AN UNEXPECTED PROBLEM

avril 08, 2015

I don’t know if you have the same but there are periods when for no real reason, life becomes a little difficult. I found myself in the Salpêtrière for longer than expected. Thank goodness for iPads!

This is not my first first visit but there have been many when I have gone to the Chapelle to see an exhibition. It was there in fact that I discovered Bill Viola. One day early in the piece I was permitted to go out on the strict understanding that I would not leave the grounds.

It has quite a history.
By the eve of the Revolution, it had become the world's largest hospital, with a capacity of 10,000 patients plus 300 prisoners, largely prostitutes swept from the streets of Paris. From La Salpêtrière they were paired with convicts and forcibly expatriated to New France.

The Salpêtrière was originally a gunpowder factory ("salpêtre" being a constituent of gunpowder), but was converted to a dumping ground for the poor of Paris. It served as a prison for prostitutes, and a holding place for the mentally disabled, criminally insane, epileptics, and the poor; it was also notable for its population of rats.

In 1656, Louis XIV charged the architect Libéral Bruant to build a hospital on the location of the factory, founding the Hospice de la Salpêtrière. The building was expanded in 1684.

During the September massacres of 1792, the Salpêtrière was stormed on the night of 3/4 September by a mob from the impoverished working-class district of the Faubourg Saint-Marcel, with the avowed intention of releasing the detained street-girls; 134 of the prostitutes were released; twenty-five madwomen were less fortunate and were dragged, some still in their chains, into the streets and murdered. Madame Roland, a Girondin supporter of the Revolution in its first liberalising stages, recorded in her Memoirs that the Revolution "has been stained by villains and become hideous ».

1857 the ithograph by Armand Gautier, showing personifications of dementia, megalomania, acute mania, melancholia, idiocy, hallucination, and paralysis in the gardens of the Hospice de la Salpêtrière.

Pitié-Salpêtrière Hospital l

In the first half of the 19th century, the first humanitarian reforms in the treatment of the violently insane were initiated here by Philippe Pinel, friend of the Encyclopédistes;
Students came from all over Europe to listen to Charcot's lectures. Among them was a young Sigmund Freud.

The Hôpital de la Pitié, founded about 1612, was moved next to the Salpêtrière in 1911 and fused with it in 1964 to form the Groupe Hospitalier Pitié-Salpêtrière. The Pitié-Salpêtrière is now a general teaching hospital with departments focusing on most major medical specialities.

Hospital Chapel

Chapelle de la Salpêtrière (Hospital Chapel), is one of the masterpieces of Libéral Bruant, architect of Les Invalides. It was built around 1675, on the model of a Greek cross and has four central chapels each capable of holding a congregation of some 1,000 people. Its central octagonal cupola is illuminated by picture windows in circular arcs.

There was little or nothing to see in the Chapel apart from some strange paintings on boards and the beautiful little virgin in wood. I didn’t remember her but she is very touching. Unfortunately the Chapel is falling into ruin. I guess like so much, there are no funds to repair it.