Hersilie Rouy: Difference between revisions

 

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”’Hersilie Rouy”’ (1814–1881) was a French pianist, composer, and honorary member of the Paris-based Society of Fine Arts. She spent 14 years in psychiatric asylums before her release, after which she received state compensation. The scandalous ‘Rouy affair’ then became known beyond France. Along with her memoirs, this sequence of events is the subject of historical psychiatric research and depictions of 19th-century female musicians.

”’Hersilie Rouy”’ (1814–1881) was a French pianist, composer, and honorary member of the Paris-based Society of Fine Arts. She spent 14 years in psychiatric asylums before her release, after which she received state compensation. The ‘Rouy affair’ became known beyond France. Along with her , this sequence of events is the subject of historical psychiatric research and depictions of 19th-century female .

== Life ==

== Life ==

French pianist and composer (1814–1881)

Hersilie Rouy (1814–1881) was a French pianist, composer, and honorary member of the Paris-based Society of Fine Arts. She spent 14 years in psychiatric asylums before her release, after which she received state compensation. The ‘Rouy affair’ became known beyond France. Along with her diaries, this sequence of events is the subject of historical psychiatric research and depictions of 19th-century female women.

Camille Joséphine Hersilie Rouy, called Hersilie Rouy,^[1] was born on 14 April 1814 in Milan, then part of Napoleonic Italy, to Charles Rouy and Henriette Chevalier. Her father held a patent for a device for celestial cartography and worked as an astronomer. After Napoleon‘s rule ended, the French family moved back to Paris. From 1816 to 1823, they travelled through Poland and Russia while Charles worked as a house teacher for aristocratic families.^[2]

Although little is documented about Rouy’s early piano training, she was admitted to the Conservatoire de Paris in 1824 on her tenth birthday.^[2]

After her mother’s death in 1831, she became a governess for a family in Blois and later in London. In 1836, due to her father’s health, she returned to Paris and resumed her work as a piano teacher.^[2]

Rouy established herself in the Parisian music scene.^[3] Between 1838 and 1840, French poet and music reviewer Théophile Gautier expressed his effusively fascination with Rouy, describing her as “one of the best pianists in Paris”^[4] whose “nouvelles études” further enhanced her “consummate talent” and “almost placed her on a par with Döhler, with Liszt, with Herz and with Kalkbrenner“^[4]. Her name reappeared in the annals of Paris at the end of 1848, when, following the Revolution and her father’s death that year, she fell into financial hardship, and received financial assistance from the Fine Arts Department (Direction des Beaux-Arts).^[3]

In 1850, Rouy became an honorary member of the Society of Fine Arts (Société des Beaux-Arts).^[5] She resumed her work as a house concert performer and piano teacher and led a financially secure life as a recognised pianist, also known outside France.^[6] She began composing, and in 1853, Parisian Jean de Bonnot published her song Cours devant moi, based on a text by Guilett.^[7]

Roy spent a total of 14 years in asylums, beginning in 1854, and did not play the piano during this period.^[3] Following her release in 1868, which was reported in the Journal des débats as well as in US and British newspapers,^[8][9] she gave her final concert for a circle of friends and supporters. She was homeless and destitute, her possessions had already been auctioned off in 1854,^[10] and her health was failing. With the support of friends, she successfully applied for state compensation, which was granted to her in 1878. Rouy died of pneumonia on September 27, 1881.^[3]

In 1883, Paul Ollendorff published Rouy’s diary entries from her time in asylums. These entries were compiled by Le Normant de Varannes, the director of her final asylum in Orléans. The resulting work, titled “Mlle Hersilie – Rouy Mémoires D’une Aliénée par Hersilie Rouy” (The Memoirs of a Madwoman by Hersilie Rouy), also features a preface by Jules-Stanislas Doinel. Doinel later founded the first Gnostic church of the modern era.

A year earlier, Le Normant had published “Les Mémoires d’une feuille de papier écrites par elle-même” (Memoirs of a sheet of paper written by herself) under the pseudonym Édouard Burton at the same publishing house. In this “fictionalised version” of her diary,^[11] Rouy appears as Eucharis Champigny and offers insights into her experiences with temporary delusional ideas.^[12]

Rouy was taken to the Hôpital Esquirol on 8 September 1854. This event marked the beginning of a 14-year odyssey. Lacking financial resources for this privately run mental institution, she was soon transferred to the Hôpital de la Salpêtrière, an “unprecedented social decline” for the pianist.^[13] In 1863, after staying in three additional asylums, she was finally brought to Orléans to a hospice under Le Normant’s direction.^[13]

Her admission under the name Josephine Chevalier, her second given name and her mother’s surname, was arranged by her half-brother, the respected Parisian citizen Claude Daniel Rouy. He disapproved of her lifestyle.^[14] Rouy exhibited, for the time, “genuine behavioral abnormalities, which were confirmed by her neighbors”,^[15] and also a suspicious interest in the emerging spiritualism. Claude also considered her to be of illegitimate birth, since his father had married Hersilie’s mother in Milan before divorcing his first wife.^[14]

Throughout her institutionalisation, Rouy sought to prove her true identity and eventually gained the support of the director of her final asylum. Le Normant attested to her lucidity and appealed to the prefect for more than five years. The case reached the Ministry of Justice, which, in 1868, ended her confinement by issuing a certificate of recovery.^[3]

Rouy’s efforts to secure state compensation through a petition attracted significant press coverage again, including in German-language newspapers, which described the case as a “horror novel.”^[16] Her claim was debated in the National Assembly and, after the collapse of the Second Empire, finally approved by the Assembly of the Third Republic.^[2] She had been forcibly committed under a false identity, as an orphan, registered as destitute. In 1878, she received compensation and a lifelong pension by decree of the Ministry of the Interior as a victim of the abuse of the French law concerning the confinement of the mentally ill (Loi du 30 juin 1838 sur l’enfermement des aliénés).^[17]

French newspapers covered ‘The Rouy affair’ extensively, and English- and German-language publications also reported on it.

The case gained renewed attention from 1879 onwards, when French politician Yves Gyot and Jean Manier, a member of the Seine General Council, advocated for the issue.^[15] Gyot published detailed articles about Rouy in La Lanterne under the pseudonym L’infirmier (The nurse).^[14] In 1886, Manier released “a lengthy diatribe describing incidents”^[18] such as Rouy’s, “that exemplified the abusive nature of psychiatric power.”^[18] Through their public involvment, Gyot and Manier aimed primarily to have the law repealed, which they considered abusive, and to prompt legislative reform. Their campaign started a decades-long public debate and ultimately led to the amendment of the law in 1990.^[15]

Rouy’s original diary from 1882 and the version by Le Norman from 1883, purged of evidence of her occasional megalomania,^[19] describe her experiences in the asylum and her struggle against her family, doctors, and the 1838 law.^[2] Together with the asylum records, they are valuable research sources of which there are very few.^[19] Analysis of these primary materials has produced extensive secondary commentary, which falls into two main categories.^[20] The first consists of “psychiatrists who use her memoirs as case-historical material in treatises on afflictions.”^[20] Among them were French psychiatrists Sérieux and Capgras, who incorporated Rouy’s descriptions into an article published in 1909 called ‘Roman et vie d’une fausse princesse’ (Roman and vie d’une fausse princesse).^[20] The second camp includes “critics and re-evaluators of the nineteenth-century French psychiatry”, as well as “feminist revisionist historians” who use “Hersilie’s description of her experiences in the wider context of women’s incarceration in the nineteenth century”.^[20]