Dogs and females: Vivisection,feminists and the novelist Rachilde

A battle joined

Vivisection was being practised widely in France in the latter half of the century, largely as a result of the impact of Claude Bernard’s Introduction à l’étude de la médecine expérimentale (1865). ² His magnum opus was hailed by some as the equivalent, for nineteenth-century science, of the appearance of Descartes’s Discours de la méthode. Indeed, the ‘méthode expérimentale’ was on everyone’s lips during this period. It was the buzzword of the scientific community. The preface of a manual of vivisection published in 1882 begins as follows:

Nous ne sommes plus à une époque où pour tout homme intelligent, il soit nécessaire de démontrer l’utilité de la physiologie expérimentale et partant des vivisections. L’expérimentation s’est imposée comme une nécessité à la marche toujours en avant des sciences biologiques. (Livon, 1882)

An important component in Bernard’s method was the age-old practice of vivisection. He had qualms about its use on humans, but none about using it on animals. The only truly scientific medicine was experimental medicine, and the experimenter – like a surgeon – does not hear the cries of pain or see the blood flow as he pursues his all-important idea (Bernard, 1965 [1865]: 180). The scientist could not really study how and why human beings die because he was obliged to dissect bodies after their death, but this was not the case with animals, and Bernard stated unapologetically, ‘pour apprendre comment l’homme et l’animal vivent, il est indispensable d’en voir mourir un grand nombre’ (Bernard, 1965: 173).

In literature, Émile Zola had found it expeditious to appropriate a version of Bernard’s experimental approach so as to provide a semblance of scientific exactitude to his novels. More importantly for this article, however, the great hysteria specialist Jean-Martin Charcot had made the decision to emphasise the impeccably scientific nature of his experiments with hypnosis by calling them ‘hypnotisme expérimental’, so as to differentiate them from quasi-identical procedures performed by itinerant sideshow hypnotists, the ‘magnétiseurs’ such as the Belgian Donato or the Dane Hansen who were touring France, Italy and Switzerland in the early 1880s with immense popular success.

There seems to have been a moment in early 1883 when the anti-vivisectionist movement became particularly vociferous and the medical response especially muscular. The skirmish had to do with the British example, for British associations for animal rights and anti-vivisection had had some success in promoting their ideas with politicians, and they now aimed to fight the barbaric practices they saw still being pursued on the continent. ³

The number of British anti-vivisectionist groups was estimated at about ten in the mid 1870s. Pressure on parliamentarians and activism that fuelled public revulsion forced the British parliament to pass, in 1876, the Cruelty to Animals Act. Although the legislation limited vivisection experiments and introduced a number of restrictive provisions and conditions, such experiments were still allowed if the proper authorisations were obtained, with the result that neither the scientific nor the anti-vivisectionist communities were pleased. Still, the Act provided for fines for non-compliance, and medical professionals, physiologists, research personnel and doctors were those targeted. Continental doctors, especially the French, were outraged.

In response to French activism and British influence, the physiologist and later Nobel Prize winner Charles Richet wrote a long essay in the influential Revue des Deux Mondes in February 1883 arguing that since humans, dogs and many other species were not that dissimilar physiologically (similarities in skeleton, organs, blood, poisons that affected them), it was natural for experimental science to practise vivisection on them, as the only means of guaranteeing knowledge about, and the eventual good health of, the human being. His claims for science were broad and his scorn for the non-scientist palpable:

Tout ce qui est progrès de la science doit être estimé au plus haut prix. C’est en quelque sorte, une arche sainte à laquelle il n’est pas permis de toucher. Il importe peu que le profane la comprenne ou l’ignore; la science, c’est l’avenir de l’humanité. (Richet, 1883: 835)

But in positioning animals as inferior to humans and naturally subservient to human needs, Richet provided ample ammunition to his opponents.

On the one hand, his reaction to the pain suffered by animals in experiments appeared both cavalier and contradictory. Yes, they do suffer, he admitted, but what does some momentary suffering mean to an animal that is unable to consciously realise or reflect about that pain? It cannot suffer that much compared to a human being (Richet, 1883: 838, 840). Yet at the same time Richet attempted to argue that vivisected animals do not in fact suffer because of the widespread use of painkilling drugs, such as chloral, morphine, chloroform and ether. His opponents would hammer him mercilessly on this point. In this part of his essay as well, he appears almost to equate non-Europeans to the animals that he calls degraded in the series of beings. Searching for an example to parallel and support his argument for ends justifying means, he asks, ‘What if a few hundred or thousand obscure coolies die digging the Panama canal?’ Their loss is simply a sacrifice for a higher purpose (Richet, 1883: 839).

The third and last section of his article is perhaps the one which infuriated feminists most, and it still bears a sting for the contemporary reader steeped in the niceties of environmental friendliness. The section is an argument, based on the Darwinian idea of survival of the fittest and natural selection, that man is in fact king of all animals and all nature because, though physiologically weak, his intellect has enabled him to dominate all other living things. Although Richet admits that disease still bests human ingenuity from time to time and that nature can play tricks on us, man’s triumph is entire, ‘une victoire définitive et complète’, ‘le triomphe de l’humanité dans la nature’ (1883: 854). The diminishing numbers of tigers, lions, panthers, wolves, raptors, etc., are a sign of man’s triumph. Pointing to the usefulness of domesticated animals, he salutes this disappearance of many wild species in a sentence that juxtaposes European colonialist ambitions with a lust for power over humans and animals that may leave today’s reader a bit queasy: ‘Mais que l’Afrique soit arrachée à la barbarie, tâche magnifique, à laquelle sera vouée, nous l’espérons, la France du XXe siècle, et nous verrons la plupart de ces espèces sauvages diminuer de nombre et disparaître’ (1883: 854).

Richet’s article was a salvo in a battle royal between representatives of the French medical establishment and ‘one of their own’, Dr Anna Kingsford, an Englishwoman described as wilful but stunningly beautiful (French, 1975: 223), who had graduated from the Paris Faculté de médecine in 1880 with a thesis on vegetarianism. Returning to Paris, she was leading a campaign to end medical vivisection by forming leagues in major continental cities and pressuring governments to introduce anti-vivisectionist legislation, as had been done in Britain. Her training had involved close contact with the teachings of Claude Bernard, and thus the examples of animal suffering and medical hypocrisy she felt able to cite stemmed from direct experience.

Her response to Richet, which she titled ‘King or tyrant?’, is both a catalogue of horrors from someone who had worked with vivisectionists and an attack on his claim for the unquestionable supremacy of science. Horrific details are provided about breaking animals’ limbs and about Bernard’s special oven where he conducted burn experiments by roasting large dogs alive. She destroys the argument that animals are anaesthetised and do not suffer by quoting Bernard’s own remarks to his students on the inefficacy of morphine (it merely makes animals passive) and the pain caused by the drug curare, which was used to keep animals paralysed and immobile during the operation. She writes movingly about the curare experiments of the prominent physiologist and student of Bernard, Paul Bert, who briefly held the portfolio of minister of education, speaking of ‘les souffrances horribles … de ce chien curarisé et mis en lambeaux, mourant petit à petit au milieu des ténèbres dans le laboratoire de Paul Bert – le moraliste!’ (Kingsford, 1883: 36). Vivisectionist talk about avoiding animal pain was, she asserted, propaganda aimed at misleading public opinion.

For Kingsford, physiological research raises obvious moral questions. The argument of researchers that they work ‘for the good of the human race’ cannot trump the moral concern about torture. In her own way, she was rehearsing what Gargantua wrote to his son Pantagruel who had left to study in Paris: ‘science sans conscience n’est que ruine de l’âme’.

Other anti-vivisection militants, such as Daniel Metzger, noted the brutal aftermaths of cutting into the brain: animals could take up to a month to die. But he concentrated on what he called the lamentable inconsistencies and contradictions of vivisectionist research, focusing in part on Claude Bernard’s misdiagnoses, notably regarding his theory of sugar secretion by the liver. He also remarked that even after hundreds of vivisections of animals’ cerebellums, conflicting theories about the organ’s function cluttered the field (Metzger, 1889: 58). Like Kingsford, he challenged in a more general way the assumption of vivisectionists that their experimental results were perfectly valid. After all, physiologists normally operated on animals whose faculties were much impaired because of their physical injuries and because they were pacified and unalert following the use of various drugs (Metzger, 1889: 14–15).

Morality, male and female

The type of contribution to the vivisectionist debate which attacked feminist logic most directly came from Geneva where Kingsford also lectured. Henri Kleffler is, he writes, not a doctor but a concerned individual determined to ignore the so-called moral question surrounding vivisection. In so doing, his argument lays bare in a raw and almost comical way the fundamental misogynistic schema that encouraged nineteenth-century feminism to take on causes apparently outside the female bailiwick.

Anna Kingsford claims to base her arguments on science, but in using science to reverse accepted usages, says Kleffler, ‘elle sort de son rôle naturel’ (Kleffler, 1883: 8). In defining that role, Kleffler lays down the basic rules of nineteenth-century male and female nature: ‘la femme, dans le type normal qui caractérise sa nature, est intellectuellement passive et moralement active, tandis que l’homme est au contraire intellectuellement actif et moralement passif’ (1883: 10). If this makes men seem morally deficient, that is only an appearance, for Kleffler’s companion dictum is that men’s strength enables them to go beyond morality, to the idea of justice, which is the male moral function. Science being the only road to discovering truth, ‘la morale’ is not just subservient to science, it is already included in it. The female claim that morality is absent from the practice of vivisection is thus an aberration. Yet, what clearly irritates Kleffler as unnatural is the activism that is at the heart of the anti-vivisectionist philosophy: here are women trying to change the laws of Switzerland when it is men who represent ‘l’activité’ and women ‘la sensation passive’ (1883: 79)!

Summarising her views, Kingsford compares vivisectionists, and their supportive medical community, to the perpetrators of the Inquisition. The Inquisitors were not evil, not even cruel, but rather zealously religious. They sincerely believed that in torturing Jews, heretics and witches they were improving humanity. The zeal of men of science who vivisect is entirely comparable, writes Kingsford, and thus their voice in the debate is compromised. Just as it took the lay authorities to end the Inquisition, it is for the public, and the public at large only, writes Kingsford, to decide on the acceptability or not of vivisection.

Anti-vivisectionists as lunatics

If women were stepping out of their normal passive role and attempting actively to change laws regarding science, were the women in fact mad? In a period of accelerated study of abnormal psychology, anti-vivisectionists were bound to come under scrutiny by the medico/psychiatric community, especially as they were attacking a practice defended by most doctors. Dr Valentin Magnan, Charcot’s partner in the French ‘discovery’ of sexual inversion and sexual fetishism (Charcot and Magnan, 1882) was also perhaps one of the most literal-minded classifiers of degeneracy active at the fin de siècle, and the anti-vivisectionist movement did not escape his perusal. His paper De la folie des anti-vivisectionnistes (n.d.), first given before the Société de biologie, became one of the medical tracts in the quarrel. In what is a typical Magnan rising sequence of incrimination, he first presents anti-vivisectionists simply as overly sensitive, ‘des âmes trop sensibles’. But in the same breath they are unbalanced, ‘des cerveaux mal équilibrés’, and become in the same sentence, ‘des dégénérés’. Their behaviour is quite simply, he asserts, one manifestation of ‘la folie héréditaire’ (Magnan, n.d.: 1). Proof of this morbidity is offered in a brief set of case studies. One concerns a woman who happens also to be a vegetarian, and is plagued by a family ‘madness’ that has her visiting slaughter-houses at La Villette to plead with workers to stop killing animals. However, alongside examples of individuals authentically troubled by cruelty to animals, Magnan also cites the case of a 38-year-old female whose problem appears to be of another order: ‘Elle ne tient pas à garder les réserves de son sexe, elle s’affranchit de toutes ces conventions ridicules, et au besoin elle ne craint pas de jurer et de recourir à un langage un peu épicé’ (Magnan, n.d.: 5). A female’s use of coarse language was a defining factor in the hysteria diagnosis according to prominent hysteria specialists such as Legrand du Saulle and Charles Richet. But worse, the woman’s stepping outside the boundaries of normal female behaviour is crystallised in her abnormal relationship with her husband: ‘Elle estime son mari, elle le considère comme un ami, comme un camarade’ (Magnan, n.d.: 5). In other words, treating one’s husband as an equal signals that there can be no satisfactory intimate relationship. This ‘indifference’ towards her spouse, and thus towards humanity, compared to her exaggerated concern for animals, is another sign of her ‘lunacy’.

Other doctors, such as Élie de Cyon, also espoused the madness argument, characterising prominent individuals such as Richard Wagner, who had written an anti-vivisectionist pamphlet, as a lunatic (Cyon, 1883: 13). Cyon notes that Protestant countries produce far more anti-vivisectionist agitation than Catholic France, and he then provides the explanation: ‘le catholicisme ouvre aux vieilles demoiselles exaltées un refuge dans ses couvents’ (1883: 15). By contrast, English spinsters, with no such outlet, become spiritualists or get involved in fantastical charities.

Institutional versus physical activism

The raw machismo of male medical superiority, the contempt of doctors and others for the ‘profanes’ – that is, the uninitiated who dared to have views on scientific and medical theory and practice – and the tendency of the medical community to treat women with opinions as unbalanced or senile, all these favoured a streak of female activism, especially with regard to an issue as emotionally involving as vivisection. Louis Pasteur was one larger-than-life target and Anna Kingsford published a paper, ‘La Rage de Monsieur Pasteur’, on the suffering and death he was inflicting on rabbits and guinea pigs. The prominent feminist Maria Deraismes, one of the important theoreticians of the feminist movement, was, along with writer and journalist Olympe Audouard, one of the leading female orators of her day, and though texts on her career rarely mention it, she gave regular talks in the 1880s and 1890s to organisations such as the Société française contre la vivisection. ⁴ Like others, she enjoyed recording the contradictions in Claude Bernard’s writings about the accuracy of the results from vivisection. ⁵

Marie Huot, who became Rachilde’s friend, was immediately positioned as a radical feminist when in October 1892 she gave a speech to the Société de géographie in which she called for ‘la grève des ventres’: that is, the freedom of women to choose pregnancy or not. Although the neo-Malthusian Paul Robin wrote to her immediately to invite her collaboration (see Demeulenaere-Douyère, 1994: 339–40, 370–1), it was only four years later, in 1896, that his own association was formed, La Ligue de la régénération humaine. The subtitle of its publication, Régénération, was ‘procréation consciente et limitée’.

Huot was an opponent of cruelty to animals and made numerous public appearances, in the words of a British observer, as the ‘the indefatigable and zealous secretary of the Ligue populaire contre la vivisection’. ⁶ Huot’s zeal made of her, in fact, a serious physical activist. She is reported to have interrupted a Sorbonne lecture by Louis Pasteur in 1886 because he sacrificed dogs in his rabies experiments. She also had a face-to-face encounter with Charles-Édouard Brown-Séquard, the successor of Claude Bernard in physiology at the Collège de France, whom she rapped over the head with an umbrella because he had performed vivisection on a monkey. Huot also delivered an ironic lecture about the doctor’s celebrated discovery of what wags called ‘Brown-Séquard’s elixir’. The 72-year-old physiologist had been fascinated by the reproductive enthusiasm of guinea pigs and rabbits in his laboratory, and decided to extract some of their testicular fluid and self-inject it. The results were in fact invigorating, according to the doctor, both in general increased energy and libido upswing, but for Huot the message was the same: animals must be maimed or die for the supposed good – in this case for the vanity – of mankind. ⁷

Marie Huot and Rachilde

It was female activism that attracted Rachilde to Marie Huot in the first place, since Rachilde herself had acted as a kind of anti-vivisection terrorist. For some reason difficult to discern (given her love of animals) she had worked as an assistant in a laboratory where vivisection experiments were being carried out. Upset by the cruelty, she trashed the lab and made off with its mice, maintaining as well that she had pierced a vivisectionist doctor’s ear with a hatpin in response to a discourse about animal insensitivity (Rachilde, 1942: 58–9; Rachilde and Homem-Christo, 1923: 118–19).

In her introduction to the Huot poems, Rachilde writes that she encountered the activist for the first time during another of the former’s umbrella attacks. This time she had smacked a labourer who was digging a trench and threatening to use his pickaxe on a stray cat that had ended up in the trench with him. The umbrella attack diverted the man’s attention and the cat escaped, while a disapproving crowd that had formed called the police and Huot was led away to the station.

It was probably fortuitous that Rachilde met Huot in this way, because as the ultimate individualist and a person with a built-in contrarian mindset, Rachilde was suspicious of organised feminism and group causes in general. She wrote in Pourquoi je ne suis pas féministe that women should avoid joining social movements. Their ability to think analytically was, she believed, already compromised by monthly hormonal changes. Powerful ideas from outside could easily overcome a female’s ability to think rationally and for herself (Rachilde, 1928: 10, 21). Not only Rachilde, but nominal feminists such as Rachilde’s older novelist colleague Georges de Peyrebrune, and the novelist and winner of the Légion d’honneur Daniel Lesueur, who was to publish a report demanding marriage reform and equal pay for equal work for females, shared various versions of the then-contemporary medical contention that women were intellectually inferior to men. ⁸ Charles Sowerwine has wondered why so few of the prominent women we might think of as late-century feminists campaigned for political rights for women. He mentions in this context the extremely well-connected editor and writer Juliette Adam and the politician Léon Gambetta’s mistress and political confidante Léonie Léon, showing that many female activists shared the view that women had a calling more immediate than political because they accepted the biological model of gender roles: they ‘didn’t need citizenship: they had the higher role of preserving the Republic in the home, the cradle of male citizenship’ (Sowerwine, 2010: 30–1).

For Rachilde, equally put off by the coquettish, sexualised female (for her, she is ‘la femelle’, not ‘la femme’) and the staid bourgeoise, Huot is someone she can identify with. She obviously admired Huot’s fearlessness and force of character. Like Rachilde’s own powerful heroines, Huot exhibits a certain animality. She is ‘l’animale [Rachilde’s italicisation] de race, la seule excuse de ses voisines’. Rachilde used the same expression to describe another older woman friend with strong feminist views and a forceful, if difficult character, Camille Delaville. She was ‘très généreuse en action, comme toutes les femmes de race’ (Rachilde, 1886: xviii). Later in the text Rachilde sees Huot as ‘la panthère en face du chasseur, acceptant la bataille’ (Huot, 1908: 14), a close cousin of the wolf figure so often seen in Rachilde’s fiction and autobiographical texts – hunted, perhaps wounded, but defiant. Huot is ‘une créature de combat’, ‘une guerrière’ (1908: 16).

But Huot appeals to Rachilde in other more unexpected ways. As of 1907, when Rachilde’s preface was written, she had known Huot for some 15 years and had visited her in her home, meeting her discreet, gentle husband and handsome young activist son. Although Huot’s home life is presented as private and calm, the exotic decoration of her apartment, her attraction to Egypt and India and her Eastern fatalism suggest an individual abstracted somewhat from the day-to-day. It is at this point in her text that Rachilde makes a series of comments that appear out of place, even potentially hurtful.

Huot has never really known passionate love: ‘[Elle] ne comprend rien aux démences de l’amour’. There is something virginal about her, visible in her ambiguous feelings about sensuality: ‘La corde de la sensualité manque à sa lyre’. And another of Rachilde’s favourite ideas surfaces: the way of true passion is via an avoidance of physicality in love. Describing Huot, Rachilde writes, ‘la seule force de l’âme … est de fuir les liens charnels’ (Huot, 1908: 17–18). Huot and she are newfound kindred spirits and almost all of Rachilde’s comments can be seen as self-directed. One thinks of her repeated assertions, before her marriage, that in spite of her racy novels, she was a virgin, and one thinks as well of those situations in numerous novels written after her marriage – La Jongleuse, La Princesse des ténèbres, La Haine amoureuse, Refaire l’amour – where her characters advocate celibate love and an eroticism of the mind. In a less spiritual and probably quite revealing moment, Rachilde did of course note that sexual coupling and the happy ending were never her way of finishing a novel. In a companion sentence, her nervousness about sexual relations becomes clear. The physical manoeuvres involved in lovemaking, she admits, made her laugh out loud (Rachilde and Homem-Christo, 1923: 208).

Some of Rachilde’s comments about Huot’s spiritual nature may simply refer, of course, to the woman’s theosophist beliefs. ⁹ However, ‘unsensual’, ‘virginal’, ‘never having known passionate love’ – how can these remarks have pleased Huot? Perhaps they had a hidden purpose, that of clearing Huot’s reputation, for in 1907, when Rachilde penned her preface, asceticism and marital fidelity did not give an accurate picture of Huot’s personal life, since the preface is silent regarding Huot’s relationship with the Swedish-born painter and Sufi mystic John Gustav Agelii (also known as Abdul-Hâdî but most frequently as Ivan Aguéli). Aguéli was an animal lover who frequented anti-vivisectionist circles in Paris, usually in Arab dress. Huot supported him financially from time to time, and she testified on his behalf at a 1900 trial after he had fired a pistol at a matador during the preparations for a Paris-area bullfight (Andro, 2010). But there appears to have been more to the Huot–Aguéli relationship than a mutual sympathy regarding the protection of animals. One of the few texts that addresses Aguéli’s private life says simply that he had few close acquaintances, ‘mis à part bien entendu la liaison sentimentale qui l’attachait à la poétesse théosophe Marie Huot’ (Aguéli, 1988: x).

Experiments with women and dogs

In France, the kind of triumphalism that surrounded the notion of experimental science preyed on certain feminists’ sensibilities for a very special reason. Here was the irresistible machismo of the male scientist harnessed to a specialty that required subjects. It was not lost on feminists that the powerlessness and suffering inflicted on animals by the experimental vivisectionist had a parallel in the way females were treated by hysteria doctors who employed ‘hypnotisme expérimental’. Charcot was the most obvious target, although very similar experiments in hypnotism and hysteria were going on at other hospitals: at La Charité under Jules Luys and at La Pitié under Amédée Dumontpallier. Not a few observers have noted that if women with problems of mental distress came to the aliéniste hoping for some alleviation, what they often got was not a cure, but a doctor anxious, for experimental purposes, to replicate their symptoms of distress in the hypnotic state. In a speech given to the Société française contre la vivisection that is nominally about animal suffering, Maria Deraismes draws a direct parallel between the vivisected animal and the female hysteria patient:

Ni le sexe, ni la volonté ne sont respectés. On égratigne la chair, on la pique, on la larde, on l’entame. Quand le patient reprend connaissance et qu’il voit ces traces sanglantes sur son corps, il ne peut réclamer. À l’hôpital, on dispose de lui comme d’une matière brute. (Deraismes, 1886: 32)

The satisfaction of doctors with the extreme freedom hysteria research afforded them is captured vividly in the report of a Belgian psychologist about his visit to La Salpêtrière in 1885. Joseph Delbœuf was allowed special access to the most favoured and famous of Charcot’s hysterical subjects, the blonde, bosomy Blanche Wittmann. As he engaged in hypnotic experiments with her in the company of two other doctors, he expressed his rare luck in the condescending terms of the time. He had never had access to such a subject: ‘ [je n’avais] jamais eu en main une pareille chair à expériences, une véritable grenouille humaine’ (Nicolas, 2000: 188). As if to substantiate this image of the hysteric as ‘experimental flesh’, ‘a true human guinea pig’, Delbœuf observed blandly that Blanche was in fact pregnant at the time of his visit.

Rachilde, vulnerable herself since her teenage years to diagnoses of nervous problems, made space in her novel La Marquise de Sade (1887) for two doctors whose sadism she juxtaposes, one a hysteria specialist involved in hypnotism, the other a vivisectionist. The latter, a Mr Duchesne, is afraid of being bitten by dogs, but is not perturbed by hearing them cry in pain. The former, whose name Marscot seems modelled on that of Charcot, has marvellous hypnotic techniques for manipulating his female patients, but no interest at all in curing them:

Marscot, décrivant son système miraculeux du coup de tam-tam, qui plus tard, si on le laissait expérimenter, arriverait à renverser comme des capucins de cartes des tas de filles nerveuses que d’ailleurs il ne se chargerait jamais de guérir, se contentant des manifestations curieuses de la catalepsie, sans songer à autre chose; filles et chiens étaient là pour servir de vulgaires mannequins à souffrance. (Rachilde, 1996 [1887]: 200)

What connects the two doctors, as the last sentence above shows, is their indifference to the suffering of the experimental flesh they work with. Conflating the sentient and the non-sentient, the text suggests that dog and female are equally powerless and about as important to the experimenter as a clothing-store dummy.

But the ease and popularity of vivisection of the body made doctors and psychiatrists dream of a new frontier. One tranquil assertion, often voiced in the mid 1880s, was that the next objective would be the scrutiny of the mind. Whether it was the Nancy school of hysteria studies or its Paris competition, the Salpêtrière, medical men held out great hope for hypnotism as a kind of mental scalpel. The hysteria specialist Dr Henri Beaunis, a defender of Nancy theories, contended that ‘hypnotism will be for the philosopher what vivisection is for the physiologist’ (Beaunis, 1885: 1). The Paris-based Charles Richet, undeterred as ever by opposition to vivisection, agreed: ‘Hypnotism’, he averred, ‘is an admirable tool for psychological vivisection’ (Bérillon, 1902: 13). But it was the female, as Rachilde rightly foresaw, next in line after dogs and other animals, who would be the choice subject for mental dissection. ¹⁰ In ridiculing the vanity of vivisectionist doctors in print, in interrupting their experiments, batting them with umbrellas and trashing their labs, French feminists were in fact striking a blow for their own gender.