Pension Belhomme

The Pension Belhomme was a prison and private clinic during the French Revolution.

History

Around 1765, the joiner Jacques Belhomme took on the construction of a building for the son of a neighbouring aristocrat, who had been mad since birth. Seeing that running an asylum was more lucrative than joinery, he opened an asylum for lunatics, old people and whoever else rich families wanted to entrust to him. A famous precursor of psychiatry, Philippe Pinel, carried out his first treatments of the insane here.

On the French Revolution, Jacques Belhomme thought his fortune was assured. Remote from the violent centre of Paris and the complacencies of its then masters, Jacques Belhomme had noticeable advantages. In September 1793 the députés encouraged the sans-culottes to imprison all suspect individuals - nobles, their wives and childre, foreigners, priests, lawyers, the actors of the Comédie Française, rich people in general - in short, all those who had not made clear their allegiance to the Republic. With the prisons of Paris already overflowing, the state requisitioned Belhomme's asylum and then all other private clinics. Belhomme entreated the 12 police chiefs in charge of Paris to send him rich prisoners who would pay a high fee to live in his asylum as comfortably as possibly. From then on marquises, bankers, journalists, famous actors, old nobles and army officers (along with other disgraced persons who bribed the doctors and police chiefs to be transferred here on the pretext of illness) lived cheek-by-jowl with the mad here.

This scandal finally burst in January 1794. Belhomme was arrested for supplying wine to the prisoners and imprisoned in another pension, at Coignard, where the Marquis de Sade was also held. He was found guilty twice and, like the majority of his pensionaries, only escaped the guillotine due to the fall of the Terror on 9 Thermidor. Some of his pensionaries did not escape, however, proving too well-known to pass unnoticed - Béatrice de Choiseul-Stainville, duchesse de Gramont, sister of Louis XV's famous minister; the duchess of Le Châtelet, daughter-in-law of a famous mistress of Voltaire, the fermier général Magon de La Balue, guillotined with his children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren, brothers and cousins; and the lawyer Simon-Nicholas Henri Linguet, despite his denunciation of the monarchy for which he had spent a year in the Bastille under the ancien regime.

To expand during his luck year, Jacques Belhomme rented the neighbouring building, the hôtel de Chabanais, to which he linked his own building by a charming garden (the young marquis de Chabanais, descendant of Colbert, had emigrated with his mother and had his possessions confiscated by the state). Belhomme ended up buying this house to invest the money he had raised during the Terror. It was in this setting occurred the romance between Marie-Adélaïde de Bourbon-Penthièvre (widow of duc d’Orléans and mother of the future king Louis-Philippe) and of the deputy to the National Convention Jacques-Marie Rouzet, whom she married in secret on leaving prison.

The hôtel de Chabanais was razed in 1953 as was the maison Belhomme in 1973, following real-estate speculations.

Bibliography

• Frédéric Lenormand, La pension Belhomme, une prison de luxe sous la Terreur, Paris, Fayard, 2002.