[From "morbus democraticus" to passionate idealism. Different reactions of French alienists after the Commune of Paris].

Literary and medical works published immediately after the fall of the Commune of Paris purport an analysis which deserves a critical reading: the study of the influence that alcoholism and the federate movement had on each other, easily naïve and not without excess, stamped with obviously reactionary emotions, appears as historically and scientifically questionable as the proposals towards an interpretation of the event in terms of mental pathology. The search of cases of insanity among the rebels, the idea that their acts could only express some kind of phrenopathic disorder opens the debate on the very existence of some morbid types such as Falret's and Pottier's "reasoning, inexhaustible and proselyte lunatics", the "many characters with fanciful projects, including reformists of the human race, and various utopists" that Morel includes in his classification of hereditary insanity, Serieux's and Capgras "idealists concerned with justice" found amongst delusions related to altruistic claims, Dide's and Guiraud's "idealistic passions, social reformers, anarchists" appear to us as very outdated classifications, on the border of the psychiatric field.