From paranoia querulans to vexatious litigants: a short study on madness between psychiatry and the law. Part 1

Abstract

The first part of this two-part paper presents a comparative history of paranoia querulans, also known as litigants’ delusion, in German-speaking countries and France from the nineteenth century onwards. We first focus on two classic literary works which describe litigious behaviours that were later pathologized, then give an insight into the history of Querulantenwahn (litigants’ delusion), a term coined in 1857 by Johann Ludwig Casper and adopted by German-speaking psychiatrists and forensic experts. The last section is devoted to its French equivalent, the delusion of the litigious persecuted-persecutors. We show how this category, widely popular among French fin-de-siècle alienists, was replaced by another: the delusion of revendication (litigious subtype). The history of the vexatious litigants in the English-speaking world will be explored in the Part 2.

Keywords

Forensic sciences France Germany paranoia querulans psychiatry vexatious litigants 19th century 20th century

Introduction

In the past two decades, several dozen scientific papers published in both German- and English-speaking countries have been devoted to vexatious litigants, querulous paranoia and unreasonable complainants.¹ However, the genesis of these terms has never been studied in close detail and has remained widely ignored by historians and scholars. Such a state of affairs is all the more surprising, given that vexatious litigants and pathological complainants have long been recognized in literary, legal and medical fields. Even before the birth of modern psychiatry, the dramatists Aristophanes and Racine created characters whose only passion consisted of making judgments and getting legal arguments settled – an attitude they described as trialophilia (see below). How and why was such behaviour later pathologized by psychiatrists and legal experts? Which manifold realities did the latter aim to define? Did political and social contexts influence the scientific theories about this phenomenon, which stood at the crossroads between psychiatry and the law? To answer these questions, we shall begin by comparing the descriptions of trialophilia in two literary classics: The Wasps by Aristophanes and The Litigants by Racine. The second section will give insight into the birth of Querulentenwahn (litigants’ delusion) in the German-speaking world, followed by an account of the genesis of its French equivalents. The history of vexatious litigants in English-speaking countries, from the Vexatious Litigants Acts (1896) to the beginning of the twenty-first century, will be investigated in Part 2 of this paper.

Trialophiles and quibblers in literary classics

During the nineteenth century, two literary classics were often mentioned by French alienists to support the idea that pathological litigation was by no means a new phenomenon.¹ The first of these was The Wasps by Greek dramatist Aristophanes, who lived and died in Athens. The second was Les Plaideurs (The Litigants) by the French dramatist Racine, who spent a good part of his life at the Palace of Versailles. Both were comedies with plots centred on conflicts created by some bad-tempered, litigious characters, but a closer look at these texts shows that they did not represent litigiousness in the same way. In The Wasps, first produced in 422 BC, Philocleon (whose Greek name suggests that ‘he likes Cleon’, the Athenian statesman depicted by Aristophanes as a demagogue) was described as follows by his slave Xanthias:

Our master has been stricken with a terrible affliction, namely he is a trialophile (φιληλιαστής) addicted to litigation, serving on a jury and passing judgment! He absolutely loves it, can’t get enough of it! You should hear him moaning if he doesn’t get a seat on the front bench! (Aristophanes, 1998: 139)

Thus, Philocleon seemed addicted to judging: he would do anything to serve on a jury. His son Bdelycleon (whose name translates as ‘he hates Cleon’) consequently decided to have him locked in their house, under their slaves’ guard. Strictly speaking, the poor old man’s disorders should never have been considered as pathological litigiousness: addiction to judging is not the same as addiction to suing. But the most important point to note is that in Aristophanes’ play, Philocleon embodied a typical victim of Athenian demagogy (Christ, 1998): he was portrayed as a citizen trapped into the law courts, unwilling to leave for fear of missing the flattery of all the complainants. His behaviour could not be considered as the expression of an individual character flaw, but as a result of being conditioned by his experience of bad institutions. The only possible cure was not a medical, but a political one.

The situation was quite different in Racine’s play The Litigants, a rewriting of Aristophanes’ text, and first performed in 1668. True enough, Dandin, the fictitious seventeenth-century French judge, shared with Philocleon a passion for judging. However, the former, contrary to the latter, represented a bourgeois living in a monarchy. Racine, who was himself appointed as courtier by King Louis XIV, did not present his character’s trialophilia as a consequence of bad politics but as a personal feature, which made him a much better candidate for psychiatric treatment than Philocleon was. What is more, Racine’s plot included two other characters, Chicaneau (Quibbler) and The Countess, whose passion – in contrast to that of Dandin and Philocleon – consisted not in judging but in seeking redress. The following passage presents the first of these anti-heroes as an aggrieved landlord eager to set things right:

[Quibbler]: The Case is this. About fifteen or twenty Years ago, a certain Ass-Colt went through a Meadow of mine, roll’d about in it, and in short did a notable Damage: Upon this I drew up my Complaint to the Judge of the Village, and caus’d the Ass to be seized. An Inquisitor is nam’d: The Damage rated at two Bottles of Hay: At the Years end got a Verdict by which we are dismist out of Court. I appeal … I begin a-new. I produce Sayings, Objections, Inquests, Compulsatory Commissions, Reports of Inquisitors, Assignments, three Interlocutory Orders, new Facts and Grievances, verbal Processes … At last comes a decree. I am cast with expenses, of five hundred Pounds Sterling. Is this Justice? Is this Judgment? (Racine, 1715: 14)

This extract constitutes a genuine parody of what would later be called litigants’ delusion. Quibbler’s claims may well have their roots in bourgeois values, which asserted the right to defend one’s properties against all damages; but his craving for justice seemed to express the half comical, half pathological distortion of these values through the character of Quibbler, a single, isolated individual. To analyse this further, let us now have a look at the first descriptions of litigants’ delusion by nineteenth-century German psychiatrists.

Psychiatric birth of Querulantenwahn (litigants’ delusion) in the German-speaking world

Casper’s forensic writings

From a purely psychiatric viewpoint, the concept of pathological litigiousness was born in German-speaking countries during the second half of the nineteenth century. Johann Ludwig Casper (1857) seems to have been the first to use the expression Querulantenwahn (litigants’ delusion) in his Practisches Handbuch der gerichtliche Medizin which included, along with clinical descriptions, the following aetiological hypothesis.

It is not difficult to discover the origins of such a delusion (Wahn). Awareness of one’s right (Rechtsbewusstsein) is one of the most deeply rooted of all human feelings (Empfindungen). The knowledge that one’s rights must be and remain protected binds every single individual to the State, their guarantor; but once this knowledge has been seriously undermined among the masses, it may also cause the State to dissolve. Accordingly, all human beings strongly resent any real or imagined infringement on their rights. This is especially the case for people endowed with limited intellectual capacities or those who possess, or pretend to possess, outstanding mental gifts. The former cannot understand why their confidence in their own rights may be shaken; the latter’s selfishness entices them into claiming rights neither society nor law can grant them … That’s why many people feel ever more taken aback and thoroughly belittled when judgments in due form have repeatedly refused to grant them so-called rights. An ever stormier urge to conquer the latter drives them to squander their wealth, overwhelm legal authorities up to the highest official level with repeated requests and grievances, study the laws of their country day and night, ruin their inner as well as public lives. It is all too understandable, and also proved by experience, that after many years of unsuccessful proceedings and complaints (vergebliches Processieren und Querulieren) such people end up suffering from real losses of intellectual abilities; at long last the opinion according to which they are right and the whole world is at fault first becomes a fixed delusion (fixer Wahn) then more often than not, after a period of years, changes into an all-encompassing delusional disorder (allgemeiner Wahnsinn).² (Casper, 1857: 543–4)

Casper’s medico-legal writings not only provided the framework for all subsequent descriptions of litigants’ delusion in German-speaking countries, but by mentioning the dialectics of individual rights and State authority, they also provide valuable information about the general context in which this concept was born. The second half of the nineteenth century was indeed a period of strong development for German legal science. Among other thinkers, Carl von Gerber (1823–91) presented his Grundzüge eines Systems des deutschen Staatsrecht (1865). He was closely followed by Paul Laband (1838–1918) who aimed at the ‘scientific construction of constitutional right’ (Jouanjan, 2010: 7), and Georg Jellinek (1851–1911) then attempted to solve his predecessors’ contradictions with his doctrine of subjective public rights (Jellinek, 1892). Nothing less than the legal construction of modern States was at stake, which implied finding a balance between individual rights and public order: ‘The State was seen as a person endowed with a will of its own, who made its decisions then announced them … Against the exercise of such sovereign power, how could individuals have enforceable rights?’ (Jouanjan, 2010: 10).

Any member of the German intellectual elite who tried to solve such questions could not avoid seeing ‘mad litigants’ (wahnsinnige Querulanten) as troublemakers: claiming more than their share of rights, they were doomed to be accused of competing against the sovereign powers of the State, thus undermining its constitutional foundations. In Hegel’s dialectic of Master and Slave (1807/1986: 145–55), in which the rule of law is represented by the Master and the subject (Untertan) is represented by the Slave, pathological litigants could easily have been suspected of reversing roles; taking into account their demands would have implied a denial of State authority. They embodied nothing less than a refusal to distinguish between private and public spheres, which could not be tolerated by the advocates of established order and had to be either condemned or pathologized. Though he described at length the life-stories of three such litigants and briefly mentioned the existence of three other similar cases, Casper refused to give an opinion about the nosological position of his litigious Wahn (delusion). The first reason was that he considered it impossible to classify mental illnesses according to the contents of the delusional ideas:

Any ontological distinction between delusional subtypes established on the sole basis of their (often so changeable!) typical delusional ideas … must be rejected by forensic psychonosology (gerichtliche Psychonosologie). This is all the more true given that, as experience has shown, every generalization or creation of new nosological species or varieties lead all too easily to mistakes and have regrettable consequences on forensic pathologists’ and medical authorities’ expertise. (Casper, 1857: 479)

Some pages later, Casper put forward other reasons to defend his position:

I am far from considering the litigants delusion (Querulantenwahn) a self-standing species (eine eigene species) … Doing so would be utterly impossible, since such a disorder always blends and mingles with others, namely the so-called ‘delusion of grandeur’ and ‘persecutory delusion’. (p. 543)

Consequently, Casper decided to include his Querulantenwahn into the general category of Wahnsinn, which he defined as an altered state of consciousness characterized by the presence of delusional ideas (Wahnvorstellungen).

Richard von Krafft-Ebing

After the publication of Casper’s Handbuch, a series of papers devoted to litigants’ delusion appeared in German scientific journals. Clinical descriptions were very similar to Casper’s.

Like Casper, Friedrich Scholz (1868) began by insisting on the importance of right as an ‘ethical founding of the State’, and then defined ‘awareness of one’s rights … as the most powerful link between the individual, the State and its institutions’ (p. 351). In one clinical illustration, he wrote at length about the life-story of the ‘litigious lunatic’, depicted as a particularly self-centred man, eager to benefit from rights that society could not grant him (p. 348).

In the same year, Droste (1868: 73) described a ‘troublesome and offensive’ litigious detainee who had been imprisoned ‘not so much for petty crimes and swindles as for the numerous attacks he directed against the authorities’.

Such writings paved the way for Richard von Krafft-Ebing, who mentioned litigants’ delusion in the first edition of his Lehrbuch der gerichtlichen Psychopathologie (1875). While Casper had refused to consider the Querulantenwahn as a separate nosological entity, Krafft-Ebing regarded it as a specific subtype of persecutory delusion (Verfolgungswahnsinn). However, in his Lehrbuch der Psychiatrie auf klinischer Grundlage, he added that all the following points allowed a clear-cut distinction to be made between delusional litigiousness and persecutory delusion (Krafft-Ebing, 1883: 150).

The ligitant’s delusional ideas are based ‘upon real life events’ (wirkliche Begebenheiten).

Their alleged enemies ‘aim at harming their legal rights but do not intend to make an attempt on their life’.

They quickly abandon ‘the passive role of a defendant’ to take on ‘the active role of an attacker’ (Angreifer).

Apart from these new elements, Krafft-Ebing’s text was strikingly similar to Casper’s.

The litigants’ or suitors’ delusion (Querulanten- oder Prozesskrämerwahnsinn) is an important variety of persecutory delusion (Verfolgungswahnsinn). It mainly affects individuals either endowed with limited intellectual capacities or exceedingly proud of their alleged or real intellectual giftedness. Sentenced for some crime or civil lawsuit, they believe themselves to be in the right and the tribunal to be wrong. Driven by the painful affect and passionate excitement that such an alleged infringement on their rights arouses, they become increasingly convinced that they were condemned by partial, biased or even bribed judges. The powerful impulse which results from these delusional assumptions drives them to demand full restoration of their rights, keeps getting more and more powerful, dominates all their ideas and aspirations … What was or seemed to be mere passion thus begins to resemble a real mental illness (psychische Krankheit) characterized by loss of insight, loss of ability to correct false ideas, loss of respect for others, then final loss of reason. Obeying their insane logic with morbid tenacity and shameless insolence, these individuals contest not only the legal validity of judgments issued against them but also their irrevocability. They appeal to all authorities, all instances, and often offer to play the role of pettifoggers or shysters for other suitors. Rejected everywhere, they become more and more insolent towards legal authorities, accuse them of injustice, dare to insult civil servants, commit lese-majesty crimes, assault clerks, bow and scrape in front of the armed forces but may end up being accused of murder or voluntary homicide. (Krafft-Ebing, 1875: 123–4)

Definitions and debates at the dawn of the nineteenth century: Mendel (1885), Hitzig (1895) and Köppen (1895)

Krafft-Ebing’s writings aroused a series of debates which mainly focused on medico-legal issues, but also tried to answer the still controversial question: was Querulantenwahn a completely self-standing mental disorder? A mere subtype of persecutory delusion? Or only a symptom which could appear during the course of any psychosis? As early as 1885, an interesting note by Mendel in Eulenburg’s Encyclopädie (Mendel, 1885: 223–4) anticipated Kraepelin’s decision to separate Querulantenwahn completely from persecutory delusion; Mendel emphasized that both illnesses followed very different courses. In Querulantenwahn, the psychosis (die Psychose) often emerged during the fourth or fifth decade of life and the ‘fixed idea’ (die ‘fixe Idee’, p. 223) focused on one single legal issue; in contrast, Mendel saw a persecutory delusion as an all-encompassing, congenital disorder. But 12 years later, Hitzig (1895) took the opposite view; in the first substantial monograph devoted to the topic, he asserted that delusional ideas in Querulantenwahn were a mixture of those met in persecutory delusions and ‘ideas of self-overestimation’ (Überschätzungsideen, p. 31). Although the major symptom consisted of a seemingly isolated ‘idea of prejudice’ (Beträchtigungsidee, p. 33), a delusion of grandeur (Grössenwahn) supposedly made its appearance from the onset, first accompanied by memory troubles, then by an all-encompassing ‘delusion of reference’ (Beziehungswahn). Hitzig thus considered pathological litigants to be both antisocial and socially dangerous, while not thinking them responsible for their actions, for he assumed that anatomic alterations of the brain were at the origin of their mental state (p. 98).

Such views led Hitzig to tackle a medico-legal issue that had been raised by Horn in 1893. Horn had mentioned the existence of sane Querulanten (litigants), for it was obvious that all querulieren (grudgingly complaining) was not pathological. Hitzig (1895) answered that the pathological dimension of Querulantenwahn had never consisted of the mere ‘enjoyment found in complaining’ (Lust am Querulieren, p. 10) but in the manifold accompanying phenomena which caused a complete alteration of the whole psychical personality. When German anti-psychiatry was coming to the fore, these points would have to be studied in more depth: on the one hand, Querulantenwahn was seen by the public of the 1890s as an often misused diagnosis (Schwoch and Schmiedebach, 2007), but on the other, psychiatrists had always known that pathological litigants could enrol the public in their campaigns.

Such cases are commonly long misjudged by lay-people (Laien): unaware of the insane and unseemly character of their own conduct, the persons affected often have an impressive command of legal dialectics. Accordingly, they are cunning advocates (Sachwalter) for their own cause. (Krafft-Ebing, 1875: 124)

In this context, it is no wonder that the report presented by Max Köppen in 1895 at the Versammlung Deutscher Irrenärzte in Hamburg gave birth to a series of objections raised by some of the most renowned psychiatrists of the time. Approaching the question from a medico-legal point of view, Köppen (1895: 230) suggested that the use of the word Querulantenwahn should be avoided in forensic reports, so as not to cause public outrage. While recognizing the existence of sane Querulanten, he set out to prove that, in many cases, litigiousness had to be seen as a genuine ‘symptom’ of mental illness (p. 230). According to him, valid diagnosis had to be established on the basis of criteria such as general behaviour, overexcitement, presence of delusional ideas, false memories, distortion of real facts and logomachia (p. 226).

When Köppen had finished his talk, seven of his colleagues responded (Köppen, 1896: 144–8). One the one hand, Meschede, Mendel and Thomsen objected that, since many other psychoses presented the same ‘symptom’, it was a great mistake to think of litigants’ delusion as a self-standing disorder. Meschede suggested replacing Querulantenwahn with a symptomatic Queruliersucht (obsessive complaining, pp. 146–7) and Thomsen added that most of the so-called litigants’ delusions simply belonged to paranoia, some other cases being the consequence of periodic manic fits (p. 146). However, on the other hand, Mittenzweig, Bruns, Siemerling and Hitzig thought it a mistake to stop using the word Querulantenwahn, which they considered perfectly accurate even though the public disliked it. They referred to some cases in which complaints appeared in such an unmistakable way and played such a role that all other delusional ideas were of very secondary importance; they then reminded the meeting that an unshakeable will to triumph in court, irrational obstinacy, lack of regard for family, friends, fellow citizens and authorities, proved the existence of a very specific kind of illness (pp. 147–8).

Kraepelin’s contribution

In the first decade of the twentieth century, such debates over Querulantenwahn still continued. In a series of articles, Gustav Specht (1901, 1905, 1908) supported the idea that paranoia, and more specifically litigants’ delusions, were mere symptoms of chronic mania. Meanwhile, Kirchberg (1903) talked of Paranoia chronica querulatoria and Heilbronner (1907) appealed to aetiology in order to prove that litigiousness had nothing in common with paranoid delusions but could appear on hysteric constitutional basis – an opinion refuted four years later by Paul Bjerre (1911).

These detailed controversies, along with Sérieux and Capgras’s contribution (see below) and his own clinical experience, led Emil Kraepelin to take a major step. He had always considered Querulantenwahn as a subtype of Paranoia, and in the seventh edition of his Psychiatrie (Kraepelin, 1903–4/1915: 423–33), it still appeared in the same category as the ‘expansive delusions’ and ‘persecutory delusions’ (p. 425). But in the eighth edition (Kraepelin, 1909–15: 1533–46), everything changed: emphasizing aetiological criteria, Kraepelin stressed that Querulantenwahn, the starting point of which was a real-life event, had to be considered a psychogenic illness (psychogene Erkrankung, a category which also included, e.g., traumatic neurosis and induced insanity); on the other hand, Paranoia was seen as a constitutional disorder (konstitutionelle Störungen, a group which also comprised, e.g., manic-depressive psychosis, hysteria and obsessive-compulsive neurosis). Although Kraepelin’s clinical examples remained, in all other respects, very close to Casper’s, a page had been turned in the history of Querulantenwahn.

Between the two World Wars: two theoretical debates

Between the two World Wars, the theoretical debates, while taking account of Kraepelin’s contribution, focused on relatively new topics. A first series of questions was raised by Maier (1912), Rittershaus (1923), Ewald (1925) and Klüber (1931); inspired by Specht (1901, 1905, 1908), they discussed the links between affective (i.e. manic-depressive) psychosis and litigants’ delusion:

According to Specht (1908: 826), it was ‘impossible not to see that every single genuine vexatious litigant (Querulant) would not have turned into a pathological suitor (pathologischen Prozesskrämer), had he not carried with him the whole array of mania’. Consequently ‘manic – or more exactly manic-depressive – state of mind (Geistesverfassung)’ was supposed to account for the conception and pathological elaboration of persecutory ideas, and also to explain the ‘extraordinary reaction (außerordentliche Reaktion) these ideas provoke in the patient’s personality’.

As early as 1912, Maier suggested renaming the phenomenon described by Specht as ‘manic litigants’ delusion (manischer Querulantenwahn)’ (Maier, 1912: 593). Such litigiousness was, in his eyes, a transient symptom secondary to what he called ‘affective psychosis (Affektpsychosen)’. In contrast, he saw genuine Querulantenwahn as a product of the ‘active influence of affect-laden complexes of ideas’ (p. 608). In his opinion, the latter concerned ‘wishes, fears or ambivalent tendencies (ambivalente Strebungen)’ whose influences accounted for the birth of delusional disorders.

As for Rittershaus (1923), Ewald (1925) and Klüber (1931), they certainly did not agree with Specht on all points, but all three of them considered certain people highly vulnerable to affective fluctuations. Due to their alleged constitutional basis, the individuals were supposedly sometimes liable to develop manic-depressive psychosis, or even litigants’ delusion. Without stating that these were identical illnesses, the three authors maintained their common origins: pathological modifications of the affective life substratum.

Once the distinction between paranoia, manic litigants’ delusion and genuine Querulantenwahn was established and the primary role of the affective constitutional basis highlighted, a question remained: was Querulantenwahn to be considered a truly delusional disorder? In other words, was it right to talk of a Querulanten-Wahn (litigants’ delusion)? Kurt Schneider (1923), Julius Raecke (1926) and Kurt Kolle (1931) all answered in the negative; they were influenced by Ernst Kretschmer’s (1918, 1921) character-style typologies, and also by his theories about real-life experience, personality and social environment as risk factors for sensitive delusions of reference.

In the first edition of his Die psychopathischen Persönlichkeiten, Schneider (1923: 8) mentioned the Querulant (litigant) as one example of ‘individual fanatic’ fighting for ‘real or imaginary rights’ and emphasized that similar cases of expansive psychopathy were usually accompanied by paranoid symptoms.

Raecke (1926) had similar opinions; he declared that pure (as opposed to symptomatic) pathological litigiousness was conditioned by a ‘characterial predisposition (Charakteranlage)’ coupled with some ‘psychic transformations’ (p. 14). Inability to fully ‘abreact (abreagieren)’ responses to disappointments supposedly led psychopathic personalities to ‘litigious reaction (querulatorische Reaktion’ (p. 15). Strong excitement, emotional tension and dominance of a ‘prevalent idea (überwertige Idee)’ – an expression borrowed from Wernicke (1894) – hindered the subject from listening to friendly advice. Such conditions could either quickly subside, which made the illness curable, or lead to the development of pseudo-delusions of reference with persecutory ideas (p. 67).

Like Raecke, Kolle (1931) pointed out the influence of constitutional factors such as ‘hypomanic or hyperthymic temperament’ (p. 51) combined with a triggering event and the ‘pathological reaction’ it caused (p. 87). He borrowed from Lange (1925) the concept of chronic vital conflict (chronischer Lebenskonflikt) and stressed that morbid litigiousness was no paranoid delusional disorder (p. 90) . From then on, the word Querulant, when used by German psychiatrists, would refer to a subtype of psychopathic personality (psychopathische Persönlichkeit).

From the twentieth to the twenty-first century

Learning from his predecessors, Arthur Van der Heydt (1952) suggested that a character neurosis was at the origin of what had become, in the meantime, a well-established subtype of psychopathic personality. Another 20 years later, his colleague Heinz Dietrich (1973) would list no less than seven pathological subtypes – legal, altruistic, collective, custodial, career, conjugal and pensions litigation – and he established a distinction between what was considered as normal (neurotic, reactive) and pathological (chronic, psychopathic) litigiousness. But the second half of the twentieth century also saw the publication of several forensic works on ‘morbid suitors’ legal status’ (Bublitz, 1956) and ‘treatment’ (Aschwanden, 1978; Händel, 1973). Since then, psychiatric as well as forensic research has been under way in German-speaking countries. Saß (2010) studied the spectrum of pathological litigiousness, from delusional transitions into paranoid disorder to personality and structural distortion (Strukturverformung). Meanwhile, the question of chronic litigants’ civil and criminal liability (Lube, 2009; Saß 2010) and dangerousness (Knecht, 2012; Tölle and Windgassen, 2011) was still subject to debate. Circulated in the tabloid press throughout Germany, and also in the most reputable broadsheets, several articles a year describe their feats and features (e.g. Groschupf, 2011; Schöne, 2012). In November 2012, a public lecture hosted by the Institute for Cultural Inquiries of Berlin even offered to study the anthropological significance of Querulanz ³ – an unmistakable sign that, from Casper’s early writings to the beginnings of the twenty-first century, Querulanten have found their place not only in nosological classifications, but also in modern German folklore.

Pathological litigiousness in French alienism: from persecuted-persecutors to delusions of revendication

In France, the medical construction of pathological litigiousness followed a different path. Long before Racine’s character Quibbler (Chicaneau) was considered an archetype of vexatious litigant by French alienists, the word ‘chicane’ (quibbling) had been in use in literary letters (De Sévigné, 1734/1973–78), satirical poems (Boileau, 1666) and religious pamphlets (Bossuet, 1688) as a derogatory way of referring to long-winded legal disputes and, by extension, any legal matter. Two other expressions, ‘procédurier’ and ‘processif’, enabled one to refer to ‘litigious, trialophile, legalistic people’ (TLFi, 2013). The first of these words meant both liking for and knowledge of legal procedures – implying the procédurier knew how to plead and appeal and was apt to do so with excessive zeal. The second, processif, described a person who generated lawsuits and complaints, as De Balzac (1833/1999: 69) shows in the following depiction of a quarrelsome caviller: ‘Monsieur Taboureau has become a litigious (processif) and scornful quibbler (chicaneur). The richer he got, the fouler.’

The persecuted-persecutors: a growing category (1876–1903)

To explain more specifically the psychiatric birth of the French nosological entity which covered the spectrum of pathological litigiousness, it is necessary to mention the epistemological break which took place after Charles Lasègue (1852) gave his ground-breaking description of persecutory delusions (délire des persécutions). Lasègue intended to pave the way for a ‘science of pathological types’ which, he added, was ‘yet to be invented’ (p. 130). In the same decade, Jean-Pierre Falret criticized the notion of monomania and expressed his wish to discover a ‘natural classification, which will take into account the total scope of the pathological phenomena and the progression of the disease’ (Falret, 1854/1864, 2012: 495). Rapid obsolescence followed for the nosological system both men had inherited from Esquirol; it was replaced by another, which supposedly enabled one to ‘go into detail and decompose classes into genders, genders into species’ (Lasègue, 1852: 130). However, it took another 24 years to distinguish between Lasègue’s famous ‘persecutees’ (persécutés) and another species of lunatics: the persecutors.

In 1876 Henri Taguet published in the Annales médico-psychologiques an article entitled: Les aliénés persécuteurs. Its first lines read as follows:

Our small world hosts one particular class of individuals which is to be approached along the corridors of administration offices, at the Prefecture of Police and in the surroundings of ministries and tribunals: these are the persecutors … Their ways of reasoning are by no means absurd, but they exaggerate and distort everything according to their own wishes. (Taguet, 1876: 5)

Taguet gave examples in which self-standing ‘persecuting delusions (délires persécuteurs)’ appeared from the onset and dominated all others symptoms (p. 15). He did not speculate on their nosological position or classificatory significance, but acknowledged that analogous phenomena were sometimes caused by megalomania and general paralysis (p. 15). At the end of one clinical description, in explicit reference to Racine, he exclaimed: ‘How many Quibblers (Chicaneaux) should have their place reserved in a lunatic asylum!’ (p. 13).

Two years later, Falret presented a report at the Société médico-psychologique. He alleged the existence of hereditary, supposedly ‘degenerate’ persecuted-persecutors who harassed and blackmailed their putative enemies: ‘exceedingly proud sterile inventors or rejected outcasts, they have remarkable gifts as well as huge intellectual and, above all, moral deficiencies’ (Falret, 1878: 414–15). These characteristic features of the ‘persecuted-persecutors’ and their distinction from Lasègue’s persecutory delusion were to become commonplace in French medical literature. However, eight years elapsed before Falret’s student Pottier published Étude sur les aliénés persécuteurs (1886), the first real monograph devoted to the topic, which was to become a must-read. Like Falret, Pottier first endeavoured to draw a clear-cut line between persecuted-persecutors and persecutory delusion: ‘In spite of analogous main delusional ideas, these lunatics are very different from common persecutees (persecutés): the course of their illness, from the cradle to the grave, and physical as well as moral symptoms, are not the same.’ (Pottier, 1886: 30). To illustrate his theories, Pottier included no less than 14 clinical reports (pp. 73–108); among them, he cited two observations of ‘litigation mania’ directly translated from Casper’s Handbuch (1857). Regarding the medico-legal applications of his contribution, he added: ‘Mental health assessment is all the more difficult because most of the time, their delusional ideas are largely based upon real facts which serve as starting points for a systematization. The imaginary elements they add are difficult to distinguish from the real facts taken as a basis.’ (Pottier, 1886: 33). To end with, Pottier mentioned several subtypes of persecuted-persecutors: litigants, and also criminals, lovers, hypochondriacs, sterile inventors (p. 44). Although he did not go into detail, their existence would be confirmed and features further studied by other alienists.

The golden age of persecuted-persecutors: Cullerre (1888), Ball (1890), Magnan (1891) and Arnaud (1903)

Pottier’s book was published in 1886; adopted by all leading alienists of his time, the concept of persecuted-persecutor quickly became a landmark of French fin-de-siècle nosology. Two years later, Alexandre Cullerre introduced Les frontières de la folie, a work mainly devoted to forensic questions, as follows:

What is conventionally called health, whether mental or physical, is a very relative thing. There is no absolute formula for it … How many people are there, whose eccentric gait, bad temper, changeable feelings, bizarre ideas, strange deeds warrant the most contradictory opinions among those who approach them? (Cullerre, 1888: 24)

Among these people, Cullerre singled out three overlapping subtypes: the litigious, the jealous and the ‘pure’ persecutors (pp. 161–90). He insisted that litigants’ delusions may appear on the basis of persecutory or hypochondriacal ideas, and gave numerous examples of their dangerousness (‘… their claims and craving for justice sometimes lead them to commit crimes’; p. 182); also he borrowed from Taguet the phrase: ‘How many Quibblers (Chicaneaux) should have their place reserved in a lunatic asylum!’ (p. 180).

It was then Benjamin Ball’s turn (1890) to distinguish the many kinds of mental illnesses in which persecution played a role. Enumerating no less than seven kinds of disorders, he marked the now classic difference between the ordinary persecutees (‘Lasègue’s type’, p. 33) and the persecuted-persecutors (‘Falret’s type’, p. 33), ‘whose exaltation sometimes leads to crime, which draws attention from the public and causes the justice to intervene directly’ (p. 32). He explicitly mentioned Krafft-Ebing’s ‘litigants’ and plaintiffs’ delusion, whose archetype Racine seems to have described in advance’ (p. 45) and listed several features they had in common with all other persecuted-persecutors (p. 46):

relentless activity;

outstanding tenacity;

personal elation;

abuse of logic;

intellectual and often physical resilience;

graphomania, a feature Ball considered common to all lunatics. (p. 26)

A personal enemy of Ball and zealous defender of Morel’s theory of degeneration, Valentin Magnan answered by publishing his Leçons cliniques sur les maladies mentales (1891). He stressed that persecuted-persecutors did not suffer from the chronic delusional insanity of systematic evolution (a controversial category he had invented; p. 292) and gave, among others, the following example.

[M. D…] accuses the Public Prosecution Office of leniency towards the alienists: ‘Since his Majesty the Public Prosecutor – he claims – didn’t think it wise to punish them, here I come, on my own, inspired by ardent love and zealous worship of truth and committed to the great cause of justice and right, to demand, etc.’ He considers seven medical certificates less than worthless against him, but argues that ‘the Court should regard them as evidence of a crime which, initiated, couldn’t be committed as a result of circumstances beyond its perpetrators’ control’. From medical and legal points of view, he contests the measures taken against him and proudly, forcefully asserts that, in lunatic asylums, he has been at great risk of turning mad. (Magnan, 1891: 304)

Lastly, the chapter of Ballet’s Traité de pathologie mentale devoted to chronic personality disorders, written as late as 1903 by François-Léon Arnaud, included a section about the persecuted-persecutors (Arnaud, 1903: 653–63). This category comprised the hypochondriacs, lovers, filial and, of course, litigious persecutors, all characterized by:

1° Persecuting tendencies fully developed from the onset, with early choice of an alleged persecutor who, in turn, is soon to be persecuted.

2° Absence of hallucinations and, most often, of truly delusional ideas.

3° Absolute immutability of the systematized beliefs. (p. 653)

‘Changeable moods’ and ‘bizarre personality’, ‘ferocious egoism’ and ‘extraordinary pride’, ‘sterile activities’ and ‘complete lack of moral feelings’ supposedly explained why persecuted-persecutors could so easily ‘conflict with their equals and superiors’ (p. 655).

Why persecuted-persecutors seemed doomed to disappear

We have just explored the birth and gradual recognition of the persecuted-persecutors as a nosological entity, from 1876 (Taguet’s article) to 1903 (Ballet’s Traité). We shall now try to discover why pathological litigiousness, which had always belonged to the latter category, developed and had become, by the mid-1920s, a subtype of the delusions of revendication. To answer this difficult question, let us first emphasize that Taguet, who coined the word ‘persecutor’, did not speculate about its classificatory significance, but simply wrote: ‘Their ways of reasoning are by no means absurd, but they exaggerate and distort everything according to their own wishes.’ (Taguet, 1876: 5).

Based on such criteria, Falret (1878) implicitly positioned the persecutors between two other nosological categories. On the one hand, he referred to them as ‘persecuted, reasoning and persecuting lunatics’ (p. 413) – an obvious allusion to reasoning mania. On the other, he stressed that they had ‘absolutely no moral sense’ (p. 415), a criterion which could only be taken as a hint at the folie morale, a French translation for Prichard’s moral insanity (1835). It is no wonder, then, that eight years later Pottier expressly stated what his master Falret had implied: according to him, all clinical observations relevant to persecutors had previously been scattered among the chapters devoted to ‘moral insanity, reasoning mania, impulsive insanity, litigants mania (litigious insanity of the Germans [sic]), etc.’ (Pottier, 1886: 29–30). Pottier added: ‘They don’t belong with persecutory delusions … but with another large, still mainly unknown family, namely hereditary, reasoning or lucid lunatics … We shall try to describe them as a distinct species.’ (p. 30).

Cullere, Ball, Magnan and Arnaud all agreed with Pottier. The first wrote that litigants delusion was ‘a species of reasoning mania’ (manie raisonnante; Cullere, 1888: 178). The second laid emphasis on the ‘mental vigour’ and ‘abuse of logic’ displayed by all persecuted-persecutors (Ball, 1890: 46). The third stated: ‘Falret has shown that persecuted-persecutors offer the same features as hereditary, moral and reasoning maniacs’ then launched into pages-long explanations intended to shed light on the intricate history of ‘reasoning mania’ from Pinel to ‘Marc, Trélat, Morel, Falret, and Campagne’ (Magnan, 1891: 293–8). Finally, Arnaud asserted that reasoning mania, moral insanity and persecuted-persecutors all belonged to chronic personality disorders. He considered them so closely related that, practically speaking, it proved ‘very difficult’ to establish a clear-cut distinction between litigious lunatics and reasoning maniacs. In the latter category were some cases which could easily have been considered an example of the former (Arnaud, 1903: 645).

The crux of the problem was that reasoning mania and moral insanity, created by Pinel (1801) and Prichard (1835), had always been criticized by some, cherished by others, but defined by none. As late as 1867, Brierre wrote: ‘If something was ever practically acknowledged, it is the existence of lunatics who can speak, write, act for hours – and even longer – with all appearances of reason.’ (Brierre, 1867: 1). Meanwhile, the majority of French alienists agreed that such phenomena were merely symptomatic and comprised extremely heterogeneous facts. Accordingly, Magnan (1891: 293) said to his readers: ‘As you can see, opinions diverge, the situation is confused. You can get an idea of how intricate things are by turning back to the previous works published about these reasoning conditions.’

How much more clearly could Magnan say that, among French alienists, no one had ever successfully taken over Falret’s early attempt at distinguishing the ‘natural categories of facts still merged together’ under the names of ‘reasoning mania, lucid madness and moral insanity’ (Falret 1866/1890: 490)? To be sure, Magnan (1891: 297) tried to save face by suggesting that reasoning mania, if not a self-standing category, could represent an important symptom of ‘degeneracy’. However, along with lucid madness and moral insanity, his manie raisonnante remained so controversial that it seemed, as it were, doomed to disappear. When this happened, it is only too understandable that persecuted-persecutors disappeared too: the latter category had always been dimly distinguished from the former (see Taguet, Falret, Ball, Magnan, Arnaud), if not considered one of its subtypes (see Pottier, Cullerre).

A new category: the delusions of revendication

Let us now see how a new nosological concept, namely the delusions of revendication, replaced that of persecuted-persecutors. In 1895 Pailhas presented a report at the Congrès des aliénistes et neurologistes in Bordeaux, entitled États monomaniaques liés à une déviation de l’instinct de conservation de la propriété. He alleged the existence of ‘property instincts’ supposedly giving birth to the ‘noble desires to possess, as well as rapacious greed … and love of legitimately acquired properties as well as immoderate and unrestrained emotional attachment to them’ (Pailhas, 1895: 1). According to Pailhas, it was all too understandable that such instincts could have pathological consequences:

Needs to satisfy impulsive tendencies gradually associate with beliefs in alleged rights, and after several legal defeats with yet another belief – namely that justice is denied. These dominant factors support tenacious claims which inevitably result in a series of wrongdoings or even lead to crime. (p. 2)

Pailhas gave examples and stressed that ‘rural populations, humble landowners cherish their lands with fierce jealousy and, as a consequence of such excessive love, are especially prone to rebel against dispossession, revolt against seizure, become litigious and refractory to agreements when their lands are at stake’ (p. 2). Indeed, a good number of clinical descriptions written by Pailhas and his followers (Chuiton, 1897; Régis, 1896) would mention small farmers who refused to leave their lands. Humble landowners willing to defend their properties against legal authorities thus became epitomes of pathological litigiousness. Casper’s model for the Querulant had been the German individual living under the rule of law but trying to obtain more than his share of rights; Pailhas had set up a new model, namely the French peasant desperately fighting against expropriation. This may be linked to the fact that the French, contrary to the Germans, lived in a country where much of the land – previously owned by the aristocrats and clergy – had been shared after the 1789 Revolution. Whatever the case, the French, from then on, would repeatedly insist on the jealous love of one’s belongings as a cause of vexatious litigation.

This did not hinder Emmanuel Régis from giving a theoretical and clinical answer to Pailhas, only one year later. Régis (1896: 229–30) claimed that his colleague had given a ‘somehow inaccurate name’ to his cases, which seemed to belong with ‘the German paranoia quaerulans’. As a consequence, he suggested renaming the ‘deviations of property instincts’ as ‘reasoning delusions of dispossession’. Then (pp. 231–9), he presented the forensic assessment, written with the help of his colleagues Pitres and Landes, of a litigant nicknamed ‘the rebel of Bergerac’ by the local press. This man had never admitted the expropriation of his lands and had been put in jail after resisting the authorities for a long time. With his colleagues, Régis pretended to have ‘successfully proved that the defendant was mentally ill and legally irresponsible, which had been denied by prior experts’ testimony’. An acquittal had been obtained, and the man confined in a mental hospital.

During the next few years, two doctoral dissertations (Béra, 1898; Chuiton, 1897) and several reports were devoted to similar cases of ‘litigious paranoia’ (Ladame, 1898), ‘litigious lunatics’ (Giraud, 1903) and ‘litigious delusional insanity (Tissot and Briand, 1904). These works were published by a wide range of French journals, from the Archives de neurologie to the Archives d’anthropologie criminelle. Nevertheless, the contributions of Pailhas and Régis might well have been forgotten, if Cullerre (1897) had not taken them as a basis for defending the existence of a newly named ‘délire systématisé des persécutés-persécuteurs, le délire de revendication’ (p. 353). In this seminal article, Cullerre began by stating that Pailhas’s and Régis’s writings had led him to present ‘two very analogous cases’ (p. 353). However, a few lines later, he added that, from a medico-legal point of view, the conditions he described were slightly different.

Here, we are not concerned with people who won’t comply with a decision of the court and refuse to leave their expropriated lands, but with persecutees (persécutés) who believe they are unduly deprived of goods and defend imaginary rights to possess them. Consequently, I shall be forgiven for coining the phrase ‘delusion of revendication’ (délire de revendication), which has no other merit than that of describing accurately the kind of ideas which constitutes the focal point of their delusions. (Cullerre, 1897: 354)

In a footnote, Cullerre cited a famous French dictionary which defined ‘revendication’ as the act of ‘claiming something which belongs to us but is in someone else’s hands’ (p. 354). Inheritance disputes were at the centre of both the clinical descriptions he presented: ‘For different reasons, all equally groundless, these men imagine they have greater rights than their fellow heirs.’ (p. 366). Cullerre underlined the ‘purely moral nature’ of these delusional ideas. He refused to decide whether such cases were examples of what ‘the German authors called paranoia quaerulans [sic]’ – for he considered its definition equivocal (p. 386) – and finally insisted that delusional revendication fell into the category of persecutory delusions (p. 367).

From Sérieux and Capgras to De Clérambault: delusion of revendication as a long-lasting paradigm for pathological litigiousness

Three more steps had yet to be taken to change Cullerre’s delusion of revendication into a category all French alienists would have to reckon with. The first was the publication by Paul Sérieux and Joseph Capgras (1909) of their famous work on delusions of interpretation; while acknowledging that mixed states could be found, both men established a straightforward distinction between revendication and interpretation. Their differential criteria soon met public recognition. According to them, delusions of revendication were characterized by the absence of truly delusional ideas and the presence of ‘prevailing, fixed or obsessive mental representations’ relating to damage allegedly suffered (p. 263). These ‘ideas of prejudice’, mainly plausible, excluded bodily persecution, delusional interpretation and megalomania; though emerging in the intellectual spheres, they supposedly determined chronic passionate states which accounted for pathological reactions. The authors also emphasized that, contrary to delusions of interpretation, delusions of revendication could be treated and even cured (p. 263).

Based only on their distinction between revendication and interpretation, and adding that ‘paranoia’ was circumscribed by ‘these two clinical species’ (p. 8), Sérieux and Capgras consigned to oblivion the old category of ‘persecuted-persecutors’ which, they said, ‘arbitrarily’ grouped together ‘dissimilar cases’ (p. 8). Such an assertion cut deeply into the former classifications of mental illnesses and inaugurated a new era in French alienism. Maurice Dide (1913) contributed to it by describing the psychosis of passionate idealists. Characterized by ‘purely affective judgements’ (p. 25) and accompanied by ‘always the same feelings’ (p. 171), pathological idealism was considered a tendency apt to create several ramifications, from mystic love to egocentric revendication and pseudo-altruistic quest for justice (with the examples of Torquemada, Calvin, Robespierre and others; pp. 140–51).

So now the ground had been prepared for De Clérambault (1921/1987) who determinedly defended the existence of what he called the delusions of passion, namely erotomania, pathological jealousy and all the various delusions of revendication (idealists’, inventors’ and litigants’ delusions). De Clérambault (p. 344) fully and clearly expressed his agreement with ‘all distinguishing features’ mentioned by Sérieux and Capgras in their attempt to separate delusional revendication from delusional interpretation. However, in accordance with Dide, he added that these features ‘all proceed from a unique element: morbid passion considered a pathogenic factor’ (p. 344). In other words, all features which enabled one to distinguish interpretation from revendication stemmed from the more general distinction between interpretation and passion. Pathological litigiousness, considered a delusion of revendication, was itself seen as a product of passionate states.

In delusions of revendication and erotomania, the onset of passion can be accurately dated … Neither delusional revendication nor erotomania influence the patient’s self-image; they only modify his approach to the relational atmosphere within the limits and in the context of his passion … Be it in delusional revendication, erotomania or even jealousy, the passionate individual heads towards a destination … He is well aware of his own demands, which are fully developed from the onset. His delusions are circumscribed by his own desires, his cogitations polarized just as his will, and because of his will. (De Clérambault, 1921/1987: 342)

De Clérambault acknowledged the existence of numerous mixed types but insisted that ‘studying pure cases forces us to ascribe to each pathogenic factor no more than what it brings about’ (p. 345). Up to the present day (Fouldrin, Gourevitch, Baylé and Thibaut, 2006), his nosological principles have been in use among French clinicians. Nevertheless, it is most important to point out that neither De Clérambault, who was mainly interested in erotomania, nor his precedessors Sérieux and Capgras, who focused on delusions of interpretation, ever worked on pathological litigiousness, but merely specified its nosological position. Thus neglected, the French version of litigants’ delusion did not give rise to far-reaching research after the 1930s; few works addressed the topic (e.g. Pons and Ortega-Monasterio, 1988) and the public still remains largely unaware of its existence.

Conclusion

In this paper, we have focused on the history of pathological litigiousness in classic literary works, then in the German- and French-speaking psychiatric worlds. In German psychiatry, the Querulantenwahn gave rise to many debates. First described by Casper in 1857, it was considered by Krafft-Ebing (1875, 1883) a subtype of persecutory delusion, then once and for all excluded from this group by Kraepelin (1909–15). Its kinship with manic states was studied by the Specht school from the 1900s to the 1930s, but the opinion finally prevailed that mad litigants had to be considered pathological personalities. Even today, their characteristics are well known to the German public and are studied by legal experts who continue to devote numerous works to the institutional problems they pose.

In contrast, pathological litigiousness has not been closely studied in France since the early 1930s. In French nosology, it still ranks among the delusions of revendication, which in turn rank among the delusions of passion, a category created by De Clérambault (1921). Previously, it had been known as the litigious persecutors’ delusion and was considered to be a subtype of persecuted-persecutors’ delusions. However, the limits of the latter category had never been clear. All agreed that persecuted-persecutors could barely be distinguished from reasoning mania, mania without delusion and moral insanity – expressions which were, in themselves, far from uncontroversial. To replace them, Sérieux and Capgras (1909) introduced the simple contrast between delusions of interpretation (délires d’interprétation) and delusions of revendication (délires de revendication). De Clérambault’s role consisted in placing the delusions of revendication into the more inclusive category of delusions of passions, which did not prevent pathological litigiousness from being neglected by all the subsequent French clinicians; although it had once been part of the French literary as well as psychiatric folklore, it no longer seemed to raise much interest.

In the English-speaking world and Commonwealth countries, the situation is different; consequently, the second part of this paper will present the ways in which vexatious litigation was defined by psychiatrists and magistrates, from the British 1896 Vexatious Litigants Acts to India’s 2005 Law Commissions and Australia’s 2008 Law Reform Committees.

[Part 2 of this paper will be published in History of Psychiatry 26(1)]

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Emma Goodwin for her thorough rereading of this article and Thomas Lepoutre for the valuable advice he provided.

Notes

References

Aristophanes (1998) The Wasps, trans. Meineck

from the original text [422BC]. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company.

Arnaud

(1903) États morbides continus du caractère. In: Ballet

(ed.) Traité de pathologie mentale. Paris: Doin, 640–667.

Aschwanden

(1978) Die Behandlung der Querulanten im Zivilprozess. Zürich : Juris-Verlag.

Ball

(1890) Du délire des persécutions, ou maladie de Lasègue. Paris: Asselin et Houzeau.

Béra

(1898) Étude sur les aliénés processifs. Toulouse: Marquès.

Bjerre

(1911) Zur Radikalbehandlung der chronischen Paranoia. Jahrbuch für psychoanalytische und psychopathische Forschung 3(2): 795–847.

Boileau

(1666) Satires du sieur D… . Paris: Billaine; reprinted in 2012, Paris: Hachette-BNF.

Bossuet

(1688) Histoire des variations des églises protestantes. Paris: Mabre-Cramoisy; reprinted in 2011, Paris: Nabu Press.

Brierre

Boismont

(1867) De la folie raisonnante et de l’importance du délire des actes pour le diagnostic et la médecine légale. Paris: Baillère.

10.

Bublitz

(1956) Bericht über juristische Probleme des Querulantentums. In: Kleist

(ed.) Richter und Arzt. München: Reinhardt, 124–159.

11.

Casper

(1857) Practisches Handbuch der gerichtliche Medizin. Berlin: Hirschwald.

12.

Christ

(1998) The Litigious Athenian (Ancient Society and History). Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press.

13.

Chuiton

(1897) Du délire raisonnant de dépossession au point de vue clinique et médico-légal. Bordeaux: Cassignol.

14.

Cullerre

(1888) Les frontières de la folie. Paris: Baillière.

15.

Cullerre

(1897) Une forme de délire systématisé des persécutés-persécuteurs, le délire de revendication. Annales médico-psychologiques 5: 353–368.

16.

De Balzac

(1833) Un médecin de campagne. Paris: Mame-Delaunay; reprinted in 1999, Paris: Le Livre de Poche.

17.

De Clérambault

(1921) Les délires passionnels. Érotomanie, revendication, jalousie. Bulletin de la Société Clinique de Médecine Mentale 9: 61–71; reprinted in 1987 in: Œuvres Psychiatriques. Paris: Frénésie Eds, 337–346.

18.

De Sévigné

MR-C

(1734) Lettres. Aix-en-Provence: Perrin; reprinted in 1973–78, Paris: Gallimard.

19.

Dide

(1913) Les idéalistes passionnés. Paris: Alcan.

20.

Dietrich

(1973) Querulanten. Stuttgart: Ferdinand Enke-Verlag.

21.

Droste

GEA

(1868) Ein widerwärtiger lästiger Querulant. Vierteljahrschrift für Psychiatrie 2(1): 73–77.

22.

Ewald

(1925) Das manische Element in der Paranoia. Zeitschrift für die gesamte Neurologie und Psychiatrie 75(1): 665–763.

23.

Falret

(1854) De la non-existence de la monomanie. Paris: Rignoux; reprinted in 1864 in: Des maladies mentales et des asiles d’aliénés. Paris: Baillère, 425–449; translation: Lepoutre

(2012) De la non-existence de la monomanie, by Jean-Pierre Falret (Introduction and translation; Classic Text No. 91). History of Psychiatry 23(3,4): 356–370, 488–495.

24.

Falret

(1866) La folie raisonnante ou folie morale. Paris: Martinet; reprinted in 1890 in: Études cliniques sur les maladies mentales et nerveuses. Paris: Baillière, 475–544.

25.

Falret

(1878) Des aliénés persécutés raisonnants et persécuteurs. Annales médico-psychologiques 19: 413–417.

26.

Fouldrin

Gourevitch

Baylé

Thibaut

(2006) Psychoses et délires chroniques non schizophréniques. Cours de psychiatrie du CNUP 2(2). Accessed (15 Oct. 2013) at: http://lmm.univ-lyon1.fr/internat/download/item278b.pdf.

27.

Gerber

C von

(1865) Grundzüge eines Systems des deutschen Staatsrecht. Leipzig: Tauchnitz.

28.

Giraud

(1903) Notes sur les aliénés processifs. Journal de neurologie 8: 423.

29.

Groschupf

(2011) Hauptstadt der Querulanten. Der Tagesspiegel (16 Sep.): 4.

30.

Händel

(1973) Die Behandlung des Querulanten. Kriminalistik 27: 17–20.

31.

Hegel

GWF

(1807) Phänomenologie des Geistes. Bamberg und Würzburg: Goebhardt; reprinted in 1986, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag.

32.

Heilbronner

(1907) Hysterie und Querulantenwahn: ein Beitrag zur Paranoiafrage. Zentralblatt für Nervenheilkunde und Psychiatrie 30: 769–784.

33.

Hitzig

(1895) Über den Querulantenwahnsinn, seine nosologische Stellung und seine forensische Bedeutung. Leipzig: Vogel.

34.

Horn

(1893) Differentialdiagnose zwischen gesunden and geisteskranken Querulanten. Friedreich’s Blätter für gerichtliche Medicin und Sanitätspolizei 44: 314–342.

35.

Jellinek

(1892) System der subjektiven öffentlichen Rechte. Freiburg: Mohr.

36.

Jouanjan

(2010) Les droits publics subjectifs et la dialectique de la reconnaissance: Georg Jellinek et la construction juridique de l’État moderne. PDF can be found at: www.sites.google.com/site/olivierjouanjan/olivier-jouanjan.

37.

Kirchberg

AHF

(1903) Zur Paranoia chronica querulatoria. Berlin: Schade Verlag.

38.

Klüber

(1931) Ein kasuistischer Beitrag zu G. Spechts Lehre von dem Zusammenhang der chronischen Paranoia (Querulantenwahn) mit der chronischen Manie. Zeitschrift für die gesammte Neurologie und Psychiatrie 131(1): 152–170.

39.

Knecht

(2012) Der Querulant – beschwerlich oder gefährlich? Archiv für Kriminologie 230(3/4): 99–108.

40.

Kolle

(1931) Über Querulanten. Archiv für Psychiatrie und Nervenkrankheiten 95: 24–102.

41.

Köppen

(1895) Der Querulantenwahnsinn in nosologischer und forensischer Beziehung. Archiv für Psychiatrie und Nervenkrankheiten 28(1): 221–243.

42.

Köppen

(1896) La folie des quérulants au point de vue nosologique et médico-légal. Archives de neurologie 2(2): 143–148.

43.

Kraepelin

(1903–4) Psychiatrie, ein kurzes Lehrbuch für Studirende und Aerzte, 7th edn. Leipzig: Barth; translated by Diefendorf

(1915): Clinical Psychiatry, A Textbook for Students and Physicians. New York: MacMillan.

44.

Kraepelin

(1909–15) Psychiatrie, ein kurzes Lehrbuch für Studirende und Ärzte, 8th edn. Leipzig, Barth.

45.

Krafft-Ebing

R von

(1875) Lehrbuch der gerichtlichen Psychopathologie. Stuttgart: Enke.

46.

Krafft-Ebing

R von

(1883) Lehrbuch der Psychiatrie auf klinischer Grundlage. Stuttgart: Enke.

47.

Kretschmer

(1918) Der sensitive Beziehungswahn, ein Beitrag zur Paranoiafrage und zur psychiatrischen Charakterlehre. Springer: Berlin.

48.

Kretschmer

(1921) Körperbau und Charakter. Untersuchungen zum Konstitutionsproblem und zur Lehre von den Temperamenten. Berlin: Springer.

49.

Ladame

(1898) Observation de paranoïaque processive, type du délire de dépossession de Régis. Archives de neurologie 2(6): 222–223.

50.

Lange

(1925) Über die Paranoia und die paranoische Veranlagung. Archiv für Psychiatrie und Nervenkrankheiten 93(1): 85–152.

51.

Lasègue

(1852) Du délire des persécutions. Archives générales de médecine 28: 129–150.

52.

Lube

(2009) Die Prozessfähigkeit eines Querulanten im Verfahren. Monatsschrift für Deutsches Recht 2: 63–65.

53.

Magnan

(1891) Leçons cliniques sur les maladies mentales. Paris: Progrès médical.

54.

Maier

(1912) Über katathyme Wahnbildung und Paranoia. Zeitschrift für die gesamte Neurologie und Psychiatrie 13(1): 555–610.

55.

Mendel

(1885) Paranoia. In: Eulenburg

(ed.) Real-Encyclopädie der gesammten Heilkunde, Vol. 15. Wien & Leipzig: Urban & Schwarzenberg, 223–224.

56.

Pailhas

(1895) États monomaniaques liés à une déviation de l’instinct de conservation de la propriété; leur intérêt au point de vue médico-légal. Albi: Amalric.

57.

Pinel

(1801) Traité médico-philosophique sur l’aliénation mentale, ou La manie. Paris: Richard, Caillet et Ravier.

58.

Pons

Ortega-Monasterio

(1988) Délires quérulents. Annales médico-psychologiques 146(1–2): 104–108.

59.

Pottier

(1886) Étude sur les aliénés persécuteurs. Paris: Asselin et Houzeaux.

60.

Prichard

(1835) A Treatise on Insanity and Other Disorders Affecting the Mind. London: Sherwood, Gilbert and Piper.

61.

Racine

(1715) The Litigants, translated by MR Ozell. London: Jonas Brown; originally published in French in 1669.

62.

Raecke

(1926) Der Querulantenwahn: Ein Beitrag zur sozialen Psychiatrie. Munich: Bergmann.

63.

Régis

(1896) Médecine légale. Un cas de délire raisonnant de dépossession. Annales médico-psychologiques 4: 229–239.

64.

Rittershaus

(1923) Die chronische Manie und ihre praktische Bedeutung. Allgemeine Zeitschrift für Neurologie und Psychiatrie 79: 324–345.

65.

Saß

(2010) Der Exzess einer Tugend. Querulanz zwischen Persönlichkeit, Strukturverformung und Wahn. Forensische Psychiatrie, Psychologie, Kriminologie 4: 223–232.

66.

Schneider

(1923) Die psychopathischen Persönlichkeiten. Leizig und Wien: Deuticke.

67.

Scholz

(1868) Zwei Psychiatrische Gutachten von Dr. Fried. Schols. Vierteljahrschrift für gerichtliche und öffentliche Sanitätswesen 8: 343–355.

68.

Schöne

(2012) Der Querulant und sein ganz normaler Wahnsinn. Die Welt (17 Mar.): 8.

69.

Schwoch

Schmiedebach

(2007) “Querulousness”, anti-psychiatry and the public around 1900. Medizinhistorisches Journal 42(1): 30–60.

70.

Sérieux

Capgras

(1909) Les folies raisonnantes – le délire d’interprétation. Paris: Alcan.

71.

Specht

(1901) Über den pathologischen Affekt in der chronischen Paranoia. Erlangen: Deichert.

72.

Specht

(1905) Chronische Manie und Paranoia. Zentralblatt für Nervenheilkunde und Psychiatrie 28: 590–597.

73.

Specht

(1908) Über die klinische Kardinalfrage der Paranoïa. Zentralblatt für Nervenheilkunde und Psychiatrie 31: 817–833.

74.

Taguet

(1876) Les aliénés persécuteurs. Annales médico-psychologiques 15: 5–19.

75.

Tissot and Briand (1904) Aliénés délirants processifs. Bulletin de la Société de médecine légale de France 36(2): 121–136.

76.

TLFi (2013) Trésor de la Langue Française informatisé, s.v. ‘processif’ and ‘procédurier’. Accessed (15 Oct, 2013) at: http://atilf.atilf.fr/.

77.

Tölle

Windgassen

(2011) Psychiatrie: einschließlich Psychotherapie, 16. Auflage. Berlin: Springer.

78.

Van der Heydt

(1952) Querulatorische Entwicklungen. Halle: Marhold.

79.

Wernicke

(1894) Grundriss der Psychiatrie in klinischen Vorlesungen. Leipzig: Thieme.