Charles Léonard Lafontaine (27 March 1803 – 13 August 1892)Always Charles Lafontaine; never Charles LaFontaine. He is also variously referred to in the literature as Charles Delafontaine and Charles de Lafontaine. was a French "public magnetic demonstrator",Gauld (1992), p. 163. who also "had an interest in animal magnetism as an agent for curing or alleviating illnesses".Crabtree (1988), p. 145.
Family Charles Lafontaine was born in Vendôme, Loir-et-Cher, France, on 27 March 1803. He was related to the famous fabulist, Jean de La Fontaine;Lafontaine (1866, II), p. 273. and, belonging to a theatrical family, he was involved with the theatre from an early age.
Appearance At 5'9" (175 cm) he was of medium height. His dark hair was brushed forward, his expression "rather austere, perhaps thoughtful", and he had a "prodigious" beard.Animal Magnetism, The Times, (Tuesday, 20 July 1841), p. 5. Given the English fashion of the day for a clean-shaven face, Lafontaine’s beard was a subject of some considerable notoriety when he arrived in England – Spencer Timothy Hall's description of Lafontaine at a conversazione in 1841 is typical:
Richard Harte, former journalist with the New York Telegram, one-time member of the Theosophical Society Adyar (1877-1893), a former editor and regular contributor (often under the nom de guerre "D.C.K.") to The Theosophist, and author of The New Psychology, observed that,
Animal magnetism He was introduced to mesmerism in Brussels, in 1831, by the Belgian lithographer, inventor, and scholar Jean Baptiste Ambroise Marcelin Jobard (1792–1861), who later become the director of the Royal Museum of Industry at Brussels. He then went on to study the works of Marquis de Puységur (1751–1825) and Joseph-Philippe-François Deleuze (1753–1835) and, abandoning the theatre altogether,Although his brother continued to pursue a theatrical career (Lafontaine, 1866, I, pp. 29–34). he began touring parts of Europe.
A detailed description of Lafontaine's magnetization technique, translated directly from the text of the fifth (1886) edition of his L'art de magnétiser, is presented at Hart (1903), pp. 66–69.
United Kingdom He decided to come to England in June 1841, and soon began to lecture in London. According to Goldsmith (1934, p. 225), Lafontaine "attracted considerable attention by mesmerizing a lion in the London Zoo".Given the extent to which so many of Lafontaine's accounts of events are difficult to substantiate, it is significant that (a) Goldsmith does not cite a reference for this statement involving Lafontaine and a lion at the Zoo; (b) there is no account of any such event in the newspapers of the time; (c) there is no reference of any sort to any such event in any of the literature (except, of course, those which cite Goldsmith as their source); and, further, on the basis that the Gardens of Zoological Society of London were not open to the public until 1847, it is highly likely that this account has no truth to it.
Lafontaine had almost no English at all, and had to use interpreters; also, he traveled with young assistants, one of whom was identified as ‘Eugene’ (or M. Eugéne), a French youth approximately 18, and a number of young (English) women who assisted him from time to time. On leaving London, he conducted “a lengthy tour of the provinces, visiting Birmingham, Manchester, Leeds, Sheffield, Nottingham, Leicester, Liverpool, Ireland and Scotland” (Gauld, 1992, p. 204). Although, from time to time, Lafontaine ‘treated’ individuals, he was principally what Gauld (1992, p. 203) describes as a “magnetic demonstrator”; and, on most of the occasions in which he had provided ‘treatment’, the events were intended to be demonstrations, rather than the expression of the activities of a professional therapist.In relation to Lafontaine's claim to have supplied mesmeric anaesthesia for surgery, on occasion, whilst he was in England, Gauld (1992, p. 204) notes that, in January 1842, whilst in Sheffield, Lafontaine (at Lafontaine (1866, I, pp. 320321) claims to have provided the mesmeric anaesthesia for surgeon George Calvert Holland (1801–1865), "for the painless amputation of a leg". However, in relation to constant issue of the veracity of Lafontaine’s own (otherwise unreported) claims being open to question, it is important to note that the surgeon in question (Holland, 1848) makes no mention whatsoever of such an astonishing event — and, moreover, George Sandby (1848, pp. 47–54) makes no mention of any such event within his exhaustive list of operations under mesmeric anaesthesia compiled six years later.
James Braid Manchester surgeon, James Braid's first direct observation of the operation, and associated phenomena, of animal magnetism was at Lafontaine's third Manchester conversazione on 13 November 1841. Braid always maintained that he had gone to Lafontaine's demonstration as an open-minded sceptic – eager to examine the evidence and, then, form a considered opinion of Lafontaine's work. He was neither a closed-minded cynic intent on destroying Lafontaine, nor a deluded and naïvely credulous believer seeking authorization of his already formed belief.Neurypnology (1843), p. 2.For an extended account of the interactions between Braid and Lafontaine, see Yeates (2013), pp. 103–308 passim.
Braid was amongst the medical men who were invited onto the platform by Lafontaine. Braid examined the physical condition of Lafontaine's magnetised subjects (especially their eyes and their eyelids) and concluded that they were, indeed, in quite a different physical state. Braid always stressed the significance of his attending Lafontaine’s conversazione in the development of the theories, techniques, and practices of hypnotism. In Neurypnology (1843, pp. 34–35) he states that he had earlier been totally convinced by a four-part investigation of Animal Magnetism published in The London Medical Gazette (i.e., Anon, 1838) that there was no evidence of any magnetic agency at all. The concluding paragraph of the final article read: This, then, [in conclusion,] is our case. Every credible effect of magnetism has occurred, and every incredible is said to have occurred, in cases where no magnetic influence has been exerted, but in all which, excited imagination, irritation, or some powerful mental impression, has operated: where the mind has been alone acted on, magnetic effects have been produced without magnetic manipulations: where magnetic manipulations have been employed, unknown, and therefore without the assistance of the mind, no result has ever been produced. Why, then, imagine a new agent, which cannot act by itself, and which has never yet even seemed to produce a new phenomenon?Anon, The London Medical Gazette, Vol. 20, No. 538, (24 March 1838), p. 1037.
And, as well as the strong impression made upon Braid by the Medical Gazette's article, there was also the more recent impressions made by Thomas Wakley’s exposure of the comprehensive fraud of John Elliotson’s subjects, the Okey sisters,See Clarke, 1874. [all of which] determined me to consider the whole as a system of collusion or illusion, or of excited imagination, sympathy, or imitation. I therefore abandoned the subject as unworthy of farther investigation, until I attended the conversazioni of Lafontaine, where I saw one fact, the inability of a patient to open his eyelids, which arrested my attention; I felt convinced it was not to be attributed to any of the causes referred to, and I therefore instituted experiments to determine the question; and exhibited the results to the public in a few days after. — (Braid, Neurypnology (1843), p. 35; emphasis added).
Braid attended two more of Lafontaine's conversazione (his fourth and fifth). By the fifth (on Saturday 20 November 1841), Braid was convinced of the veracity of some of Lafontaine's effects and phenomena; and, in particular, whilst Braid was convinced that a transformation from, so to speak, condition1 to condition2, and back to condition1 had really taken place, he was convinced that no magnetic agency of any sort (as Lafontaine claimed) was responsible for these veridical events. He also rejected outright the assertion that the transformation in question had "proceeded from, or [had been] excited into action by another [person]" (Neurypnology, p. 32).
On returning home on the evening of Saturday 20 November 1841, Braid performed his experimentum crucis; and, operating on the principle of Occam's Razor (that 'entities ought not to be multiplied beyond necessity'), and recognizing that he could diminish, rather than multiply entities, Braid made an extraordinary decision to perform a role-reversal and treat the operator-subject interaction as subject-internal, operator-guided procedure; rather than, as Lafontaine supposed, an operator-centred, subject-external procedure. Braid emphatically proved his point by his self-experimentation with his "upwards and inwards squint". In other words, rather than it being due, as Lafontaine supposed, to the charismatic influence of the operator's downward gaze, compounding the transfer of magnetic fluid that was supposedly being transferred, via the operator, through the subject's thumbs which were being tightly held by the operator, it was a simple biophysiological reflex produced by the subject's upward gaze.
And, further, Braid's use of 'self-' or 'auto-hypnotism' (rather than 'hetero-hypnotism'), entirely by himself, on himself, and within his own home, clearly demonstrated that it had nothing whatsoever to do with the 'gaze', 'charisma', or 'magnetism' of the operator — all it needed was a subject's 'fixity of vision' on an 'object of concentration' at such a height and such a distance from the bridge of their nose that the desired 'upwards and inwards squint' was achieved. And, at the same time, by using himself as a subject, Braid also conclusively proved that none of Lafontaine's phenomena were due to magnetic agency. Braid conducted a number of experiments with self-hypnotization upon himself, and, by now convinced that he had discovered the natural psycho-physiological mechanism underlying these quite genuine effects, he performed his first act of hetero-hypnotization at his own residence, before several witnesses, including Captain Thomas Brown (1785–1862) on Monday 22 November 1841 – his first hypnotic subject was Mr. J. A. Walker. (see Neurypnology, pp. 16–20.)
The following Saturday (27 November 1841), Braid delivered his first public lecture at the Manchester Athenæum, in which, among other things, he was able to demonstrate that he could replicate the effects produced by Lafontaine, without the need for any sort of physical contact between the operator and the subject.
M‘Neile's "Satanic Agency and Mesmerism" sermon On the evening of Sunday, 10 April 1842, the controversial Liverpool cleric Hugh M‘Neile preached against "Mesmerism" for more than ninety minutes to a capacity congregation.His text was 2 Thessalonians ii. 9,10: "Even him, whose coming is after the working of Satan with all power and signs and lying wonders, and with all deceivableness of unrighteousness in them that perish; because they received not the love of the truth, that they might be saved."See Yeates (2013), pp. 273–308. He began, speaking of "latter days" – following which, Christ would return to Earth, and peace would reign for 1,000 years – and how, as the second advent neared, "satanic agency amongst men" would become ever more obvious; and, then, moving into a confusing admixture of philippic (against both Lafontaine and Braid, as, among other things, "necromancers"), and polemic (against animal magnetism), where he concluded that all mesmeric phenomena were due to "satanic agency".