The circulation of animal magnetism theories and practices in the 18th and 19th centuries in Europe, and later worldwide, is both a significant phenomenon and one that has so far been little studied in its complexity.
The theory of the universal fluid and the magnetic therapies developed by Franz Anton Mesmer in Vienna became popular in Paris, where he settled in late 1778. Around 1784, they spread not only throughout France, but also to its colonies, to Malta with the network of Societies of Harmony, and all over Europe following the trajectories of learned, Masonic, mystical and esoteric societies, and of artistic and musical creation. The texts of the disputes that they generated were read, translated, commented on and re-elaborated throughout Europe and beyond.
This diffusion phenomenon continued and extended, particularly after the Revolution, in a double dynamic of claimed continuity with Mesmer’s discoveries, and of re-elaboration in the direction of somnambulism and hypnosis. It was in this form that animal magnetism – with its ambiguous status between science and belief and between physical and moral knowledge – contributed to the development of Romantic culture, to philosophical medicine and German Naturphilosophie, as well as to the French and English novels, when its effects were exhibited in clinics and theatres. It then provided the ground for the global affirmation of spiritualism and, at the end of the century, a source of inspiration for psychoanalysis. The very condemnations by the scientific academies, particularly in France, and, on the religious level, by the Holy See, contributed to this reconfiguration, by reviving transnational circulations. From this perspective, the study of magnetism makes it possible to revisit the history of disciplinary boundaries, the analysis of the political uses of knowledge and the forms and methods of popularisation at work between the 18th and 19th centuries.
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Claire Gantet (5 octobre 2022). Mesmerism. Le mesmérisme. Consulté le 22 avril 2025 à l’adresse https://mesmerisme.hypotheses.org/237