
dinances of January 1, 1927 and February 2, 1949, so that transvestitism technically
continues to be an offense in France except during carnival. Transsexuals (i.e., those in
any stages of sex reassignment) must regularly submit medical testimony in order to
legally cross-dress in public. It is worth pointing out that earlier dress code laws existed.
The decree of 8 Brumaire II (October 29, 1793) was primarily intended to give free¬
dom of dress to male and female citizens, thus abolishing class distinctions: “Each is
free to wear whatever clothes and fittings of his sex that please him” (Duvergier 1825,
vol. 6; emphasis added). It nevertheless continued to criminalize travestissement in mil¬
itary or ecclesiastic garb, which was seen as a threat to social order.
18. Benedict A. Morel (1809-1873) was born in Vienna and brought up in
parochial boarding schools since his father travelled constantly as a supplier to the
Napoleonic army. Morel was initially enrolled in a seminary before switching to med¬
ical studies; his Catholic training strongly influenced his medical work. During his
medical studies in Paris he befriended Claude Bernard and was drawn into the circle
of alienist J. P. Falret at the Salpetriere. From 1848 to 1856 he was an alienist at the
asylum in Mareville, and then spent the rest of his life as director of the Asyle Saint
Yon (see Dowbiggin 1991, 118). Friedlander (1973) also points out the influence of
Prosper Lucas’s “laws of creation” (1847-1850) and of Gtxxmn Naturpliilosophie on
Morel’s work.
19. Morel’s treatise on degeneration appeared two years before Darwin’s On the
Origin of Species (1859); nevertheless. Morel’s Lamarkian theory of the transmission of
dysfunctional, acquired traits continued to hold sway in France throughout the nine¬
teenth century since French biologists strongly resisted Darwin’s ideas (see Buican
1984).
20. Nye (1984) and Pick (1989) carefully explore the medical and social utility
of the degeneration diagnosis in Europe.
21. See Dowbiggin (1991) for a social and professional history of degeneration
theory in late-nineteenth-century France, emphasizing its importance—as a credibly
somatic and scientific theory—in defending psychiatric professional power in the face
of the waning credibility of Esquirolian moral therapy and of growing antipsychiatric
sentiment in the 1860s.
22. See Foucault (1963) and Ackerknecht (1967) on the rise of anatomico-
pathological correlation in the Faculty of Medicine of Paris in the early nineteenth cen¬
tury. Arnold Davidson (1990) has suggested that there was a radical break between the
anatomical and psychological modes of conceptualizing mental disorders, particularly
“sexual perversion.” Although these two perspectives were very different conceptually, I
demonstrate here that there was not an epistemic break between them but a giadual
transition from the anatomical to the psychological approach. Castel (1976) documents
the general ascendency of psychiatry in France.
23. The Societe medico-psychologique was founded in 1852 after an abortive
attempt to start it in the tumultuous year 1848. Its membership roster included the
prominent alienists ol the time. Its official organ, the Annales niMico-psychologiques
(which first appeared in 1843) was the first journal dedicated to psychiatry in France.
24. Goldstein (1987) traces in detail the professional history of psychiatry/
alienism in nineteenth-century France and its growing presence in the courtrooms as a
means of accruing professional power.
25. In his roster of “genesic perversions,” Legrand du Saulle included a
necrophile as well as an eleventh-grade student who was arrested for performing “buccal
masturbation” (presumably fellatio) upon a fifty-seven-year-old man under a bridge.
The case appears to have grabbed the doctor’s attention as a case of “reasoning insanity,”
not primarily because of the sexual activity but because of the fellator’s youth and the fact
that the adolescent performed the activity outside in the chill of winter (1876, 444).
26. llza Veith (1965) notes that hysteria in men was briefly reported by Aretaeus
and Galen (both of the second century), but male hysteria was ignored for a millenium
and a half (Veith, 22, 38). She discusses several other doctors who were significant to
the male hysteria diagnosis. Charles Lepois (1563—1633) first clearly argued that hyste¬
ria was a cerebral disorder and therefore could affect both men and women, but he did
not succeed in weakening the uterine theory of hysteria. Similarly, physiologist and neu¬
roanatomist Thomas Willis (1622-1675) proposed the cerebral seat of hysteria. It was
Thomas Sydenham (1624—1689), however, who most convincingly claimed that hyste¬
ria was a mental disorder due to the “faulty disposition of the animal spirits” rather than
of the uterus or semen. Although this neurological etiology meant that it could affect
men and women ecjually, Veith argues that Sydenham avoided controversy by designat¬
ing the masculine version of hysteria as “^pochondriasis.” William Cullen (1712-
1790) repopularized the uterine theory of hysteria, broadening the pathophysiology to
include disorders of menstruation and the ovaries. Although Scipion Pinel (1844, 179)
propounded the neuropsychological pathology of hysteria, he still considered it a dis¬
ease of women since it was a “genital neurosis” like nymphomania or furor uterinus.
Also see the thoughtful revision of the history of hysteria by King (1993).
27. On hysteria as a caricature of femininity see Smith-Rosenberg (1986, 215)
and Showalter (1993).
28. Dr. Yver, in the service of Dr. Lacassagne in 1872, reported in Klein (1880,
case no. 41). Also see Stoickesco’s and Henriet’s cases reported by Petit (in Klein, case
nos. 42 and 27), Michea (1865b) (precocious intelligence, “little inclination for corpo¬
ral exercises”). Scipion Pinel described a young man with the classicalhystericus
whose “genital organs were poorly developed; he had never known women, he said; he
had a weak constitution, pale, feminine skin, no beard, little hair” (1844, 423).
29. Other findings described are; “caracteres de feminisme” (Ledouble 1879);
inlantihsm and effeminacy, very impressionable mother (Lancereaicx 1884); “the son
IS hysterical like the mother” (Gschwender 1869). Also see Petit’s thesis of 1875 (re¬
ported in Klein, no. 59), Gouty and Arou (in Lallemand’s thesis, 1877; reported in
Klein, nos. 75, 71).
30. Jacques-Joseph Moreau (de Tours) (1804-1884) was born in Montresor,

Indre-et-Loire, to a father who served in Napoleon’s army. He completed his medical
training in Paris and did his internship under Esquirol at Charenton Asylum. He estali-
lished himself at Bicetre Hospital, where a controversy over the etiology of mental disease
was raging; he sided with somaticist hereditarians. He claimed that an inherited nevrosite
(a dynamic nervous lesion) underlay mental illness. Following along Morellian lines,
Moreau argued in La Psychologu morbide that heredity was a strong pathological element
in mental illness. For more information on Moreau, see Dowbiggin (1991, ch. 3).
31. Smith-Rosenberg (1986, 206) describes the same association between hys¬
teria and masturbation in late-nineteenth-century America.
32. From Petit’s thesis (1875), reported in Klein (1880, case no. 62). See also
Bouneau’s thesis on hysteria (1817), reported in Briquet (1859, 15), which describes
a small, thin, weak hysterical man who had abandoned himself to masturbation in
childhood.
33. It should be noted that in 1881 Fabre retreated from his earlier position that
effeminacy was pathognomonic for male hysteria. His change of opinion was mainly
prompted by August IGein’s thesis (1880), which forcefully argued that effeminacy was
not a necessary or even regxtlar feature of the disease.
34. Goldstein (1991) argues that Flaubert used his hysteria to gain a subversive,
androgynous gender position from which to write of women’s experience. Wliile one
can interpret hysteria to have been Flaubert’s muse, Flaubert instead complained that
his hysterical, feminine hypersensitivity—like masturbatory exhaustion—^was the cause
of his bouts of literary impotence; “Each attack... was a seminal loss of the picturesque
faculty of the brain” (Flaubert to Colet; qtd. in Dumesnil 1905, 430).
35. Steakley (1975) examines the history of antisodomy legislation and homo¬
sexual rights in modern Germany.
36. Ulrichs derived the appellation Urning from Pausanias’s praise of Uranian or
celestial pederasty m Plato’s Symposium (see Halperin 1990, 16). Ulrichs’s works on
Uranian love, originally published from 1864 to 1879, were reprinted in 1898 by Mag¬
nus Hirschfeld.
37. For more on Ulrichs’s scientific basis for the “inversion” model, see Kennedy
(1997). For more on the inversion model’s subsequent impact on sexology, see Hekma
(1994) (although this is a rather meliorist analysis critical of effeminate homosexuals).
38. For more on Ulrichs and the subsequent campaigns to overturn Paragraph
175, see Kennedy (1988), Steakley (1975), and Oosterhuis (1991).
39. The outpouring of German articles in the 1870s on contrary sexual sensation
includes publications by Schminke (1872), Scholz (1873), Gock (1875), Servass
(1876), Westphal (1876), Stark (1877), and Krafft-Ebing (1877).
40. Krafft-Ebing distinguished thirteen “congenital” cases from five “tempo¬
rary” cases of contrary sexual sensation. Widely admired as the founder of modern sex¬
ology, Krafft-Ebing came from a politically liberal family; his maternal grandfather had
been a liberal law professor at Heidelberg University. He received his medical degree
there in 1863 and took up teaching and practice in psychiatry. His interest in “inverts”
began when he encountered the writings of “Numa Numantius” (Karl H. Ulrichs) in
1866. Krafft-Ebing’s great encyclopedia of sexual perversions, Psychopathia Sexualis
(1886), grew rapidly through twelve editions and firmly established his leadership in
sexology until the advent of Freud. Also see Grimm (1995).
41. Apter (1991, 17) analyzes the fin-de-siecle history of fetishism from a
Freudian perspective to argue that Charcot and Magnan’s article turned all fetishists
into suspected homosexuals. Instead, I argue that Charcot and Magnan viewed “inver¬
sion” as just one variant of a broader “sexual perversion” diagnosis (what would later be
called “fetishism”).
42. Krafft-Ebing originally distinguished two categories of Perversion des
Geschlechtstriebs: “1. Es besteht geschlechtliche Neigung zu personen des anderen
Geschlechts, aber die Art der Befriedigung des Triebs ist eine perverse, a) Falle von
Mordlust als potenzirter Wollust bis zur Anthropophagie, b) von Nekrophilie. 2. Es
besteht instinctiver Abscheu gegen Vermischung mit Personen des anderen Geschlechts
und als Aequivalent des Defects normaler Geschlechtsempfindung geschlechtliche
Empfindung gegenuber Personen desselben Geschlechts. . . . Falle sogenannter con-
trarer Sexualempfindung.” (1877, 301).
43. See Krafft-Ebing (1894, 14-15). For more on his efforts to repeal Paragraph
175, see Oosterhuis (1997).
44. Chevalier, however, complained in his thesis on inversion that “the French
language was truly tortured before reaching the expression of inversion” (1885, 14).
See his list of competing terms further on.
45. Tamassia’s perceptive formulation of the problem is worth quoting in full:
“Noi non possiamo con molta precisione definire I’abnorme stato psicologico, di cui ci
occupiamo. La parola inversione e troppo vaga: essa include due idee: Tuna che I’indi-
viduo, pur riconoscendosi di un dato sesso, psicologicamante sente tutti gli attributi del
sesso opposto, ed in questa specie di dualismo tra sentimento della propria individual-
ita e materialita dell organismo, modella tutti i suoi pensieri, limitandosi pero al puro e
semplice riconoscimento di questo terribile stato; Paltra che Pindividuo, posseduto
egualmente da questa alterazione dell’istmto, appetisce soddisfare il proprio istinto ses-
suale su individui del proprio sesso.” (1878, 99).
46. These points had already been stated by Klein in 1880. On Charcot’s devel¬
opment of the diagnosis of male hysteria, see Micale (1990, 1995) and Evans (1991).
47. On French anxieties concerning national decay, infertility, and emasculation
see Nye (1984, 1989, 1993a).
48. The Italian is refenng to the character of Baptiste, the groom-loving valet in
Zola’s Iiz Curk (1871, 591). As I will explain shortly, the Italian’s confession (which I
cite as “Invert”) was published anonymously in a medical journal in 1894-1895. Its
date of composition is uncertain. Setz (1991, 82) estimates that it was written in 1887
or 1888 based on the author’s references to historical events. Alternatively, the docu¬
ment can be approximately dated to 1889 since the Italian author wrote to Dr. Laupts
upon encountering the 1896 publication of the confession, and Saint-Paul (1930,
115n.2) notes that this was seven years after the original letters were sent to Zola.
49. Undated letter from the Italian invert to Dr. Laupts; qtd. in Saint-Paul
(1930,115).
50. For the various diagnoses of Zola as a pathological writer, see Toulouse
(1896) and Nordau (1893, 2:456). For more on the medical attach of Zola, see Mar-
tineau (1907), Rolet (1907), and Pick (1989, 76-78).
51. From Zola’s thank-you note of 16 April 1896 to Marc-Andre Raffalovich, for
the gift of the latter’s EUranisme et Vunisexualite (qtd. in Allen 1966, 221).
52. Critiques related by Laupts (1907, 837).
53. The italicized paragraph was censored in the original text (Invert 1895,228),
but appeared in Latin in the later versions. My thanks to David Halperin for this trans¬
lation from the Latin.
54. His obscurity has persisted since most modern scholars of homosexuality cite
his work without discussing his life or contributions. See for example, Lanteri-Laura
(1979) and Greenberg (1988). Unfortunately, Garden’s essay (1993) suffers from fac¬
tual errors and a hagiogiaphic approach that distorts Raffalovich’s writings and politics.
55. For examples of this neoconservative approach to gay rights in the United
States see Kirk and Madsen (1989), and Sullivan (1995).
56. Sewell (1963, 22). Also see Ellman (1988, 282, 391-92).
57. John Gray’s father had been a carpenter, but the young Gray had managed to
educate himself and enter the civil service as a postal clerk and then a librarian in the For¬
eign Office. He was an aspiring poet—a talent which may have attracted Wilde as much
as Gray’s boyish loob. In any case, Wilde vaunted Gray’s artistry and had promised to
cover the expenses for his first collection of poems, Silverpoints (1892). The choice of
the hero’s name in Wilde’s 4 Portrait of Dorian Gray was probably the main token of af¬
fection to John since the character resembles Wilde more than Gray. The young poet
nevertheless took to signing himself “Dorian” in letters to Wilde (Ellman 1988, 308).
58. The London Times, 18 June 1894, qtd. in Sewell (1963, 20).
59. His choice of patron saint betrays a certain naughty humor. Saint Sebastian
(the patron of archers, usually depicted as a seminaked, bound youth pierced by ar¬
rows) had long been an object of pederasts’ veneration. The iconographically homo-
erotic saint was one of Wilde’s favorite painted subjects and he used the name as his
alias in France (Ellman 1988, 71n.).
60. For these and other details on Raffalovich, see Sewell (1963, 1968), McGor-
mack (1991), and Ellman (1988).
61. Homosexual author and arts critic Arthur Symons met Ellis in 1888 and they
became lifelong friends. They were housemates for a while and frequent travel com¬
panions. During their trip to Paris in 1890 they attended one of Gharcot s public lec¬
tures at the Salpetriere and a meeting of the Paris Anthropological Society; they also met
Huysmans and Remy de Gourmont, among other literary notables. In 1899 Symons
published The Symbolist Movement in Literature based on his readings of and personal
acquaintance with many Symbolist authors. He and Ellis published translations of Zola
novels [TAssomoir and Germinal, respectively). It was through Symons that John A.
Symonds first inquired in 1892 about the possibility of Ellis commissioning a volume
on sexual inversion; this would later flower into Ellis and Symonds s Sexual Inversion
(1896). For these and other details on Symons, see Grosskurth (1980).
62. Respectively, these three points were advanced by: (1) Gharcot and Magnan
(1882) (2) Magnan (1885a) and Serieux (1888); (3) Laurent (1894).
63. See Laupts’s questionnaire (1894, 107) and Ghevalier (1893, 39).
64. (1985), s.v. “homosexualite.”
65. Raffalovich’s medicomoral apologia gained currency among twentieth-
century French homosexuals, notably Andre Gide and Henry de Montherlant. On Gide
and his apologia for “normal,” virile pederasty in Corydon, see Pollard (1991) and
Lucey (1995). On Montherlant’s archconservative nationalist politics and praise of
masculinity, see Mosse (1985, ch. 8). Echos of Raffalovich are also heard in subsequent
conservative, Roman Catholic, French homosexual organizations (see Rosario 1992).
The conservative, rightist aspects of Raffalovich’s sexual politics are completely erased
by Cardon (1993).
66. A respected psychologist, philosopher, and hypnotist. Max Dessoir (1867-
1947) proposed that pubescent children were in a stage of “undifferentiated” sexuality
where libidinal drives could become attached to either sex or even to animals. This was
all quite normal, for it was followed by a stage of “differentiation” where the libido fo¬
cused on heterosexual relationships. Some children, however, never escaped these “em¬
bryonic” libidinal attachments and retained homosexual, bisexual, or other perverse
orientations (1894).
Albert Moll (1862-1939) studied medicine in Berlin, Vienna, London, and Paris
(with Charcot), and also learned hypnotic therapy from Hippolyte Bernheim in Nancy.
He first gained a reputation for his research in hypnotism (1889). In Moll’s monograph
Kontrdre Sexualempfindung (1891), he pointed out the circularity of the degeneration
theory of inversion, where homosexuality served as both symptom and diagnosis. He
believed instead that inversion was just one of the natural variants of the sexual instinct.
See Sulloway (1983, 298-305) for his discussions of Dessoir and Moll.
67. See Herdt’s (1989) cross-cultural review of the coming out process.
68. On homosexual bars see Benstock (1989). On the cultural chic of homosex¬
uality at the time, see Weber (1986, 37). On working-class lesbian culture, see Canade
Sautman (1996).
69. Hirschfeld was an early German pioneer in sexology and an active cam¬
paigner for homosexual rights. For more on Hirschfeld, see Charlotte Wolff’s biography
(1986). Although Raffalovich (1905,283) bravely argued for the equitable treatment of
unisexuals, he vigorously opposed Hirschfeld’s Scientific and Philanthropic Commit¬
tee because of the “sexual anarchy” and excessive sexual freedom he believed the Com¬
mittee promoted. Steakley (1997) discusses the polities of Hirschfeld’s sexology.
70. I borrow the neologism unknowing from Sedgwick (1988), who uses it to
designate the way in which the lack of knowledge, or a willful ignorance, can be as much
a source of power as any purported knowledge.
71. See Park (1997) on Renaissance concerns over clitoral hypertropy and
sodomy.
72. On Enlightenment representations of “tribades,” see Merrick (1996) and

Colwill (1996). On the novelistic representation of lesbianism, see Aron and Kempf
(1979, 148-50), and Marks (1979).
73. On the rise of popular literary images of Sappho, particularly in pseudosci¬

entific novels, see Albert (1993).
74. In the United States—particularly since the wave of “gay liberation” and
public visibility sparked by the Stonewall Riot m 1969—fictions of homosexuality es¬
pecially have served the nationalist cause. During the Gulf War (1990-1991), Iraq’s
President Saddam Hussein was portrayed as a transvestite, sadistic, pederast {National
Examiner, 12 March 1991). T-shirts sporting an image of a camel with Hussein’s face
Notes to the Fetishists 199
for an anus declared patriotically, “America Will Not be Saddani-ized” (see Goldberg
1992,1-5). Homosexualizing the enemy and protecting the United States from homo¬
sexual invasion were a unified strategy of defense. The U.S. military, quite literally,
feared a homosexual invasion in 1993 when threatened by President Bill Clinton with
the open admission of gays into the armed services. U.S. television viewers were treated
to grainy footage of showering enlisted men as soldiers confessed their fears of being
cruised by the impending hoards of queers clamoring to enter the services. These sol¬
diers’ anxieties (or fantasies) of homosexual objectification and scopophilic feminiza¬
tion clearly outweighed any concerns over flashing on millions of television screens.
Given the incessant mention of AIDS throughout the debate, one imagines that these
soldiers feared a double contagion: both AIDS and homosexuality. Their generals’
paranoid fabrications of the homosexual menace strangely mirror the very neuropsy¬
chiatric unfitness for which homosexuals were originally screened out by the Selective
Service in 1940 (Medical Circular No. 1; also see Berube 1990, 11-5).
75. In this Platonic dialogue, Socrates tells Phaedrus the following story. Thoth
(the god of numbers, geometry, letters, and games) offers Thamos, King of Egypt, let¬
ters {grammata) as a means of making Egyptians wiser and of improving their memory.
It will be an elixir {pharmakon) of memory and wisdom, Thoth promises. Thamos re¬
jects letters, predicting that they will produce forgetfulness because people will come to
rely on alien marks rather than their own memory. “You have discovered an elixir not of
memory,” Thamos declares, “but of reminding” {Phcedrus, 274c-275b). Writing
merely produces an appearance of learning rather than true learning. Instead of a cure
for forgetfulness, tht pharmakon of writing (logos) is rejected as an artifice of learning: a
poison of memory and knowledge.
Chapter 4 Fetishists
1. Binet cites Max Muller for the phrase “culte des brimborions,” but the
French translation of Muller’s Lectures on the Origins and Growth oj Religion (1878)
never uses the phrase. The translation talks about the “respect superstitieux pour de
veritables brimborions” (1878a, 59), which is different in tone than the original Eng¬
lish version of this passage: “the superstitious veneration of mere rubbish” (1878b, 65).
Nevertheless, after Binet’s article, the term “culte des brimborions” was cited regularly
by writers on sexual fetishism. Muller’s lecture will be discussed in greater detail later.
2. I cite Flaubert’s fiction by the title of the work and page number in the Plei-
ade edition of his (Euvres.
3. Gharles de Brosses, president of the Dijon Assembly, published a com¬
pendium of existing exploration narratives of the South Pacific, Histoire des naviations
aux terres australes (1756). De Brosses was better known for his Lettres familims sur
ritalie and his Traite sur la formation mechanique des langues (1765). For more on de
Brosses, see lacono (1992, 59-64).
4. Adding to the etymology of the word, de Brosses explained that it was also de¬
rived from the Latin fatum or fanum, meaning enchanted, divine, or oracular. Muller
(1878a, 58) argued that this etymology was false and had been invented to further de
Brosses’s aim of erecting the notion of fetishism as a religion. Indeed, de Brosses
200 Notes to the Fetishists
claimed that savages and primitives deify the first object they encounter that “flatters
their caprice” (21): pebbles, bones, shells, flowers, mountains, animals (18). He in¬
sisted, nevertheless, that fetishism was not idolatry, since the fetish was worshipped for
its own sake and not because it was an image or representation of a god (20). The sav¬
age mind was supposedly too infantile to engage in symbolic activity; according to de
Brosses, fetishism “corresponds to the degree zero of the human faculty of representa¬
tion and symbolization” (lacono 1992, 54). Pietz (1985, 10) points out that the fetish
was first conceptualized as a material object in close relation to the body (since certain
fetishes were always worn). They could control the body, its desires, health, and identity.
5. Contemporary anthropologists have rejected most of de Brosses’s observa¬
tions on fetishism. Some anthropologists have even questioned whether “fetishism” ex¬
ists at all as a religious system anywhere. For a contemporary review of fetishism as an
object of anthropological inquiry, see Auge (1988).
6. See lacono (1992) and Canguilhem (1983) on the place of fetishism in
Comte’s work.
7. Of course, associations between religion and illness are to be found well be¬
fore the invention of “monomania.” We have already seen that medieval physicians reg¬
ularly worried that the enforced sexual abstinence of priests and nuns could result in
disease. Nuns had been especially singled out as a population at risk for hysteria. As we
shall see further on, a connection between religious chastity and hysteria resurfaced in
the nineteenth century. Louyer-Villermay (1819a, 572), for example, warned that such
lengthy abstinence was a cause of “andromania”: the nymphomaniacal lust for men.
8. Charles-Chretien-Henri Marc founded, along with Esquirol, the Annales
d’hygiene publiqtie in 1829. They were both dedicated to the social implementation of
medical knowledge and were strong promoters of the monomania diagnosis (Goldstein
1987, 175).
9. It was only because of a particular excess and mania that Dr. Guislain, for ex¬
ample, could diagnose insanity in a woman who repeatedly genuflected, sang religious
verses, invoked the Virgin out loud, and whose entire “psalmodic conversation revolved
around evangelical subjects” (1881, 155).
10. See Goldstein (1987) on medical anticlericalism during the Third Republic.
11. Dr. Santenoise’s article “Religion et folie” (1900) was published in the ma¬
terialistedited by psychologist Theodule Ribot.
12. Dr. Hospital of the Glermont-Ferrand asylum described a classic case of a
“priest lover”: la femme Ron—, a thirty-four year-old peasant woman, “large, robust,
very ugly.” Upon becoming widowed and destitute, this patient developed the impera¬
tive desire to “live with the Gapuchin monks, but in the least equivocal terms and of a
nature that left no doubt about the form of her insanity” (1875,252). She was arrested
for scaling the wall of what she wrongly believed to be a Gapuchin monastery and in¬
sisted on leaving the asylum to go live with the Gapuchins. Hospital’s diagnosis oiero-
tisme was definitive, confirmed by the fact that the patient’s brother had been commit¬
ted for depressive religious mania and the patient’s autopsy revealed an evident lesion of
the cerebellum (the phrenological seat of “amativeness”).
13. Marx, Capital (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1961-1962), 3:809; cited
in Geras (1971, 69).
14. For a postmodern French critique of the contemporary culture of consump¬

tion, see Baudrillard (1979) and Baudrillard’s essay on fetishism and ideology (1972).
For a survey and critique of recent semiotic readings of Marx’s theory of fetishism, see
Pietz (1993).
15. Miller’s functionalist analysis of the Bon Marche perceptively analyzes the
bourgeois bureaucratic values embodied by the “total institution” of the Second Em¬
pire department store (1981). Also see Marry (1979).
16. R. Williams (1982, 12) also examines the reliance of mass consumerism on
manipulations of the imagination.
17. A Swiss doctor, Andre Matthey, first used the word klopemanie to describe a
“perversion of the will” driving people to useless thefts (1816). Marc first used the term
kleptomanie to describe a “monomania of theft” particular to people of substantial means
who suffered imperative, instinctive urges to steal frivolous objects they could easily af¬
ford. Although not intrinsically gendered as hysteria was, the kleptomania diagnosis was
particularly reserved for bourgeois women and was associated with many supposed fea¬
tures of the female nervous system, temperament, and biology, especially menstrual
anomalies or pregnancy (Marc 1840, 2:247-302). With the obsolescence of the mono¬
mania diagnosis, doctors sought clearer neurological and hereditary etiologies for klep¬
tomania. Morel (1854) described kleptomania as a “pseudo-monomania” that was really
an epileptiform impulsion of degenerates. Gorry (1879, 10) argued that it was never
found as a pure condition but always a symptom of other serious organic degenerate dis¬
orders. For a detailed review of the medical kleptomania literature, see Segnier (1966).
18. At the Fourth International Criminal Anthropology Conference, medicolegal
expert Alexandre Lacassagne declared kleptomania a “social phenomenon” (1896,
77). Antheume (1925) examines the “epidemic” of kleptomania in nineteenth-century
Paris. Also see O’Brien (1983) for a feminist analysis of the prevalence of the klepto¬
mania diagnosis at this time.
19. Citations from Zola’s novels correspond to the Pleiade edition of the Rougon-
Macquart cycle. Zola’s inclusion of the pink glove robber was probably inspired by one
of Legrand du Saulle’s cases. In Zola’s notes on the case, he jotted down: “The desire of
pregnant woman especially // always the same object 600 men’s black ties” (Nouvelles
Acquisitions Frangaises 10277, 397). Zola made extensive preparatory notes and
sketches for each of his novels. These manuscript dossiers, preserved at the Bibliothûe
Nationale, include not only Zola’s notes to himself throughout the conception of the
novels, but also relevant newspaper clippings and legal documents, research notes, cor¬
respondence from informants, and his own maps of neighborhoods and department
stores. They will be cited by their “Nouvelles Acquisitions Frangaises” (NAF) numbers.
20. Lunier was perhaps the only notable physician to question the female gen¬
dering of the disease when, in 1880, he objected to the label voleuses des niagasins and
substituted voleurs aux etalages (display counter thieves) because women were not the
only kleptomaniacs and the large department stores were not the only site for such
thefts. Lunier pointed out that the preponderance of female cases was due to the fact
that women shop more frequently than men and the popular prejudice associating
kleptomania with pregnancy, menopause, or other female “morbid dispositions” led to
the systematic medicolegal evaluation of female shoplifters (1880, 241).
21. Binet mentioned, in particular, Muller (1878a) and Alfred Maury, who was
an ethnologist and historian of religion. Among Maury’s many works, Binet specifically
cited La Magie et Uastrologie dans I’antiquite et au rnoyen age (1860).
22. Alfred Binet was born in Nice, on July 3, 1857. His father was a physician
and his mother an artist. He obtained a licence in law in 1878, by which time he became
an adherent of Positivist criminology. He soon began medical studies and in 1883 his
lycee friend Joseph Babinski introduced him to Charcot and Charles Samson Fere.
Binet started frequenting Charcot’s lectures and “laboratory” of hysterics (1883-
1890). In the 1880s he was under the sway of English Associationism, and especially
admired Mill. In 1892 he was named adjunct-director, and later sub-director, of the
Laboratory of Physiological Psychology at the Sorbonne. In 1895, he and Fere founded
[he Anneepsychologique, which he edited until 1899. In experimental psychology Binet
is known for having noted the role of the past in the present, for developing numerous
research tools (esthesiometer of constant mass, dynamometer for testing intellectual fa¬
tigue, chronoscope for measuring the duration of intellectual phenomena), and for his
studies on the mentally retarded. For more biographical information on Binet, see the
bibliography by Wolf (1973) and the eulogies published by his colleagues Simon
(1912) and Larguier de Bancels (1912). For more on Binet’s work on IQ testing, see
Gould (1981, 146-58).
23. Binet collaborated with Andre de Latour de Lorde on a number of plays (see
Apter 1991, 19n.9).
24. Among his French colleagues, Binet was familiar with Ball’s article on “erotic
insanity” (1887) (mentioned earlier), Magnan’s neurological theory of sexual perver¬
sions (1886), and the discussions of inverts by Gley (1884) and Ribot (1885, 74-76).
Beyond France, Binet in 1887 was informed by Mantegazza’s physiological/anthropo¬
logical writings [Ftsiologia delamore [1873] and Gli amori dei usomini [1885]) and the
work of Tarnowsky and Lombroso on inversion. See Bleys (1995) for a detailed exam¬
ination ol this nineteenth-century anthropological work on sexuality. Binet criticized
the theories of the Germans, particularly Westphal (1869, 1876) and Krafft-Ebing
(1877). Only the previous year, Krafft-Ebing had published the first edition of his Psy-
chopathia sexucdis (1886). It would go through eight exponentially growing German
editions before its translation into French by Emile Laurent and Sigistnond Csapo in
1895. Binet did not refer to it when he described “amorous fetishism” in 1887.
25. Roudinesco (1982,235-38) erroneously suggests that Binet opposed Krafft-
Ebmg’s hereditary degenerationist model in favor of a psychological one emphasizing
childhood sexual traumata. Roudinesco is trying to reconstruct Binet as an exemplar of
a French proto-Freudian psychoanalysis.
26. On the coupeurs de ludtes, see Voisin, Soquet, and Motet (1890), and similar
cases described by Gamier (1900a, 109-10).
27. On exhibitionism, also see Magnan (1890, 1899) and Soupault (1896).
28. Also see Apter (1991, 20) on the rhetoric of fetishism.
29. Compare with Apter (1991, 22-23), who glosses dynamogenie as the “rela¬
tionship between image making and orgasm.” Binet uses the term in a much broader
sense related to associationist, vibrationist notions of sensory-somatic sympathy (dis-
cussed in chapter 1): “les excitations des sens ont cette commune propriete de pro-
duire—surtout chez les hyperexcitables—une dynamogenie generale et passagere de
toutes les I'onctions physiologiques” (Binet 1887a, 259).
30. Interspersed throughout Binet’s article are analyses of fiction by Dumas (“La
Maison du vent”) and Adolphe Belot {La Boiiche deMadatmX [1882]), as well as re¬
peated allusions to fetishism in novels.
31. Heinrich Seu.se (1295-1366) was a Swiss mystic and theologian of the Do¬
minican order. He is the author of two mystical texts. The Book of Eternal Wisdom, and
The Book ofTndh. Saint Theresa of Avila (1515-1582), a Spanish Carmelite nun who
Ibnnded an ascetic branch of the order (the Discalced Carmelites), is the author of a
mystical treatise, The Interior Castle, and her autobiography, The Book of Life.
32. See pseudo-Aristotle’s Problemata (877b20-40) and Theophrastus’s De
odoribns (381-83).
33. Havelock Ellis, for example, cited Cloc|uet’s Osphresiologie extensively in his
Sexual Selection in Man (1905).
34. See Staum (1980, 168) on Cabanis and thephtlosophes’ political aims.
35. Also see Cabanis (1802, 1:223) on the links between odor and the intestinal
tract.
36. Cabanis also discussed the sensual powers of perfumes (1802, 1:224,
2:418). Also see the historical discussion of smells, mainly perfumes, in Classen,
Holmes, and Synnott (1994).
37. See Harrington and Rosario (1992) for a detailed account of “nasal reflex
neuroses” and the role of olfactory research in nineteenth-century anthropology, neu¬
rology, and sociology.
38. See Gould (1981) on the full range ol Broca’s anthropometric research and
social politics. Also see Schiller’s biography ol Broca (1979).
39. Two observations were particularly significant for Broca: the dramatic
“cephalization” (movement towards the frontal lobes) and amplification of the olfactory
center in mammals, and the shrinking of the olfactory centers in the primate .series
(from lower monkeys to apes to humans). Broca interpreted the first trend as function¬
ally signifying that olfaction had been increasingly drawn into cooperation with the fore¬
brain and thereby had diminished its reflexive, spinal character (1878, 394-6). Fur¬
thermore, because of the primal survival value of olfaction, the cephalization of the
olfactory tubercle stimulated the exuberant development of the frontal lobes in the
mammalian series (1879b, 421). The second phenomenon (the “shrinking” of the ol¬
factory center in primates), Broca interpreted as the “dethronement” of the “brutal cor¬
tex” (olfactory cortex) by the “intellectual cortex” (the cerebral cortex). This “frontal
predominance” in primates brought with it the repression of the instinctual, reflexive
animal functions (1878, 393-94).
40. Broca (1877, 655; 1878, 477; 1879a; 1879b, 449-51). Broca’s “limbic
sulcus” was a fine cleft separating the anterior pole of the hippocampal rhinen-
cephalon from the surronnding temporal lobe. It supposedly demonstrated the greater
functional independence of the rhinencephalon from the neocortex. The absence of
the sillon limbique in civilized man confirmed that for humans “the sense of smell has
lost its preponderance and autonomy” (1879b, 450). It is no longer a recognized neu-
roanatoniical feature.
41. The diagnosis ol “neurasthenia” was first popularized by American physi¬
cian George M. Beard in his Practical Treatise on Nervous Exhaustion (Neurasthenia)
(1869). He later described it as a disorder particular to Americans and their over-ex¬
hausting, energetic, ambitious lifestyles (1881). For more on neurasthenia in the United
States, see Sicherman (lf>77) and Mumford (1992). The neurasthenia diagnosis was
popularized in France in the early 1890s by Charcot, who welcomed it as a more pre¬
cise entity than the old nervosisnie (see his preface to Levillain 1891]). Also see Gold¬
stein (1987,335-6).
42. See Latour (1985) on the sociology and politics of the Pasteurian revolution
in France.
43. The noted chemist Henri Sainte-Claire Deville, for example, delivered a
short paper (1880) before the Academie des sciences on the noxious odors of Paris in
which he bowed to his friend and colleague Pasteur while still fretting about the patho¬
genicity of excremental odors in Paris.
44. Some years later, Huysmans captured the same sense of social malaise when
he had his hero des Esseintes complain about the new “aristocracy of money, ... the
caliphate of the sales counter,... the tyranny of money”: “It was the great hell of Amer¬
ica transported onto our continent; finally, it was the immense, profound vulg-arity of the
financier and the parvenu, blazing like an abject sun on the idolatrous city that ejacu¬
lated, belly up, unholy canticles before the impious tabernacle of the banks” {A Rebours,
239-40).
45. Max Nordau (ne Siidfeld) was born into a Hungarian rabbinical family. For
most of his life he lived in Paris where he practiced medicine and wrote prolifically. He
was a journalist for German and Austrian papers and published novels, essays, and
plays. He was convinced that social progress could be achieved through strength of will,
Germanic discipline, hard work, and positivist, reductionist science. He was rabidly
opposed to the trends he perceived in cultural modernity: realism and naturalism in lit¬
erature, Impressionism and Expressionism, and aggressive nationalism. Like other lib¬
erals, he feared that unrestrained freedom, “ego-mania,” would lead to anarchy and the
end of reason, culture, and order. He therefore opposed the feminist movement, which
he viewed as a threat to social cohesion. Instead, he advocated strict bourgeois sexual
morality. My biographical information on Nordau is from Mosse (1968). I cite the
French edition of the work (1894—1895), which would have been more widely read in
France than the original German edition of 1893.
46. See Silverman (1989) for the role of physicians and medical criticism in
shaping art nouveau.
47. For Zola’s notes on cheese odors, see NAF (10338, 288-89), and for his re¬
minders to himself on dung and fowl, see NAF (10338).
48. See Baldick (1955, 80) on the sources for characters and places ind Rebours.
For several of the peculiar rooms of des Esseintes’s house, Huysmans utilized the de¬
scriptions of de Montesquiou’s eccentric home as described to Huysmans by Stephan
Mallarme.
49. Also see Havelock Ellis (1905, 73; 1931) for further observations on odors in
A Rebours and Huysmans’s other work.
50. “Dans cet art des parfums, un cote I’avait, entre tons, seduit, celui de la pre¬
cision factice” (153). One English translator has rendered this: “In this art of perfumes,
one peculiarity had more than all others fascinated him, viz. the precision with which it
can artificially imitate the real article” (Huysmans 1931, 106).
51. Also see Nye (1989) on the ways in which fin-de-siecle fertility concerns
shaped the medicalization of homosexuality.
52. Huysmans to Raffalovich, 11 April 1896 (in Allen 1966, 215).
53. Birkett (1986, 61-97) examines in detail the Byzantine richness ofd Rebours
and its role as the foundational text of the Decadent movement.
54. Paul-Emile Gamier completed his medical studies in Paris and did an in¬
ternship under Magnan at the Asile Sainte-Anne. His thesis was on delusions of
grandeur in patients suffering from delusions of persecution. From 1879 to 1883 he
served under Ernest Lasegxie, chief physician of the Infirmerie speciale de alienes, and
subsequently became first physician adjunct of the service (1883-1886). In 1886, Gar-
nier succeeded Legrand Du Saule as chief physician of the Infirmerie speciale du
Depot a la Prefecture de police, where he examined criminal suspects and prepared
medicolegal reports. He became inspector of asylums of the Seine province and was
concerned with the reform of asylums, prisons, and internment houses (Intel nement des
alienes [1896]). Gamier served on the editorial board of thtAnnales d’hygienepublique
et de medecine legale. Like many of his contemporaries, he was concerned with issues of
potency, fertility and depopulation, and wrote numerous professional and popular
works on the subject (1883, 1897, 1900b). In addition to his work on “sexual perver¬
sions,” he published on the penal responsibility of morphine addicts, somnambulism,
and double suicide. Some of his major monographs are: Aphasie et folie (1889), La folie
a Paris (1890), and Traite de therapeutique des maladies 7nentales et nerveuses (with Paul
Cololian [1901]). For more on Gamier, see s Hommage (1905).
55. The doctors attending Garnier’s case presentation offered differing interpre¬
tations. One likened C-to the offenders police called frotteurs: men who rubbed
up against women’s dresses in public places. Another saw a link between these cases
and exhibitionists since, after stealing aprons or handkerchiefs or rubbing against
dresses, the patients immediately engaged in public masturbation. The diagnostic label
exhibitionist had been coined in 1877 by Lasegue and would be the subject of two ar¬
ticles by Magnan (1890, 1899).
56. Krafff-Ebing had also hinted in this direction when he described foot
fetishism as a “larval form of masochism” (1895, 160).
57. The ierms, sadism and inasochism first appeared in 1890 in a short supple¬
ment to Psychopathia Sexualis (5th ed., 1890), entitled JVeue Forschungen auf dem Ge-
biet der Psychopathia Sexualis. This was integrated into the sixth edition in 1891. Azar
(1975, 1986) carefully traces the history of these terms and points out the compounded
errors in the French medical and historical treatment of Psychopathia Sexualis. Azar
makes it clear that, contrary to many claims, Krafft-Ebing did not coin sadism but that
it was already part of French ttsage in the first third of the nineteenth century. Birkett
206 Notes to the Conclusion
(1986, 19-20) conlirins diis. Nevertheless, die wi(les[)read medical acceptance of both
terms was due to the huge success of Psychopathia Sexualis. Printings of Sade’s works
were rare and largely clandestine in the nineteenth century. The first collected edition
vwas attempted for the first time only in 1947 and even then provoked criminal prosecu¬
tion (Pauvert 1994). Stefanowsky’s model of jiassivism and tyrannism was projiosed
earlier (1888) anil was rather similar to Kralft-Ebing’s theorization of masochism and
sadism. Nevertheless, Stefanowsky (1892a, 18921)) later criticized Krafft-Ebing’s
nomenclature for being nonillustrative of the conditions and, in the case of masochism,
an unfortunate slander of a living author. While Stefanowsky’s nomenclature was used
brieflv in France, his priority battle against Krafft-Ebing was ultimately unsuccessful
and his terms forgotten.
58. Most of my citations of Psychopathia Sexualis are from the 1895 French
translation l)y Emile Laurent and Sigismond Csapo of the eighth edition, the version
most accessible to the fin-de-siecle French medical and general public. Currently, the
more widely available French translation (1931) is of a German version heavily edited
and amended by Albert Moll in 1924.
59. La Revue independante (January 1885); cited in Birkett (1986, 19-20).
60. On (lilies de Rais, see Bataille (1972)
61. .41so see Walkowitz’s analysis of the uses of the Jack-the-Ripper case as both
a perverse narrative and a myth for frightening “respectable” women off the streets
(1982). On Vacher L’Eventreur as a case of necrosadism, see Epaulard (1901).
62. Nye (1993b) also argues that medical fetishism literature arose out of con¬
cerns over social anxieties about depopulation and health.
63. Psychopathia Sexualis alone is a testament to this phenomenon. Even while in
the hands of Kraflt-Ebing, the book grew exponentially with new observations, but even
the old ones took on new interpretations from edition to edition. The work as a whole
would be transformed when it was revised by Moll for its seventeeth edition in 1924.
Conclusion
1. All quotations are from Diderot’s Les Bijoux indiscrets (1748, 8-10). The
work w-as published anonymously in Holland in 1748, but its authorship was immedi¬
ately revealed by a boobeller acting as police informant. Like other banned literature of
the time, it enjoyed enormous popularity: sLx reprintings and two counterfeit editions ap¬
peared within a few months, and an English translation was published the following year.
Although Diderot claimed to regret this literary creation, he nevertheless composed three
supplementary chapters a decade later. Adam (1968) is certain that the literary conceit is
borrowed from the Comte de Caylus’s LeNocrion (1747). This licentious story alwut a
man granted the magical power to make women s[)eak in an unusual fashion was, in
turn, inspired by a medieval Gallic tale: Le Clmialier quifaisait parler les c.. .et ks c... .
2. In the pseudo-dedication of Les Bijoux, Diderot specifically cited other ex¬
amples of pornographic orientalism: Crebillon’s Sopha (1745) and Tanzai (1734).
These, in turn, were inspired by Lhe Thousand and One Mights, which first became
widely known through Antoine Galland’s French translation of 1704-1717. Also see
Adam (1968, 11-12) on eighteenth-century pornographic uses of the exotic.
Notes to the Supplement 207
3. (Jn I >oui,s XV’s liberlinage see Guicciardi. Adam (1908, 14), [lowever, ht-
lieves ifiere is no consistent correspondence })etween histfjrical fignres and characters in
Hijmx.
4. honcault claims that contemporary society is still under the emhlerri of the
talking sex. Indeed, he states that the aim of his research on sexuality is to transcribe Ij;s
hijmix indiscrets into history (1976, IOJ-2).
5. ()n this point see Adam {1908, 1.3) and Darntori (1991). Goulemot similarly
firuls that “libertine” novels are dedicaterl to scenes of seduction and not to eliciting
desire as in the “erotic” novel (1991,02).
0. See, for exarnjde, Sade’s /^.v mforlunes de la verlu (written 1787, first pub¬
lished j 930) and Im philosofMe d/im le. boudoir (1795).
7. In the late-seventeenth and early-eighteenth centuries, a variety of tracts on
“conjugal love” dealt forthriglitly with cofailative pleasure (R. Porter 1995), but the.se
were largely replacc-fl by works advocating [>as.sionle,s.sne.ss, [particularly in women.
Lacjueur (1990, 150) attributes this to the eighteenth-century emergence of a model of
two-sex incommensurability.
8. Kven the “divine” .Manjuis de Sade’s [personal journal documenting his daily
sexiial activities reads more like a technical log than an erotic tale (.see Lever 1991).
9. If the words of Dr. Rordeti in tlie Suite de I’erdretien eidre D’Alerrd/ert el
Diderot (1830,937) are re[)re,sentative of Diderot’s o[pini(pn.s, then Diderot believed that
onanism was innocuous and far better than the corru[ption of honorable women, rigor¬
ous continence, or the endangerrnent offpne’s health with prostitutes. He also defended
[pleasure with a [person of the same sex by cleverly dismissing the very notion of sex
“cfpntrary tfp tiature” (939). Rous.seau, as we have .seen, was only too willing to label any¬
thing he associated with “civilization” as contrary to nature. Diderot’s exoticist fantasies
of “natural” female .sexuality in hk Suf/fjlernerd an Voyage de Bougainville (1796), how¬
ever, are rather similar to Rzpus.seau’s.
10. Hunt (1991) examines the ways in which the Revolutionary criminal tri¬
bunal and [pornogra[phic literature [portrayed .Marie-Antoinette as a le.sbian, an adulter¬
ess, and the incestuous molester of the young [prince.
11. Gn the sexual politics of Louis XV’s court, .see .Maza (1991).
12. Landes (1988, 70-71) further epcamines Rousseau’s critique of the civilized
man as .soft, effeminate, and enervated.
13. See Deleuze (1967) on the theme of the Adamic Fall and its connection to
hereditary flegeneration in Zola’s Rougon-lVfacquart cycle.
Supplement
1. Letter friprri Freud to his fiancee, Martha Bernays, 29 October 1982 (qtd. in
Jones 19.53, .320).
2. For epcamples of .such Freudo-centrisrn, see some of the clas.sics in the history
of p.sychiatry, Zilboorg (1941) and Alexander and Selesnick (1966).
3. Turkle (1992) attributes the initial French “anti-p.sychoanalytic” .sentiment
to the self-contented state of the French bourgeoisie and to French Cartesian rationalism.
However, it is also the case that Henri Bergson’s intuitionist and even antirationalist
208 Notes to the Supplement
philosopliv was popular at tlie time and that respected neurologists such as Janet had
been conducting odd, neomesineric and metaloscopic experiments (Harrington 1088).
Nationalist priorih- disputes were certainly an issue; even Freud’s earliest French snp-
portei's emphasized his (nncredited) debts to French neurologists (Regis Hesnard
1914, 293-ddO). The priori^' disputes between Freud and Janet, the mutual mud-
slinging. and the misrepresentations also strongly colored Freud’s reception in France.
We have seen from the inversion and fetishism debates that such Franco-German rivalry
was commonplace. It \\-as not until 1922 that Freud’s works began to be translated into
French and have an impact—mainlv in the popular pre.ss and in literature (Goplev
1989, 1949). The tide of medical opinion onlv began turning after the Societe psvch-
analytique de Paris (SPP) and its tAvo journals were founded in 1926 (see Hesnard
1928, Roudinesco 1982, and Perron 1988).
4. In 1953 the SPP fragmented over theoretical and pedagogical issues as well
as the profe.ssional and pei'sonal riralries beuveen two of its leadei's. Jac(]ues Lacan and
Sacha Nacht. Since then, French psAchoanah-sis has been influenced bv the linguisti¬
cally oriented theories of Lacan, Gilles Deleuze, and Felix Guattari, and the feminist,
semiotic theories of Julia KristeA-a and Luce Irig'araA; among others (Tinkle 1992).
5. See Nve (1993a, 5 and ch. 4), and Ro.sario (1992).
6. This Avas Pierre Janet’s opinion expressed at the 1913 International Gon-
giess of Medicine in London (.see Ellenbeiger 1970, 344).
7. See Freud’s letter to Fliess (1985, 74, 222). The.se and subsequent citations
Irom Freud’s 1887-1904 correspondence to Fliess are from Jetfrev Ma.sson’s complete
translation of the letters (Freud 1985). In Studies on llysteruu for example, Freud did
not reject hereditary etiology. Quite to the contrary, he doubted that In-steria Avithout a
preexisting disposition could cAen exist (Freud Rreuer 1895, 122).
8. SulloAA-ay (1983, ch. 4) carefully aual\-ze.s the “Project.” Pribram and Gill
(1976) haAe CAen tried to sIioav that the Avork prefigures later finding's in the neuro¬
sciences.
9. Freud’s logic ou the neuroto.xicitA' of “disturbed sexual di.schaige” is a cou-
Aoluted one. In letters to Fliess on migraines, Freud agreed on the etiological contribu¬
tion of certain olfactory substances such as floAver aromas. Avhich thev believed Avere
breakdoAAii products of sexual metabolism (1985, 161). Freud Avent a step further to
suggest that similar “human toxic emanations” proihiced during “menstruation or
other sexual processes” may also impinge upon the nei Aous svstem at the leAel of the
corpora cavernosa of the genitals. “Thus the uose Avould, as it Avere, receive informatiou
about internal olfactory stimuli by means of the corpora eai'crnosa, just as it does about
external stimuli by Schneider’s membrane [in the nose]: oneAvould come to grief from
one’s OAvn body” (1985, 161). Basically, the genitals acted as an internal nose snifling
for sexual acthitA'. According to Freud, thisAA Ould explain the frequency of migraines in
menstruating Avomen and “people Avith disturbed sexual discharge (neurastheuia,
coitus interruptus)” (1985, 143).
10. On the onanistic etiolog\- of melancholia see Freud (1985, 94); of ueurasthe-
nia see Freud (1985, 40—11); of uose disorders .see Freud (1985, 48u.).
11. SulloAA-ay (1983, 184-86) has akso highlighted Freud’s and Fliess’s dated
A'icAvs on onanism.
Notes to the Supplement 209
12. See Ellenherger’s excellent review of'Janet’s life and work (1970), specifically
Janet’s coining of the word suhcomciotvi (357n.82) and his priority disputes with PVeud
(344). (>opley (1989, 148) discusses Janet’s discomfort with the prominence of eroti¬
cism in psychoanalysis.
13. Freud, in fact, miscites Binet’s article as 1888 rather than 1887. While Freud
initially explained the choice of the fetish object in associationist terms, he later elabo¬
rated a radically different notion ba,sed on Oedipal castration anxiety. In an article on
fetishism, he exfdained that “the fetish is a substitute for the woman’s (the mother’s)
penis that the little boy once believed in” (1927a, 1.52). It helps a man abide female
castration and the horror jjrovoked by female incom[>letene,ss. I'hus the fetish “saves
the feti.shist from becoming a homosexual, by endowing women with the characteristic
that makes them tolerable as .sexual objects,” namely, a (fanta.sy) penis (154).
14. This would change, such that contemporary French .sexological works apfdy
the term sexual perversion to conditions they otherwi.se label as “normal,” such as ho-
mo.sexuality ami pedophilia (see Bonnet 1993, 113; Rosario 1992,269).
15. David.son (1988) has also [jointed this out, but I cannot accept his further
.suggestion that Freud wished to normalize the [jerversities. Freud’s was an ambivalent
apologia at best, as can be .seen in his “Letter to an American Mother” (193.5). Freud
refased to label homosexuality an illness, but always viewed it as a defective sexuality,
or an “arrest of sexual development.” Freud’s highly teleological view of [j.sycho.sexual
development culminates in mature, “normal,” reproductive heterosexuality.
16. Also see Janet’s theories of “inferior forms” of mentation, including the [jas-
.sions (1889).
17. See Marcus (1962, xxv).
18. The essay appeared as volume four ol Die Medizin der Gegenwarl in Selbst-
darslellungen (Leipzig: .Meiner, 1925) intended as a professional history of contempo¬
rary medicine through a .series of self-[jortrait.s of its learlers.
19. See Strachey’s Tran.slator’s Note to the 1952 W. W. Norton edition of the
work (p. 7). I am grateful to David Halperin for suggesting this etymology.
20. Anzieu (1959, 1.54-55) states the commonly held belief that, “|ajs if in .spite
of himself, almost all the other scientific hy[jothese.s |of p.sychoanalysis] would be dis-
cu.s.sed in (Freud’s) auto-analysis.” Ellenberger (1970, 447-50) mythologized this pe¬
riod by describing it as a shamanistic interval after which Freud emerged “internally
transformed,” elated by a greater truth, and cured of his neurosis; he also “oiitgrew his
de[jendency on Fliess” who had acted as Freud’s “shaman master.” Also .see Buxbaum
(1951) and Jones (1953).
21. From M. .Masud R. Khan’s Preface to Laplanche and Pontalis (1973).
22. Freud’s abandonment of the seduction theory has been a matter of great con¬
tention. Masson (1992) argues that Freud had sufficient evidence to believe in the ve¬
racity of his female patients’ reports of sexual molestation, but Mas.son then blames the
[psychoanalytic profe.s.sion, not Freud, for a cover-up of child sexual abase.
23. See Freud’s The Psychofjatholoi^ of Everyday Life (1901), ./c^.y and Their Re¬
lation to the Unconscious (190.5), “Obse-ssive actions and religious [jractices” (1907),
and The Future of an Rlusion (1927).
210 Notes to the Supplement
24. Freud (1923, 71). 1 have taken the liberh' of restoring the {)resent tense ol the
original: ‘‘Die ‘Selhstdaretellimg’ zeigt, A\ie die Psychoanalyse ineine Lehensinhall
wild” (1940-1932, 16:31).
23. 01 his experience in 188.3-1886 with Charcot at the Salpetriere, Fiend
wrote, “No doubt the whole olbvhat Charcot taught ns at that time does not hold good
today” (1923, 1,3). He also noted that during this period, “Janet’s name was not so
mnch as mentioned” (13). Later Fiend came to realize that “the work [on electrother¬
apy] ol the greatest name in German nenropathologv |W. Erbj had no more relation to
realit)' than some ‘Egyptian’ dream-book, .such as is .sold in cheap bookshops . . . what
1 had taken lor an epitome ol exact ob.servations was merelv the constrnctioii ol iihan-
tasy” (16). He accused Brener of withholding the critical .sexual com[)onent of Anna
O.’s cruse (21). Their work on hysteria \ras therefore largeh' descriptive and theoreticallv
poor (21). It eras only in 1902, he claimed, that he started having disciples (the
\Nedne.sciay Psychological Society) and that p.sychoaiialysis begrm to be taken .serionslv.
It was only at this point that it began to lune an “external histoir,” as Fiend puts it, that
is, a life separate from his own pereon (48).
26. In addition to addressing Fliess as his “dearest in truth” (1983, 73), Freud
akso importuned his regular correspondent, “Daimonie, whv don’t von write?” (134).
The letters betray an intense affection and emotional dependence. Koestenbanm
(1989, ch. 1) further discusses the eroticism of Freud’s collaborations.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Abbreviations
Arch, anl.h. crim. Archives (l’an.lhr(>f)()bff.c cnmtncllc, dc criminolvîc ed dc

psych.()bff£ norrn/jh d palhobgiqu/;
Arch. ncur. Archives de neurobgie
Ann. tncd.-p.sy. A nn/ib.s mMic()-psych()bjri(pm
Ann. hyg. publ. Annahs ddhygiene piddique. d (U rnedecine legcile
Arch. l^sy. JVcrv. Archiv fur Hsychialrie und Nervenkrankheilen
Hull. Hoc. anlh. HuH/dins dc In. Socide d’anlhrojxdogic dc Hurts
Hcv. ph il. Hevm ph ihsophufW'
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INDEX
All laws are grouped under the entry for “Laws”

Medical cases with abbreviated names are grouped
under the entry for “Cases”
Adultery, 15 Binet,A. (1857-1911), 85,114, 126-31, 135,

Advice to Comnwn People on their Health (Tissot), 148, 162,168,169,202n.22
20,22 Boerhaave, H. (1668-1738), 17
Aidoiomania, 58 Au Bonheur des Dames (Zola), 123-25
Amor heroicus. See Lovesickness Boorde, A. (1490P-1549?), 16
Annals ojPublic Hygiene, 52, 72 Bourgeoisie, 20, 34, 116, 122, 164
Anticlericalism, 58, 63, 119-20, 162 Brillat-Savarin,]. A. (1755-1826), 5-8, 161
Anus, 74, 143^5 Briquet, P (1796-1881), 80
Apparent and Hidden Anomalies (Gamier), 148 Broca, P. (1824-80), 132-34
Appetite, 12, 57, 62-63, 65 Brosses, C. de (1709-77), 117-18, 122,
Archives of Criminal Anthropology, 86-87, 88, 98 199nn.3-4
Aristotle (pseudo), 131
Associationism, 27,33, 128,148, 168 Cabanes,A. (1862-1928), 190nn.21-23
Augustine, Saint (354-430), 34 Cabanis, P (1757-1808), 132
Autobiographical Study (Freud), 170-75 Cachexia, 17, 18
Autobiography 34-36, 150, 155 Carriere, E. (1808-83), 63-64
Case histories, clinical, 9, 110-11, 182n.l0
Baillarger,J. (1808-90), 45-17 Cases: C—, August (apron fetishist), 147; D—
Ball, B. (1834-93), 120 (pornographer), 52-56; D., L. (onanist), 19;
Baudelaire, C. (1821-67), 71, 82 D—, Marie (silk fetishist), 113-14; G— (col-
Bayard, H. L. (1812-52), 56-57 lectionist), 124; G— (erotomaniac), 45-47;
Beard, G. M. (1839-83), 204n.41 M—, Helene (silk fetishist), 125; Ron— (ero¬
Belot, A. (1829-90), 130 tomaniac), 200n.l2; V— (silk frotteur), 147;
Berlin, homosexuals, 105-106 X— (boot-nail fetishist), 85, 128, 129; X—
Bernard, C. (1813-78), 90, 99 (hysterical male), 81; X—, Louis (patent
Bernard, L., 137-38 leather fetishist), 143-46
Bertrand, Sergeant F., 58-62, 149, 151, 154. Casper,]. (1796-1864), 83
See also Necrophilia Charcot,].-M. (1825-93), 58, 70-71, 84-86,
Bestiality 15, 41 120,126, 151
La Bite humaine (Zola), 163 Charenton Hospital, 53
Bienville,]. D. T. de, 29-31,49 Chevalier,]., 87-88, 108-109
239
240 Index
Childhood: and criminality, 37; history of, Diderot, D. (1713-84), 18,21,157-161,

22-23; and imagination, 13, 24-26, 50-51, 207n.9
102-103, 162; masturbation, 13, 19, 22-26, Discourse on the Sciences and the Arts (Rousseau),
37-^0, 42; as primitive state, 42, 128, 162; 21
sexuality, 91-92, 102-103, 128; vulnerable Douglas, Lord A. (1870-1945), 99
nervous system, 23, 25-26, 27, 37, 50-51 Dre)fus Affair, 91, 93
Chlorosis, 46, 47 Dubarry, A. (1836-?), 4, 10-12, 84, 181n.2
Chopart, F. (1743-95), 31 Dubuisson, E (1847-1908), 123-24
“Citizens’ Sentiment” (Voltaire), 36 Dumesnil, R. (1862-1921), 81-82
Civilization, 20-26, 152, 162 Dupin and Tardif, 53
Class: and health, 20, 135; and sexuality, 24, 57, Dynamogenization, 130
73, 74, 76, 88, 102, 106, 135, 152, 169; un¬
rest, 42, 89,123,160,164 Effeminacy, 20-21,39, 75-76, 79-81, 88, 98,
Clerambault, G. G. de (1872-1934), 48, 161 101, 104, 109, 139, 142, m. See also
Cloquet, H. (1787-1840), 5, 132 Mollesse
Club des grands estomacs, 62-63 Ellis, H. (1859-1939), 100,101,140,141,
Coitus interruptus, 15 197n.61
Collectionism. See under Fetishism Emile (Rousseau), 21-22, 23-25, 102
Collet, F (1870-?), 140 EmycbpMie, 14,25,26,33, 49
Coming-out narrative, 103 EraMtography, 59
Comte, A. (1798-1857), 88,118 Eros, 188n.8
Condillac, F. (1714-80), 27,132 Erotique, 5, 51, 58; definition, 48-49
Confession, 7-8, 9-10, 15, 19,34-36,43, 92, Erotisme, 10, 14, 47-48, 65-66, 151, 159;
94-96,110, 130,150-51,155,159, 174 France as source, 4-5, 136, 182n.5
Confessions (Rousseau), 13-14, 27, 32-33, Erotolalia, 47, 66
34-37, 154-55 Erotomania: contemporary diagnosis, 48,
Conjugal onanism. See Coitus interruptus. 187n.4, 188nn.5-6; and forensic issues,
Constantine the African (c. 1020-87), 48 54-58; and genital hallucinations, 45-47; and
Contrary sexual sensation (contrdre Sexu- Anita Hill, 66-67; as monomania, 50-51;
alempfindung), 70, 84. See also Inversion and necrophilia, 58-65; and nymphomania,
Corbin, A., 135 51; with pornographic writings, 52-56; pre¬
Cross-dressing, 69, 76-77, 82, 91, 193n.l7 nineteenth century, 48-49; religious, 119-20;
Cult of Fetish Gods (de Brasses), 117-18, 122 satyriasis versus, 49-50. See also Necrophilia
Erotomaniography, 55
Danville, G., 152,153 Esquirol,]. (1772-1840), 37,50, 52,119
Debourge, 40 Essay cm the Diseases of the Valetudinary (Tissot),
Decadent movement, 138-39, 141-42, 149 20
Degeneration, 85, 90, 101, 139, 154, 162; and Essay on the Origin of Human Understanding
inversion, 84-85, 88-89, 90, 145; Morel’s (Condillac), 27
theory of, 77, 136, 163; neurological, 82, Evolution, 77, 88,133
133-34. See also Nervous weakening; Exhibitionism, 128
Hmditaires
Degeneration (Nordau), 109-110, 135-39, 142 Fabre, R (1859-99), 80-81
Demeaux, J. B. D., 38, 72 Falret,J. (1824-1902), 86
Department stores, \22-2Q. See also Kleptomania Family values, 57,122-23,153
Depopulation. See Fertility Ferrand, J. (1604-30), 49
Derrida,]., 14, 110, 111, 183n.3 Ferrus, G. (1784-1861), 52
Descartes, R. (1596-1650), 27, 128 Fertility, 20,39-40, 77, 81, 89, 94, 139, 141,
des Esseintes, DukeJ., 131, 139-42 142,147,153
Deslandes, L. (1796-1850), 5,33 Fetishism: etymology, 114, 116-17, 199n.4;
De.ssaline, J.-J. (1748P-1806), 41 apron, 85, 147; Bineton, 85, 114-15,
Dessoir, M. (1867-1947), 102,198n.66 126-31; boot-nail, 128, 129; buttocb, 85;
Dide, Xante, 163 and collectionomania, 124-25, 131, 140,
Index 241
154; commodity, 121-26, 162; as cult, 116; Hallucinations, 46-47

earlobe, 150-51; ethnography, 116-17; eye, Haussmann, Baron G. (1809-91), 122, 135
27, 128; frotteurism, 147, 205n.55;gran<i On the Health of Men of Letters (Tissot), 20
mdpetit fetichisme, 127-28; hair braid, 128, Hereditaires, 78, 124, 136
150; handkerchief, 135; and masochism, 129, Heredity, 20, 38-40, 77, 80. See also
148-49, 154-55; mouth, 130; night bonnet, Degeneration
85; olfactory, 131, 135-38, 140-43; patent Heterosexuality, 102-103, 106, 178
leather boot, \45-46-, piqtieur defilles, 150; Hill, A., 66-67
and religiosity, 130, 163; and sadism, 148- Hirschfeld, M. (1868-1935), 106,198n.69
151; silk, 113-14, 125, 147; as theological History: and confession, 43, 159; and imagina¬
system, 117-18 tion, 12, 154; and sexuality, 87-88, 110-11,
First Empire, 38, 41, 42 154-55, 164. See also Case histories
Flaubert, G. (1821-80), 71, 81-82,115-16 Homosexuality, 11,61,86,110-11, 141-42;
Fliess, W. (1858-1928), 167, 172,173-74 definition 100-101; and fetishism, 143^6;
Forensic medicine, 11, 52-62, 72-76, 86, 142, origins, 70, 178, 191n.l; psychosexual devel¬
150-51. See also Laws opment, \d2-3. See also Inversion
Fornication, 15, 16 Human sciences, 9
Foucault, M., 8,109-10 Humoral theory, 20, 48
Fournier and Beguin, 24-26, 28, 39 Huysmans,].-K. (1848-1907), 106, 121, 131,
Fournier-Pescay, 76 139-42,149,204n.44
Franco-Prussian War, 84, 89, 109, 110 Hysteria: and deceitfulness, 82-83, 97; Flau¬
Freron, E. (1718-76), 34,35 bert’s, 81-82; male, 79-83, 84, 194n.26; and
Freud, S. (1856-1939); auto-analysis, 170-73; masturbation, 29-31, 49, 80; maternal, 79,
denigrates predecessors, 210n.25; evolutionary 80, 85; pre-Enlightenment theories, 16, 79
narratives, 168-69; father described as pervert,
172; on fetishism, 168, 209n.l3; and Fliess, Imagination: degeneration, 82-83; delectation
167, 173-74,210n.26; French reception of, in, 32, 92, 136; erotic, 11, 28, 43, 154, 164;
166; and hereditarianism, 167; on homosexu¬ and erotomania, 46-47, 50, 56; and fetish¬
ality, 167, 170,209n.l5; on interpretation, ism, 128-30, 142, 143-46; and inversion, 92,
172-73; and Janet, 168; on masturbation, 102-103, 143-46; and kleptomania, 123;
167; olfactory theories, 169, 208n.9. Works; and masturbation, 13, 24-26, 30-31, 33, 38,
Autobiographical Study, 170-75; “Project for a 47, 59-60, 143-46, 162; as medium for ther¬
Scientific Psychology,” 167; Three Essays on the apy, 28, 31, 38, 51, 104, 169
Theory of Sexuality, 168 Indolence and disease, 20-21
Interpretation of the erotic, 8-10, 149, 151,
Galen, C. (c. 131-c. 201), 16 172-73
Galien, Gabriel, 31-32 Inversion: as atavism, 87-89; and autoeroticism,
Gandois-Hery, 52-55 102, 146; congenital, 84, 85, 91-92, 101-
Gamier, P. (1848-1905), 144-48, 148-51, 103, 144, 146; as delusional heterosexuality,
205n.54 100; female, 108-109, 161; as fetishism, 85,
Gay rights, 66-67, 198n.74 126; first French case, 69-70, 84-86; gender,
Genesic sense or instinct, 6, 8, 11, 25, 61, 78 81-82, 83-84, 141, 162; German cases, 70,
Genital neuroses, 132 83-84; Italian invert, 89-97, 111; Ralfalovich
Genitals, female, 46-47, 49, 51, 157-59, 160-61 on, 98-108; as science fiction, 110-11; survey
Georget, E.-J. (1795-1828), 38 on, 88-89, 94, 100; trope of, 71, 101, 111.
Gide,A. (1869-1951), 198n.65 See also Contrary sexual sensation; Homosex¬
Goldstein,]., 194n.24, 195n.24, 200n.l0 uality; Unisexuality; Uranism
Gonorrhea, 14, 16
Gray, J. (1866-1934), 99-100, 197n.57 Jacquot, F. (1819-?),61,66
Griesinger, W. (1817-1769), 83 James, R. (1703P-1776), 18
Guerin,]. (1801-86), 61-62 Janet, P. (1859-1947), 153,168
Guislain,]. (1797-1860), 61,200n.9 Jews, 90-91, 99, 166
Haeckel, Ernst (1834-1919), 166, 168 Journal des gens du monde, 36
242 Index
ICleiti, A., 80 143^6; hysteria, 28-31, 80-81; impotence,

Klejilomania, 50, 123-26, 201n.l7 19; indolence, 20; mutilation, 59-61; necro-
KralR-Ebing, R. (1840-1902),10, 84, 85, 148- |)hilia, 60-61; nymphomania, 29-31; self-
49, 205n.57 mutilation, 31-32;
Krueg,J., 70 consequences of, 17-19, 37, 39; Enlighten¬
ment medical theories, 17-20; and erotoma¬
Ld-Bas (Huysmans), 142, 149 nia, 46; female, 5,24, 28-31, 161; and fetish¬
Lacassagne, A. (1843-1924), 87, 124 ism, 85, 113-14, 128-29, 143-47; and
Lallemand, C. (1790-1853), 38, 41 imagination, 13, 24-25, 37-38, 143^6; in¬
Lasegue, E. (1816-83), 82-83 spection boards, 38; pedagogy condemning,
Latour, A. (1805-82), 63-65 21-26; physical restraints against, 37; pre-
Laupts, Dr. (pseudonym). See Saint-Paul, G. Eiilightenment medical theories, 14, 16-17,
Laurent, Emile (1861-1904), 152 183n.l0; public health threat, 22, 39^0; in
Laws: antisodomy, 83, 85, 107; censorship, schools, 24-25, 38; theological condemnation,
191n.36; corruption of minors, 72; national 14, 1.5-16
as)’liims, 55; public decency, 72; loi de Senes Mauss, M. (1872-1950), 121
(1819), 71-72 Medical: education, 63-65, 191n.36; profession,
Legrand du Saulle, H. (1830-86), 65, 77-78, 9, 52-53, 60-62, 65, 77-78
93, 120,201n.l9 Medicolegcd Study of Assaults on Decency
Lesbianism, 31, 108-109, 161 (Tardieu), 72-77
Leuret, E (1797-1851), 52-53, 60 Medico-Psychological Society, 45, 77, 86
Liaisons, mental, 27-28, 31-33 Melancholia, 48^9. See also Lovesickness
Limbic system, 133-34, 203n.40 Micale, M., 166
Literacy, 26 Michea, C. (1815-82), 61, 62, 80, 87
Literature (of the imagination), 15, 25-28, 31, Miller, M., 122
34,50, 51, 82-83, 102, 104, 108-109, 130,
Mirbeaii, O. (1848-1917), 149
162, 182n.5
Moll, A. (1862-1939), 102, 198n.66
Locke, J. (1632-1704), 27
MoUesse or mollities, 15,20-21,75-76, 183n.5.
Lombroso, C. (1835-1909), 136
See cdso Effeminacy
Louyer-Villermay, J. (1776-1837), 51
Monomania: destructive, 61; erotic, 51, 60; Es-
Love, 49-51, 55, 57, 60, 61; Binet’s p.sychology
quirol on, 51, 60; medicolegal issues, 53, 54-
of, 127-29; chivalric, 48, 50; morbid, 150-
56, 60, 62. See also specific types: Erotomania;
53. See also Lovesickness
Kleptomania; Mastupratiomania; Theomania
Lovesickness, 48-49
de Montherlant, H. (1895-1972), 197n.65
Lunier, J. (1822-85), 63
Moral, the physical and the, 23, 50, 185n.28
Moral therapy, 28, 51, 53
Madness Considered in Its Relation to Medico-
Morality: and medicine, 19-20, 22, 56-58, 61-
Judicial Questions (Marc), 57-58
65, 74, 145; public {mmirspubliques), 71
Magnan, V (1835-1916), 70-71, 84-86, 136
Moreau de Tours, J. (1804-84), 80, 195n.30
Maire, Fiangois, 150-51
Moreau de Tours, P (1844-1908), 42
Manustupration, 14, 15, 18, 25, 33. See also
Masturbation Morel, B. (1809-73), 72, 77, 193nn.l8-19
Marc, C. (1771-1840), 52, 57-58,118-19 Muller, M. (1823-1900), 117,199n.l
Marchal de Calvi, Charlesjacob (1815-1873),
59 Nacke, P (1851-1913), 106-107
Marie-Antoinette (17.55-1793), 31, 161, 207n.l0 Narcisse (Rousseau), 21
Marx, K. (1818-83), 121-22 Nasal reflex neurosis, 132
Masochism, 32-33, 148-49, 205n.57 Nationalism, 84, 105-108, 110, 139
Mastupratiomania, 33, 37, 40. See also Natural versus artificial, 15, 33, 57-58, 66, 136,
Masturbation. 140
Masturbation: delinilion, 14; Naturalism, 90, 93, 137, 139
associated with: crime, 37; death, 18, 19, 119; Necrophilia, 58-65, 85, 149, 194n.25; in litera¬
degeneration, 78; homosexuality, 32, 102, 108, ture, 190n.31
Index 243
Nervous system: arrested development, 23, 42; Philosophes, 20, 42-43, 131-32
hypersensitivity, 25-28, 51, 79, 81, 162; and Philosophical Hygiene (Virey), 38
sexual perversions, 86-88; sympathetic action Physiologies, 5, 182n.7
of, 25, 31,51, 132; weakening of, 20, 23, Physiolom of Taste (Brillat-Savarin), 5-8
134, 136,139,140-41, 162, 189n.l6, Pietz,W., 117, 121
204n.41. See also Olfaction Pinel,P.( 1745-1826), 27-28
Neurasthenia. See Nervous system, weakening Plato, 110-11
Nominalism, 8 Platter, Felix (1,536-1614), 16
Nordau, M. (1849-1923), 109-10,135-39, Pleasure, 8,12,20,27,31,32-33, 46-47, 11.3-
142, 204n.45 15, 119, 124, 125, 130,153-55, 162, 164,
Normal versus pathological, 61-62, 66, 101, 207n.7
127-28, 154-55 Pollution; definition, 14, 183n.2; involuntary,
Nosology, 9, 85,126 26, 92; nocturnal, 26, 33; voluntary, 14, 15,
Novels. See individiud titles and Literature; 16-17
Pornography. Pornography: eighteenth-century, 27, 31, 157-
Numa Pnetorius. See Wilhelm, E. 59; medical, 10, 26, 56, 94-96, 154; nine¬
Nuns, 16, 120, 200n.7 teenth-century, 108-109; as one-handed liter¬
Nye, R., 109, 183n.4, 205n.51 ature, 28; political, 31, 54, 158, 160
Nymphomania, 28, 29-31, 49-51, 56-58. Primitives, 41-42, 88, 121, 116-18, 127-29,
See also Hysteria 133,162, 163, 169
Prostitution, 72, 74, 162
Odors. See Olfaction; Fetishism, olfactory Psychoanalysis, 8-9, 182n.l3; biological founda¬
Odors in the Novels of Zola (Bernard), 137-38 tions, 166-170; French, 166, 207n.3, 208n.4.
Odors of Paris (Veuillot), 135 See abo Freud
Olfactif See Fetishism, olfactory Psychopathia sexualis (Kraflt-Ebing), 10, 148-
Olfaction; Broca on, 132-34, 203nn.39-40; and 49, 206n.63
decadence, 137-38, 140, 141-42; in primi¬ Psycho-sexual genetic narratives, 33
tives, 133-34; science of, 5, 131-32 Public health, 38-40, 52
Onan, 15 Public hygiene. See Public health
Onania, 17-18, 19
Onanism. See Masturbation Queen of England, 76
Onanism (Tissot), 18-22, 28
Osphresiology (Cloquet), 132 Race. See Primitives; Savage, noble
Ralfalovich, A. (1864-1934): conservative poli¬
Paraphilia. 12 tics, 98; critique of French sexology, 104-105,

Parent-Duchatelet, A. (1790-1836), 37, 72 111; on effeminates, 97, 101-102, 104; Gray
Paris: Faculty of Medicine, 63-64, 77, 118,120; and, 99-100; theory of psychosexual develop¬
homosexual underworlds, 73, 106; as patho¬ ment, 102-103; on unisexuality, 97, 98-99,
genic, 62-64 100, 106; and Wilde, 99, 103-104; youth,
Parosmia, 132, 140 99-100

Passivism, 148. See also Ma.sochism de Rais, Cilles (1404-40), 65, 149
Pasteur, Louis (1822-1895), ARebours, 121, 131, 139-42, 204n.44

Pathognomy, 19, 72, 76-77 Regis, E. (1855-1918), 150
Peasants, 20,41, 119, 169 Reveille-Parise, J. H. (1782-1852), 39
Pederasts, 72-77, 79, 106, 108, 162 Revolutions: 1798, 38, 41, 42; 1848, 64, 66
Penis: divided in two, 31-32; pathological traits, Revuephilosophique, 200n.l 1

74, 78, 79 Richer, R (1849-1933), .58, 120
Perfumes, 131, 1.32, 140-41 Rodamel, 49
Perversification, 5, 63, 66, 181n.4 Rolet, 10

Perversion, sexual, 5, 11-12, 65-67, 79, 85, Rony-Dtrprest, 49-50
110, 114, 126-27, 151-52, 168-70,181n.4 Rougon-Macquart family, 163
Pluedrns (Plato), 110-111 Rousseau, J.J. (1712-1778): antipathy for
Pharnuikon, 111 doctors, 21; as fetishist, 128-30, 148; and

244 Index
Rousseau, J.J. (1712-1778) {continued) Tante, 75-76

masturbation, 13-14, 18, 35; and spanking, Tarde, G. (1843-1904), 87, 152-53
32- 33, 35, 128-29; and Tissot, 21-22; and Tardieu, A.-A. (1818-1879), 4, 72-77
virtue, 36; on women, 24, 161. Works: Confes¬ Theomania, 58, 118-20, 136
sions, 13-14,27,32-33,34-37, 154-55; Theophrastus, 131
Discourse on the Sciences and Arts, 21; Emile, Third Republic, 119, 120, 163
21-22,23-25, m-,Narcisse, 21 Thomas, G., 66-67
Tissot, S.-A.-A.-D. (1728-1797), 18-22.
Works: Advice to Common People on their
Sacher-Masoch, L. von (1836-95), 148
Health, 20,22; Essay on the Dbeases of the
Sade, D. A. E, Marquis de (1740-1814),
Valetudinary, 20; On the Health of Men of Let¬
53-54, 148-50, 207nn.6, 8
ters, 20; Onanbm, 18-22,28
Sadifetishism, 148-51
Toussaint-Louverture (1743-1803), 41
Sadism, 148-49, 205n.57. See also Fetishism;
Transsexualism, 86
Sadifetishism
Treatise on Degenerations (Morel), 72, 77
Saint-Paul, G. (1870-1937), 88-89, 93-97,
Treatise on Sensations (Condillac), 132
100,102, 105, 107, 110
Tribadism. See Lesbianism
Santenoise, 120
Tyrannism, lA?,. See abo Sadifetishism
Satyriasis, 28, 49-50, 57-58, 119
Savage, noble, 41-42- See also Primitives
Ulrichs, K. H. (1826-95), 83-84,100
Science fictions, 95, 109-11
Sebastian, Saint, 99, 197n.59
Unisexuality, See abo Inversion
Uranism, 83-84, 141. Seeabo Inversion
Second Empire, 65, 72, 77, 122, 135
Uranbm and Unisexuality (Raffalovich), 98, 101
Second Republic, 191n.35
Uterine fury. See Nymphomania; Hysteria
Seed. See Semen
Self-pollution. See Masturbation; Pollution
Semen, 14, 16-17,20,23,33,153,169 Vampire of Montparnasse. See Bertrand, Sergeant
Sexual intercourse, 17, 31, 33, 47, 152-53, 159, Ventre de Paris (Zola), 137-38
207n.7 Veuillot, L. (1813-83), 135
Sexuality and knowledge, 4, 6, 11, 35, 43, 62, Viaticum (Constantine the African), 48
65, 111, 154-55, 169, 174 VireyJ.J. (1775-1846), 38
Shaw, C. J., and Ferris, G. N., 5 Voltaire (F. M. Arouet) (1694-1778), 36
Social medicine. See Public health

Socialism, 64-65 Westphal, K. (1833-90), 70,84, 85
Sodomy, 15, 41, 74, 92, 142, 143-45. Seeabo Wilde, 0. (1854-1900), 99,103-104, 140
Laws, antisodomy Wilhelm, E., 107-108
Solitary vice. See Masturbation Williams, R., 123
Soubourou, P.-H.-R. (1877-?), 124 Women: artifice of, 24, 161; and corruption of
Spanking, 32-33, 154-55 children, 24, 25, 108; erotic confessions of, 7,
Stefanowsky, D., 148 161; and illness, 187n.2; and masturbation,
Stekel, W. (1868-1940), 12 5, 28-31, 161; mutilation of, 59-60; nervous
Stigmata, 72, 77, 134, 136 weakness, 26,27,28, 50, 79,124, 162; sexual
Subjectivity, 11, 32, 34-36, 43, 110-11, 155, voracity of, 24, 30, 51,57, 160,163
164, 174, 182n.l2 Woodward, S. (1787-1850), 5
Sulloway, R, 166-67,168
Supplement: dangerous, 13, 14, 33; Derrida on, Zola, E. (1840-1902): on fertility, 94; on inver¬
14 sion, 89-95; as psychopath, 93,137-38.
Symonds,J. A. (1840-93), 100 Works: La Bite humaine, 163; Au Bonheur des
Symons, A. (1853-1945), 99, 100, 197n.61 Dames, 123-25Le Ventre de Parb, 137-38
Tamassia, A., 70, 86, 196n.45 Zoloeand Her Two Acolytes (Sade?), 54
bruinjel university library
Bannerman Centre,
Uxbridge, Middlesex,
UB8 3PH
Renewals: wwvwb^^
OR
01895 266141
long loan
XB 2594020 1
those erotic expressions seen as threatening
to the social order, national population, mili¬
tary power, and the supremacy of will and
reason. In each case, Rosario argues, the
original culprit of deviant behavior was
identified as the imagination—a perilous site
beyond surveillance, highly susceptible to
the salacious effects of literature, where
irrational associations might take root and
usurp the “reality” of conventional sexuality.
What emerges most compellingly from
Rosario’s study is the anxiety produced by
the erotic imagination and the elaborate,
often desperate theoretical fabrications
designed to contain it.
Filled with extraordinary case studies
and written in prose that is as lively and
entertaining as it is insightful, this book
offers both a history of the erotic imagination
and its narrative expressions, as well as a fas¬
cinating mirror in which our contemporary
ambivalence about sexuality—from the acri¬
monious rhetoric of family values to censor¬
ship of pornography and hostility towards
gays—takes on surprising new significance.
Uxbridge, Middlesex, UBS 3PH
5
BRUNEI UNIVERSITY LIBRARY
QJ
C
QJ
Bannerman Centre,
D
J QD Vernon A. Rosario, M.D., Ph.D., is a
i (T3 ■sD
rsi
QJ
C "oj
LO resident in psychiatry at UCLA, Neuropsy¬
QJ
c cn
k_ 13
00 chiatric Institute. He is the coeditor of
O
I—
Solitary Pleasures: The Historical, Literary and
5 QJ
5
Artistic Discourses of Autoeroticism, editor of
Jo Science and Homosexualities, and coauthor of
QJ
5 Gay and Lesbian Life in the United States,

forthcoming from Oxford University Press.
Jacket design by Kathleen M. lynch
Jacket painting: Erich Lessing/Art Resource, NY

^ ADVANCE PRAISE F O R
“Rosario’s historical study of the erotic imagination in France illuminates brilliantly the
crucial role that sexual confessions have played in first identifying eroticism and then
linking it decisively to perverse sexuality. In their respective ways, as he wittily demon¬
strates, both medical experts and their patients have channeled into eroticism the anxi¬
eties and obsessions of modern society.”
— Robert A. Nye, Department of History,
Oregon State University
“Dr. Rosario’s fascinating study of the developments of society’s concepts of perversity
is especially enriched by his unusual background. His thorough knowledge of the
history of science and expertise in medicine are combined with an ability to analyze
both literary and medical texts in an extremely subtle manner. His impressive com¬
mand of the French literary tradition as well as recent theoretical frameworks gives his
work authority and complexity. The writing throughout is illuminating, elegant, and
richly satisfying.”
— Henry F. Majewski, Professor of French Studies,
Brown Universi
900 00
9 78 D195 .1 04837
ISBN 0-19-510483-8

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^ FRENCH HISTORIES OF PERVERSITY*^

[This] is a book to be read only by the sexu¬

The Female Thermometer

The Erotic Imagination

New York * Oxford

Oxford New York

and associated companies in

Copyright © 1997 by Vernon A. Rosario II

Published by Oxford University Press, Inc.,

Oxford is a registered trademark of Oxford University Ptess

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced,

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Earlier versions of some material have been published:

Printed in the United Stales of America

' " ■' '' ■ ''™'' *

' h)i i.Hfiin’'

■-^\u>c! iif^'9 f: »|->

In the process of writing this book, I have sometimes felt

and the Department of History at U.C.L.A. who helped me navigate bureau¬

Note on Translations and Citation System

ir;- .*-'• *;■&'%' V;

Often eroticism is just a manifestation of illness, exliibited as a

What is the origin of the “erotic”? The question seems

predilections, Saddam Hussein’s supposed penchant for transvestitism, or

While Dubarry insisted on the social importance of discussing sex,

The first French use of erotique—in the contemporary connotation of sexual

Dr. Hippolyte Cloquet’s medical lectures (34).^ Like Cloquet, Brillat-Savarin

Fancying himself a man of science, Brillat-Savarin wanted to test the pop¬

doctors’ descriptions of patient histories and physical examinations, police and

While “perverts” relied on medical literature for information and titilla-

a subtle role in the narrative production of all three speakers, as it must

That dangerous supplement that deceives nature? Titillated readers of

The confrontation between the “natural” individual and “artificial” soci¬

Sins of the Flesh Versus Diseases of Semen

In the Middle Ages, Roman Catholic theologians elaborated doctrine on the

self composed of a number of different kinds of polluting acts. Similarly, Her¬

The Semen discharged too lavishly, occasions a Weariness, Weakness, Indis¬

However, we should be wary of clumping Boerhaave with the later anti¬

Tissot and Rousseau Battling Pollution

The slightest irritation immediately provoked an imperfect erection, this was

As wdth Oiiania, new editions of Tissot’s Onanism included plaintive con¬

To support his contention that mental work was debilitating, Tissot

Civilized Corruptions of Soft Nerves

In drawing attention to children, the anti-onamsm literature participated in a

The excessive development of nervous sensibility, which is the source of so

Childhood was a perilous time of extreme nervous and imaginative impres¬

We have seen that antimasturbationist doctors were preoccupied with

Les Liaisons Dangereuses

lication of “licentious literature” often colored with political and anticlerical

I nourished myself on situations that had interested me in my readings, I re¬

Rousseau’s friend, the sensudAistphilosophe Etienne Bonnot de Condillac,

Fournier and Beguin warned that imaginary excess provoked hypersexualism in

These connections between masturbation, nymphomania or furor uten-

perience of childhood—spankingd^ The importance of associationist mecha¬

advantage” of its “convenience,” the supplement—masturbation, imaginary

Speaking the Unmentionable

Writing about oneself is an ancient tradition; however, the word autobiography

ther the “knowledge of mankind,” Rousseau volunteered himself as the first-

Given this model of psychic development—in which every sensory impression

While Rousseau hoped his erotic sell-exploration and self-revelation would

ir;- .-'• ;■&'%' V;