ABSTRACT
Every psychiatrist, every historian yielded, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, to the same impulse of indignation; everywhere we find the same outrage, the same virtuous censure: “No one blushed to put the insane in prison.” And Esquirol, listing the fortress of Hâ in Bordeaux, the houses of correction in Toulouse and Rennes, the “Bicêtres” still existing in Poitiers, in Caen, in Amiens, the “Château” of Angers, continues: “Moreover, there are few prisons where the raving mad are not to be found; these unfortunates are chained in dungeons beside criminals. What a monstrous association! The calm madmen are treated worse than malefactors.”
