Juliette Rigondet: Un village pour aliénés tranquilles (2019)

Juliette Rigondet's Un village pour aliénés tranquilles is very fully researched, and in fact is a remarkable book about a kind of experiment which continues to this day. In late nineteenth-century Paris psychiatric hospitals (or asiles (asylums, as was the term of the day)) were overflowing: left to institutionalisation, the inmates weren't being 'cured' at all. Hospitalisation was adversely affecting the very reason why they were hospitalised in the first instance. In 1868 writer Hector Malot drew attention to this problem in his novel Le Beau-frère, in which a man, eager to gain possession of his brother-in-law's money, has his wife send her brother to a psychiatric hospital: the unfortunate man was perfectly sane, although on being moved to the hospital he soon goes mad – obviously in part a pre-echo of Samuel Fuller's film Shock Corridor (1963). The most saddening thing perhaps is not merely that psychiatric hospitals 'caused' madness, but that rapacious relatives did sometimes resort to such barbarous practices.
Auguste Marie was a psychiatrist who had investigated experiments with psychiatric patients in Scotland, and was impressed by what he saw. As a result, in 1892 a number of patients were sent away from Paris hospitals to Dun-sur-Auron: this meant taking the train to Bourges and then the 'Tacot' to the small town, where the patients – almost all females and mainly over the age of fifty, although there were a number of younger women – would be welcomed in host families which would be paid to board them.
The title of the book, Un village pour aliénés tranquilles, relates to the kind of person needed in the host family: a quiet, non-violent individual who would be of no risk to the local community. And obviously if the women were over fifty there would be little risk of complications, such as unwanted pregnancies. Nursing staff with an infirmary in the town ensured that the patients received professional care, and today the Centre hospitalier George-Sand, with its park, is a substantial landmark on the edge of the town. The fact that the 'experiment' still exists is testimony to its success, and in one of the early stages as many as 1000 patients existed side by side with the non-patient population of 4000. Also, another smaller similar community was established in Ainay-le-Château (Allier) for men, and a further one in Lurcy-Lévis (also in Allier), initially for older patients.
Rigondet's book is a story culled from medical and historical records, and also, we learn from the final paragraph, also a part of the author's personal family history, as one of the patients she has been writing about is her aunt, her mother's sister using one of her forenames which she never used, in order to retain her anonymity.
The book investigates the situation from many angles: the patient's adaptation to the new home rather than hospital environment, and the host family's adaptation to a stranger (or perhaps two) in the household; the reaction of the community as a whole to strangers in its midst; patient suicides (very few); cases of patients being raped; sexual relationships and pregnancies (which tended to be hushed until later years); patients working for the host parents and in the hospital buildings; etc.
This is a fascinating book about a little-known aspect of French society.