The Man Who Thought He Was Napoleon

In December 1840, almost twenty years after his death, Napoleon’s remains were returned to Paris for internment. The very next day, the director of a Paris hospital for the insane admitted fourteen men (not the first by any means) who took themselves for Napoleon. This bizarre episode is Laure Murat’s springboard for a vivid account of the impact of historical events on madness. Murat digs into the archives to get at the truth of this story--but also to ask, Why Napoleon? Why not Louis IV, or Jesus Christ? The French psychiatrist Jean-Étienne-Dominique Esquirol claimed that he could recount the history of France from asylum registries. Murat takes up that challenge in her inquiry on the relationship between history and madness. She uncovers the stories of countless patients whose insanity seems to have roots in the political traumas of their time, such as the watch maker who believed he had "lost his head” by the guillotine and lived with a replacement one. Are these matters of ideology or pathology? What did government "reason” mean in the face of revolutionary "madness”? These questions, Murat shows, run throughout the nineteenth century, a time when the borders between political passion and manic excess were especially clouded. This, then, is a history of psychiatry, but of a different kind--an account of how notions of insanity evolved in relation to historical upheaval and the attempts of asylums to care for patients who suffered from explicitly political delusions. Murat is the first to tell this story, and she does so through deft use of previously obscure archives.