The Morzine Possession Epidemic: Le Mal de Morzine (1857)

Morzine. A mountain commune in the Chablais, high in the Dranse valley of Haute-Savoie. In 1857 it belonged to the Kingdom of Sardinia, and around 2,200 people lived there. Three years later, Savoy would become French.

March 1857. Péronne Tavernier was ten years old and preparing for her first communion. She saw a classmate fall into a swollen torrent. Her first crisis followed.

Soon she and Marie Plagnat fell into cataleptic states while minding goats. They raised their eyes to heaven and stretched out their hands, as if receiving a letter. They spoke of the Virgin and the Devil, of invisible serpents and black dogs. On 15 August, the feast of the Assumption, the crises spread through the congregation during Mass.

Most of the afflicted were girls and young women. Witnesses described violent convulsions, screams and "impressive acrobatic moves." The girls would "roll their bodies up into balls and distort their limbs." Dr Augustin Constans saw them imitate "crawling, leaping, climbing animals with ghastly fidelity," speaking "in hoarse, rough tones." "Three or four men are needed to restrain the ten-year-old girls," Allan Kardec's Revue Spirite reported.

The possessed named their demons. The Miser. The Thief. The Woodcutter. The same journal claimed they answered questions in German and Latin and revealed facts from the past they could not have known. Some 19th century writers said the women rose into the air. Each fit lasted twenty to twenty-five minutes. Afterwards, the victims remembered nothing.

The curé, Abbé Pinget, performed exorcisms against his bishop's ban. Sardinian authorities sent Carabinieri and Dr Tavernier of Thonon, who blamed digestion. By April 1861 there were around 200 cases. The French government sent Constans, inspector-general of asylums.

Spring 1864. The bishop of Annecy came for confirmation. "The church became a perfect hell," one account recorded. The possessed shouted, "Damned carrion of a bishop, why dost thou come to torment us?" Seven or eight men, helped by police, forced them to the altar. The bishop left "trembling, disturbed, with his legs covered by excoriations." Brigadier Fourcade of the gendarmerie was injured protecting him. The sub-prefect put it plainly: "C'est la population entière qui est malade."

Constans diagnosed hystéro-démonopathie épidémique. He returned with gendarmes, infantry and a new priest. The worst cases were dispersed to distant hospitals. The curé and the mayor were replaced, and anyone claiming a diabolical cause faced fines. Joseph Tissot, a philosophy professor at Dijon, concluded "simple hysteria." He is said to have run secret holy-water tests. Believers replied that "Satan was too cunning." In the end, Pinget recanted from the pulpit. The illness, he told his parishioners, was natural.

The cost was real. Péronne's brother Joseph starved to death, believing the Devil stopped him eating. Jean Berger, an elderly shoemaker accused of sorcery, was attacked by a mob. The last flare-ups came in 1870 and 1873.

Kardec blamed imperfect spirits of the dead. Later accounts have proposed epidemic hysteria or conversion disorder, while historians have also examined the village's social and religious conflicts. Ruth Harris called it possession on the borders, in a village caught between Sardinia and France, clergy and state. The Morzine-born painter Laurent Baud depicted the confirmation scene in Les Possédées de Morzine.