The Journal of Modern and Contemporary History of​​2/2007² includes an extensive article by Guillaume Cuchet³ - professor of Contemporary History and specialist in the History of Religions - on the emergence and development of the Spiritist Doctrine, a fact that took place during the Second Empire in France. We thought it appropriate to prepare a summary of the text for the readers' illustration, with varied reports on the History of Spiritism, highlighting, among others, two relevant issues:

1.   Did Allan Kardec actually create the word Spiritism, when it is already known from at least three works, prior to April 18, 1857, published on modern American spiritualism, mentioning the word spiritism?⁴

2. Why does Allan Kardec use the expression Modern Spiritism, or equivalent, in his works on several occasions?

We believe that, in the end, taking into account only this article by a French historian, not spiritist, we can conclude that the Encoder really created the word Spiritism - Spiritisme - for the first time, for France, and the reason is found in this summary. Furthermore, from its careful reading, it can also be concluded that there are other spiritisms; the one elaborated by Allan Kardec is one of them, Kardecist Spiritism. There are several passages in the works of Allan Kardec that inform about these spiritisms, a term created, for the first time, for the United States - Spiritism - during the birth of modern American spiritualism to designate those spiritualist followers, who believed, not only in the dead, but also in the possibility of communication with them.

Belief in the superhuman world and in ghosts is found in the midst of peoples: born of the impatient aspiration that constantly characterizes us and leads us to escape reality to approach a wonderful Universe or the times and space that no longer exist.

For the editors of the Magazine Pitoresco, the famous journal founded by Edouard Charton, there was no doubt that in 1850 the belief in spirits belonged to a time in the past of civilization.

Irony of history, just three years later, all of urban France was turning the tables and trying to communicate with the Spirits.

Currently, the tomb of its main theorist, Allan Kardec (1804-1869), remains one of the most flowery in the Pere-Lachaise cemetery, with countless groups, magazines, books, internet sites dedicated to it. Spiritism is the only spiritualist doctrine of the 19th century that was successful and survived the death of its founder and became a religion in the sociological sense of the term. The case is rare within a century that is usually referred to as that of the end of dogmas.

Three premises are useful. The first concerns vocabulary. France got used to calling spiritism the set of practices born in the United States in 1848 and exported to Europe around 1852, which consisted of turning tables and communicating with spirits. In fact, there is an abuse of language, even with its use having been consecrated. The word was not born before it was invented by Allan Kardec in 1857. Until that moment, it was called “American spiritualism”, modern spiritualism, “magnetic phenomena” or “table phenomena”.

If the term was quickly imposed, it is not only due to Allan Kardec's propagandist talents, but also because the term allowed resolving a lexical ambiguity. The translation of spiritualism – the term in use within Anglo-Saxon countries – into spiritualisme sounded bad in French, because the word already had a meaning. It designated the position of those who, against the supporters of the sensualist or materialist philosophy of the 19th century, admitted the immortality of the soul and the study of the faculties. In the strict sense, spiritists were the spiritualists who believed in communications with spirits.

The second observation is of a documentary nature. There is an enormous spiritist literature: pamphlets, books, periodicals, whose duration is generally quite short, which testify to both the interest aroused in society by these issues, and the turning point that the 1860s constituted in the democratization of prints.

A geographical question, in short, that reveals an original, well-known aspect of the unique French culture. French spiritism is very different from that in progress within the Anglo-Saxon countries, even though throughout the Second Empire American mediums were welcomed in France. In England and the United States, Allan Kardec's religious speculations were for a long time figured as French curiosity and aberration. On the other hand, the French did not hide their low esteem for American experiences, seen as unphilosophical. Thus, in my opinion [of the author], Spiritism is a worldwide phenomenon, the first true Americanism of European culture, and, within its religious and funerary extensions [cult of the dead], a typically very French phenomenon, which, above all, spread within countries of Catholic culture such as Italy, Belgium and Spain.

Nicole Edelman showed that its eruption at the beginning of the Second Empire had been prepared for by over fifty years of magnetic and spiritualist research.

Spiritism was born in the United States in the State of New York in 1848 and, from 1852 onwards, spread throughout Europe, starting modestly with groups or individuals who were dedicated to magnetic research, in fashion in Europe since the 1820s. It is not well known when or how the tables crossed the Atlantic. England, due to its privileged connections with the United States, was the main bridgehead in Europe. At the time, there was talk of the role of Scotland, but it is possible that it was just an approach to the origins of Daniel Dunglas Home (1833-1886), the most famous medium of the time. There is also talk of a possible connection between America – Louisiane – and France.

In all cases, American practices penetrated the continent through Germany, starting in Breme and Hamburg, and through France, through Strasbourg and Paris. Around mid-1853, the phenomenon literally exploded – it was performed only with table dancing. However, by the month of June, the tables began to deliver messages! That is, communications from the other side. Dominican Henri Lacordaire wrote to his friend Mme Swetchine on the 29^th of June:

"Have you ever heard about the tables and have you seen them turn? - I disdained to see them turn, as something too simple, but I have heard and made them speak. They did not say remarkable things about the past and the present. Over time, there were more or less bizarre ways to communicate with the spirits; only in the past, we made a mystery of these processes, in the same manner as we made a mystery about chemistry; justice, through terrible executions, relegated these strange practices to the shadows. Today, thanks to the freedom of worship and universal publicity, what was a secret has become a popular formula. Also, perhaps through this disclosure, God wants to provide the development of spiritual forces to the development of material forces, so that man does not forget, in the presence of the marvels of mechanics, that there are two worlds included one within the other: the world of bodies and the world of Spirits.”

But after the winter of 1854, with the help of the Crimean War, things seemed to be a bit on the wane. Fashion passes and practice becomes banal. Victor Hugo, like many others, made the tables turn in Jersey with Mme. de Girardin and some friends.

The philosophical aspect of Spiritism itself only really begins with the publication on April 18, 1857 of the famous The Book of Spirits, the bible of Spiritism until the present day. Taking advantage of the success, Kardec founded in January 1858 the Spiritist Magazine and on the 1^st of April the Parisian Society of Spiritist Studies.

The wave began again in mid-1859, when the Empire quarreled with Catholics over the Roman question. In this context, spiritist societies benefit from greater administrative tolerance. Since then, expansion has been rapid. In January 1860, Kardec notes that spiritist ideas are in the air, and that they can be confessed more easily, without fear of ridicule. The theorist became a missionary: from September 1860 onwards he carried out propaganda trips in France (Sens, Macon, Lyon, Saint-Etienne, Bordeaux, etc.) and in Belgium (Bruxelles and Anvers in 1864).

It can be said, written by the Catholic N.C.Le Roy, that Spiritism is the public temptation of society.

The progression of the spiritist movement marked a step in 1863. Most of the periodicals in the province had disappeared by 1868.

Leon Rivail, better known by his druid name of Allan Kardec, passed to the rightful title of prophet or Pope of Spiritism, even though he (very timidly) refused the title. He was the inventor of the word and doctrine. But he was not alone, at the time, as a suitor for the tiara: he had competitors, well known today, such as Zoe Pierart, director of the Spiritualist Magazine, Louis-Alphonse Cahagnet, the baron of Güldenstubbe, and the dissident disciples of the magistrate Jean-Baptiste Roustaing, all placed on the Index by the Roman Church.

There are several biographies of Kardec, which usually come from supporters of his doctrine, but they don't really say much about him. This Lioness of Catholic origin, coming from a bourgeois family of magistrates and lawyers, was educated in Protestant Switzerland, at the school of the great Rousseauist pedagogue Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi (1746-1827).

A reader of Fourier and Saint-Simon, he was interested in animal magnetism from 1823 onwards, and tables from 1854 onwards, but he did not make himself known until the publication of The Book of Spirits, in the spring of 1857.

His doctrine rests on two pillars: the identification of spirits with the souls of the dead and the principle of reincarnation.

Kardec's ideas are not original. He himself did no mistery about it: everything, or almost everything, was already within the magnetism or religious speculations of Charles Fourier and Jean Reynaud. From magnetism, he borrows his tripartite philosophy: body, soul and fluidic body, renamed perispirit. Unsurprisingly, most of the early spiritists were first magnetists, now magnetizers, and the first mediums, sleepwalkers.

Kardec's synthesis presents three characteristics that will contribute to give French Spiritism its particular profile: the religious, mortuary [cult of the dead] and scientific dimensions. Kardec, in relation to the second, made an effort to give Spiritism a philosophical content, he was very much aware of the need to propose effective consolations in this field.

The key to the spiritist success lies above all in the body of simple and exciting practices on which Kardec grafted his system, and in his ability to bring comfort to the men and women of his time.

References:

¹ link-1 - Accessed on 01/27/2022

₂ link-2 - Accessed on 01/27/2022

³ link-3 - Accessed on 01/27/2022

⁴ link-4 - Accessed on 01/27/2022