Amand-Marie-Jacques de Chastenet, Marquis of Puységur

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Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found. Amand Marie Jacques de Chastenet, marquis de Puységur[1] (1 March 1751 – 1 August 1825), was an artillery officer-general, known for his transcribed experiments of animal magnetism on humans.

Biography

Grandson of Jacques François de Chastenet de Puységur, Marshal of France (1656–1743), he was the son of Jacques François Maxime de Chastenet de Puységur, lieutenant-general of the King's armies (1716–1782) and of Marie Marguerite Masson.

On May 8, 1781, he married Marguerite Baudard de Sainte-James, daughter of Claude Baudard, baron de Sainte-Gemmes, treasurer-general of the navy, and Julie Augustine Thibaut-Dubois, in the church of Saint-Roch; the marriage was celebrated by his relative, Jean Auguste de Chastenet de Puységur, then Bishop of Carcassonne.

Like many of his ancestors before him, he made a career in the King's armies where he reached the rank of general of the artillery corps. He was mayor of Soissons from 1800 to 1805.

He was the father-in-law of Admiral Louis Henry de Labaye de Viella.

Animal magnetism

Like his two younger brothers, Jacques Maxime (1755–1848) and Antoine-Hyacinthe (1752–1809), Puységur was a student of Franz Mesmer in the Harmony Society from 1782.

Puységur distinguished himself from Mesmer by declaring that he was only a vector for the patients, who would be their own doctors, whereas Mesmer claimed to heal by an exclusively physiological action of which the magnetizer would be the source. He also questioned the fact that the crisis, which Mesmer had made the manifestation par excellence of magnetism, was anything other than a parasitic element.

From 1784, in his estate of Buzancy in the Soissonnais, Puységur began to practice mesmerization, a trance-like state reputed to bring healing, to cure the ailments of the staff of his castle. It was after a bad course of this practice that he said to have noticed a state of somnambulism in Victor Race, a peasant whose family was in his service. This is how he described the deeply asleep but fully conscious state that he would later reproduce. He will describe in particular a clairvoyance of the patients on their own disease, on that of the others and on the remedies which are appropriate for them. This first event took place on May 4, 1784, the year of the publication of his first work on animal magnetism. It was also the year of the publication of the two official reports on animal magnetism commissioned by Louis XVI.

In 1785, he brought Victor Race to Paris to demonstrate his discoveries to Mesmer. The same year, he created in Strasbourg the "Société Harmonique des Amis Réunis" (Harmonic Society of United Friends) in which he trained some two hundred magnetizers and set up numerous treatment centers. This society continued to exist until 1789 and published numerous articles on the various cases treated by magnetism.

Always decried and questioned, he carried out numerous actions to respond to this ambient incredulity. For one of his biographers, Jean-Pierre Peter, this emphasis on the power of each person worked against him, and instead of seeing him as a personality who purified and codified magnetism and the phenomenon of somnambulism, he was preferred to be portrayed as a manipulative aristocrat in order not to lose the image of hierarchical power. It is a point of view that reminds us that this kind of practices could not be neutral in the political and religious context of the French Revolution.

Puységur was the leader of the "psychofluidist" school of animal magnetism. Among them were the naturalist Joseph Philippe François Deleuze, the physician Alphonse Teste, the officer and writer Charles de Villers, Casimir Chardel, Auguste Leroux, A. A. Tardy de Montravel and Jules Charpignon.

Works

  • Mémoires pour servir à l'histoire et à l'établissement du magnétisme animal (1784)
  • Du magnétisme animal considéré dans ses rapports avec diverses branches de la physique générale (1807)
  • Recherches, expériences et observations physiologiques sur l'homme dans l'état du somnambulisme naturel, et dans le somnambulisme provoqué par l'acte magnétique (1811)
  • Les fous, les insensés, les maniaques et les frénétiques ne seraient-ils que des somnambules désordonnés? (1812)
  • Appel aux savants observateurs du dix-neuvième siècle, de la décision portée par leurs prédécesseurs contre le magnétisme animal, et fin du traitement du jeune Hébert (1813)
  • Les vérités cheminent, tôt ou tard elles arrivent (1814)

Citations

  1. Sometimes Amand Marc Jacques de Chastenet.

References

External links