In The book of the Spririts 1857 (Le Livre des Esprits), Allan Kardec who changed on advice from a medium his name from Hippolyte Rivall, elaborated a metaphysical system based on communications with the beyond.Born to a Lyon family October 3, 1804, his father a magistrate, Hippolyte was baptized and raised as a Catholic. After his first years of primary education in Lyon, his parents sent him to Switzerland where he enrolled in the Pestalozzi innovative school, which drew a great deal from the writings of Rousseau.
Later Rivall co-founded a Pestalozzi-inspired technical school in Paris with the backing of an uncle trained as an educator. (Henri Sausse, Biographie d'Allan Kardec. 1927, 18-20)
Rivall had been a casual student of Mesmerism since the 1820s. Late in 1853, a Mesmerist friend, M. Fortier, told him about uncanny events that had occurred in his experimental seances. M. Fortier came to Rivall with startling news: his seance table had begun communicating clear messages by means of mysterious tapping noises. Attending Fortier 's seances introduced Rivall to a small but active group of Parisians engaged with these phenomena.
A. passages quoted here from a memoir Kardec wrote in the late 1860s, dated December 1855, sheds some light on this more personal aspect of his interest in the beyond:
Q. Does my mother's spirit come to visit me sometimes?
A. Yes, and she protects -you as much as it is possible for her to do. Q. 1 often see her in my dreams; is this a memory and a figment of MY imagination?
A. No; it is In fact her spirit appearing to you; you must be able to tell by the emotion you feel.
The Baudin circle responded enthusiastically when Rivall informed them of his intention to produce a book of spirit teachings. Other men who frequented the Baudin séances. The playwright Victorien Sardou and his father, the writer Rend Taillandier, and the publisher Didier, provided Rivall with notebooks of spirit communications they had collected from different mediums, in hopes that the additional data would help him in his project. Mrs. Baudin suggested a pseudonym for Rivall to use:
You will take the name Allan Kardec, which we give to you. In 1856, to accelerate the process of' information gathering, Kardec began to frequent the somnambulist Wina Japlict and her magnetiseur, M. Roustan. Who devoted considerably more time to answering Kardec's questions.
Despite this competition, Kardec's book enjoyed a remarkable success, which was only to grow as the decade continued. The first edition of Le Livre des Esprits sold out quickly. In 1858, Kardec followed it with a revised and augmented edition. Though superficially similar to other texts on spirit phenomena, Kardec's book in fact constituted a dramatic innovation in its genre. Instead of in a florid oracular style, the voices in Kardec's book expressed themselves quite differently and spoke about clearly defined subjects in simple language. And where texts like Auguez's and Caudemberg's were dense and repetitive, Kardec's in short segments was set off with clearly marked headings, each addressing a specific cosmological or moral question, from "The Origin and Nature of Spirits" to "Self-knowledge."
Also new things require new words, Kardec proclaimed. (Quoted in La Revue Spirite. vol.4,1861: 104) Spiritualism, he wrote, was simply "the opposite of materialism," and hence applied to any person is to believe he has something in himself other than matter. "Spiritism," on the other hand, explicitly designated a "doctrine" based on "relations between the material world and Spirits, or beings from the invisible world." By inventing a specific name to describe both his doctrine and the practices that went along with it, anyone who held seances was a Spiritist - and all Spiritists accepted the metaphysical system Kardec outlined in his writings. Coining the word Spiritisine, therefore, allowed Kardec to emphasize the distinctiveness and simultaneously creating the impression that everyone who contacted spirits shared them.
The voices who expressed themselves so succinctly in Kardec's books, owed pronounced debts to the visionary tradition of French Utopian Socialism.
At the same time, however, Kardec eliminated the revolutionary aspect this visionary current had acquired during the 1840s. He accomplished this change of direction quite shrewdly, by using one of the key elements of Charles Fourlier's cosmology - the idea of reincarnation - and bolstering it with an epistemology drawn from Corntean Positivism.
Kardec and the spirits he quoted used the Golden Rule as the basis for a fundamentally social conception of morality. Both good and evil, they argued, expressed themselves primarily through an individual's relations with others. Charity and selfishness, therefore, became the two poles of the Spiritist moral compass.
In a Spiritist world, he argued, the rich would feel an obligation to be charitable, while the poor, strengthened by the expectation of a better life to come, would accept gifts with a resigned gratitude.
A similar blend of egalitarianism and acceptance of inequality characterized the Spiritist view, of gender. While Kardec: maintained that the soul had no sex, he nevertheless believed that male and female bodies were suited for different social roles. For Kardec, the roles men and women played in society were a biological inevitability - a man's "physical organization" rendered him incapable of dispensing the kind of love a mother could, just as a woman's rendered her incapable of inhabiting the public worlds of science or politics.
Spirit phenomena provided the underpinnings of this eschatological, moral and social vision. Between incarnations, every soul existed for a period of time as a disembodied "wandering spirit." These spirits filled the universe: though humans ordinarily could not perceive them, they formed an omnipresent throng surrounding the living. When people contacted the beyond in seances, these "wandering spirits" were the beings that appeared. All such spirits had distinct personalities, Kardec maintained. They differed from one another as dramatically as a randomly assorted crowd of human beings. Some had advanced rapidly, through the spirit hierarchy, and showed a saintly concern for human welfare; others had only progressed slowly, and exhibited a mischievous caginess to lead people astray.
While Kardec's presentation of his ideas was innovative, the ideas themselves were not. Indeed, the doctrine of Spiritism was for the most part a selective compendium of ideas from mid-nineteenth century French Utopian Socialist thinkers.
Kardec's spirits appeared to have borrowed their notion of reincarnation and their critique of eternal damnation from the works of Utopian Socialists like Fourier and Jean Reynaud. Their moral vision, with its emphasis on charity, owed a great deal to the thought of Pierre Leroux and Saint-Simon one of the teachers of Eliphas Levi. (See Georgcs Brunet, Le Mysticisme social de Saint-Simon, Paris: 1922, and Robert B. Carlisle, The Proffered Crown Saint-Simonianism and flee Doctrine of Hope, 1987)
The Spiritist conception of a universe driven to constant improvement by a law of progresion too reflected the optimism of thinkers like Eugene Pelletan. Even Kardec's notion of the spiritists which might strike the modem reader as peculiar, had its antecedents in Fourier's notion of the "aromal body" and in the theories of the Mesmerists.
Despite of its remarkable popularity, Kardec's work has received little scholarly attention, and the following report of the "Spiritists on Trial" is the first to be written in English.
Despite his lofty pronouncements, in practice Kardec's exposition could often seem closer to old-fashioned metaphysical deduction, for example, did Kardec's assertion of the irrefutable truth of reincarnation differ from a Catholic's assertion of the reality of transubstantiation? Some "spirits" argued for reincarnation, while others especially those who spoke to Anglo-Saxons - argued against it.
Kardec sought to address this objection by appealing to the truth-determining power of rigorously applied logic. The rational and the true, for Kardec, were Identical. Hence, in his view, the unparalleled rationality of Spiritist doctrine gave it a greater claim to truth than any other philosophy could command.
In the spring of 1858 Kardec decided to found the Societe Parisienne des Etudes Spirites. In the late 1850s and early 1860s, small Spiritist groups began to proliferate throughout France, especially in Paris, Lyon and Bordeaux. Many of these groups initiated corresponding relationships with the Societe Parisienne, which its periodical the Revue Spirite's publicity quickly made into the most visible French organization of its kind.
In its early years, Kardec presented the Societe Parisienne similar to the Society for Psychical Research in London, as a body devoted to unbiased inquiry. into the mysteries of the beyond. To demonstrate the openness of his Society, Kardec began to include its minutes in the Revue Spirite. This publicity imparted a new degree of transparency to the elaboration of Spiritist doctrine. Readers who did not live in Pan's could now follow the Societe's deliberations and independently evaluate its Judgments of spirit communications and new ideas. In addition to reassuring readers of the objective character of the Spiritist enterprise, Kardec's efforts to create a sense of his own impartiality in this early period served as an implicit rebuttal to the increasingly virulent screeds against Spiritist dogmatism.
With the founding of his School of moral, philosophical and Christian Spiritism. Kardec suggested two new rules Spirit Societies should adopt in order to ensure the necessary "uniformity of doctrine." First, each Society was to require its members to make a "categorical declaration of loyalty, and a formal statement of adhesion to the doctrine of the Livre des Esprits." Second, societies were to reaffirm this initial commitment by starting each meeting with a quotation from either the Livre des Mediums or the Livre des Esprits. The Socite Parisienne would sever all ties with any group that refused to accept these new rules and make Kardec's doctrine its primary object of study.
Kardec's article also advanced a new scheme for the management of the increasingly numerous Spirit Societies that had appeared since 1858. Previously, these groups had only. been connected to the Societe Parisienne by informal correspondence. Now, Kardec proposed a more structured organization. In order to give small groups a node around which to congregate, Kardec recommended the creation of a "directing group" in every French city with a large Spiritist population. (La Revue Spirite, Vol.4 (1861): 3&4--385)
An increasing number of Spiritists also began publishing their own collections of spirit writings. These texts tended to support Kardec's ideas, and to acknowledge the debt by presenting his works as essential reading for anyone interested in contacts with the beyond. In his large book of dialogues with the various spirits his wife contacted, the homeopathic doctor L.T. Houat included a footnote sending readers in search of "more detailed Instructions" to Kardec's works. Henri Decon, for his part, announced his intention to publish a new journal devoted entirely to spirit communications - most of them received by his wife - In an 1862 manifesto exhorting his readers to follow Kardec's example:
M. Kardec has just called to us: Sow! Sow! Who could remain deaf to this voice, echo of the conscience of every Spiritist? Who would not wish to help this fen.ent chief laborer? He has struck the first blows, he does not rest. Let us imitate: him, and bring our small contribution of grain God, seeing our good will, will make it grow. (La Revue Spirite, Vol.6,1863: 156. 'Un Capitaine Spiritisme').
Kardec's final book, La Gazette selon le Spiritisme, appeared in 1868, and strongly reflected this turn to millenarianism. The work closed with a series of communications and commentaries declaring that "the time chosen by God has come," and that a new generation of highly-evolved souls was in the process of- being incarnated on Earth. (1)
These more elevated, intelligent humans would transform the planet's social organization, introducing a golden age of charity and fraternity. By the dawn of- the twentieth century, Spiritism would become "on which the human race will turn," the basis for an unshakable new faith in the immortality of the soul and the profoundly moral nature of the universe.”
Kardec did not live to assess the validity of this prophecy. After several years of faltering health, he died of a heart attack on March 31, 1869.
As Kardec himself maintained, simply. reading Spinitist texts did not make one a true "adept." (La Revue SpirUe. Vol. 11, 1868,1) This new spiritual system, he wrote, extended its greatest benefits to those who held seances,
Kardec's correspondence and the papers associated with the early years of the Societe Parisienne appear to have been burned in the early 1880s. But in a long article published in the January 1869 Revue Spirite Kardec put the total number of French Spiritists at an entirely implausible 600,000.
"French Spiritists, he asserted, were seventy per cent male. They tended to be moderately educated: thirty per cent had received a "careful instruction" and twenty per cent a “superior instruction," while ten percent were "simply literate." Spiritists generally considered themselves Catholic, though "not attached to dogma."
According to Kardec, French Spiritism "has propagated the most in the petite bourgeoisie and the working class," appealing above all to artisans, clerks, and small shopkeepers. This was particularly. true in Bordeaux and Lyons, which, according to his account, had large contingents of working and lower middle class Spiritists. Kardec's description of the average French Spiritist, while probably based on a valid empirical foundation, also bears the marks of self-serving distortion. Possible motives for the alteration of data emerge clearly in Kardec's analysis of his figures. By presenting Spiritism as being above all the concern of educated men, he sought to emphasize its seriousness and respectability. The numbers, Kardec wrote, demonstrated that the great majority of Spiritists come from the enlightened classes, and not from among the ignorant. Everywhere Spiritism has spread from the top to the bottom of the social scale; in no place has it developed first in the inferior ranks.
Kardec also argued, women's innate predisposition to believe unquestioningly, and to be seduced by the uncanny, made them less likely to be attracted to the new doctrine.
The Spiritist enterprise was scientific, not mystical; its adherents prized objective discovery over intuitive insight. This rationalism, Kardec asserted, made Spiritism a predominantly masculine endeavor - it was a doctrine for scientists.
Oppenheim provides several short case studies that illustrate this point, including those of Samuel Carter Hall and Florence Maryatt. Turner describes the case of EW. H. Myers and his 1899 contact with Annie Marshall in Between Science and Religion: The Reaction to Scientific Naturalism in Late Victorian England (1974)
The work of Philippe Arias provides some insight into why this promise of continued contact after death exerted such a remarkable attraction for people in mid nineteenth-century France. In his view, a Romantic -revolution in coupled with the rise of a sense of the domestic sphere as a separate, private world, defined by, a small number of intense relationships, he argues, changed the prevailing view of death. Individuals became less concerned with their own fate in the afterlife, and more concerned with the pain the loss of loved ones would cause. (The Hour of our Death, 1981, 602-614, and Spiritisme, Vol.7 1888: 8)
Flammarion's Conversion.
In addition to responding to specific instances of grief many- saw these new ideas and practices in much the same way Kardec had in his early days - as a remark-able solution to the metaphysical conundrums of the age. This was certainly the case for the young Camille Flammarion. The story of his discovery of Kardec's ideas provides important general insights into the nature of Spiritism's attraction for believers during this period.
Flammarion was born in 1842 to a relatively prosperous farm family in the Haute Marne, and received most of his education at the nearby Cathedral school in Langres. A series of financial reversals forced his family to move to Paris in the mid 1 850’s, where Flammarion gave up his plans to become a priest and instead found work as an apprentice engraver.
In 1858, a doctor visiting Flammarion's apartment happened upon a long manuscript on astronomy the young man had written. Impressed by the precocity of the work, the doctor encouraged Flammarion to apply, for a job at the Pan's Observatory, and procured him the appropriate letters of introduction. Shortly thereafter, Le Verrier, head of the Observatory, hired him as a student astronomer.
Flammarion's studies at the Observatory allowed him to pursue his passion for astronomy, but they also brought about a spiritual crisis. When he arrived at the Observatory, Flammarion had a strong, literal-minded faith, the product of religious training and the example of a rigorously devout mother. He was entirely convinced "of the divinity of Jesus and His real presence in the Eucharist," attended Mass every Sunday, and confessed his sins regularly.
By 1860, when he turned eighteen, this certainty had almost completely eroded. When regarded with a scientifically informed eye, he wrote, the words of the Bible came to appear -quite novelistic. By the end of his eighteenth year, Flammarion had entirely ceased to believe "in the divinity of Jesus, in the sacraments, and in all the teachings of- the Church."
This break with the Catholic Church took a serious emotional toll. While Flammarion felt he had no choice but to abandon the irrational faith of his childhood, he found no emotional substitute for it. The philosophical spiritualism of thinkers like Descartes, Kant and Lcibnitz provided him a measure of consolation, but these ideas lacked the reassuring concreteness of his old belief. They provided intriguing speculations, he asserted, but no tangible evidence to match the miracles of the Church. Flammarion remembered this period of his life as among the most difficult: "my eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth years," he wrote, -were years of horrible anxiety; even though my work exhausted me, I had many sleepless nights. (Patrick Fuenth and Philippe de la Cortadiare, Camille Flammarion, 1994, 23-57.)
Allan Kardec's philosophy appeared not only to resolve the logical inconsistencies of Catholic dogma, but also to constitute a definitive metaphysical truth, scientifically proved with empirical evidence. In a letter to his friend Charles Burdy, Flammarion mentioned his new discovery with excitement. He had just finished reading the Livre des Esprits a second time. Allan Kardec, he asserted, was a "profound thinker," and gave every sign of presenting his ideas in good faith. Either Spiritism is not a utopia," Flammarion wrote, "or this thinker is mad."
Kardec received Flamarion "quite affably," and struck the young astronomy student as surprisingly reasonable. The older man remained entirely welcoming, and after Flammarion admitted that, despite his attraction to the new doctrine, he would not accept it completely until he had witnessed some convincing spirit phenomena. At the end of- their discussion, Kardec invited Flammarion to a meeting of the Socite Parisienne scheduled for the end of the week.
At the gathering a female enthusiastic believer who was also at the Society meeting, probably Hononine Huct, invited Flammarion to a gathering that would surely succeed in eliciting a manifestation that would convince him. The seance far exceeded Flammarion's expectations. A spirit named Balthazar not only produced an impressive array of raps, but also caused a table to rise off the floor and hang in the air with no visible means of support. In a letter to Burdy, Flammarion wrote that he was able to turn the table's rollers freely, and felt it tilt gently when he pressed on Its surface. These manifestations provided Flammarion with the irrefutable physical proof that he craved. In the presence of such phenomena, he wrote, "it is impossible to deny. the existence of invisible agents."
On November 2, 1861, only two days after his experiment with the spirit Balthazar, Flammarion wrote a letter to Allan Kardec asking to be admitted as an associate member of the Societe Parisienne, Kardec accepted his application on November 15.
By late December, Flammarion had become an enthusiastic adherent of Kardec's doctrine. He described his new convictions in a letter to the Abe Berillon of Langres, who had been his confessor during his days at the Cathedral school there:
Have you heard of Spiritism? It is a nest, science that has just appeared on the horizon, and emanates from God himself, through the ministry, of His spirits. This religion surprises at first, but is rational, and will be the culmination of Christianity; it explains all the dogmatic truths of the future life that have previously been so mysterious.
I do not ask you to reflect on this new doctrine, my dear Superior, since I know you always reflect. If you would like, I could discuss it with you at greater length, and, if you will, ex professor since I am in intimate relations with spirits who hale already lived on Earth, particularly Galileo and Fendlon; they have taught me the same truths that other spirits have dictated throughout the world. I should warn you in advance that I am not in the presence or under the influence of any evil spirit: I study Spiritism as I study mathematics.
Spiritism's empirical basis made the immortality of- the soul an incontrovertible fact. The rationality of its philosophy appeared to resolve the disconcerting "mysteries- of Catholic dogma, transforming faith from a matter of intuition to a matter of reasoned judgment. In Spiritism, religious knowledge was as clear as mathematics, a matter not for ecstatic contemplation, but for rigorous logical analysis. Spiritism also allowed its adepts a reassuringly direct contact with the beyond: in his times of doubt, Flammarion could pose his questions to Galileo and Fendlon, who would provide him with ready-made revelations suited to his personal circumstances. In fact, Galileo inspired the young astronomy student to write a long essay on the origins of the universe, which Kardec canonized by including it in his 1868 Selon le Spiritisme.
After his conversion, Flammarion quickly, became one of the most visible apologists for Kardec's doctrine.
Even in the regulated atmosphere Spirit Societies sought to create, mediums as intermediaries, exerted a unique and multifaceted form of power.
In his 1861 Livre des Mediums, Kardec presented a detailed collection of instructions, for the conduct of seances, the behavior of mediums, and the evaluation of spirit communications. This work proved quite influential, establishing the dominant paradigm for French seance practice in the 1860s.
Regarding converts that were eager to synthesize mediumism and fortune telling, Kardec described them as a "new breed apostles" that distributed -books of magic and sorcery, and often attempted to act on these strange predilections by forming societies of their own." (La Revue Spirite, Vol.6 1863: 77)
Kardec wrote: The most revered names are associated with the most ridiculous practices of black magic, including cabalistic signs and words, talismans, sibylline three-legged tables and other accessories; some add cartomancy, palmistry, divination, paid somnambulism (mediumship), etc. -using them either as a supplement, or as lucrative products. This sort of association with the classes dangereuses, Kardec believed, did little to advance the cause of Spiritist respectability.
The Spiritist seance as Kardec envisioned it, then, had none of the carnivalesque flash, Kardec decried in fortune tellers, paid working-class somnambulists, or performers like the Davenports from the USA, who had recently performed Paris.
To ensure the "silence and reverence" that elevated spirits required, Kardec forbade all members to speak during seances, unless he granted them permission to do so. Every communication submitted to the society. had to receive the president's approval before being read to the group. Most importantly, Kardec chose which spirits would be invoked at each meeting, and what questions they would be asked. The act of invocation in fact was very crucial to Kardec's effort to make Spiritist practice "serious."
Also the procedure of using an authoritative, non-entranced questioner to guide the medium - probably patterned after the older relationship of somnambulist and magnitiseur - became quite common in Second Empire Spirit Societies, particularly those in which the primary mediums were women. The Spirit Society presidents Henri Dozon, Alexandre Delanne, L.T. Houat, Jobard, and Pierre Patet, for example, all served as posers of questions, but not as mediums themselves.
Spiritism, Kardec believed, could only triumph if it emerged as a uniform, rational doctrine espoused everywhere in the same way; in his eyes, any deviation between spirits dramatically undercut the legitimacy of the movement's project.
By positing the existence of this category of spirit, Kardec created an elegant way of discounting communications that met his linguistic criteria, but contradicted the established precepts of Spiritist doctrine. The spirits' truth, Kardec insisted, was uniform and entirely consistent. Therefore, if a communication did not mesh logically with others already accepted as true, it could not be valid, no matter how stirring its rhetoric or how clear its diction. The notion of the Esprits savant (wild spirits), therefore, provided Kardec with a crucial safety valve -a way to de-legitimize the compelling but awkwardly heterodox communications some mediums produced.
In the published minutes of the Socite Parisienne, Kardec provided several examples of the method he used to expose Esprits savants. In October of 1860, for instance, he devoted a general meeting of the Society to the discussion of communications produced by a spirit channeled by a young medium who claimed to be Saul, King of the Jews. The system the Saul voice elaborated differed markedly from the one outlined in Kardec's work:
In this young lady's circle, the spirit that communicates using the name of Saul has propounded an idiosyncratic system that : 1. The earlier a spirit's first terrestrial existence, the more enlightened it is; from which it follows that Saint Louis, for example, is less advanced than Saul, because he has not been dead for as long a time. 2. That Spirits are only incarnated on Earth, and that these incarnations number only three - never more, never less - which is enough to advance them from the lowest degree to the highest. (Rivail, Livre des Esprits, p. 48-49.)
Kardec announced that he found this theory. to be "Irrational and disproved by the facts. To prove his point, he requested that "Saul, King of the Jews" be evoked. The spirit appeared, writing through an unidentified medium, and strongly argued for the reality of his heterodox theory. Eventually, though, the self-proclaimed Saul retreated from Kardec's barrage of probing questions: "once summoned, [the spirit] failed to defend his system, but refused to admit defeat, and requested to be heard in a private seance with his usual medium. Eventually, the spirit was entirely undone bv a series of questions. The spirit maintained that Earth was the only "solid globe," and that all other planets where merely. "fluidic globes." A notion this absurd, Kardec maintained, irrefutably demonstrated that Saul was an Esprit faux (very) savant. (La Revue Spirite, Vol.3, 1860: 33)
These ignorant spirits posed the greatest danger, Kardec maintained, when they felt confident that their listeners would uncritically accept the strange and irrational ideas they espoused. The only way to ensure that good spirits frequented a circle, he wrote, was to subject every communication to the strict methods of "control."
The Problem of Dissent
Despite these warnings, however, all too many mediums, when presenting their communications to Kardec for evaluation, appear to have done so already convinced they had received transcendent wisdom from superior beings. From the medium's perspective, after all, a spirit communication was the physical trace of a powerful, deeply personal experience of inspiration and transcendence. By giving a communication his authoritative stamp of approval, Kardec proved the authenticity of that moment of inspiration; if Kardec refused the communication, on the other hand, it meant the medium had mistaken an inferior spirit's fantasies for enlightenment. Kardec's further implication that such inferior communications were consequences of the medium's own "weakness and credulity" would have made his refusal double painful.
For the most part, these recalcitrant mediums only exist in the historical record as depersonalized targets of Kardec's admonitions. The case of the Bordeaux lawyer Jean Baptiste Roustaing and his medium, Mme. Emille Collignon, however, is a well documented exception to this rule. Roustaing's story provides a revealing illustration of the way authority functioned in French Spiritism. It also sheds light on some of the tensions and ruptures that the Spiritist attempt to create a universal doctrine on the basis of continuing, direct revelation inevitably engendered. Despite Kardec's efforts at codification, the spirits could still speak with a disconcerting variety of voices.
Born into a lower middle-class family, Roustaing studied law in his spare time while earning a living. In 1826, he moved to Paris, where he did his legal apprenticeship. After finishing his training in 1829, he returned to his native city of Bordeaux and began to work as a lawyer. He built a successful career as an avocat. In 1858, Roustaing contracted a serious illness, which obliged him to stopwork, even after his recovery in 1861, he did not have the strength to resume his profession.
Fortunately, just as Roustaing recovered, he found a new vocation: the study of Spinitism. He First heard about the new doctrine from a local doctor and from a fellow lawyer named Andre Pezzani. Initially, Roustaing was skeptical, but after reading the Livre des Esprits, his opinion changed, for much the same reasons as the young Flammarion's had (see part 2).
This new doctrine seemed to offer Roustaing a solution to the metaphysical doubts that had plagued him during his illness. Before encountering Kardec's work, Roustaing could not bring himself to accept the teachings of the Catholic Church. The Gospels seemed "obscure and incomprehensible,” and the interpretations the Church offered were too patently irrational to satisfy the requirements of his well-honed mind. At the same time, however, the Bordeaux lawyer felt a desire to believe. He admired Christian morality, even as he refused to accept the “spectacular transgression of natural laws" that appeared to occur so frequently, in the Gospels.
Spiritism, with its emphasis on fact, and its claim to provide an explanation for miracles consonant with the demands of modem science, finally allowed Roustaing to exchange his doubt for a definitive certainty. His enthusiasm for the new, doctrine inspired him to send a declaration of faith to Kardec, which was published in the Revue Spirite in 186l. In his response to the letter, Kardec declared that Roustaing's endorsement signaled the beginning of a new phase in Spiritisrn's development. In the doctrine's early days, believers had been scorned and ignored. Now, Kardec wrote, as more respectable men and women came forward to declare their allegiance, Spiritism would become impossible to ridicule or dismiss.
The teachings of the spirits could hardly be absurd or dangerous if they had succeeded in winning the adherence of a sober, dignified Bordeaux lawyer.
After his conversion, Roustaing approached his study of the new doctrine with a steadily escalating intensity. He began by attending a variety of Spiritist meetings, not as a medium himself, but instead observing and posing questions to the spirits that appeared. At the same time, he studied Mesmerism.
The evening of June 23, 1861, before going to bed, Roustaing addressed a fervent prayer" to Saint John, asking him to appear in a mediumistic consultation scheduled for the next day. The Bordeaux lawyer also requested that his father appear. In the June 24 consultation, to Roustaing's awe struck surprise, both - even though he had told no one of his prayers the
previous night, John the Baptist issued a long, prophetic communication in which he declared that “the time has come," and proclaimed the eminent dawning of an earthly paradise made possible by the triumph of Spiritism. Roustaing's father expressing pride in his son's new-found religious vocation.
Roustaing, armed with this powerful reassurance and "deeply moved," continued his studies with a growing sense of mission.
In December of 1861, he met a new medium, Mme. Emille Collignon. Unlike her predecessors, Collignon appears to have had not only the will, but also the ability and patience to produce voluminous automatic writings ambitious enough to satisfy the exigent former lawyer. At the end of her second meeting with Roustaing, Collignon received a long, spontaneous communication collaboratively by the spirits of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, assisted by the apostles.
In this missive, the spirits announced their intention to use Collignon as the vehicle for a dramatic series of new communications:
To this end, dear friends, we will undertake to explain the gospels in spirit and truth, and thus set the stage for the unity of beliefs among men; you may call this "the revelation of the revelation."
In August of 1866 Roustaing succeeded in publishing three thick volumes, the communications that made up the Quatre Evangiles, in other words, were in fact revelations from God himself.
The new "revelation of the revelation," Roustaing explained with a typical combination of legalistic circuitousness and visionary typographical exuberance, that Christ, did not have a body in the human sense. Instead, he had a fluidlic body, a long-lasting "full-form" spirit materialization. His birth and Mary's pregnancy, therefore, did not actually occur, but were instead simulations, so real they convinced Mary herself.
Spiritism and Mesmerism, by introducing the idea that the soul could use the "universal fluid"(the etheric) to make its presence felt in the material world, made this explanation possible. Christ, as Roustaing and Collignon portrayed him, was a spiritual entity with a tangible but not fleshly body.
Later Rudolf Steiner the founder of Anthroposophy would also claim (in competition with Leadbeater and Krishnamurti’s assertions), that the Christ appeared in the etheric (to him).
Kardec however stopped short of giving Roustaing his whole hearted endorsement. In Kardec's view the work-'s flaws did not stem from its contradiction of already published Spiritist texts, but rather from the novel ideas it advanced. "Until we receive further information," he wrote, "we will neither approve nor disapprove of these theorys." Instead, believers would do free to consider these volumes as "the personal opinions of the Spirits who formulated them," not as -Integral parts of the Spiritist doctrine. With this statement, Kardec implied that Roustaing's Moses, Matthew, Mark, Luke and John might in fact have been Esprits savaiges. (La Revue Spirite, Vol. 9,1866: 190.)
According to Roustaing, Kardec dissimulated the self-serving nature of- this intolerance by claiming that when he rejected an idea or communication, he did so not for subjective reasons, but for objective ones. Rejected corn m unicati ons, Kardec maintained, had simply failed to withstand the rigors of the universal control,” an impersonal standard that demanded both logical coherence and corroboration from a majority of spirits.
Kardec's "universal control," as Roustaing interpreted it, was simply an ambitious man's ploy to impose his will on others, and to give his ideas the allure of irrefutable truth. (Roustaing, Quatre Evangiles, reponse ses critiques et ses adversaires, 1882, 18.) This brochure is a manuscript Roustaing wrole in 1866 and Roustaing went onto note that in America, where Spiritualism remained free of dogma and decentralized, it had succeeded in making converts "bv the millions."
In theory, Spiritism was a doctrine that promised freedom, social reform, and the transformation of "human spiritual life. In practice, as Roustaing saw it, Spiritism was an authoritarian sect that "exhausted and imprisoned" the minds of its adherents by forcing them to bend to Kardec's implacable will.
In the end, hoiicvcr, the authoritarianism against which Roustaing fulminatcd served Kardec well. By 1864, the overwhelming majority of groups devoted to spirit contacts accorded a central role to Kardec's texts, and acknowledged the pre-eminence of the Societe Parisienne. The popularity of Kardec's books, the simplicity of the ideas they contained, and their accessible style made Spiritism the philosophical lens through which the French -believers and critics alike - understood seances and the otherworldly contacts that occurred in them. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the communications mediums received came to reflect this growing consensus by echoing the doctrine Kardec espoused. By the end of his life, Kardcc's ideas had come to assume an important, if hotly contested, place in the French visionary imagination, which they would continue to occupy well into the twentieth century.
After a brief battle for succession, the medium Pierre-Gattan Leymanie, who had managed to secure the backing of Kardec's widow, emerged as the dominant Figure in the movement.
Leymarie presided over an increasing formalization of the organizational structure Allan Kardec had established, creating an independent bookstore and publishing house to manage the sales and production of Spiritist tracts. As Spiritisrn's structure changed, so did its approach to the spirit world: in the pages of the Revue Spirite - now edited by Leymarie - eschatological speculation and spirit communications gave way to descriptions of spectacular spirit phenomena. Leymarie brought a new concern with politics to Spiritisrn as well. Where Kardec had been careful to stress his political neutrality, Leymarle allowed his left-wing republican views to become increasingly evident.
Mme. Rivall founded a commercial company; this new organization managed the publication and distribution of Kardec's works, the Revue Spirite, and a variety of other Spinitist books and pamphlets.
In mid-1870, a declaration of Spiritists disturbed by this new commercialism discussed their situation with Marseille, the Paris Prefecture of Police's controleur generale. He advised them to distance the Societe Parisienne from Mme. Rivail and enlist Camille Flammarion as Its new president. But the astronomer, who had grown ambivalent about the religious aspirations of many of Kardec's followers, refused. By 1871, the various factions appeared to have reached an unease peace, and Leymanie soon consolidated his position as Kardec's successor. (Archives de la Prefecture de police de Paris, dr. BA 1243, report dated June 14. 1875. 4.)
The stringent laws governing associations during the Second Empire had made Kardec acutely aware that the continued existence of- his Society depended on its scrupulous avoidance of questions involving controversies of- religion and politics.
As the Empire liberalized in the late 1860’s, discussions of Spiritism began to appear in venues closely associated with the political Left, and some Spiritists became deeply involved in the Ligue de Penseignetnent, a society devoted to lay education and the founding of popular lending libraries. Kardec expressed reservations about the group, but the secretary general of its Paris chapter, one of its largest, was Emmanuel Vauchez, a convinced Spiritist. (Valentin Tournier,LeSpiritisme devant la raison," 1875)
The age of revelation had passed with Kardec. Now that they had proclaimed their doctrine complete, Spiritists needed to prove its truth with scientifically-controlled evidence. Leymaric made this aspiration clear in his 1874 aftenvord to a French translation of excerpts from the writings of' William Crookes, the famous Victorian psychical researcher. In his essay, Leymarie described the mission of the Societe Parisienne as follows:
Our Society has clearly-stated goals, which are: to explain the law governing the phenomena that M. W. Crookcs has described, that Spiritist phenomena are not supernatural, but instead stem from natural laws, that they are due to the reciprocal action of Spirit and matter. (Jaubert's letter of support for Leymarie, dated June 7, 1875. in Marina Leymarie, ed., Le Proce des spirites, 1875, 119)
By bringing the two approaches together, basing metaphysical speculation on scientific data, the Spiritists believed they had achieved a perfect "rational solution" to the entire problem, for them, science became metaphysics and metaphysics became science.
This growing interest in the work of British psychical researchers was strong enough to inspire a new joumal, La Revue de psychologie, edited by Dr. T. Puel. The Revue was shortlived - appeaning irregularly throughout 1874, then even more sporadically until 1876 - but it nevertheless introduced the Frenchspeaking world to many early classics of psychical research, including the articles Crookes published in the Quarterly Journal of Science beginning in 1870.
See also Louis Jacolliot, Le Spiritisnie dans le monde, Vinitiation et les sciences occulles dans Vinde et chez tous les peuples de Vantiquild (Paris: Slatidne, 1988 [18751), esp. 326-36. Jacolliot, an Orientalist lecturer and prolific writer, provides a similar disavowal of the spirit hypothesis by a French proponent of' psychical research. Jacolliot shared Crookes' belief that spirit phenomena - in this case, the levitations Hindu holy men produced in India - were the product of a'force psychique.--- He bolstered his case by reproducing one of Crookes' Quarterly Revue articles in translation as an appendix. Like Puel he had social ties to the Spiritists: in addition to participating in experimental tests on Buguet, he testified on Le marie's behalf in the Buguet trial.
The reality of the spirit world, Leymane insisted however , had already been established irrefutably by the -long, very careful and thorough proofs- that Kardec and his disciples had published. Crookes and his fellow researchers may have denigrated Kardec's ideas as unscientific, but their findings led to a different conclusion:
The scientists of the Royal Society of London, so timid about the work done in France, should also carefully consider the following fact: The fundamental principles advanced in the Livre des Esprits have been confirmed by all the experiments performed with new, powerful mediums, and the investigations of M.W. Crookes lend them further support .
Kardcc's ideas were psychical research avant la leitre, Leymanic argued. Since Kardec had based his conclusions on empirical evidence, it was perfectly natural that the data other scientists gathered would support them. The British "timidity" about this fact, Leymaric insisted, would inevitably diminish as the evidence supporting Kardec became ever more voluminous. Despite his fundamental disagreements with Crookes' conclusions, Leymarie nevertheless regarded the British scientist's work very highly, not least for its value as a propaganda tool. Crookes' rigorous experiments, Leymarie asserted, provided Spiritists with powerful ammunition to use in their battle against skeptics.