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Paracelsus also invented the figure of Frau Troffea, described as having set off the epidemic with her conjugal anger. Paracelsus wrote about the 1518 dance epidemic in Strasbourg, reworking his 1537 theory of the cause of dance mania as published in “The Seven Defenses” 7: In sum, the imagination strikes the heart and tickles the nerves, and it provokes a turbulent joy and contracts the muscles, inducing the dance. Under the auspices of the new hygienism, the posthumous publication of the heterodox physician Paracelsus, “Les causes des maladies invisible” (1565), had a particular impact on the interpretation of waltzmania. Guy in Alsace and Rhineland during the Wars of Religion, the Convulsionaries of Saint-Médard in the early 17th century, or even the ecstatic Quaker dances taking place in the North American frontier. In the context of this political dynamic of early hygienism under the French Consulate, waltzmania came to be understood within a genealogy of European choreaic contagions: the 11th-century legend of the Dancers of Kölbigk, Tarantism in Mediterranean Europe, the Veitztanz maligned by Martin Luther and cases of the Danse de St. The arrival of the German waltz in France coincided with the first publications of the new “Psychological and Political Sciences Class” of the National Institute of France as well as the 1802 creation by the Prefecture of Police of a Council of Hygiene in Paris. Waltzmania was understood as an epidemic of deviant dancing transmitted via the imagination. Following the same logic, waltzmania was understood as an epidemic of deviant dancing transmitted via the imagination. 6 Doctors wrote about the force of the imagination to explain the collective contagion of revolutionary violence: a mental contamination linked to a deviant behavior produced involuntary imitation. Mental health medicine ( médecine morale) at the time considered that the impressions of the imagination gave way to physical expressions called “nervous sympathies” ( sympathies nerveuses) and that these could be transmitted from one individual to another. This “universal fury” of dancing was described according to several medico-philosophical notions: enthusiasm, passion, desire ( envie), madness, and a whole ensemble of phenomena connecting body and soul, in which the mental faculty of the imagination played a pivotal role. 4 Through touch, the exchange of perspiration, and a rapidity that solicited the imaginations of the dancers embracing one another, the dazzling intimacy of the waltz was said to produce a ravishment that - according to the doctors who described it - menaced the health of an entire generation of youth. Partners experimented with a vertigo whose centrifugal force and intoxication “exhausted” their bodies and “heated” their imaginations.
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In this turning dance, the familiar Contredanse figures disappeared as the couple advanced with simple, repetitive steps, improvising their path across the dance floor while negotiating a shared center of gravity.
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The German poet Ernst Moritz Arndt described the French “nationalization of this German dance” in moralizing terms: The closed-couple hold, he said, allowed the male dancers to squeeze “the lady dancers as close as possible against themselves” while placing their hands “firmly on the breasts” of their partners.
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The acceptance of the waltz in France merely increased concerns. The first dance with a closed-couple hold to be adopted by an elite society in Europe, waltzing had already created trouble in certain German-speaking regions where it was promptly banned. Under the reign of the Directory, during the winter season of Republican Year VII (1798–1799), the fashionable German “walsces” were all the rage. This article is excerpted from the book “ Cultures of Contagion.”Īs the 18th-century salon culture of bon mots gave way to the passionate experience of the new social dances, their contagious vertigo became polemical.