The treatment of the insane in eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Montpellier. A contribution to the prehistory of the lunatic asylum in provincial France.

THE LAW of 30 June 1838 which created lunatic asylums in every department in France fixed the legal and institutional framework within which the insane were to be treated for the remainder of the nineteenth and well into the twentieth centuries.' The law was a victory for the campaign of public opinion and pressure on government which interested parties, especially in the medical profession, had been waging since the Restoration for the improvement of the conditions in which the insane were treated. The mythopoeic power of the gesture by which in 1793 Phillipe Pinel, founding father of French psychiatry, had ordered the release of insane inmates of the Paris Hopital General from the chains customarily used to restrain them had, it is true, ushered in a mode of treatment which, in its emphasis upon humane conditions under medical supervision, prefigured the regime to be favoured in the post-1838 lunatic asylums. Moreover, the foundation in 1796 of the Maison Nationale des Alienes in the Parisian suburb of Charenton permitted a second centre for the scientific study of insanity to develop in the capital.2 Paris, however, was not France: and the conditions in which the insane were kept in the provinces were sufficiently scandalous to fuel a significant reform campaign. In 1818, for example, Esquirol, one of Pinel's foremost disciples, published an official report on conditions for the insane in hospitals, prisons, diepots de mendicite, and similar institutions throughout France, which helped fan the