(mysterious music)
Can we communicate with spirits?
An enigmatic figure in the French capital of Paris
maintained it was possible.
His name was Allan Kardec, and what he achieved
shook people's beliefs to the core.
(speaking French)
Kardec died on March 31st, 1869.
This was the start of an enthusiasm and a movement that
has lasted to this day.
In the mid-19th century,
Kardec established spiritism in Paris.
Can we communicate with the dead?
This is one of the city's most mysterious affairs.
If we want to discover the truth, this is where we
must investigate.
(dramatic music)
I'm Jean-Marc Leri.
I've devoted my life to understanding Paris' history,
studying its secrets, and wandering its maze of streets.
The city holds many centuries-old mysteries.
Often these cases are dismissed
as occult phenomena, myths, legends, or popular beliefs.
Things have happened here, though.
There are facts, consistencies,
and bonafide witnesses.
Historians, scientists, and investigators
of all sorts have been unable to solve them.
(dramatic music)
It is time to reveal the most plausible theories
and to get as close as possible to the truth.
Here's Paris as you've never seen it before.
(dramatic music)
(eerie music)
Our investigation begins in Paris' biggest cemetery,
a place of secrets and mystery:
Pere Lechaise.
(eerie music)
It is home to the grave of
one of Paris's most enigmatic figures, Allan Kardec.
Kardec established a movement, spiritism,
based on the idea that it's possible to communicate
with spirits.
His grave is the most visited in Pere Lachaise.
Almost 150 years after his death,
Kardec still draws people from all over the world.
Making contact with the beyond, communicating with the dead.
Allan Kardec's assertions still fascinate those who believe
in his tenets.
What if it were true?
Did Allan Kardec really find the means of communicating
with the dead?
The answer lies here in Paris.
(eerie music)
To better understand the whole business,
we have to go back a few years.
(eerie music)
It all began in the United States
with the birth of spiritualism in the 1840s.
The Fox sisters participated in the movement's development.
On the night of March 31st, 1848, in a small farmhouse
in Hydesville near Rochester, New York,
Margaret and Kate, the daughters of a blacksmith, John Fox,
made contact with a spirit.
(eerie music)
The being communicated by rapping on the walls
and moving the furniture.
(eerie music) (distant knocking)
The events in Hydesville were far-reaching,
giving rise to a nationwide craze that soon spread across
the Atlantic.
People communicated with spirits at table-turning seances,
where mediums acted as channelers or transmitters.
When spiritualism reached Paris with the gripping myth
of the Fox sisters,
it sparked the interest of a teacher
by the name of Hippolyte Leon Denizard Rivail.
(eerie music)
Rivail was 50 at the time.
He taught chemistry, physics, anatomy, and astronomy.
He'd written a number of school science textbooks,
and he was interested in somnambulism,
magnetism, and hypnotism.
Rivail was motivated by two things:
the scientific progress of the 19th century
and the explanation of occult phenomena.
(mysterious music)
One day, some friends told him about the table-turning
phenomenon.
Rivail was intrigued.
He devoured reports on the topic.
It gradually became his passion.
(dramatic music)
This is where it all began,
a stone's throw from the Opera House
and department stores like Printemps,
which would open 10 years later.
In 1855, Rivail met a magnet healer named Fortier
who took him to Madame de Plainemaison
at number 18 rue de la Grange-Bateliere
one Tuesday at 8 P.M.
(suspenseful music)
Madame de Plainemaison was known for hosting seances
to communicate with the dead.
For Rivail, it was an eye-opener.
He made contact with a spirit named Zefiro
who gave him the task of speaking for the deceased.
(mysterious music)
He then stopped choosing the name Rivail because the spirit
told him, "We lived together a very long time ago
"in Gaul.
"We were friends and your name was Allan Kardec."
(eerie music)
How does communication with spirits work?
How do mediums speak to the dead?
Is it through thought transmission?
(speaking French)
There are slightly more sophisticated explanations about
how mediums work.
It's thought that mediumship is actually the ability of
a medium to penetrate the unconscious minds of the people
around them.
Some psychoanalysts, some psychiatrists, experience this
with their patients.
These phenomena exist.
They have been recorded well beyond spiritism.
They're found in all civilizations, in all societies, and
this is still very much the case today.
(mysterious music)
Spiritualism was born in the United States
with the Fox sisters.
It was exported to Paris with Allan Kardec.
He named the movement "spiritism".
Kardec developed this doctrine and maintained it was
possible to communicate with the spirits of the dead.
Some adept today regard spiritism as the fourth revealed
religion after Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.
(speaking French)
If I had to define spiritism in very simple terms, I would
say it's a philosophy of life whose goal is the improvement
of the individual.
Allan Kardec wrote several books, the most famous being
"The Spirits Book", which was first published in 1857.
There are 1,058 questions in the most recent edition.
The book was very popular and it has been translated
into many languages.
Spiritism took off in a big way in Paris.
On January 1st, 1858, Kardec launched the "Revue Spirite"
at his home in the Passage Sainte-Anne at number 59.
(dramatic music)
In it, he published the messages of famous spirits from
down the centuries as well as ordinary peoples' accounts.
The periodical was a huge success.
Three months later, he founded the Parisian Society
of Spiritist Studies.
Spiritist meetings were held at 8 Rue Des Martyrs from
mid-October 1857 to April 1st, 1858.
(eerie music)
How could someone walking down this street today possibly
imagine that this door once led to the beyond?
(eerie music)
Some people maintained it was possible to converse with
the spirits in different ways.
Mediumship, rapping on objects, voices from the invisible
fluids of the spirits.
Well before spiritualism and spiritism, table-turning had
existed since time and memorial.
Here is what a spiritist seance was like in Kardec's day.
Nothing has really changed.
Day or night, a small group of people you know,
friends, acquaintances, relatives,
no more than six or seven.
Hide mirrors with a veil.
Make sure the room is dark.
Dim lights.
Candles.
A small dining table or a pedestal table.
Place both hands on the table, but very lightly.
One person will conduct the seance from start to finish.
If you intend to summon a specific spirit, think very hard
about this spirit and wish for it's manifestation.
Complete silence.
Wait.
Call this spirit.
"Is there anyone there?"
A slight lifting of the table or a circular movement.
If something goes wrong and suddenly distress you,
stop immediately.
The practice of table-turning caught on among the Paris
smart set.
Big names from the arts and literary worlds joined
the movement.
Many attended spiritism seances to communicate with
the dead.
The playwright, Victorien Sardou, tried his hand at
psychic art because he was convinced the French Renaissance
ceramist, Bernard Palissy, was invisibly guiding him.
(eerie music)
Author Theophile Gautier wrote short stories dealing
with spiritism.
The astronomer Camille Flammarion regularly saw the ghost
of Galileo.
In 1887, while creating "Sherlock Holmes", Arthur Conan
Doyle hosted spiritism seances.
(eerie music)
But the most famous adept of the movement Kardec launched
was this man:
the great author, Victor Hugo, one of the 19th centuries
most famous figures.
His house on the Place des Vosges, in the heart of Paris'
Marais district, still stands today.
In exile and surrounded by family and friends, Hugo began
to engage in table-turning seances.
Initially, without success.
Then one day, after several fruitless attempts.
(speaking French)
The table talked at last and everyone recognized the
spirit communicating with them as Leopoldine Hugo,
Victor Hugo's daughter.
Leopoldine had died 10 years earlier, a few months after
her wedding.
She and her husband drowned in a boating accident on
the Seine.
Victor Hugo was devastated by her death.
It was a huge shock for the entire family, and it sparked
an obsession with talking tables.
They held spiritism seances every night and sometimes
in the daytime, too.
And this led to Victor Hugo producing some absolutely
astonishing writings.
"You speak to me as bodiless souls.
"Speak to the living in my sleep.
"Your windblown robe flutters and rolls
"like spray blown from the deep."
Hugo seemed to lose himself in spiritism in his endless
search for his beloved daughter.
Leopoldine was just 19 when she died.
(speaking French)
The fact that such a prominent figure as Victor Hugo
had practiced spiritism and made tables talk was incredibly
important for the new spiritist circles and,
in Allan Kardec's periodical, a number of articles were
devoted to Victor Hugo.
(suspenseful music)
The movement grew.
Like Victor Hugo and his friends, everyone in paris wanted
to turn tables.
Kardec was hailed as God's chosen one.
People wanted to see him, meet him, hear him speak.
Kardec's books were read in humble dwellings
and palaces alike.
More and more followers embraced his doctrine.
He seemed to have been entrusted with an almost
divine mission.
The emperor, Napoleon III, invited him to the Tuileries
Palace so they could talk.
Kardec thought spiritism could become the universal religion
of mankind.
(dramatic music)
Kardec's ideas spread around the world and, notably,
to Brazil.
(speaking French)
When spiritism began to be disseminated in France it was
the preserve of the elite,
of the intellectual elite of science.
There were all of these phases of experimentation,
of investigation.
But in Brazil, there was a totally different approach.
Spiritism really took hold there through the implementation
of the doctrine's moral aspect.
You have to know that Brazil has the largest number of
spiritists in the world, in the region of three and a half
to four million.
Also, because of the extreme poverty in the country,
the moral charity organized by the spiritists immediately
found a huge and highly receptive audience.
When Kardec died on March 31, 1869, it triggered an
enthusiasm and a movement that has lasted to this day.
(suspenseful music)
Paris provides evidence of this, too.
Many Brazilian followers regularly come to pay their
respects at Allan Kardec's grave in Pere Lachaise cemetery.
(eerie music)
Kardec had passed away, but all sorts of hoaxes would be
exposed in table-turning seances.
One of the two Fox sisters, Margaret, expressed remorse
at the end of her life and confessed to the hoax in
a lengthy article in an American newspaper.
Many people refused to believe her, though,
and the movement survived.
Daniel Dunglas Home, a famous medium idolized at the time,
was unmasked as a fraud during a seance with the French
empress Eugenie.
So, too, were the Italian psychic, Eusapia Palladino,
and the Russian occultist, Helena Blavatsky, both darlings
of the science world and the royal courts of Europe.
Myths were exploded.
(tape reeling) (film playing)
Georges Melies, the celebrated illusionist and future
creator of the cinematic spectacle, was called as an
expert witness.
With his knowledge of special effects and illusions,
he revealed how the spiritists experiments
were pure trickery.
(film playing)
Spiritism, mediumship, clairvoyance, somnambulism,
conjuring, there was confusion.
The boundaries between science and magic had been blurred.
(piano rag)
What parts did Kardec play in all this?
(light waltz music)
In 1835, the city of Paris awarded a contract to a
physicist magician called Lacaze, who sold all sorts
of physics and magic accessories in his store.
(firework exploding)
After the Revolution of 1848, he opened a small theater
in the Carre Marigny, just off the Champs Elysees,
where he put on shows combining amusing physics,
phantasmagoria, and curiosities, summoning rapping spirits
well before the advent of spiritism.
(light waltz music)
Originally called the Chateau d'Enfer, or Castle of
the Underworld, his theater was known as the Pavillon Lacaze
before it became the Folies Marigny in 1865,
then the Theatre Marigny.
(light waltz music)
And Kardec had a ring-side seat.
In the days when he was still known as Rivail, he had
worked as a stage manager for Lacaze at the Carre Marigny.
So he was obviously aware of the magician's tricks.
He knew all about the devices used to create illusions
in these spectacles.
This is surely one of the keys to the mystery.
A question remains, though.
Why was there such a craze for spiritism?
The answers are many.
It was the age, people needed to believe.
In the first half of the 19th century, the search was on
to satisfy existential anxiety,
and understanding of electricity meant you could make
visions appear.
Different beliefs, scientific advances, freak shows,
everything was jumbled up.
Maybe Rivail sincerely believed.
Maybe he got tangled up in a lie.
Who knows?
(suspenseful piano music)
The enthusiasm for Allan Kardec reflects our interest
and fascination for the hereafter.
This investigation into the world of spiritism has shed
some light on the mystery.
But Paris has other mysteries.
The clues and keys to these enigmas are to be found in
old books, lost in the capital's libraries, in the city's
streets, or beneath its buildings,
by the light of a candle, or in the dead of night,
by cross-checking documents, archives, and records.
Paris has not yet revealed all of its secrets.
(eerie organ and piano music)