The satyriasis diagnosis: anti-clerical doctors and celibate priests in nineteenth-century France

摘要

In the nineteenth century, doctors were an influential and articulate group within the anticlerical movement. This article examines the manner in which anticlerical doctors attacked one of the Catholic Church’s key rites, ecclesiastical celibacy, as a dangerous imposition on the male body. The key to this medical discourse was a condition which has received comparatively little attention from historians, satyriasis. A condition of excessive sexual desire in men, satyriasis was a disorder which, in extreme cases, led to crimes of sexual violence. For anticlerical doctors, the state of abstinence imposed on the clergy was a trigger for satyriasis, as well as two related disorders, masturbation and spermatorrhea. Catholic doctors responded to this argument by refuting the link between celibacy and satyriasis. But with the advent of the Third Republic, the attack on the priest as a sexual predator took on a new prominence in the context of Church-State battles over education and laicisation.