Mental Illness and Asylums

The Belle Époque's approach to mental illness mixed medical advances with persistent cruelty. The old practice of exhibiting "lunatics" for entertainment had ended, but new forms of exploitation emerged. The asylum system warehoused society's unwanted while doctors experimented with treatments ranging from innovative to barbaric.

The Salpêtrière, where Charcot had demonstrated hysteria, remained Europe's largest asylum. Its 5,000 inmates included genuinely mentally ill alongside inconvenient women—disobedient wives, unmarried mothers, political radicals. Diagnosis often reflected social nonconformity rather than medical condition. Release required family consent, trapping women whose families benefited from their absence.

Dr. Valentin Magnan's classification of mental illness represented medical progress, distinguishing between conditions previously lumped as "madness." Yet classification also enabled new forms of control. "Moral insanity" diagnoses confined those violating social norms. Homosexuality, nymphomania, and anarchism became medical conditions requiring confinement.

Treatments ranged from humane to horrific. Occupational therapy, pioneered at Ville-Évrard asylum, gave patients purpose through work. Gardens, workshops, and art studios provided therapeutic activities. Yet the same institutions practiced prolonged baths, straightjackets, and isolation cells. Experimental surgeries destroyed lives in pursuit of cures.

The asylum workforce—underpaid, undertrained, overworked—often treated patients brutally. Attendants used violence to maintain order in overcrowded wards. Sexual abuse of female patients was endemic but rarely punished. Whistleblowers faced dismissal. The socialist newspaper L'Humanité's exposé of Villejuif asylum conditions shocked readers but produced minimal reforms.

Private sanatoriums for wealthy patients offered different experiences. These establishments, often in suburban villas, provided comfortable accommodations and genteel activities. Diagnosis of "neurasthenia" justified extended stays for those escaping unhappy marriages or business failures. The same behaviors landing poor women in public asylums earned wealthy women rest cures.