Anne C. Vila
Senior Fellow (2021-2025)
Professor, French, UW–Madison
Convulsive Enlightenment: Lives and Afterlives of the Convulsionnaires in French Culture and Theory (18th to 21st Centuries)
18th-century France is classically known as the age of “lights” or Enlightenment. However, it was also a century of convulsions because of the agitations created by the Jansenist Convulsionaries, an extreme but influential fringe group of a dissident reform movement within Catholicism. The convulsionary movement first took shape in 1727 around the tomb of the recently deceased deacon François de Pâris, an objector to the repressive Unigenitus Bull (1713), which had condemned Jansenism as heretical. To demonstrate the injustice of that Bull, its participants carried out spectacular expressions of faith in the form of ecstatic convulsions, symbolic figurations, apocalyptic prophecies, putative miracle cures, and extreme bodily mortifications. The Convulsionaries both captivated and alarmed their contemporaries, not least those affiliated with the Enlightenment movement. They were also mapped onto an extraordinary number and range of later groups, including the patients who swooned around Franz Mesmer’s magnetic tubs, 19th-century Parisians caught up in ballroom frenzy, indigenous people in the French colonial empire, Charcot’s hysterics and their literary avatars, and Surrealist poets. In this talk, I will track the main strands of the Convulsionaries’ impact in their day and of their long-term heritage in French culture, aesthetics, and theory.
Anne Vila is Professor of French at UW-Madison and a Senior Fellow at the IRH. Her work is situated at the intersection of eighteenth-century French literature, intellectual history, and the medical humanities. She is the author of Enlightenment and Pathology: Sensibility in the Literature and Medicine of Eighteenth-Century France (1998) and Suffering Scholars: Pathologies of the Intellectual in Enlightenment France (2018), and the editor or co-editor of several volumes, including A Cultural History of the Senses in the Age of Enlightenment (2014). Her current book project is entitled “Convulsive Enlightenment: Lives and Afterlives of the Convulsionnaires in French Culture and Theory (18th to 21st Centuries).”
*Events are currently open only to 2023-24 fellows due to space concerns; please contact IRH at info@irh.wisc.edu to be added to a cancellation list for in-person events.*