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

Liébeault, had confirmed his conclusions.“I am convinced as much as you, my dear friend,” Liébeault wrote to Liégeois, “that certain somnambules will commit criminal acts by hypnotic suggestion and will do so irresistibly while asleep or while awake afterward—and therefore without any responsibility. They go to their goal the way a rock falls to earth.”
    Liégeois had argued for years that the guilty party was not the person who committed the crime but rather the hypnotist who instigated it. If the act was undertaken without consciousness, if the actor was indeed an automaton, then the hypnotist—the author of the suggestion—should be punished.
    But how does one root out the author of the crime? It would be very difficult to do in some cases, Liégeois warned. If the hypnotist were crafty, he would ensure that his automaton had no recollection. The hypnotist would suggest to his subject that after the fact he would have total amnesia about the planning of the crime. It would simply never occur to the innocent perpetrator that the hypnotist had planted the crime in his mind. This, Liégeois concluded, made it nearly impossible to locate and punish the author of the criminal suggestion.
    From his spot in the audience, Gilles de la Tourette listened, his fuse burning. Finally, unable to control himself, he shot to his feet and in a voice laced with contempt denounced Liégeois for speakingon medical matters that were beyond his qualifications as a mere lawyer. Gilles de la Tourette’s cronies—the interns and medical students he’d planted in the audience—broke into wild applause. Then he ridiculed Liégeois’s history of hypnotism and crime, and the gang erupted again.
    Delbœuf was astonished by the rudeness of the Salpêtrière contingent, although he was awed by the eloquence of Gilles de la Tourette’s harangue.“I had never heard someone use sarcasm with such mastery, such volubility, such aplomb,” he recalled.
    Delbœuf had seen the conspiracy forming around him. “It comprised a crowd of young men, students of M. de la Tourette, without doubt,” he wrote. “A young man who was in front of me had to have been one of the leaders because at each instant during the lecture of M. Liégeois he turned toward his master and made signs of collusion.”
    Now Gilles de la Tourette attacked Liégeois for unnecessarily stirring up the public’s darkest fears. If, as Liégeois contended, hypnotists can turn anyone into an automaton, then a cunning devil could put the entire society under his spell. A political adventurer could stir up mass unrest.“You cannot look at someone too rigidly across the table or on a train for fear of letting yourself be hypnotized,” Gilles de la Tourette scoffed. And then what? First one person, then another, and before you know it, the entire population is marching like an army of zombies in support of its hypnotic new leader. The country falls into the grip of a despot! At that, the Salpêtrière soldiers hooted and stamped their feet. They cried: “
Vive
Boulanger!”
    It was only months earlier that a nightmarish coup had nearly befallen the nation. Georges Boulanger, a rugged general on horseback, had won the hearts of the masses prancing about the streets atop his black stallion. He was the strong hand the country needed at a time of government weakness, rampant crime, and immorality. His admirers wanted him to seek a vacant Paris seat in the nation’s legislative assembly known as the Chamber of Deputies. The newspapers sang his praises. His image was plastered everywhere. A nation hungry for renewal took pride in the powerful general. When he was elected in a landslide in January 1889, his supporters wanted more: A mob took to the streets urging Boulanger to march on the Élysée presidential palace and claim it as his own. The masses were as if mesmerized, and the nation stood on the edge of an uprising. The general,watching events from his headquarters at the