Convulsions

The appearance of convulsions is associated with the name of Jansenist (1690-1727), who was the eldest son of an adviser to the Paris Parliament . At seven years old, he was sent to a boarding house, where he was distinguished by great piety. Having become fascinated with Jansenism, after the death of his father, he ceded his place in parliament to his younger brother in order to devote himself entirely to religious activity ^[2] . In 1713, he received permission from his father, who wanted him to engage in social affairs, to enter the seminary . After that, he lost his father, who died, and distributed to the poor the share of the inheritance due to him.

Francis died on the evening of May 1, 1727 , at the age of thirty-six. Before his death, he dictated his confession of faith and bequeathed to bury himself as a poor man in a common cemetery. Fulfilling the will of the deceased, he was buried in the parish cemetery of the church of Saint-Médard on May 3. On the same day, a silk winder named Madeleine Benigny, who suffered from paralysis of her left hand, came to the house where the deacon used to live, on Bourgogne street at 8 o’clock in the morning and saw how they brought a coffin in which they should put the deceased. When the coffin was placed, the patient bent down a little to rub her hand on the coffin before it was laid on the coffin, and then went to her home. When she entered her room, she immediately began to unwind the silk with both hands. Rumors spread around the city that her illness had passed without a trace. After that, the next day a crowd of cripples and patients gathered in anticipation of healing ^[3] .

The Jansenists venerated Francis as saints, although for the past fourteen years he had not been at the sacrament under the pretext that he was not worthy of him. Many inhabitants of the quarter, who personally knew Francis, went to his grave and then claimed that they had recovered from their illnesses or received relief from their suffering. After spreading the news of miracles on his grave, crowds of people poured out their feelings in exalted prayers, speeches and prophecies, whole religious mysteries and processions were played out. Since 1731 fanaticism has reached such limits that the worshipers, stretching on the grave of the saint, fell into convulsions, whence the name “convulsions” came from ^[3] . Pilgrimages began, paralytics were brought to the grave; mentally ill, blind, sick with incurable diseases rubbed against the tombstone of the deacon and hoped for a miracle. Some Jansenists saw in these phenomena divine evidence of the truth of the teachings of the Jansenists, trying to use to strengthen their positions in the confrontation with the Jesuits. According to reports of those years, not only the Jansenists themselves were convulsing, but also completely strangers who accidentally witnessed convulsions. Even children fell into a state of ecstasy ; in particular, women were affected by it ^[3] .

Convulsions were divided into:

• securists (from French secours - “help”, “auxiliary tool”), who prepared convulsions with strokes, injections, etc.
• naturalists or figure skaters who, obscenely exposed, portrayed either the impotence of an unredeemed human nature, or the purity of the Christian church.
• discontentants and melanzhists who debated about who sends convulsions - God or the devil ^[4] .

All of them were at enmity with each other, proving the truthfulness of their teachings and the hereticity of other groups. The activity of the secularists, which received the most fame, resembled torture: they trampled each other with their feet, beat with sticks, logs, staves and burned with a hot iron. Some broke the fingers of young women, tore their breasts with ticks, pricked their bodies with iron rods, and even crucified them ^[5] . However, convulsions were surprisingly insensitive to pain, becoming literally invulnerable ^[3] .

To prove the miracles allegedly committed at the grave of Francis, a book was written “La vérité des miracles opérés par l'intercession de François de Paris” (3 volumes), presented to the king by Parliamentary Advisor Louis-Basil Carr de Montgeron. The latter belonged to miracles at first ironically, but on September 7, 1731 , against his will, he himself was convulsed ^[4] . In this work, he cites numerous examples of the invulnerability of "convulsions", which, according to modern concepts, are exaggerated.

In order to end the unrest, Louis XV ordered in 1732 to ward the cemetery with a wall and guard the guards. The next day, at the cemetery’s gate, an anonymous prankster hung a sign with the inscription: “ De par le Roy, défense à Dieu de faire miracle en ce lieu ” (“It is forbidden by the king to perform miracles in this place”) ^[6] . Even the order of 1733 to incarcerate prisoners could not completely stop the epidemic. Among the followers of this movement were representatives of all walks of life and all social institutions - educational, religious and governmental. Even Fontenay, court secretary of Louis XV, turned out to be subject to seizures.

There were cases when convulsions opposed the royal army with weapons in their hands. The head of the Paris police Giraud said that it is easy to destroy this evil in the bud by taking strict measures against the instigators of the riots. Counselor Kappe de Montgeron, who dedicated his work to these manifestations, was sent to the Bastille, some of the most famous patients were distributed among medical facilities. But the use of force for a long time was restrained by the fact that Cardinal Noai , who had some sympathy for the Jansenists, was an ardent defender of the teachings of Francis of Paris.

Repression, restrictions and prohibitions proved powerless to completely stop these manifestations. Since it was forbidden to convulse in public, meetings of the Jansenists began to take place in private homes ^[3] . Then this phenomenon, like other mass psychic epidemics, gradually subsided and disappeared by itself. Despite the fact that even among the Jansenists themselves, not everyone approved of convulsive activity, it existed for a rather long time, some manifestations were recorded up to the French bourgeois revolution .

The scale of the phenomenon already in the XVIII century caused a lot of responses, including sharply critical ones. So, Voltaire , whose brother - Arman Arue - was a Jansenist, reacted negatively to Jansenists and convulsions. He wrote in one of the letters to Helvetius : “The Jansenists, convulsions, rule Paris. This is much worse than the Jesuit kingdom ... ” ^[7] . In a note to one of the poetic texts, Voltaire notes about this sect: “ They scorched the girls (On rôtissait) so that their skin, however, was not damaged; struck them with de bûches in the stomach, but not injuring them and this was called giving help ”; he calls them charlatans, in his opinion: "The earth has been flooded a thousand times with superstitions more terrible, but there have never been among them more stupid and more humiliating ." Voltaire became the heir to his brother, who made a collection of their “visions” that took place among women in 1744 . These materials eventually ended up in the Voltaire library , located in St. Petersburg since 1779 . A.S. Pushkin got acquainted with them, who in 1832, conducting historical research, during his work on the History of Peter I , visited Voltaire’s personal library. In addition, a pointer to Voltaire’s works in the Pushkin’s library is cut on a page with the word convulsionnaires. At the time of Pushkin in Russia they were called "convulsors" and compared with the Methodist sects " in England, and especially in America, where the so-called field gatherings, campmeetings, the rabies of the Methodists comes to incredibility " (the journal " Library for reading " for 1835 ( volume X, section “Mixture”) ^[8] .

The Scottish philosopher David Hume , describing in detail this phenomenon in the “ Study of Human Knowledge ” ( 1748 ), wrote ^[9] :

Scientists and thinkers tried to find a rational explanation for what was happening at the Saint-Medard cemetery. In 1733, Philippe Hecquet ( 1661-1737 ), dean of the faculty of medicine at the University of Paris , explained convulsions with erotic excitement, which in those possessed by this ailment was caused by foreign smells.

The well-known anthropologist E. B. Taylor, in the book “ Primitive Culture ” in the chapter “Fainting and seizures caused for religious purposes”, notes that in “... the religion of unicultural peoples, the condition in which a person is colloquially called“ touched ” has an important place and there have always been deceivers who feigned this condition. “ By their morbid nature, these seizures are extremely similar to those mentioned by the history of the convulsions of Saint-Médard and the Cévennes enthusiasts ” ^[10] .

The journalist and sociologist Mikhailovsky N.K. explained the origin of this phenomenon by the epidemic and imitative nature of some nervous diseases, comparing convulsions with clicks : “ ... it’s a very common phenomenon that several clicks follow. All kinds of convulsions and convulsions generally strongly affect the audience and very often cause a whole string of imitators ” ^[11] .

According to Bekhterev V.M. , due to self-hypnosis, these or other mystical ideas that stemmed from the religious manifestations of the Middle Ages were often the source of a number of convulsive and other manifestations of great hysteria, which, thanks to the prevailing beliefs, also received a tendency to epidemic spread . So, convulsive epidemics developed as a result of mutual suggestion on the basis of religious mysticism and severe superstitions ^[12] .

• “The History of Por Royal” - Saint-Beuve .

• Jansenism
• Sect
• Whoopers
• Hysteria

• Convulsionists // Brockhaus and Efron Encyclopedic Dictionary : in 86 volumes (82 volumes and 4 additional). T. XVa (1895): Koala - Concordia, p. 919 - St. Petersburg, 1890-1907.
• Bekhterev V. Brain and suggestion . - Litres, 2017.
• Zarin S. Convulsionists // Orthodox Theological Encyclopedia. - T. XII.
• Mikhailovsky N.K. works on sociology: In 2 vols. / Kozlovsky V.V. (ed. ed.). St. Petersburg: Aletheia, 1998.
• Renjar P. Mental epidemics. Historical and psychiatric essays. M .: Emergency Exit, 2004.
• Tsvetkov S.E. History of the Bastille. Publishing House: Armada Press. Year of publication: 2001. ISBN 5-309-00153-0
• Yum. D. A treatise on human nature. Book one. About cognition. - M .: "Canon", 1995. ISBN 5-88373-013-2
• Yakubovich D. Pushkin in the Voltaire library // [Alexander Pushkin]. - M .: Journal-newspaper association, 1934. - S. 905—922. - ( Lit. inheritance ; T. 16/18).
• “Le tombeau de Paris” (P., 1834-59); Mathieu, "Histoire des miraculés et des convulsionnaires" (1864).
• Catherine-Laurence Maire, Les Convulsionnaires de Saint-Médard; Miracles, convulsions et prophéties à Paris au XVIII ^e siècle , Paris, 1985, (ISBN 2-07-070314-2)
• Daniel Vidal, Miracles et convulsions jansénistes au XVIII ^e siècle, Le mal et sa connaissance , Paris, PUF, 1987