Free Little Demon in the City of Light: A True Story of Murder and Mesmerism in Belle Epoque Paris by Steven Levingston

was burning toward the explosive moment when Liégeois took the stage to present the Nancy views on crime and hypnosis in front of a restive army of Salpêtrière disciples poised to defend their positions.
    Gilles de la Tourette was the commander of the Salpêtrière troops. In anticipation of Liégeois’s appearance, he had stationed in the audience, young doctors and interns who were awaiting his order to attack.
    The enmity between Liégeois and Gilles de la Tourette was bothscholarly and personal. Gilles de la Tourette had reviled Liégeois for at least five years, ever since the law professor delivered his first major report on crime and hypnosis to the Academy of Moral and Political Sciences in 1884 and followed it up with an important book on the subject. Gilles de la Tourette had fired back with a book of his own, and now both men considered themselves preeminent scholars on crime and hypnosis and, like politicians on opposite sides of an issue, agreed on almost nothing. Although their books explored similar avenues of hypnosis and crime—cases of rape and experiments in simulated attacks and poisonings—they stood at odds on two key issues. Since Liégeois believed in the power of suggestion, he argued that almost anyone could be hypnotized and therefore could commit a crime under hypnosis, a view that implied a person’s morality was malleable—under hypnosis, even the most upright citizen could be coerced into committing a crime. To Gilles de la Tourette, these were absurd propositions. In line with Charcot, he asserted that only people with severe hysterical neuroses could succumb to hypnosis and therefore the population of possible hypnotic criminals was limited; moreover, he and Charcot insisted that morality was fixed and could not be manipulated by a hypnotist.
    The combatants were striking in their physical differences. Gilles de la Tourette was a neurologist at the Salpêtrière who had found a place in medical history for his work on a disorder characterized by motor and vocal tics, which has come to be known as Tourette’s syndrome. He was an unattractive, argumentative man with skeletal cheekbones and heavy-lidded eyes. Lacking in social graces, he was loud and impulsive, foul to anyone who dared contradict him. He had no illusions about how he came across, describing himself as“ugly as a louse, but very intelligent.”
    Liégeois had the demeanor of an absentminded professor; he wore tiny, wire-rimmed spectacles, and his pants pockets were stuffed with notes. He was famous for boring his audiences, partly because his research was so voluminous and his recitation so detailed, but also because he was arrogant in supposing that his listeners hung on his every word.
    Stepping to the podium on the final day of the congress, he opened by admitting to the delegates that he was undertaking a“perilous task” in speaking before them, but the risk was a worthy one. “Of allthe questions submitted to the Congress,” he told the amphitheater, “there are few as important as the reports” on crime and hypnotism.
    And with that, he gave himself license to drone on as long as he wished. Launching into his presentation, he said,“In this case, the only thing that can be done, gentlemen, is a complete history of the subject.” Then he strolled leisurely through the dusty archives of his own work until he finally came to his point: that his research proved an individual was capable of committing a serious crime in a hypnotized state. He’d seen it again and again in his laboratory. He had repeatedly produced what he described as“experimental crimes.”
    Crucial to his argument was that the hypnotized individual committed the crime without consciousness and therefore without responsibility. The hypnotized person was an automaton acting without free will under the command of the hypnotist. Liégeois told the audience that the spiritual father of the Nancy movement, the country doctor Ambroise-Auguste