divining the enlightenment: public opinion and popular ......on public opinion in france see arlette...

Divining the Enlightenment: Public Opinion and Popular Science in Old Regime France

Michael R. Lynn

Isis, Vol. 92, No. 1. (Mar., 2001), pp. 34-54.

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Divining the Enlightenment

Public Opinion and Popular Science in Old Regime France

By Michael R. Lynn*

ABSTRACT

This essay explores the interconnections between the use of divining rods, a practice known as dowsing or rabdomancy, and the Enlightenment in France. The use of divining rods to find underground waters and minerals underwent considerable scrutiny in the 1690s after Jacques Aymar claimed that he could also track murderers and thieves. The subsequent debate, which engaged astrologers, doctors, theologians, and savants, reveals the tensions in French culture at the dawn of the Enlightenment and outlines the public forums used to address those tensions. Another dowser, Barthelemy Blkton, provoked another debate in the 1780s, this time with more emphasis on good versus bad science than on demons or stars. The varying arguments conceining dowsing illustrate the changing relationship between science and the Enlightenment. Also, the shifting location of the debate uncovers a growing public sphere of scientific activity and a broad range of individuals who participated.

A T 10:OO P.M. ON 5 JULY 1692 thieves broke into the Lyonnais wine shop owned by Antoine Boubon Savetier and his wife, bludgeoned them to death with a billhook, and

escaped with approximately five hundred livres.' When the local authorities made no progress on the case a wine dealer from Dauphin6 stepped forward and recommended the services of Jacques Aymar, a peasant known to have solved an equally difficult murder case. Having little choice, the authorities called on Aymar's help. He arrived in Lyon, inspected the site of the murder, and immediately started off on the trail of the culprits. Aymar first led police out of Lyon and down the Rh8ne River, where he tracked the killers to the home of a gardener. Once there, Aymar confidently announced that three people had committed the crime; he indicated the table where they had sat and pointed out the

* Department of History, Agnes Scott College, Decatur, Georgia 30030. For their questions, comments, and help, I would like to thank Bill Beik, Christine Blondel, Tom Broman,

Denise Davidson, Suzanne Desan, Roger Hahn, Judith Miller, Greg Monahan, Stacy Schmitt, J. B. Shank, Sharon Strocchia, Peggy Thompson, the members of the Vann Seminar in Premodern History at Emory University, and the University of Wisconsin-Madison Department of Special Collections.

' A billhook is a tool with a curved blade attached to a handle, used especially for clearing brush and for rough pruning.

isis, 2001, 92:34-54 0 2001 by The History of Science Society. All rights reserved. 0021-1753/01/9201-0002$02.00

MICHAEL R. LYNN 35

wine bottle they had used, information corroborated by the gardener's ch i ld~en .~ Aymar then led the police to the town of Beaucaire, where he followed the trail to the local jail and directly to one of the inmates, who had been arrested for petty larceny just an hour earlier. This man, Joseph Amoul, a nineteen-year-old from Toulon and easily identified because of a hunchback, denied the accusations. Nonetheless, the guards arrested him and took him back to Lyon, where witnesses identified him. At that point Arnoul confessed and named his two accomplices, one called Thomas and the other Andre Pese, both no- torious criminals based in Toulon.

Aymar went back to work: he followed the trail first to Toulon, where he led the police to the very inn where the suspects had recently dined, and then to the sea, where they had boarded a ship. Undeterred, Aymar obtained his own vessel and tracked them along the coast until it became clear that they were heading toward Genoa. Since he and his police escort lacked the authority to make an arrest in a foreign city, they decided to return home. For his part, Joseph Arnoul claimed that his accomplices had committed the actual murder. Nonetheless, he was tried, found guilty, and executed by being broken on the wheel on 30 August 1692.3

Jacques Aymar's spectacular feat of detection made him an instant celebrity-and immediately sparked a huge controversy. The reason for the dispute centered on the fact that Aymar had tracked down the killers with a divining rod, a forked stick usually used to find underground springs and ores. By itself, the debate launched by Aymar's solution to this case provides a unique perspective on the creation of a public climate of critical debate in the early years of the Enlightenment. The controversy surrounding Aymar's methods ultimately involved doctors, theologians, natural philosophers, and even astrologers, resulting in a mixture of ideas and notions that clearly illustrate the range of cultural and intellectual tools available to people at the end of the seventeenth century and at the beginning of the Enlightenment. The contention over dowsing, however, offers an even more revealing portrait of the Enlightenment when juxtaposed with a similar debate in the 1770s and 1780s over the capabilities of Barthelemy BlCton, another Dauphinoise peasant whose talent with a divining rod captured the imagination of the French. In this case the quarrel took place among a variety of savants, academicians, and members of the general public, with more amateurs falling on the pro-dowsing side and more academicians coming down against it. The battle developed over the proper location of scientific authority and the utility of natural philosophy in everyday life. Just as the Aymar case corresponds neatly with the osigins of the Enlightenment, the BlCton case fits well with the end, or at least the culmination, of the Enlightenment in the 1 7 8 0 ~ . ~

Throughout the time Aymar tracked the culprits, he repeatedly ama~ed his police escort and other spectators with his ability to identify the beds, chairs, plates, knives, bottles, and glasses used by the suspects. See the account by the abbC de Lagarde, "Histoire du fait," in Pierre Gamier, Histoire de la baguette de Jacques Aymar (Paris: Jean-Baptiste Langlois, 1693), pp. 80-83; and Pierre Viollet, Traite' en forme de lettre contre la nouvelle rhabdomancie (Lyons: H. Baritel, 1694), p. 12.

See the eyewitness accounts in Jean-Baptiste Panthot, Lettre de M. Panthot (Grenoble, 1692); Panthot, Traite' de la baguette, 3rd ed. (Lyon: Thomas Amaulri & Jacques Guerrier, 1693); Garnier, Histoire de la baguette; and [Jean] Vagini, "RCcit de ce que Jacques Aymar a fait pour la decouverte du meurtrier de Lyon," in Pierre le Lorrain de Vallemont, La physique occulte; ou, Traite' de la baguette divinatoire, 2 vols. (The Hague: Moet- gens, 1747), Vol. 1, pp. 29-49. For modern synopses see Alphonse Gilardin, "Un procks ?i Lyon en 1692, ou Aymar, l'homme & la baguette," Revue du Lyonnais, 1837, pp. 81-99; Louis Figuier, Histoire du meweillew duns les temps modernes, 4 vols. (Paris: Hachette, 1860), Vol. 2, pp. 59-70; William Barrett and Theodore Besterman, The Divining Rod (Toronto: Coles, 1979), pp. 27-31; and Paul J. Morman, "Rationalism and the Occult: The 1692 Case of Jacques Aymar, Dowser Par Excellence," Journal o f Popular Culture, 1986,19:119- 129. ' Robert Damton, Mesmerism and the End of the Enlightenment in France (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ.

Press, 1968), pp. 31, 96.

36 DIVINING THE ENLIGHTENMENT

This essay will follow the transition in the debate over rabdomancy (the official, and somewhat scientific, name for the art of dowsing) from the beginning to the end of the age of Enlightenment in F ~ a n c e . ~ During that period the form, the forum, and the players in the controversy all shifted to accommodate the growing public interest in scientific matters and the appropriation of natural philosophy into popular culture. This shift illus- trates the evolution of a scientifically aware public during the eighteenth century, an evolution characterized both by the plethora of social and cultural arenas in which discussions of dowsing took place and by the incredible growth of the audience that contributed to those discussions. The changing nature of the participants stemmed in part from shifting attitudes toward natural philosophy, the growth in public participation in popular science (through lecture courses, demonstrations, clubs, books, and periodicals), and the ongoing Enlightenment stress on the interconnections between science and utility. As members of the general public appropriated the tools and language of the Enlightenment, they also came to take on and alter its purpose. Throughout the eighteenth century more and more people placed more and more emphasis on reason and utility; but they frequently held a singularly personal version of these ideas, one that could easily ignore the wishes and desires of the intellectual and cultural elite. The public, it turns out, had the courage to make use of its own reason-much to the chagrin of those who composed the anti-dowsing brigade.

For many of the participants in the dowsing debate, and especially for the amateurs and those who were not full-time savants, the Enlightenment-particularly enlightened science-met a fairly simple set of criteria. First, it was useful; second, it seemed to make rational sense and appeared reasonable. Supporters of dowsing tended to focus on the apparent ability of its practitioners actually to find water and springs (and to solve the occasional criminal investigation). This was a popular science supported by public opinion, even if, as was ultimately the case, such a point of view ran contrary to that of many savants. The case of dowsing enters into French history alongside the development of the concept of public opinion. During this period, an increasingly large portion of the general public began to keep itself informed of current events and did not shy away from offering judgment on what was happening. At the same time, public opinion came to be something to which one appealed for support and for which one worked, whether as a writer, a philosopher, a social critic, or a natural philosopher. Thus, the size and the scope of the group involved in the dowsing debate altered considerably between the late seventeenth and the late eighteenth century, even as enlightened public opinion also grew and developed. Public interest in science in particular, already a mainstay on the other side of the English Channel, grew alongside the development of the Enlightenment and its insistence that natural philosophy could be applied to all aspects of human ex i~ tence .~ The size of the group discussing and judging the utility of the divining rod expanded as more and

"Rabdomancy," the science of dowsing, should not be confused with "rhabdomancy," the art of divination with sticks, although opponents often conflated the two practices.

On public opinion in France see Arlette Farge, Subversive Words: Public Opinion in Eighteenth-Century France, trans. Rosemary Morris (University Park: Pennsylvania State Univ. Press, 1994); and Mona Ozouf, " 'Public Opinion' at the End of the Old Regime," Journal of Modern History, Sept. 1988, 60(suppl.):S 1 4 2 1 . On public science in England see Larry Stewart, The Rise ofPublic Science: Rhetoric, Technology, and Natural Philosophy in Newtonian Britain, 1660-1 750 (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1992); Jan Golinski, Science as Public Culture: Chemistry and Enlightenment in Britain, 1760-1820 (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1992); Patricia Fara, Sympathetic Attractions: Magnetic Practices, Beliefs, and Symbolism in Eighteenth-Century England (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Univ. Press, 1996); and Alice Walters, "Ephemeral Events: English Broad- sides of Early Eighteenth-Century Solar Eclipses," History of Science, 1999, 37:l-43.

MICHAEL R. LYNN 37

more people became capable of expressing their opinions on this subject and had access to the basic understanding of science necessary to have a point of view.

JACQUES AYMAR, DOWSING DETECTIVE

The art of dowsing has existed since ancient times. Proponents of dowsing often point to Jacob's rod, as well as that of Moses, as early examples of divining rods. Its first appearance in early modern Europe came in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, when German miners apparently practiced dowsing in order to locate appropriate places to dig. The next two centuries saw several studies of dowsing, both for and against. Georg Agricola, for example, came out against it for any purpose. Jacques le Royer, on the other hand, claimed that the divining rod could be used to unearth all sorts of hidden things, a view he shared with Gaspard Schott. Pierre Gassendi and Robert Boyle believed that practitioners could use dowsing to find water and metal deposits but that they should avoid it for other purposes. During this period dowsing also underwent its first extended systematic analysis at the hands of Martine de Bertereau, the baroness de Beausoleil, in the Ve'ritable de'clar- ation de la de'couverte des mines et miniBres de France and La restitution de P l ~ t o n . ~ By the end of the seventeenth century some people, like Pierre Bayle in his Dictionnaire historique et critique, noted that diviners claimed to use their talents for a wide variety of purposes. They described dowsers capable of tracking thieves and murderers, discovering forgotten land boundaries, finding buried treasures, identifying the fathers of abandoned children, and determining if a person had committed adultery or, alternatively, retained his or her ~ i r g i n i t y . ~ The utility of the divining rod could surely have been quite profound, if only people could have agreed on how it worked.

Jacques Aymar was born just after midnight in Saint-Marcellin on 8 September 1662. It is not known how he came to find that he possessed dowsing capabilities, but Dauphin6 had a reputation for producing dowsers and it is likely that he initially learned of his abilities while imitating others. (See Figure 1.) He first came to realize that he could use his talent to solve crimes in 1688 when, while out searching for water, he felt his divining rod turn so sharply that he believed he had found a major spring. When the workmen dug down, however, they found not water but the body of a local woman, missing for the last four months, buried inside a barrel. That she had been murdered was certain, since the cord used to strangle her was found with her body.9 Aymar went to the former home of the murdered woman and directed his rod at each person there; it moved only toward one of them-the widower-who immediately fled, thus establishing both his guilt and Ay- mar's ability to track criminals. From that time on, people occasionally asked Aymar to use his divining rod to solve crimes. Thus Aymar had an established reputation when the authorities in Lyon called on his help. It should be noted, however, that these men were

Jacques le Royer, Trait6 du briton universe1 (Rouen, 1674); Lynn Thorndike, A History of Magic and Ex- perimental Science, 8 vols. (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1923-1958), Vol. 7, pp. 256 (Agricola), 605 (Schott), Vol. 8, p. 495 (Gassendi and Boyle); Martine de Bertereau, baroness de Beausoleil, Ve'ritable de'clar- ation de la ddcouverte des mines et minibres de France (1632); and Bertereau, La restitution de Pluton (Paris: H . du Mesnil, 1640). A description of the baroness's works can be found in Figuier, Histoire de meweilleux (cit. n. 3), pp. 276-3 11. Beausoleil, however, was accused of practicing magic and-thanks in addition to the bad political choices of her husband-was imprisoned.

Pierre Bayle, Dictionnaire historique et critique, 16 vols. (Geneva: Slatkine, 1969), Vol. I, p. 9. See also Viollet, Trait6 en forme de lettre (cit. n. 2), pp. 4 (adultery), 163 (virginity); Mercure Galant, Sept. 1693, p. 235 (virginity); and Afiches de Dauphine', 6 Nov. 1778, p. 11 1 (abandoned children).

Claude Comiers, La baguette justife'e, et ses effets de'montrez nat~trels (1693), pp. 26-27.

3 8 DIVINING THE ENLIGHTENMENT

Figure 1. A dowser at work. From Pierre le Brun, Histoire critique des pratiques superstitieuses, 2nd ed. (Amsterdam: Jean-Frederic Bernard, 1733- 1736), Vol. 4, plate. (Photograph courtesy of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Department of Special Collections.)

not overly credulous or gullible; they first put Aymar's talents to the test in order to satisfy themselves as to his legitimacy. They buried the murder weapon along with several similar tools and asked Aymar to determine not only where it lay hidden but also which of the several tools was the true weapon. Aymar accomplished this task twice, the second time while blindfolded. With his abilities experimentally proven to the satisfaction of the local state representatives, including the head of the police, the local judge, and the intendant, Pierre de BCrulle, the authorities gave Aymar temporary legal powers and a number of guards to accompany him. He then went after the three men responsible for the murders.

The range of models put forward to explain Aymar's success represents an astounding array of ideas and practices. Interestingly, the account of his activities remained fairly

MICHAEL R. LYNN 39

constant. The debate did not center on whether or not he had managed to solve the crime, for it was agreed that he had. At stake was the interpretation of the events. Some scholars, for example, undertook historical studies and collected stories, citations, and anecdotes designed to legitimize, or discredit, rabdomancy through an elaboration of its antiquity and its association with either Christian or pagan rituals.I0 Another theory centered on the astral influences behind dowsing. Astrologers concentrated their attention on the conflu- ence of stars and planets at the births of dowsers. As a result, various nativities were cast for Aymar and other dowsers to see if any correlation could be discovered. (See Figure 2.) Astrologers also believed that the position of the heavenly bodies influenced the powers of the divining rod itself. Iron, for example, should be sought using a rod cut under the influence of Mars, while diamonds were under the sway of the moon." This theory rested on the idea that the arrangement of the planets caused certain individuals, born at the right time, to be particularly in tune with the ebb and flow of ether on top of and under the earth's crust. In this way, dowsers could literally sense the movement of water, the place- ment of ores, or the passing of a murderer and, with the aid of an appropriately cut divining rod, trace the movement of that energy flow. A problem arose for the astrologers, however, when they discovered that Aymar was not an Aquarius, as they had supposed, but a Virgo and that others who exercised the power of dowsing were born at all times of the day and night, in all seasons, and under every possible configuration of the planets. Jacques Ay- mar's brother, for example, born of the same parents, in the same month, under the same zodiacal sign, and in the same place two years after Jacques, had no dowsing capabilities what~oever. '~

Some doctors, such as Jean-Baptiste Panthot, head of the medical college in Lyon, offered a physiological explanation for dowsing, based largely on Aristotelian natural philosophy. They proposed that dowsers were akin to human magnets and that the divining rod itself acted like the needle of a compass. In effect, the dowser could focus on the vapors left behind after an individual passed by. This would cause a physical, and frequently visible, reaction in the dowser. Physicians felt confident that this theory explained the violent headaches and fatigue Aymar occasionally suffered. He reportedly entered into a feverish state while practicing his art: his body temperature increased; he experienced muscle spasms and a quickening pulse rate; and on occasion he even vomited blood. Medically speaking, dowsers traced individuals through a trail spread in their wakes with every breath they took. As a result, Aymar could not even walk near the ill-fated Joseph Arnoul without suffering severe heart spasms. Panthot and other doctors could not quite explain how Aymar could focus on one such individual, nor could they determine why he could not trace noncriminals in a similar manner. It seemed that immoral behavior left

lo Generally, those in favor of dowsing cited more biblical examples, while those against it cited classical examples. For a pro-dowsing example see Comiers, Baguette justfke, p p 51-53; for an anti-dowsing example see Pierre le Brun, Histoire critique des prntiques superstitieuses (Paris: Jean de Nully, 1702), pp. 73-173.

" A nativity is a horoscope based on the date of a person's birth. See the astrological chart cast for Aymar reprinted in Vallemont, Physique occulte (1747) (cit. n. 3), Vol. 2, p. 165. For the astrological influences involved in the cutting of the divining rod see Pierre le Lorrain de Vallemont, La physique occulte (Amsterdam: Adrian Braakman, 1693), pp. 386-394; see also Jean Nicoles, La baguette divinatoire; ou, Verge de Jacob (1693), ed. Paul Chacornac (Paris: Diffusion Scientifique, 1959), pp. 117-1 18. Nicoles's book has been translated as Jbcob's Rod, trans. Thomas U'elton (London: Thomas Welton, 1870).

lZ Claude-Fran~ois MBnestrier, "Des indications de la baguette," in La philosophie des irlzages Jnigmatiques (Lyon: Hilaire Baritel, 1694), pp. 442-443. On Aymar's brother see Comiers, Baguette justfie (cit. n. 9), p. 25. Clearly, not all astrologers were in accord, as some emphasized the individual's birth while others focused on the rod itself. The former held that only certain people could be dowsers, while the latter believed that anyone with an appropriately cut rod could dowse.

DIVINING THE ENLIGHTENMENT

Figure 2. Jacques Aymar's astrological chart (nativity). Astrologers begin the day at noon rather than at midnight; thus, although Aymar was born on 8 September 1662, the horoscope shows his birth on 7 September. From Pierre le Lorrain de Vallemont, La physique occulte; ou, Traite de la baguette divinatoire (Amsterdam: Chez Adrian Braakman, 1693), p. 462. (Photograph courtesy of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Department of Special Collections.)

MICHAEL R. LYNN 4 1

traces that could be followed, but nobody could invent a very good medical explanation as to why that might be. There were also various levels of intensity involved: Aymar claimed that he fell violently ill only when on the trail of particularly violent criminals and not when merely tracking thieves or finding springs and ores.13

Natural philosophers modified this physical explanation in order to incorporate the me- chanical philosophy into their theories. Savants such as Pierre Garnier, Pierre le Lorrain de Vallemont, and Pierre Chauvin adopted a Cartesian point of view and suggested that people left small but very strongly constituted corpuscles behind them as they passed.14 We might take Cartesian explanations of light and heat to help us understand how the dowser could make use of these corpuscles. From the Cartesian point of view, matter completely fills the world. The eye sees objects because they radiate corpuscles that bump into the matter between an object and the eye until the eye registers it. We can picture a long, solid line of matter from the object to the eye, an instrument designed specifically to filter such information. This sort of explanation can also be utilized to show how heat can be transferred, for example, from a candle flame to a hand. Cartesian natural philosophers expanded these examples to suggest that a dowser could "read" the matter left behind by certain individuals just as one's hand remains warm for a time after it is removed from a source of heat. Diviners used a tool-the divining rod-to focus these corpuscles, just as the eye focused and interpreted the light emanating from an object.

The initial attack against dowsing came most strongly from the religious sector. Theo- logians, as we might expect, had much to say on the topic of divining rods and the practice of divination in general. Apparently some individuals took the term "divining rod" literally and claimed that Aymar accomplished his feats through divine assistance. But most religious explanations concentrated instead on an assumed diabolical intervention into the affairs of people on earth. The Oratorian priest Pierre le Brun, for example, argued that Aymar succeeded in his work thanks entirely to demonic assistance. Like Gassendi and Boyle, Le Brun did not dispute the fact that Aymar could find water, precious metals, or other material objects. But he felt that Aymar's forays into the world of the soul, his seeming ability to follow immoral activity through a divining rod, clearly crossed the line between the realms of natural philosophy and demonic magic. Le Brun assumed that the devil had somehow duped Aymar into accepting demonic help and thus had transformed the divining rod into a magic wand. In an age still replete with witches and sorcerers, these arguments were certainly persuasive, if not particularly original.15

EXPERIMENTS, TESTS, AND TRICKS

While some created theories to explain dowsing, others developed tests and demonstrations to help understand Aymar's abilities. In addition to the minimal trials performed initially by the authorities in Lyon, Aymar underwent several other experiments in an effort to

l 3 Panthot, Lettre de M. Panthot (cit. n. 3), pp. 8-10. On the response of the medical community to Aymar's abilities see Come Ferran, "Les m6decins de Lyon et la baguette divinatoire au XVII sikcle," BulWin de la Soci6t6 Fran~aise d'Histoire de la Mkdecine, 1936, 30:225-243. Of course, some doctors came out against Aymar, but usually for theological, and not medical, reasons.

l4 Garnier, Histoire de la baguette (cit. n. 2); Vallemont, Physique occulte (1747) (cit. n. 3); and Pierre Chauvin, Lettre ci Madame le marquis de Senozan (Lyon: J.-B. de Ville, 1693). See also Claude Comiers, Factum pour la baguette divinatoire (1693).

On assumptions about divine assistance see Lagarde, "Histoire du fait" (cit. n. 2), p. 88; on diabolical intervention see Le Brun, Histoire critique des pratiques superstiteuses (1702) (cit. n. lo), pp. 173-183. See also Viollet, Trait6 en forme de lettre (cit. n. 2), pp. 4-5.


verify and explain his abilities. In one such experiment, the lieutenant-general in Lyon, Matthieu de Sbve, hid three e'cus under one of several hats on a table in his library and asked Aymar to find the money, a task Aymar accomplished easily. He also asked Aymar to determine where, in his library, twenty-five e'cus had been stolen some seven or eight months earlier. Aymar first indicated the cabinet in which de Sttve had kept the money and then proceeded to trace the thief back to the servants' quarters and to his very bed (even indicating the side of it on which he had usually slept, information corroborated by his former bedmate). The wife of the lieutenant-general devised another test of Aymar's abilities. Calling him into her drawing room, she asked Aymar to determine who had stolen money from a certain Monsieur Puget, one of the witnesses present. It was a trick question, however: she had taken the money herself. Aymar searched the room and announced that he did not believe a theft had occurred. She asked him to look again and he gave the same response as before but added, apparently rather coldly, that if there had been a theft it had been committed as a joke and in an innocent manner; his talent, he claimed, worked only when he tracked real criminals.'"

These early experiments were supplemented in 1693 when Henri-Jules, the prince de Cond6, invited Aymar to come to Paris and submit himself to a series of tests. Cond6 assigned a member of his entourage, Monsieur Robert, to undertake this task, and he, in turn, solicited the assistance of several members of the AcadCmie Royale des Sciences and some nobles who expressed an interest in the proceedings. In one experiment, Aymar had to determine the amount and type of various metals buried in a garden. (See Figure 3.) In another case, the academician Jean Gallois asked Aymar to find a gold louis hidden in the garden of the Bibliothttque de Roi; Aymar failed-but only because Gallois had, in fact, hidden the coin in his pocket. At Chantilly, the site of CondC's country estate, Aymar successfully identified the man who had stolen and eaten several trout from a basin in the prince's gardens, but he also badly misidentified a boy as the man's accomplice. One of Aymar's detractors lied, telling Aymar that the boy was the son of the guilty man when in reality the boy was not related to him at all and had been absent from Chantilly at the time of the theft. Guided by misinformation, Aymar's divining rod had twitched in the presence of the boy. Back in Paris, the experimenters led Aymar to the rue Saint-Denis, the site of a recent and especially brutal murder of one of the king's archers who had come out short in an argument with some Musketeers. The man, reportedly stabbed fifteen or sixteen times, had bled profusely on the street. Aymar's divining rod did not move at all, even though he passed over the exact spot of the murder several times. This test was flawed, Aymar claimed, both because the murderers had already been caught and because his talent allowed him only to detect premeditated crimes, not crimes of passion. Through- out all of these experiments, both fair and foul, Aymar performed far below the expecta- tions of CondC and the other witnesses. He returned to Dauphin6 a humiliated man, and reports indicate that some time elapsed before he recovered all of his dowsing skills.17

Aymar clearly had trouble demonstrating in experimental settings that his talents were real and not the product of some sort of charlatanism. Part of his problem in this regard, however, stemmed from the nature of the experiments created to test his abilities. Aymar performed admirably, and satisfactorily, before the officials in Lyon, who, apparently, set

l6 Garnier, Histoire de la baguette (cit. n. 2), pp. 101-102. l 7 For a summary of some of these experiments see Figuier, Histoire du merveilleux (cit. n. 3) , Vol. 2, pp.

79-88. On the tests given by CondC see Paul Bussikre, Lettre d M. l'abbe' D. L. *** (Paris: Louis Lucas, 1694), pp. 18-23 (for the trout), 39-40 (for the archer). Unfortunately, CondC gives no reason why he decided to invite Aymar to Paris and test his abilities.

MICHAEL R. LYNN

Figure 3. A dowser finding metals or treasure buried underground. From Pierre le Brun, Histoire critique des pratiques superstitieuses, 2nd ed. (Amsterdam: Jean-Frederic Bernard, 1733- 1736), Vol. 4, plate. (Photograph courtesy of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Department of Special Collections.)

fairly straightforward experiments. Such, however, was not always the case. In the later attempts to determine the truth of Aymar's dowsing abilities, the tests frequently involved some element of trickery. Some individuals simply assumed that Aymar was a fraud; as such, they felt, it was appropriate simply to place him in an impossible situation-such as providing him with false information-and then wait for him to slip up. These demonstrations seemed also to focus on Aymar's lack of learning and status. As an uneducated peasant from the provinces, Aymar did not have a very high standing in the eyes of nobles such as Cond& or academicians like Gallois. As with other phenomena-for example, reports of meteors-savants were sometimes unwilling to accept the scientific observations or experiments of amateurs, especially the common folk. The ability to determine truth and judge the work of Aymar clearly fell outside his own purview and into the hands of the social and intellectual elite, who felt no compunction to treat him as an equal in any sense of the word.I8

Several published statements appeared as a result of these experiments in an effort to

l 8 On the case of meteors in eighteenth-century France see Ron Westrum, "Science and Social Intelligence about Anomalies: The Case of Meteorites," Social Studies of Science, 1978, 8:461-493. On the subject of ttust, testing, and the evaluation of truth see, e.g., Steven Shapin, A Social History of Tr~ith: Civility and Science in Seventeer~th-Century England (Chicago: Univ. Chicago Press, 1994).


warn the public of what CondC had discovered. Robert wrote a letter, published in the Mercure Galant and the Journal des Savants, that described Aymar's supposed talent as nothing more than an illusion and a trick. A few years later, the Acadtmie Royale des Sciences put forward its official opinion in the form of a judgment passed on Le Brun's book against Aymar. This decision, written by Bernard le Bovier de Fontenelle and published in 1701, came out strongly against dowsing.19 Despite these attacks, many people still stood behind Aymar, at least when it came to discovering water and ore deposits. Some even retained their belief in the moral utility of dowsing. During the Revolt of the Camisards (1702-1705), for example, Aymar helped the Catholic side hunt down some Huguenots accused of murder. He successfully completed this task, and at his word a number of rebels were executed. As late as 1706 Aymar appeared in Lyon to help local officials with a difficult criminal case.20

This intellectual and cultural debate took place in several distinct public arenas. It was waged first, and most heatedly, in the pages of the Mercure Galant and the Journal des Savants. Oftentimes, several articles on dowsing appeared in a single issue. The argument continued into the next century in the pages of the Me'moires de Tre'voux, which offered judgments in the form of book reviews and general opinion pieces. Many of these early commentators also published versions of their arguments in book form, several of which went through multiple editions.21 The debate did not occur merely in an abstract form, however. The experiments performed both in Lyon and at the behest of the prince de CondC took place in noble homes, in private and public gardens, and in the streets of Paris. Participants in these trials included both men and women; cases such as that of the murdered archer took the observers from the stately hBtels of the rich and famous down onto the bloodstained streets of Paris. The observers also varied in terms of their education: some savants took an active role, but other cases also involved keen amateurs with a ready interest but no real specialization or skill that gave them knowledge of the subject at hand. Thus, while most of the participants in this debate were scholars of some kind, with official status, a few amateurs were able to join in, even if only in a passive manner as witnesses or as the victims of the crimes that Aymar struggled to solve.

The range of theories put forward to explain dowsing seems to fit rather nicely with Paul Hazard's theory that a crisis of consciousness occurred at the end of the seventeenth century. Hazard even mentioned the story of Aymar, amidst the thousands of other anecdotes cited. He claimed that the ultimate rejection of Aymar's abilities by the state, after the turmoil of the critical debate, reflected the general move in France toward a rational outlook that culminated in the age of Enlightenment. The broad mix of cultural tools brought to this debate certainly lends credence to the notion of a crisis. But the debate surrounding Aymar did not actually lead to such a firm conclusion as Hazard suggested.

l 9 Fontenelle's decision is reprinted in Pierre le Brun, Histoire critique des pratiques superstiteuses, 2nd ed., 4 vols. in 2 tomes (Amsterdam: Jean-Frederic Bernard, 1733), Vol. 1, p. lx.

20 The intendant in Burgundy, for example, reported in 1707 that a dowser had discovered a mine in the nearby mountains: "M. Pinon, intendant en Bourgogne, k M. Desmaretz," 21 July 1707, 24 Nov. 1707, in Correspond- ance des Contrdleurs gdndraux des finances avec les intendants des provinces, 3 vols. (Paris: Imprimerie Na- tionale, 1883), Vol. 2, p. 423. On the Camisards see Jean-Baptiste Louvreleuil, Le fanatisme renouvelk (1704), 3rd ed., 3 vols. in 1 tome (Avignon: Seguin, 1868), Vol. 2, pp. 51-52; and Antoine Court, Histoire des troubles des Cevennes; ou, De la guerre des Camisards, 3 vols. (Alais: J. Martin, 1819), Vol. 1, pp. 353-356. On the 1706 case in Lyon see Nicolas Boileau-DesprBaux, Correspondance entre Boileau-Despre'aux et Brosette (Paris: Techener, 1858), p. 267.

2' The two most popular books on the case of Aymar, those of Le Brun and Le Lorrain de Vallemont, each went through half a dozen editions appearing as late as the 1750s and 1760s.

MICHAEL R. LYNN 45

While the use of dowsing in legal proceedings clearly had limits, the question of whether dowsers could use divining rods to find water and minerals remained open. In other words, while the authorities could not prove or disprove the legitimacy of dowsing, the reality was that it worked often enough that people continued to use it. As a result, Hazard's crisis of consciousness evaporates. It is perhaps more useful to see this dispute as a prototype for a public sphere debate, one in which a limited number of doctors, natural philosophers, astrologers, theologians, nobles, and amateurs all engaged in a discussion on dowsing. In this case, burgeoning rationality was ignored, and public opinion, which fell on the side of utility, triumphed over the opinions of diverse scholars who, whether they supported or attacked dowsing, could never completely justify their positions. According to this account, then, the Enlightenment had its origins not with the victory of rationality over superstition but with the creation of a public forum in which the relative positions of rationality and superstition could undergo open debate and d i s c u ~ s i o n . ~ ~

It was not until the 1770s, and the appearance of Barthelemy BlCton, Dauphint's other famed dowser, that rabdomancy once again became a source of controversy. Born some- time during the 1740s into a peasant family, BlCton discovered his abilities at the age of seven. While carrying dinner to some workmen, BlCton took a break and sat down on a large rock. A sudden fit came over him; he was faint and feverish and did not feel any better until he was moved from that spot. Every time he went anywhere near the stone, however, his illness returned. After witnessing BlCton go into his fit, the local prior con- cluded that there must be something about that specific location that caused the sickness and so ordered some men to dig up the ground around the big rock. There they found a spring that, according to one source, was still in use at the beginning of the twentieth century.23 Since the region of Dauphin6 had already produced a number of famous dowsers, Aymar among them, the people there were always on the lookout for such occurrences.

This time the debate focused largely on issues of scientific authority and legitimacy. The chief question centered on who had the right to verify something as scientific. The pro-dowsing faction received backing from a few savants and from several nobles-most notably the tacit support of Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette, who used Bltton's talents both to find springs at Versailles and for the general benefit of France. But BlCton received his most powerful support from the general public itself. It was the French population at large who continued to hire him, witness his feats, and write testimonials concerning his success. Amateurs, keen to apply their understanding of Enlightenment reason and con- vinced of their ability to understand the laws of nature, began to take sides and offer opinions. Savants and academicians, who made up the bulk of the anti-dowsing camp, were unhappy with this trend and declared that the Parisian public should not involve itself in scientific debates. The streets were not a place, they claimed, for the testing of theories.

Many perceived popular credulity as a growing problem in late eighteenth-century France, in part because of the success of scientific popularization in reaching a growing portion of the urban population. In the decades before the French Revolution, a wide

22 Paul Hazard, The European Mind: The Critical Years, 1680-1715 (1935; New York: Fordham Univ. Press, 1990), pp. 177-179 (on Aymar). See also Joan DeJean, Ancients against Moderns: Culture Wars and the Making of a Fin de SiLcle (Chicago: Univ. Chicago Press, 1997), pp. 39-41.

23 For a summary of Bleton's early life see Figuier, Histoire du merveilleux (cit. n. 3), Vol. 2, pp. 104-105.


variety of activities disseminated scientific ideas to willing Parisians. Public lecture courses, such as those offered by Jean-Antoine Nollet, along with popular demonstrations and scientific clubs, all spread science to an eager and increasingly large audience. In this environment, Parisians rapidly appropriated science into the general urban culture. As a result, some people began to feel confident in their ability to participate in current scientific discussions, and savants themselves occasionally turned to the public for support. In the last decades of the eighteenth century several scientific battles were being waged in the public sphere. Two controversies in particular, over medical electricity and Franz Anton Mesmer's use of animal magnetism, were closely tied to the case of BlCton and his divining

Among savants, BlCton received his most active support from Pierre Thouvenel. Born in 1747, Thouvenel received a medical degree and established himself in Paris, where he soon became identified with questions of water supply and received an appointment as the royal inspector of mineral waters in France. It was through his work in this capacity that he came into contact with BlCton. He published his first book on the subject, the MLmoire physique et m6dicina1, in 1781. Thouvenel tried to present a clear account of BlCton's abilities in order to bring the new science of rabdomancy to the central position within the scientific world that he felt it deserved.25 In the first section of the book, Thouvenel established many general physical propositions that he thought would demonstrate scientifically how dowsing operated. Specifically, Thouvenel based the art of dowsing on a combination of electricity and magnetism. He claimed that certain individuals, more sensitive than most to changes in the fluids that surround and flow through us all, could sense minute alterations in the underground flow of electricity and magnetism. The changes in electric fluids ac- counted for the appearance of seizures akin to epilepsy. The fits, like the medical crises associated with mesmerism, also suggested a connection between magnetism and the ability to discover ore deposits. Unfortunately, Thouvenel could not prove any of the connections he suggested. This meant that he had to supplement his physical and medical con- jectures with additional materials.

Thouvenel provided this further proof in the second section of the book, where he described, in copious detail, the observations he had made on BlCton. Here we get a minute description of the spasms and convulsions that shook BlCton while he worked. Thouvenel also examined the motion of the divining rod, which, when near water or a mineral deposit, would begin spinning at an estimated speed of thirty to eighty rotations per minute. No- tably, BlCton did not utilize the traditional forked branch but, instead, a single, slightly curved piece of wood. (See Figure 4.) In addition, he claimed that he used the divining rod only for the benefit of observers; he himself could actually feel the presence of water beneath his feet and did not need the twitching or rotating rod to help him. In this section,

24 The literature here is vast, but on medical electricity see John Heilbron, Electricity in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries: A Study of Early Modern Physics (Berkeley: Univ. California Press, 1979). On Mesmer see Darnton, Mesmerism (cit. n. 4); and Charles C. Gillispie, Science and Polity in France at the End of the Old Regime (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Univ. Press, 1980), pp. 261-289. On both of these topics see Colin Jones and L. W. B. Brockliss, The Medical World of Early Modern France (Oxford: Clarendon, 1997), pp. 574-576, 794-802. On the connections between science and the public sphere see Jones, "The Great Chain of Buying: Medical Advertisement, the Bourgeois Public Sphere, and the Origins of the French Revolution," American Historical Review, 1996, 101:13-40; and Thomas Broman, "The Habermasian Public Sphere and 'Science in the Enlightenment,' " History of Science, 1998, 36123-150, More generally see Sarah Maza, Private Lives and Public Affairs: The Causes CClBbres of Prerevolutionary France (Berkeley: Univ. California Press, 1993). On popular science see Michael R. Lynn, "Enlightenment in the Republic of Science: The Popularization of Natural Philosophy in Eighteenth-Century Paris" (Ph.D. diss., Univ. Wisconsin-Madison, 1997).

2S Pierre Thouvenel, Mimoire physique et midicinal (Paris: Didot, 1781).

MICHAEL R. LYNN 47

Figure 4. Some of the different ways to hold a divining rod. From Pierre le Brun, Histoire critique des pratiques superstitieuses, 2nd ed. (Amsterdam: Jean- Frederic Bernard, 1 733- 1 736), Vol. 4, plate. (Photograph courtesy of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Department of Special Collections.)

then, Thouvenel described Bltton and the practice of dowsing as witnessed through countless demonstrations. In grand fashion, Thouvenel did not want to feign any hypotheses. However, while he presented his observations as experimental in nature, they were really just descriptions of Bltton at work and, as such, not easily disproved by those who sought


to attack dowsing. Simply put, there was no concrete experimental procedure to examine and refute.

The third and last part of Thouvenel's book neatly took the debate away from the realm of science and savants and put the question instead into the hands of the general public. This section reproduced numerous notarized documents, reports, and affidavits that attested to the success BlCton had enjoyed throughout France. For the most part, these were testimonials from satisfied clients, including clergymen, nobles, town councils, and members of the professional and middle classes. The goal of such evidence was to overwhelm critics of dowsing with massive numbers of credible witnesses. If these individuals had social or intellectual status, then their opinion in the matter would help support dowsing. At the same time, it was much harder to refute these documents than it was to disprove Thou- venel's theories or observations, even though they did not actually have any scientific value. They were, after all, merely testimonials from amateur observers and as such carried only social, not scientific, weight. They simply represented the vast number of individuals who claimed to have watched BlCton successfully find springs. The problem lay in the observers' status as witnesses-were they, even though they might have an education, or be of noble or clerical status, able to be good witnesses? Or were they too credulous of things they did not fully u n d e r ~ t a n d ? ~ ~

DOWSING AND PUBLIC OPINION

Thouvenel's book was greeted by a cacophony of opinions, voiced by members of the AcadCmie Royale des Sciences and amateurs alike, as everyone debated the acceptability of dowsing. The reviewer of Thouvenel's book for the Journal des Savants recognized the ambiguous position of dowsing and tried his best to find a middle ground: he wanted to "hold himself equally distant from the blind credulity of many of the ignorant and from the oftentimes too presumptuous incredulity of certain savants." The resulting review was necessarily vague-scientific proof was clearly lacking in Thouvenel's book, but the obvious utility of dowsing and B1Cton7s incredible success rate were difficult to deny. The problem for this reviewer, as for many opponents of the practice, lay in the fact that while Thouvenel claimed scientific status for dowsing, the best support for his theories came through public acclamation rather than mathematical or experimental proof. Several savants, such as the famous demonstrator of experimental physics Joseph Aignan Sigaud de la Fond, spoke in favor of dowsing. He explicitly praised the utility of the divining rod: it could be used, he claimed, to discover "springs, mines, and the hidden treasures of the earth." Unfortunately, he added, charlatans who took advantage of "public credulity" could also abuse the tool. As an example, he pointed back to the case of Jacques Aymar, who, he insisted, could never have used the scientifically sound divining rod to solve a murder

Dowsing's opponents did not mince words in their attacks: they labeled BlCton a sorcerer [sorcier], a play on the French word for "dowser," "sourcier." The astronomer and aca-

26 On the use of credible witnesses in the creation of scientific truth see Shapin, Social History of Truth (cit. n. 18). Mesmerists also utilized the tactic of collecting affidavits and testimonials in order to support their claims, and, like BIBton, Mesmer often took his appeals directly to the general public. See Lindsay Wilson, Women and Medicine in the French Enlightenment: The Debate over "Maladies des Femmes" (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1993), p. 113.

27 Journal des Savants, Sept. 1781, p. 628; and Joseph Aignan Sigaud de la Fond, Dictionnaire des meweilles de la nature, 2 vols. (Paris: Chardon, 1781), Vol. 1, pp. 75, 76.

MICHAEL R. LYNN 49

demician Joseph-JCrBme Lalande focused his attention on the motion of the divining rod, or what the pro-dowsing group had termed the hydroscope. He published a letter in the Journal des Savants that purported to prove how BlCton managed to make it move. Henri Decremps devised an experiment using the divining rod and then gave detailed, step-by- step instructions on how any competent charlatan could reproduce it. Louis Bernard Guy- ton de Morveau criticized Thouvenel for, among other things, not including the full names of those who had testified to Bltton's talents. He insinuated that perhaps Thouvenel had written all of the documents himself. The mathematician Gabriel Antoine de Lorthe cri- tiqued Thouvenel on a more basic level. He noted that Thouvenel had forgotten to include any physics and medicine in his book and suggested that the tome had been misnamed; Lorthe recommended a new title: the "Story of the Celebrated B l C t ~ n . " ~ ~

Unfortunately for Lalande, Decremps, and the other individuals opposed to dowsing, showing how someone could purposefully cause a divining rod to rotate and vibrate did not prove anything. No one had ascertained that BlCton practiced such false methods. In fact, as noted earlier, BlCton claimed that he did not even need the divining rod, since his entire body gave evidence of the existence of underground springs. Nor could they explain B1Cton7s amazing success rate in finding springs. Clearly, in order to sway public opinion the opposition needed to debunk BlCton in such a way that the public could participate in the experimental process and actually witness his failure or, better yet, see his fraudulent methods unmasked. To achieve this end, they invited Bltton to visit Paris in order to perform experiments in front of a larger, more general audience, a plan designed to prove once and for all that dowsing was not scientifically sound.

Thouvenel and BlCton did indeed come to Paris, but the first round of experiments did not go exactly as the anti-dowsing faction would have liked. Early in May 1782 Bltton went to the Jardin de Luxembourg and submitted himself to several days of public scrutiny. Charles-Alexandre Guillaumot, the intendant-general of the BBtiments du Roi, presided over the experiments, accompanied by numerous doctors, academicians, men of letters, artisans, and distinguished amateurs; in all, an estimated twelve hundred people attended these demonstrations. The main part of the experiment called for Bltton to trace an underground aqueduct, the plan of which was in the sole possession of Guillaumot. BlCton met with nothing but success. In fact, Guillaumot claimed that BlCton's path above ground so accurately mapped the underground flow of water that if the plans for the aqueduct were ever lost they could easily use BlCton to determine its exact location. He could even estimate how deep the aqueduct ran and the diameter of the pipe being used. BlCton performed this feat not once but twice, on two different days, and, to add insult to injury, did it blindfolded both times. The Journal de Paris announced that the science of dowsing could now be appropriated for the benefit of "physics and for the economic utility of society."2y Once again, BlCton had publicly demonstrated his talents, and the anti-dowsing

28 Me'nzoire.~ .secrets pour servir a l'histoire de la Ripzibliqzie de.s Lettre.~ en France depuis 1762 jzisqzi'd nos jours, 36 vols. (London: John Adamson, 1784-1789), Vol. 20 (1782), pp. 248-250 (sorcierl.sourcier); Journal des Savants, Aug. 1782, pp. 558-564 (Lalande); Henri Decremps, La nzagie blanche de'voile'e (Paris: Langlois, 1784-1785), pp. 72-73; Louis Bernard Guyton de Morveau, in Jozirnal de Nancy, 1780,3:244-272,327-337, 1781, 4:87-107, 125-156; and Gabriel-Antoine de Lorthe, "Lettre & M. Thouvenel," in Me'lange d'opziscules rnath&rnatiques, 6 vols. (Paris: l'Auteur, HBtel d'orleans, rue Dauphine; J. P. Duplain, Libraire, Cour du Com- merce, 1782-1785), Vol. 5, p. 7. See also J. P. Battelier, Nouvelles de la Re'pziblique de.s Lettre.~ et de.s Arts, 12 - .

June 1782, p. 169. 29 Journal de Pari.s, 13 May 1782, p. 531. See also Jozirnal Encyclope'dique, July 1782, pp. 142-144. Guil-

laumot had extensive experience with underground objects himself; at about the same time that he put Bleton to the test, he also super;ised the construction of the Catacombs


side was left wondering where they had gone wrong. Clearly, their effort to debunk dowsing was going to require more rigorous experiments along with a larger appeal to the sensibilities of the general public. The initial effort to refute dowsing, however, was rem- iniscent of those employed by Aymar's critics; the chief difference in B1Cton7s case seems to be his examiners' unwillingness to resort to trickery. Just as the theories used to explain rabdomancy had undergone a transformation during the age of the Enlightenment, so too had the tools utilized to test it.

While the anti-dowsing group scurried to create a new set of experiments, the pro- dowsing faction used the victory to strengthen their case. BlCton kept himself busy in and around Paris, amazing and astounding royal ministers and officials, ambassadors, clergymen, and countless other amateurs as he continued to find springs. While visiting the Jardin de Pharmacie, ostensibly to attend a public lecture, he agreed to submit himself to an experiment at the hands of some of the professors. The Journal de Paris reported that from 1:00 P.M. until 6:00 P.M. BlCton endured considerable pain in order to determine the connection between his powers and electricity. Essentially, the members of the Collkge de Pharmacie wanted to know if BlCton could distinguish the rate of flow of electricity just as he could determine the rate of flow of water. Their answer, after submitting BlCton to five hours of electric shocks, was yes, and nine members of the Collkge, along with two visiting physicists, signed a letter to that effect.30 BlCton acquired converts almost as rapidly as he found springs.

By the end of May, the anti-dowsing faction was ready to try again. On 29 May BlCton showed up at the garden of the Abbaye de Sainte-Genevikve to undergo testing before a huge audience. In addition to the large number of amateurs, the tests were witnessed by members of the Royal Academy of Sciences, including Bertrand Pelletier, J.-A.-N. Caritat, marquis de Condorcet, and Charles Bossut; other scientific luminaries, such as Benjamin Franklin and Denis Diderot; several nobles and state dignitaries; and a number of midlevel scientific popularizers such as Nicolas-Philippe Ledru. This set of experiments certainly made a pretense at being more rigorously developed and more closely watched. The garden, already replete with fountains and running water, was prepared in advance with hunks of minerals and ores buried underground at different depths and in various amounts based on BlCton's previous discoveries. BlCton, with his eyes covered, zigzagged back and forth across the garden for eight hours before his blindfold was removed. Throughout the day he found many ores and water sources, but he also missed many. (See Figure 5.) A week later BlCton returned to the garden. This time the anti-dowsing side wanted to see if he would indicate the same spots he had found the week before. Also, they wanted to examine the movement of the divining rod more closely. BlCton arrived in the morning, blindfolded as before, and again roamed the gardens indicating springs and ore deposits until half past noon; but he had not been able to duplicate his feat. Nor could any correlation between the rotation of the divining rod and his proximity to either underground water or ores be identified. These results, printed in full in the Journal de Physique, were also published in summary form in the Journal de Paris in order to reach the widest possible audience.31

This, of course, was not the end of the matter. Within two weeks Thouvenel, who

30 Journal de Pari.~, 21 May 1782, p. 564; 26 May 1782, pp. 583-584. 31 The full account, published in the Jozirnal de Physique, came complete with a diagram of the gardens with

BlCton's route mapped out point by point: Journal de Physique, 1782, 2058-72, and plate. See also Journal de Paris, 16 June 1782, pp. 675-677.

MICHAEL R. LYNN 5 1

Figure 5. Chart detailing the route taken by Bleton during his test at the garden of the Abbaye de Sainte-Genevieve, 29 May 1782. From the Journal de Physique, 1782,20, plate. (Photograph courtesy of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Deparfment of Special Collections.)

claimed that the tests performed by the anti-dowsing faction were invalid, took BlCton back to the gardens to perform some tests of his own. Thouvenel published his results, along with some additional affidavits, in a lengthy supplement to the Journal de Paris. He also continued to solicit support from savants such as Pierre-Isaac Poissonnier, Pierre- Joseph Macquer, Jean Darcet, and Joseph-Ignace Guillotin. At the same time, BlCton continued to find springs in and around Paris itself, often at the request of the intendant of Paris or other royal officials.32 The anti-dowsing faction had succeeded in demonstrating before a crowd of savants, academicians, and amateurs that BlCton was inconsistent at best, but they still were unable to explain how Blkton seemed to find more springs than anyone else did. Nonetheless, public opinion began to falter a bit; Bleton's failure to live up to the standards set by the academicians, at least when he failed to meet those standards in a public forum, did have some negative impact on his reputation.

At this time the popularizer J.-A.-C. Charles, soon to be a famous aeronaut, entered the debate on the side of the anti-dowsing group. BlCton agreed to undergo some experiments designed by Charles, who wished to examine the connections between electricity and dowsing. BlCton stood over an aqueduct where, of course, his divining rod began to move. Then he stood up on an insulated stool, at which point the rod stopped moving. This was

'*For Thouvenel's reaction to the experiments see Journal de Paris, 2 June 1782, pp. 612-613; Monthly Review, 1782, 67553-556; and Journal des Savants, 1782, 20:70. For the new results see Journal de Paris, 26 June 1782, pp. 719-726. Interestingly, Guillotin spoke in favor of dowsing but had earlier worked on the con~mission that condemned animal magnetism.

5 2 DIVINING THE ENLIGHTENMENT

repeated several times, but in the final experiment Charles secretly connected a wire from the ground to BlCton. The divining rod, however, did not rotate. This led Charles, and many others, to conclude that the rotation of the rod was entirely BlCton's doing.33 Charles enjoyed a solid reputation among the general public, and his experiments added to the damage done to BlCton's image by the academicians.

Thouvenel and BlCton were now on the defensive, and popular opinion was beginning to waver. At about this time, Mesmer was also coming under attack. Independently, BlCton could probably have survived for as long as he kept finding springs. But with the attacks against animal magnetism coming fast and furious, and given the obvious connections between mesmerism and dowsing, the pro-dowsing side faced serious problems. It did not help their cause any that the mesmerists themselves explicitly associated animal magnetism with dowsing. On the other hand, the ballooning craze, beginning in 1783, worked in Thouvenel's favor by making the impossible and seemingly inexplicable appear reasonable and commonplace. After the Montgolfier brothers and their imitators took to the skies, Thouvenel wrote that BlCton was to the subterranean world what the aeronauts were to the heavens.34

The issue ultimately remained unresolved, however, as can be seen from the number of nineteenth- and twentieth-century books that either explore the public benefits of dowsing or attack it as a For their part, BlCton and Thouvenel could never prove their theories. On the other hand, the anti-dowsing side had shown how a charlatan could turn the divining rod but could never explain how BlCton continued to find springs and mines with remarkable frequency. When the second volume of Thouvenel's Mkmoire physique et medicinal was published in 1784 it received the same sort of ambiguous attention as his first book. The reviewer for the Journal des Savants merely noted that this volume contained the same kind of information that Thouvenel had been publishing in the Journal de Paris but that the marvels were even more multiplied in the book. He did not directly criticize Thouvenel, BlCton, or the practice of dowsing, although he did mention that Thouvenel's theories remained unproven. His reluctance to attack dowsing may be attrib- utable to BlCton's discovery of a particularly large and lucrative coalfield at about that time. Public opinion, charmed once again by this concrete evidence of utility, had temporarily resumed its active support of BlCton. Whatever the reason, BlCton temporarily managed to maintain his somewhat battered reputation and continued to work with Thou- venel finding springs and ore deposits for the state. In the first six months of 1785 he discovered forty-one coalfields in ten different provinces throughout Fran~e.~"n the end,

" For a description of this experiment see Journal des Savants, Aug. 1782, p. 561; and Barrett and Besterman, Divining Rod (cit. n. 3), p. 45. Barrett and Besterman point out that Charles's experiment was flawed, albeit in a way not understood at the time.

34 Journal de Paris, 4 Jan. 1784, p. 14 (Thouvenel on aeronauts). For the use of dowsing by nlesnlerists see Joseph-Jacques Gardane, Eclaircissemens sur le magne'tisme animal (London, 1784), pp. 6-7; Jean Jacques Paulet, Re'ponnse a I'auteur des doutes d'un provincial (London, 1785), p. 19; Journal de Paris, 22 Feb. 1784, pp. 242-243; and Joseph Phillippe Fran~ais Deleuze, Histoire critique du magne'tisme animal, 2nd ed., 2 vols. (Paris: Belin-Leprieur, 1819), Vol. 2, pp. 277-280. For a combined attack on mesmerism and dowsing see Journal de Nancy, 1784, 14:112-129.

35 See the articles on the baguette divinatoire and the hydroscope in Gaspard Monge, Comte de PCluse, Jean- Dominique Cassini, Pierre Bertholon, et al., Dictionnaire de physique, 4 vols. (Paris: HBtel de Thou, 1793- 1822), Vol. 1, pp. 2-9, Val. 3, p. 500. For modem dowsing see the bibliography in Barrett and Besterman, Divining Rod (cit. n. 3).

36 For the review of Thouvenel see Journal des Savants, 1784, 25:314-315; cf. the review in the Gazette de Sunti, 1784, 47:185-187. On the large coalfield see MCrnoires secrets (cit. n. 28), Vol. 26 (1784), pp. 91-92; on the fields discovered in the first half of 1785 see Journal de Paris, 17 June 1785, p. 695.

MICHAEL R. LYNN 5 3

however, Thouvenel suffered disgrace within the elite scientific community, and no amount of public support could help him sway more than a few academicians and savants to accept his suppositions as facts. He eventually moved to Italy, where he lived out his days trying to prove his theories.

The range of the debate over BlCton covered much more ground than the one concerning Aymar. First, the sites of the debate were more numerous and accessible to more people. In such forums as the Journal de Paris, the Journal Encyclopt?dique, and the more scholarly Journal de Physique, the struggle to prove dowsing's legitimacy reached a much larger group of people than previously had been possible. In addition, the growth in literacy and the greater circulation of these journals, especially the Journal de Paris, ensured that a much larger portion of the population could follow the currents of the debate. But the debate over BlCton did not occur exclusively in print. BlCton performed countless demonstrations, all attested to and verified by members of the general public. These demonstrations of his abilities were made all the more potent thanks to Thouvenel's decision to publish the affidavits in his books and in the Journal de Paris. In this way, dozens of nonspecialists could assert their authority as witnesses and vouch for BlCton's skills. Sim- ilarly, the very open and very large public demonstrations that occurred around Paris drew huge crowds of people. Authority, in this case, lay with the public and those few savants who supported their cause. Public opinion had initially, in the case of dowsing, fallen on the side of utility and accepted the credibility of Thouvenel's witnesses. Much to their chagrin, the anti-dowsing side found that in order to sway public opinion they had to abandon their theories and ideas and focus instead on the visual, the observable, the amus- ing, and the useful. High science had to meet the popular practice of dowsing on its own ground.

CONCLUSION

The inability of anyone to prove definitively, in either the Aymar or the BlCton case, that dowsing did or did not have scientific merit leaves the historian in a bit of a quandary. What relationship existed between science and pseudo-science, natural philosophy and magic, when the terms themselves clearly lacked concrete and absolute definitions? What can be divined about the nature of the Enlightenment and its relationship to reason, utility, amusement, and instruction? During this period, a transformation in this aspect of the Enlightenment occurred in several ways. Most obviously, the nature of the arguments used for and against dowsing had altered. Gone, in the case of Bleton, were the appeals to astrology and theology that appeared at the time of Aymar. Guyton de Morveau claimed, for example, that BlCton should be accused not of practicing magic but of being a swin- dler.37 The question was now one of good use of reason versus popular credulity rather than one of demonic or astral influences battling Cartesian corpuscles. In this respect, we can clearly see the influx of rational thinking and the attempt to apply reason to various aspects of life.

The nature of the people involved in the debate over dowsing also altered over time. The change is partly numerical; the number of people who could and did participate in the debate had increased dramatically by the end of the eighteenth century. In Aymar's case, a small group, distinctive for the level of their education, debated amongst themselves and sought to influence their intellectual peers. By the time BlCton appeared on the scene,

37 Guyton de Morveau, in Journal de Nancy, 1781, 691.


little or no control remained over who could read about, discuss, or contribute to the debate. More important, the nature of the public had changed. A growing and shifting group of academicians, amateurs, and popularizers all spoke their minds and sought to influence the outcome of events. In particular, members of the general public seemed confident in their ability to participate in scientific discussions. A half-century spent appropriating various types of science and obtaining a substantial level of scientific cultural capital left many members of the public with the conviction that they were able to make decisions in scientific affairs. The popularization of science had sharply increased the number of people willing to assert their own scientific opinions. The problem, from the elite perspective, lay in the fact that not all popular science was equal and that while many felt ready to face the challenge of deciding scientific debates, not everyone enjoyed the same level of prep- aration. In giving people an awareness of science, popularizers sometimes imbued them with a greater sense of knowledge than they actually possessed. Popular scientific knowledge, then, could be used for purposes far beyond its original intent and the level at which it had been appropriated.

At the same time, differing views as to the nature of the Enlightenment enterprise, especially with regard to who could judge something as useful and rational, emerged from the muddle of the dowsing debate. Reason held a vital place for both the pro- and anti- dowsing camps, but it meant different things to the two groups. The definition of what was rational and reasonable was not static but changed depending on the angle of the viewer. For some, "reasonable" meant "theoretically justifiable," and although they recognized the importance of utility it could never prevail over a sound scientific explanation. For others-that is, for those who appropriated the Enlightenment at a more popular level-reason and rationality had a different status. They understood the terminology but chose to judge reasonableness according to visual criteria or utility. The general public, then, decided to create its own public opinion; and they were certainly not the ones that the scientific elite would have picked to perform that task. The tools used by people to address the efficacy of dowsing and the criteria by which they judged it altered even as they participated in the process of appropriating Enlightenment notions and ideas.

In the end, individuals across a broad spectrum joined the debate. The Enlightenment, of course, was neither monolithic nor uniform in its goals, personnel, beliefs, or processes. Many elements of the old regime tried to implement a certain degree of Enlightenment rationality in their programs. The state-another entity that could not pretend to be monolithic under either Louis XIV or Louis XVI-occupied several different positions within the spectrum of the Enlightenment. In the case of dowsing, some of the state's representatives-the academicians-largely denounced rabdomancy even as other members of the state bureaucracy-such as the provincial intendants-took advantage of dowsers' abilities in their regions. The Enlightenment itself occupied a wide range of positions vis-8-vis dowsing: people defended, attacked, qualified, tested, and questioned the use of divining rods, all from an enlightened position. Clearly, the Enlightenment-as least that part of it appropriated by the public interested in dowsing-was out of the control of the few and in the hands of the many. Usurping scientific authority, the public took over the task of divining the reasonableness, rationality, and utility of rabdomancy and of the Enlighten- ment more generally.

divining the enlightenment: public opinion and popular ......on public opinion in france see arlette...

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