2023-12-18 11:06:06
Who are the morons of the Alps? On September 17, 1839, Victor Hugo is located in Bern, Switzerland. He witnesses a spectacle that he says he will never be able to forget in his life: “In a crevice of the rock, sitting with his legs dangling on a large stone, an idiot, a goitrious man, with a slender body and an enormous face, laughed stupidly, his face in full sunlight, and looked randomly in front of him. O abyss! the Alps were the spectacle, the spectator was a moron.” Hugo uses this word “moron” to designate a sick being, as today rude people use it as an insult. However, the moron is the Christian, not in the religious sense but in its etymology: the moron meant the unhappy, the innocent, the idiot, the simpleton. The Christian has become a fool, let’s go and meet him.
At the end of the 18th century in Europe, bourgeois and aristocrats set off towards the Alps, to discover these breathtaking landscapes, towards this nature which heals the body and soothes the soul. The mountain is a promise of adventure. Travel journals, hiking guides, literary works, but also scientific treatises multiplied and amplified this passion, which continued to grow during the 19th century.
Tourist curiosity and medical phenomenon
These wanderings are an opportunity to meet those who inhabit the mountains. By the mid-19th century, thousands of them were labeled “morons.” Little by little, they become one of the essential figures of Alpine culture. Doctors and teachers make them the guinea pigs of choice: should we lock them up, educate them or simply abandon them at altitude? They are sometimes depicted as disturbing creatures bordering on monstrosity, sometimes as pure beings, preserved from the excesses of modernity and progress. It is an iodine deficiency which is responsible for this “cretinism” : it causes thyroid dysfunctions which manifest themselves in a series of physical and mental infirmities, including goiters.
The historian Antoine de Baecque notes that the “Alpine morons” have existed for a long time. “We have had the first descriptions of them since around the year 1000. They appear in dictionaries, medical encyclopedias, encyclopedias on the Alps. Real awareness is linked to a double phenomenonhe explains. First, they became known with the rise of travel stories across the Alps, which became a literary genre from the end of the 19th century. Saussure, in his Journey through the Alps in four volumes, devotes an entire chapter to ‘morons’. The other phenomenon is medical. The problem of ‘cretinism’ will become, from the beginning of the 19th century, an issue for public health in France, but also in Switzerland and in all the countries of the Alps..”
While doctors treat the “morons”, alpine tourism develops and the discovery of these landscapes is no longer reserved only for a few elites. How did the passion for the Alps gradually conquer all of Europe? What images was it built around?
Speaker
Antoine De Baecque is professor of cinema history at the École Normale Supérieure, specialist in the culture of the Enlightenment and the French Revolution. He notably published:
Sound references
- Reading the entry “morons” in theEncyclopedia by Diderot and D’Alembert, 1751, 1st edition, volume 4, read by Daniel Kenisberg
- Archive of Michel Foucault at the microphone of Jacques Chancel in Fluoroscopy – France Inter, 10 mars 1975
- Archive on iodized salt in Switzerland – RDF, August 8, 1959
- Excerpt from the film Tanned people go skiing by Patrice Leconte, 1979
- Excerpt from the cartoon “Red Rackham’s Treasure” in The Adventures of Tintinseason 1, episode 5, 1991
- Music “Long live the dahu hunt!” by Laids Cretins des Alpes – Album: Keskonvafair’…? (2007)
This show was first broadcast on February 16, 2021.
1702910945
#episode #podcast #fresh #air #story #mountains